Could a "fully offensive healer" work in FFXIV?

[Omedon]

Hi, this post is coming from a healing-averse player who has played many MMOs and only enjoyed healing in one narrow moment of the MMO space: When the idea of "a healer that heals through dealing damage" was novel, accepted in a few games, and hadn't had all the fun beaten out of it by WoW overthinking its endgame.

To heal, I really only need one condition to be met.

I either need to be focusing 99% on party members and not dealing damage, or I need to be blasting the enemies with the damage dealt then passively radiating into healing that hits the party.

What I won't do is switch back and forth, constantly, between targeting enemies and targeting the players. Maybe that means I never try a healing job in FFXIV. If so, I accept that.

For a time, chloromancer in RIFT and Discipline priest in WoW generally worked through the "healing through damage" way. As I understand it, chloromancer never changed, and WoW again overthought its endgame and needed a "high skill floor healer" (that then wiped learning parties constantly), and turned discipline healing into that.

Early in MMOs, when my lasting impressions and expectations were formed, I was a healer when healers just healed, and the social compact was everything the party did well just made the healer less stressed out, so the healer would treat the party well and vice versa.

Then healers wanted "challenge," and here we are today with white mages DPSing and discipline priests needing to constantly swap between enemies and allies.

So I know there isn't a healer in FFXIV that isn't expected to deal damage, and that's fine, I can always just... never heal in FFXIV.

But man, wouldn't it be cool if we got a choloromancer-like job? Have we heard anything about the new job in this direction? Would this even work in FFXIV? The damage doesn't have to be DPS job level, but I mean... healing through damage is a solid gimmick that I miss!

[Vencio]

Hi, this post is coming from a healing-averse player who has played many MMOs and only enjoyed healing in one narrow moment of the MMO space: When the idea of "a healer that heals through dealing damage" was novel, accepted in a few games, and hadn't had all the fun beaten out of it by WoW overthinking its endgame.

To heal, I really only need one condition to be met.

I either need to be focusing 99% on party members and not dealing damage, or I need to be blasting the enemies with the damage dealt then passively radiating into healing that hits the party.

What I won't do is switch back and forth, constantly, between targeting enemies and targeting the players. Maybe that means I never try a healing job in FFXIV. If so, I accept that.

For a time, chloromancer in RIFT and Discipline priest in WoW generally worked through the "healing through damage" way. As I understand it, chloromancer never changed, and WoW again overthought its endgame and needed a "high skill floor healer" (that then wiped learning parties constantly), and turned discipline healing into that.

Early in MMOs, when my lasting impressions and expectations were formed, I was a healer when healers just healed, and the social compact was everything the party did well just made the healer less stressed out, so the healer would treat the party well and vice versa.

Then healers wanted "challenge," and here we are today with white mages DPSing and discipline priests needing to constantly swap between enemies and allies.

So I know there isn't a healer in FFXIV that isn't expected to deal damage, and that's fine, I can always just... never heal in FFXIV.

But man, wouldn't it be cool if we got a choloromancer-like job? Have we heard anything about the new job in this direction? Would this even work in FFXIV? The damage doesn't have to be DPS job level, but I mean... healing through damage is a solid gimmick that I miss!

Healers in FFXIV can & do dps additionally in groups/alliances/raids.

Your priority though is to “heal” & sustain the party’s flow while you can.

Healer’s/Tank’s dps will never par/surpass that of actual dps jobs, but is expect for you to help out with dps nonetheless if able to.

Never grow cocky of a fully defensive tank, some slight error can wipe a whole party.

[Ranaku]

SE (FFXIV) is it seems way too obsessed with the idea of shield/HoT healers. Would be great if they spice up the ways healers heal a bit but yeah...r.i.p. geomancer...we will never forget your totems...

[TTiscancer]

LOL

Most healers just stand there and do nothing when there's nothing heal as it is, let alone try to work their healing around DPS spells like every competent healer would. If you introduced an offensive healer like they had in Warhammer Online, people would be confused and confuddled and completely lost.

[Alxyzntlct]

Hmmm...

It's an interesting idea, but there's a lot of factors to consider to ensure it didn't become the immediate "go-to" Healer that becomes the defacto choice for all groups:
- The DPS an "all-damage" healer job does would have to stay at the same ceiling that current healing classes can do
- This means that even though a player spends all of their time doing dps, that their individual attacks are ultimately weaker, otherwise they'd be doing way too much dps on top of healing the party
- The reason for this is effectively math; if someone doing dps is also healing then that means they're almost literally doubling their numerical worth (doing dps points as well as healing points), making anything outside of that job pointless

Now about the caveat you mentioned: "What I won't do is switch back and forth, constantly, between targeting enemies and targeting the players."

Then you also mention: "For a time, chloromancer in RIFT and Discipline priest in WoW generally worked through the "healing through damage" way."

Does this mean you don't mind if there's some clicking back and forth, as long as it's not every other action?

I ask because that's another important balancing factor; there has to be some interaction with players and enemies where you need to select which players to heal, because if it's instead something like an automatic heal to either large portions or an entire team, then even that would make it entirely too over-powered. As it stands now, healers have to actively choose who to heal in which situations, and yes, everyone does have AOE heals but that also requires team coordination and awareness to really take advantage of (little Timmy that runs off to a corner by himself likely isn't going to get healed, lol).

So with all of that said, I'm certainly not against the idea, but it's definitely something that needs to be well thought-out and balanced so it doesn't over-shadow the rest of the healing jobs.

[Shougun]

I think FULL offensive healer would be quite challenging I think you could add a healer that gives a sense of it far more than usual. For example one idea in the dark healer thread, I had suggested an offensive heal that would prevent damage from the target to your party (so it functions in raids too). Now it would need careful balance, can't be purely this type of healing, but it would add an element of enfeebling and such. There were curses and other concepts to give greater sense of offense, and even some healing spells that could damage enemies.

I would love to read someone try to make a full offensive healer though, sounds like a fun thought experiment.

[Jojoya]

I briefly dabbled in Chloromancer when I played RIFT but didn't care for it and quickly stopped using it so I can't give it a good evaluation.

I did main Discipline in WoW from mid-Wrath through WoD and then split time between Disc and Holy in Legion. I can't speak for what it's like now (though I imagine it's still fairly similar to what it was in Legion since that's when they decided to make it the high skill cap spec) but I doubt it was ever anything like you want to imagine.

Discipline was never a purely offensive healer. It was mainly a shield healer until Legion (we got called Bubble Bots). Damage through healing was added in MoP and was mostly intended as a sort of sustain between burst damage windows. Get close to the burst damage window and you'd switch to getting shields up on everyone (or at least as many as possible).

It was a balancing mess for the devs as they tried to sort out the identity they wanted the spec to have. Because it was going to be dealing more damage than the other healers, they had to make the healing weaker so Disc didn't become the "only best choice". They kept going through variations of smart healing (the heal would land on a random player near target, the heal would land on a random player near target at less than 100% HP, etc.) and finally gave up on that part when they decided to turn it into the high skill ceiling spec.

With the Legion rework, you generally had to heal or shield someone first so they would get a buff that would allow them to receive passive healing when you dealt damage so you were still spending a significant amount of time healing instead of DPSing. You had to keep renewing that buff if you wanted the healing from damage to continue. Again not certain what it's like now (suppose I could browse Warcraft Logs to get an idea) but I can promise it's still not a pure offensive healer.

Even as a mixed healer type, I don't see it fitting into this game well as a standard job. It could work with BLU, especially if intended for soloing content like Basic Instinct is, but that's about as far as I would go.

If you don't enjoy healing, don't sweat it. Stick to DPS or tank or whatever you do enjoy. Those of us who do enjoy healing will still be there.

[Imora]

Full on offensive healer would become mandatory, much like disc priests and holy paladins are in WoW.

They're taken because they put out good healing AND damage to beat enrage timers in cutting edge guilds.

I'd rather not see that here.

[Recon1o6]

focusing on party memebers 99% of the time will not and should never happen in any mmo.
It leads to healers having a poor solo game when they need to do levelling or msq, and in scripted encounters like ff14, boredom

ff14's healers are combat medics who dps and heal and we have seen good healing design in the past. 4.0 sch where they could get great uptime through dots while still putting out healing and 2.0/3.0 whm who could buff powerful regens and let them tick while doing damage.

Even now, 70-90% of a healer's gcd casts in this game are offensive spells. Only we have 1 dot and 1 nuke attack when we had much better options. Needless to say, between that and the lack of challenge, many healers have quit in SHB citing boredom and destroying 2 of the jobs, and barely improving the third

given ff14's healing floor and ceiling are extremely low and the devs tendency to make healers an afterthought, healing in this game would likely leave OP on the side of "we need more incoming damage because this is low and boring"
Which tbf is true but most healers want higher incoming damage and randomness and more importantly more downtime (non healing/where everyone is healed) tools

[Sebazy]

Hi, this post is coming from a healing-averse player who has played many MMOs and only enjoyed healing in one narrow moment of the MMO space: When the idea of "a healer that heals through dealing damage" was novel, accepted in a few games, and hadn't had all the fun beaten out of it by WoW overthinking its endgame.

Warhammer Online's Warrior priest is the one that I bring up when this kind of discussion arrises. Using melee attacks to generate charges for it's OGCD/Insta toolkit whilst also having basic but time inefficient heals to fall back onto when needed as well. It'd be something that would be simpler to tune than purely generating healing auras through DPS.

At this point in time I'm honestly fine with SE trying absolutely anything vaguely bold and fresh with healers though. I really don't care what it is. A move towards buffing, debuffing, disc priest style healing auras, utility through dps. I just want SE's devs to try something so I'm not facing another expansion with a nigh 10 to 1 ratio of Glare vs anything else even in Savage content.

The current state of healer gameplay is laughable at best. Can you imagine the uproar if a new DPS job got added that pressed 1 button 200+ times in a Savage encounter with the second place ability coming in at under 30 presses?