My idea for Healer 'engagement'

[EaMett]

Healers, the ones who main healers, and not the ones that play it for a faster queue time and are screaming for more dps options, but people who play healers because they enjoy healing... do not need more dps options.

It's been the other way around. Healers have a really low ceiling in this game and mains that play healer day in and day out are bored with no room for growth within the role. We don't necessarily care for our filler rotation to be DPS skills but we want more to do than just heal the very little outgoing damage the content throws at us.
The non-mains with lower mastery of or low investment in the role are fine sticking with the current paradigm. (and why wouldn't they, it looks more and more like that's been the design philosophy).

Edit: Sometimes it just feels like healers have had low adoption so the devs have just been trying to fill the queues so that the other players can enjoy the game. Regardless of the impact on healer mains.

[Recon1o6]

so, basically Lastelli, you just want to become green dps.

got it.

by the way, I was not saying heal ALL the time, but it would be nice to use more than a couple heal buttons for a more engaging time.

as for my length of time playing, I certainly lack your obvious age and veteran status, but I am not exactly new or inexperienced, while it hardly makes me the expert you are, I started at the end of Heavensward

what I was hoping of course, is that there was some way to make healers do more healing, instead of a dps with a healer side job. I dont think homogenization is a better direction.

but thats just my newbie inexperience talking it up I imagine ^^

While you won't find a single person disagreeing with you on homogenisation being a bad thing. The unfortunate circumstances is that Green dps for healers and Blue dps for tanks is how the game is designed to be played because SE's design formula isn't changing.
There's hardly any tanking checks in the game and all of them are in savage. Enmity no longer exists and boss positioning is automatic in most cases. This was most notable in the unreal trials, ARR trials that did require tank positioning causing a lot of tanks that started later in the game's life cycle to struggle.

As for healers fights are almost completely scripted and the incoming damage is both very low and comes in small bursts. The healing power afforded to players is far too strong, cheap and plentiful for such a low level of damage. Consequently you are left with lots of downtime in party duties. Solo duties well, you don't even need to heal much.


So what else are tanks and healers to do to contribute other than be dps with a different icon? sit around doing emotes? SE have said they won't tune damage any higher despite pleas from players. The answer is dps since that's always useful.

Have a look at this thread over on the healer forums.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues

The majority of healers want more damage to heal. But SE has said numerous times they can't do that. That's why so many want dps actions. We used to have them and still healed. Adding more dps actions won't raise the skill floor, it will only raise the skill ceiling and better still, get shut of some of the terrible homogenisation

[Shougun]

I might be fitting an action to an idea but before the rebalance was announced one idea to make healers more fun was to address scaling. The issue with healers is as everyone gets stronger healers get less useful. When your tank can heal themselves better and take less damage, your role becomes less relevant. So I thought to make things scale not so aggressively would help, among a few other ideas.

Anyway, so I am imagining besides helping address some overflow like bugs by changing scale that we might also see an effect where the healing action is actually overall more valuable for longer periods of time even as gear quality increases. Which is going to then require more attentive healers or the team fails, good for the idea of healers needing to heal but will be interesting to see (if I'm right) if it also causes some people not to want to be healers because there is now a higher demand to be more active (in a lot of content, given half decent gear you could just oGCD heal and so some healers use this as a way to sleep at the wheel, of course others use this as a chance to weave in damage and naturally were a bit annoyed when that weaving in damage became one button spam).

[EaMett]

Most veteran healers with a deep knowledge about xiv's mechanics will tell you the same thing: it's practically impossible to change the game to force healers to heal the majority of the time. That would require drastic changes to the whole structure of ffxiv's battle content and a complete rework of the healers' toolkits. It's simply NOT going to happen, sorry. That's why many of us simply ask for more interesting dps options. At this point we fully understand that the devs will not make the changes required to achieve what you're currently advocating, so we ask that at least we have something interesting to do once we get closer to the skill ceiling and healing becomes a snoozefest even in savage content. You'll understand that too in due time.

This is accurate, the content will not be changed enough to require more healing. In fact the devs have tried with the latest savage tier and admitted themselves that they pushed it as far as they could and wouldn't comfortable go further. And it wasn't anywhere near close enough.
I use this example way too much but it's because I think it's a decent one: The reality is that the hardest content in this game (only done by 3% of the player base) still only requires about 20-30% healing and the rest of the time is spent dpsing. The devs would never impose that on the entire player base even though "that" is still, technically, not enough for a healing-centric gameplay.

[Ronduwil]

If SE wants healers engaged and having fun, trash mobs need to be dialed up in damage output, make me heal, make the healer have to spend 85% of their time healing more than just the tank. Make healers have to actually heal. That will get my attention, and my engagement, and I will have fun. I suspect others who main healers would agree as well. I have a stack of buttons for healing, why do I not have to use most of them? Tanks use theirs, DPS uses theirs.. why don't I?

To be honest, we don't need to change a thing. There's plenty of healing and raising to be done if you run with PUGs. If you're running with the same group every single week, then by the end of the month everyone knows all the mechanics, no one takes damage, and the healers are bored. That's the nature of the game. Amping up the damage taken just so that the healers running exclusively with the best and most organized groups can continue to have a challenge may be fine for extremes and ultimates, but doing so in regular content is just screwing over that vast majority of players out there who are running with different players of varying skill levels. In high level (as in level 60+) PUGs, I'm already regularly spamming my entire stack of healing buttons for the majority of the fight.

[Misutoraru]

so, basically Lastelli, you just want to become green dps.

got it.

by the way, I was not saying heal ALL the time, but it would be nice to use more than a couple heal buttons for a more engaging time.

as for my length of time playing, I certainly lack your obvious age and veteran status, but I am not exactly new or inexperienced, while it hardly makes me the expert you are, I started at the end of Heavensward

what I was hoping of course, is that there was some way to make healers do more healing, instead of a dps with a healer side job. I dont think homogenization is a better direction.

but thats just my newbie inexperience talking it up I imagine ^^

I think a tune down on healing potency, especially those oGCD heal nuke, have a more strict ilevel sync, might increase the healing uptime abit. There was a time a tank could barely survive Titan HM triple storm, there was a time healer have to spend every trick to keep up with wall to wall pull.

ultimately, ARR do a more engaging dungeon. We have to kite adds, we have to sleep a small boss to stop it killing NPC, we have to remove poison on tank before it get too much too handle, and we have to use knock back to interrup some spell/skill.

It is overall the game mechanic tune down so low and healing power being so strong we could just pop 1-2 oGCD and not to worry about anything. Every expansion I was hoping we will have more intense healing and weaken our healing skill especially oGCD, but it just seem getting dump down evenmore, and those of us who want more intense healing just starting to vanish.

I do agree giving DPS rotation will not change the healing side but only satitfy the Green DPS mind community. Why not both, more intense healing to satisfy us and give a 1-2-3 to satisfy those green DPS. I do not believe tuning damage receive up would exclude more of the community as the current situtation is the bar setting so low. pushing the bar little higher will not hurt

[EaMett]

just screwing over that vast majority of players out there who are running with different players of varying skill levels.

Out of curiosity what would you consider screwing those players over? Scaling potencies would indeed be an issue but we all know that's never going to happen. Adding filler skills to make non-healing gameplay more engaging and raising the ceiling a bit shouldn't screw anyone over.

[Kes13a]

Out of curiosity what would you consider screwing those players over? Scaling potencies would indeed be an issue but we all know that's never going to happen. Adding filler skills to make non-healing gameplay more engaging and raising the ceiling a bit shouldn't screw anyone over.

yeah, suppose thats true enough. I dont see SE changing anything soon, I just kinda dislike their thinking on "we cant possibly make them heal more, but we can make more dps options" Just seems like a limited vision, and likely, as one posted said, its likely none play healers much to actually know how dull it is.

[DBriggs304]

I agree with this OP. Dosing is fine, but our primary responsibility is to heal.

Make us work for it.

[Reinha]

The strangest thing is that non-healers have some of the most interesting support abilities and healing skills.

TBN gives a free hard hitting damage skill, but only if it is fully consumed. Requires planning and knowledge of the fight to get the most out of it.

Curing Waltz is a short range free AoE heal which doubles in potency if the assigned person is also standing nearby, or heals from afar if the assigned person is on the other side of the platform. This could be used whenever people stack or when we have to split into two groups for a mechanic.

Nascent Flash could be an interesting alternative for HoT spells if your tank knows how to do their rotation. It could even be an AoE "heal" and a great tool in situations that require passing a damage check whilst the party is also taking damage.

Abyssal Drain heals more the more enemy targets it hits. This seems like an obvious addition to a healer's kit if it healed other players, yet we have nothing like it. Could have been how the blood Lily worked, for example.

Intervention reduces the damage another player takes. Seems like something that would help healers perform their primary task, keeping people alive. AST cards used to have this option but that got removed.