healers need a serious overhaul

[Krojack]

I think a lot of people early on in this thread completely overlooked what OPs point is. People replying are saying what you need to do now as a healer class to clear savage content. We all know what healers need to do. What OP is stating is that should change.

Future savage content should be adjusted to lower over all raid DPS to not include healers NEEDING to dps to clear enrage. Then adjust boss damage output so healers need to do more healing.

I've always found it stilly (and stupid) that a healing class needs to pick gear and meld to max their DPS over more healing output. White Mages literally meld Direct HIT as a secondary stat which does nothing to increase healing. ( Crit > DH )

E11s has a few points in the fight where a very heavy DoT is on the raid and needs to be healed though. Add more things like this to fights. Add something where say a DPS will needs to soak a lot of damage and a healer needs to keep healing them while they do so.

So many things could be changed to turn a healers primary job back into being a healer and not a weaker DPS that does large fast burst healing on the side.

I love healing but pressing 1-2 DPS ability buttons for 12 minutes starts to get old. If I wanted to DPS then I would play a DPS job.

[ItMe]

I love healing but pressing 1-2 DPS ability buttons for 12 minutes starts to get old. If I wanted to DPS then I would play a DPS job.

Am I misreading your intent, or is your stance that healers should have zero DPS buttons?

[Deifact]

Perhaps healers should be changed to convert excess healing into damage. Whm over heals in targets could be converted into damage against the target of the player being healed. Sch could have a damage component on their shields, so enemies that strike a shielded target take damage?

[Packetdancer]

I do understand some of the frustration people feel with seemingly mixed messages. A lot of groups will judge a healer predominantly by their DPS output, and encourage them to increase it week-by-week... yet many of those same groups will say that healer DPS is irrelevant enough—and healing requirements low enough—that healers should take last priority in gear. That definitely feels a little like "well, make up your mind which is the case" at first glance, even if both things do make sense individually (given current raid design).

(Plus, no one likes being passed over for gear for weeks on end; witness the statics I know of where they swapped tank and healer priority this tier due to higher damage in E11S and E12S, and how the tanks I know in those statics have complained they feel like they're being left behind as they see others gear up. Doesn't matter that it makes sense as an order of priority, it still can become disheartening to be the one who never gets anything for multiple weeks on end.)

At any rate, one of two things really probably needs to happen: either 1) Square-Enix starts redesigning encounters to actually require more active healing (at least at Savage content levels), or 2) Square-Enix starts redesigning jobs with the new expectation that healers are actually just "green DPS who sometimes heal and rez" (as the raid community currently seems to feel) and gives a more interesting DPS cycle to them.

Personally, I'd prefer they do the former; I suspect most of us here are probably in that camp.

[HyoMinPark]

nononono you're missing the point.... I have nothing against meter whoring itself.. I just dont want to be a part of it. thats why I play healers... Its fine to have meter whoring... for people who play DPS. The healers and tanks should be concerned with with keeping their "friends" alive... let the DPS worry about the "Web Site that shall not be names"

Except the issue with the bolded statement is that the requirements in this game for that are extremely low in the majority of content, and barely moderate in harder content. As I said prior, even in the hardest fights in the game (UCoB, TEA, UwU), an average healer isn’t spending 70~80% of their casts on healing or keeping people alive. It’s less than 50% for a healer playing it safe. This is, again, the fault of the developer’s and the way they’ve designed these fights. The mentality crafted by the community came from the developers’ design.

When healing requirements are fulfilled, damage should be the next go-to for ALL roles. No role should only be casting 50% or less of the time. I’m not asking for 100% ABC—even 80% to 90% is fine with most players. As someone else said to you, it is all about using the most out of a job’s toolkit—and that is including healing AND damage abilities on healers. If you are not utilizing your full kit, then you are playing a role on a subpar level. And I’m not even talking about playing at an optimized, min-maxed level here—not utilizing your full kit is just flat-out playing on a subpar level. You are wasting resources, and no job should ever be wasting their resources. (And this is a general “you” statement.)

Same with tanks: CDs are used for the big hits—but they are not that frequent. Every tankbuster in any fight will always have tank mitigation: be it cooldowns or immunities. After a tank has mitigated incoming damage, their focus is damage. The only other role a tank has is to maintain aggro, and aggro is a joke in ShB compared to prior expansions where it actually required active management (in terms of the OT Provoke-Shirking to give the MT an enmity boost, or DPS themselves managing their aggro with now-defunct abilities like Diversion and 4.0 Lucid Dreaming).

At this point, healers and tanks are subpar-damage dealers after their healing and tanking requirements have been fulfilled. So damage is also their focus. You cannot say that it is not.

I’m sorry but the short sightedness of a lot of people here is amazing. The end goal of any boss is to reduce its HP to zero... to do that, you need to do damage.. the more damage you do the quicker that happens. There’s a minimum threshold for how much healing is required and any more healing is wasted any less means death. Fact remains, the only way to reverse is it to either remove healer dps abilities or make the bosses so significantly more damage.

As for static loot, the priority list I’ve seen written dps > tank > healer is dumb. It’s a team game, 8 players. Every member is pulling their weight so deserve an equal opportunity to role. That’s how I run things, it’s how I’ll always run my static

I hope you realize how your two statements here directly contradict one another.

On one hand, you acknowledge that the basic goal of any fight is dealing damage to a boss—and that the more damage you have, the faster the boss dies. Following this logic, the priority of DPS > Tanks > Healers for gear makes sense because the damage gains from giving a DPS a weapon or body piece from Savage will be greater than giving that piece to a tank or a healer. Giving said piece to a tank if the DPS did not need it would be a bigger gain than giving it to a healer. In your second statement, however, you’re now saying that said priority is dumb despite it backing up your first one. So color me confused here.

[Absurdity]

At any rate, one of two things really probably needs to happen: either 1) Square-Enix starts redesigning encounters to actually require more active healing (at least at Savage content levels), or 2) Square-Enix starts redesigning jobs with the new expectation that healers are actually just "green DPS who sometimes heal and rez" (as the raid community currently seems to feel) and gives a more interesting DPS cycle to them.

Personally, I'd prefer they do the former; I suspect most of us here are probably in that camp.

The issue I see with the former, as mentioned before, is that just increasing the healing required in savage and ultimate is gonna leave everyone still bored out of their mind for most of their ingame time.

Most raiders spend a very small amount of their time actually raiding, the rest is spent on whatever other content the game has to offer and even people who don't raid but are competent at their job are still gonna be stuck with mindnumbingly boring gameplay of spamming 1 since all the content they do is 70-80% downtime.

[Packetdancer]

The issue I see with the former, as mentioned before, is that just increasing the healing required in savage and ultimate is gonna leave everyone still bored out of their mind for most of their ingame time.

Most raiders spend a very small amount of their time actually raiding, the rest is spent on whatever other content the game has to offer and even people who don't raid but are competent at their job are still gonna be stuck with mindnumbingly boring gameplay of spamming 1 since all the content they do is 70-80% downtime.

I mean, I wouldn't object to much higher damage in future normal content too. (Witness the 'at least' in my statement; I'd be thrilled if they were to give us more healing to do overall!) But in savage (and presumably Ultimate) is where the Healing-vs-DPS thing seems to be most pronounced, so it's probably where they could address it first by tinkering, and see what the fallout is.

[Crushnight]

The issue I see with the former, as mentioned before, is that just increasing the healing required in savage and ultimate is gonna leave everyone still bored out of their mind for most of their ingame time.

Most raiders spend a very small amount of their time actually raiding, the rest is spent on whatever other content the game has to offer and even people who don't raid but are competent at their job are still gonna be stuck with mindnumbingly boring gameplay of spamming 1 since all the content they do is 70-80% downtime.

That becomes 100% in MSQ solo duties and overworld stuff which is a hefty portion of the MSQ content. You'll never have to heal in MSQ solo duties because Dps can't, can't get hit hard enough to warrant mitigation because Dps can't, the solo experience of healers is to ignore 90% of your kit because it is worthless to you, and ignoring 90% of the job you want to play is not fun. They need to look at healers both in and out of a party not just within one.

[Undeadfire]

As for static loot, the priority list I’ve seen written dps > tank > healer is dumb. It’s a team game, 8 players. Every member is pulling their weight so deserve an equal opportunity to role. That’s how I run things, it’s how I’ll always run my static

There's a reason we do this in HC groups since we're pushing 1st week clears. DPS having the highest priority is needed so we push a much less bigger risk of DPS checks and pushing the enrage, DPS getting higher Ilvl armor has a much larger difference vs a Tank or Healer obtaining it. Tanks/Healers are the most OP jobs staying alive on powerful content and don't directly need it to push 1st week due to their large mitigation tools except Whm which lacks mitigation tools. DPS are much more prone to dying in Savage 1st weeks clear making the whole team waste more time, having 1 death isn't an option when you're pushing for 1st kills.

You're more than welcome to run it the way you like it, but that's the fact of why dedicated raid groups operate DPS priority.

Each raid fight has their own abomination mechanic raid groups rather not do and get it pushed down than rather dealing with it, example: E10S Shadow/Towers.

[Semirhage]

Hot take: the holy trinity is stupid, reductionist design that only the MMOs from the RPG subcategory bitterly cling to, and this reductionism takes sensible positions like "let's figure out how to beat this boss together" and at its worst turns them into "But I'm a HEALER! I don't WANT to do any of those other things!", or "Tanks should TANK ONLY, their job isn't damage!"

It has its merits occasionally, but treating the trinity as if it were Holy Game Design That All Must Aspire To And Any Deviation From It Is Blasphemy is nonsense.