healers need a serious overhaul

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Healers can DPS and should DPS during downtime.

But I disagree that they are Judged on their dps and are expected to push big dps numbers and heal less to achieve it.
It just...seems like the complete opposite of what a healer is designed to be....

[Undeadfire]

Healers can DPS and should DPS during downtime.

But I disagree that they are Judged on their dps and are expected to push big dps numbers and heal less to achieve it.
It just...seems like the complete opposite of what a healer is designed to be....

It's not about healing less, it's about using your healing efficiently and working with your co-healer for their O-GCDs. You use maths to max uptime your DPS and heal based on the level of damage and mitigation planning with your crew, you got Regen stuff too use them to their advantage. Melees have Feint, Casters have Addle, Ranged have Samba (etc), Tanks have multiple mitigation tools, work with them to reduce incoming damage and allowing you to push DPS more. Getting a fight over quicker results less mistakes in the long run.

[Liam_Harper]

It's not about healing less, it's about using your healing efficiently and working with your co-healer for their O-GCDs.

Exactly. If your group takes 1 million damage over a fight, it's about healing 1 million or so and putting the rest into dps. Healing 4 million and doing noodle dps has absolutely no benefit. Your group isn't safer, in fact you've probably burned resources on negligible damage and your group is less safe when things go bad.

This idea that doing dps means healing "less" is so off the mark. We are healing all the damage. We just aren't healing all the damage twice over for no reason.

The idea that healers are only designed to heal is just lazy too. It's actually great that we're capable of more. It should make the role more rewarding to master because you can contribute even further than your primary task. It should be embraced and worked on.

[EaMett]

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 real issue with 1) is that even ultimate fights are maybe what? 20-30% healing? And how many people can heal those? I agree that some change would need to happen but at this point in the game's history, this is near impossible to do. They would need to strip a lot of oGCDs, reduce mana cost, etc. etc. All things that would break older content. Which is why many in this forum have been pushing for 2)

[ForteNightshade]

The real issue with 1) is that even ultimate fights are maybe what? 20-30% healing? And how many people can heal those? I agree that some change would need to happen but at this point in the game's history, this is near impossible to do. They would need to strip a lot of oGCDs, reduce mana cost, etc. etc. All things that would break older content. Which is why many in this forum have been pushing for 2)

To be fair, they have brought up a stat squeeze at some point. If I recall, they aimed to potentially do so in 6.0. Either way, old content will need to be completely rebalanced for that. So if they did want to focus more on the healing aspects, that would be the time to do it.

Sadly, I don't think the dev will ever commit to the "battle medic" theme since it doesn't fit into the job fantasy many people have. Equally disappointing, they don't seem to realize (or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge) adding more healing tools isn't going to make us heal more.

[Quintessa]

Piety being so useless is kinda silly. Back in 5.0/5.1 AST has some difficulty with MP management, but then SE added MP recovery to cards and now I can again pick my gear with the rule of "avoid anything with piety on it" and still have enough MP to even raise people (in normal content).

All you had to do was use lucid on cooldown then, and still avoid peity. Peity was always useless and until they add a secondary function to it, it'll continue to be useless. Also this topic got moved from general, probably to "hide" the thread...

[HyoMinPark]

All you had to do was use lucid on cooldown then, and still avoid peity. Peity was always useless and until they add a secondary function to it, it'll continue to be useless. Also this topic got moved from general, probably to "hide" the thread...

Piety was actually useful on AST pre-MP adjustments because AST MP was just so bad, and it was so easy to end up MP negative despite on-point Lucid usage. You still only melded what was absolutely necessary more times than not, but AST high piety sets were fairly viable.

[ItMe]

Also this topic got moved from general, probably to "hide" the thread...

Because a topic solely about healers belongs on the general board more than the healer board???

[tdb]

All you had to do was use lucid on cooldown then, and still avoid peity.

Yeah, assuming no one died. Which is a tall order in DF raids. Now I can pretty much raise every time swiftcast is up and not have to wait for MP.

[Rilifane]

All you had to do was use lucid on cooldown then, and still avoid peity. Peity was always useless and until they add a secondary function to it, it'll continue to be useless. Also this topic got moved from general, probably to "hide" the thread...

You could use Lucid and LS like a clockwork and easily run out of MP with a no piety set. All it took was one Raise or a few hardcasts or even just mediocre dps. It was escpecially noticable on fights like e5s or e8s post adds were you could keep near 100% uptime and didn't have transitions for MP reg. Going below 1k was downright spooky in most parties, including fairly well coordinated ones. Around 1,3-1,4k was safe enough for most PFs without overdoing it by any means.
Compare that to the current low piety/ high SpS sets. Actively going for SpS was discouraged for a reason.