My idea for Healer 'engagement'

[QooEr]

If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go.

Why is only Ast allowed to be any fun? I used to love scholar and now i cant stand playing it.

The way I see it, if you join the Balance Discord, min-max your character, practice on target dummies to the point where your rotation is on auto-pilot, and run exclusively with the same players in your FC over and over, you've turned the game into easy mode for yourself. It's not on the developers to make things harder on the majority of players who play rationally to compensate for a minority's obsession.

What? DPS and tanks make the game HARDER for themselves by minmaxing and still have to adjust to encounters even when their rotation is on autopilot on a dummy.

DPS and tanks still get to have fun when they play with their friends or statics. Why do healers have to be any different?

[Sebazy]

I suspect most of it has been covered already but here's my two cents anyway:


SE have designed themselves into a corner with healers, this trend started with Stormblood, continued with Shadowbringers and looks as if it will go further down the rabbit hole with Endwalker.

I would argue that our healing toolkits are too strong relative to our hp pools and that we regenerate resources too quickly. This is 'offset' by us having small resource pools that we can deplete rapidly if we don't stay ontop of shroud and/or make some effort to get value out of abilities and oGCDs vs just hammering the Medica button.

IMHO SE have 3 options to move forward:

1) Try a WoW Cataclysm and inflate people's HP pools relative to healing and damage potency and switch to a battle of attrition style healing model. This would be highly controversial and still require significant tuning to the current healer role's cool downs and abilities. If we can just endlessly sustain people anyway by juggling cool downs, it'd likely only make things worse.

2) Embrace the green DPS and just make the healer role into a support role, effectively 4 DPS jobs with much more primitive healing kits with a focus on group healing as a by product of DPSing. Let's be clear now, I'm only putting this here because frankly, this should have been done at the end of Heavensward at the latest, if not at the start of ARR. If attempted now this would turn the healer community on it's head, cause huge amounts of outrage and require an obscene amount of developer work to retune and test old content. Even as someone who has healed in MMOs since MMOs were a thing, I'll be the first to admit that this is the road SE should have gone down in hindsight.

3) What I think is the most feasible and least disruptive angle. Embrace the downtime and give each healer within the role their own gimmick to spend GCDs on. WHM can stick to it's straight forward roots by just lobbing pure raw potency around. AST should be able to spend it's GCDs dropping it's potency onto other players via being allowed to pull cards on the GCD without cool down. SCH should be stacking dots and debuffs. Sage should be generating healing and buffs as a splash style byproduct of DPSing. Making buffs and debuffs work with fixed potency values rather than percentages would be one angle to make things much easier to tune and less likely to overinflate through the course of an expansion.

So yeah, just to be clear, whilst I think 2 would have been best for the long term health of the game. It's just too late for that at this point. 3 is the only direction I can see them going without splitting the community in half as a result.

However, I honestly can't see that ever happening at this point either. Why?

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

An old thread, but it's still stands to this day. Yoshida *needs* to invest into the battle system team to have the manpower to solve this and that doesn't seem to be something that he is willing to do.

[Ronduwil]

Why is only Ast allowed to be any fun? I used to love scholar and now i cant stand playing it.

"Fun" is a relative measure. If you consider AST to be fun, then play that. If you can't stand playing SCH, then don't play it. I'm personally not a huge fan of either of those jobs. I'm perfectly happy with how WHM plays, so I generally stick with that. I would rather see various jobs cater to various playstyles than have one homogenous playstyle to which all the jobs conform. I don't like the way that some of the jobs play, and that's OK. I still plan on leveling all the jobs to level cap just because I'm a completionist and because I want to gain a rudimentary understanding of how each one plays, but I doubt I will ever run group content with most of them because I despise their frenetic pace. I realize that many players love those jobs because of their frenetic pace, so I'm not ever going to advocate for slowing jobs other down or removing buttons to suit my preferences. By that same token, I get really irked when I see players demanding more buttons and more OGCD skills because they're bored with the way some "slow" or "simple" jobs play.

If there's any change I can get behind here, it's the idea of adding more debuffs and making their removal matter. Of course, if they were to do that, I'd prefer that they make Esuna instant-cast with the cast time folded into a cooldown instead.

[xbahax92]

I get the point, I agree halfway. Though, I dont think its fun when your entire group dies, because either you or the healer in general cant keep up.
When I remember those very first days in Holminster Switch, damn the trash mobs hit like a truck. Wall to wall pulls were really dangerous.
I am not sure if I want to heal more, with a higher risk to wipe multiple times in a dungeon/raid.

The real solution would be, again imo: Tying healing abilities and damaging skills; so when you do one - you get rewarded for the other.
Lily system works like that and they should expand on it.

[Roeshel]

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.

What are you talking about? In what 60+ normal content does plenty of healing exist?

[SturmChurro]

I main white mage - always have - and I do think we need more variety in terms of damage abilities. To actually make 'healing' itself more enjoyable would require quite a bit of an overhaul in terms of tuning, and class/encounter design, while also making it accessible for new, learning, or lower end players. Simply increasing damage taken across the board isn't really the solution here, in my opinion.

[TaleraRistain]

For me as a white mage main for the past 7 years, I only dps because SE isn't giving us anything else to do. I don't think just upping mob damage is going to fix things, since that will make the role harder on those already struggling. I've always advocated for more support abilities instead of dpsing. Damage shields, buffs, debuffs, etc. Let me manage that in a fight and make it relevant. They can change the role name from Healer to Support.

This is also why I prefer PUG runs. Unexpected things happen and it tests your abilities as a healer. There is nothing more boring for me than a flawless run where I barely heal and we wall-to-wall while I stand there continuously Holy spamming. It's pretty, but it's not engaging in the slightest. And I also chose this role instead of pure dps because I want to support my party. So my pipe dream is for SE to let us do that in other ways.

[MirielleLavandre]

We need things like elemental weaknesses, different damage types (swap weapons to help complete specific skill chains - ala Hexa-strike), and elemental staves back...hehe, who am I kidding, people would be dying left and right, though some if that old school complexity would be fun ^^ At least give us Haste as another buff to keep up on everyone

[Halivel]

More healing would add burdens to the healers, which SE has been actively tried to avoid for the sake of casual players. Remember the reason they don't make harder difficulty for 4-man dungeons? Because healers must be good or it is a wipe.

But "casual" isn't equall to "incompetent". If there was any real reason to make healing what it is - it's either "new players" or "faster faster faster" mentality in the community, with second one probably contributing the most.

I like OP's idea both as tank main and healer-2nd (probably other way around in 6.0, not sure yet) with maybe some adjustments (most being already mentioned by other healer mains), but I feel like with what our "playing culture" currently is - it will meet a lot of negative pushback if implemented. Because what I currently see in the community isn't "how to make our dungeon runs interesting", it's "how to make our runs as fast as possible and don't you dare waste 5 more seconds of my time". There are obviously people who don't think this way, it's just the overall feeling I get every time I enter any dungeon, and it's not solely devteam's fault.

What are you talking about? In what 60+ normal content does plenty of healing exist?

Bardamm's Mettle (65) tbh is the only thing I can think about. That one hits like a truck if you go wall-to-wall.
Well, maybe also 71+ leveling dungeons if you're going with people who're still leveling and as result usually aren't geared really well. Level sync and the lack of some abilities might make things a bit more complicated, but honestly not much.

[Lastelli]

I also don't agree with the idea of adding filler skills. If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go. I really don't want this game to go the way of WoW where the developers cater to long-time players' demands for more and more challenge to the point where the game is simply unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to treat an MMO like a way of life.

The irony of this comment. Back in HW, healers were way less braindead. You actually had to pay attention to mp, know exactly when damage was coming to precast your heals since we didn't have so many instant skills, know when you could afford to turn cleric stance on to do some damage, and we had WAY more dps buttons. It was still very easy to heal normal content, but a good healer in savage content was a sight to behold. You had so many different ways to optimize and it was incredibly rewarding.

And then SB came and healers were made easier because we need accessibility and we need to cater to the lowest common denominator. We can't have good players be too good otherwise mediocre players will feel bad about themselves. But at least we still had a few things to pay attention to so it wasn't too bad.

And then ShB came and the devs thought it was a brilliant idea to force a 1 button rotation on all 3 healers that basically doesn't change from lvl 1 to cap because, again, they want to make sure that playing a healer is as simple as possible and bad players don't feel bad about themselves. And healers complained loudly.

Cater to long-time players? You can't be serious. Job design was changed to cater to new, inexperienced players in the last 2 expansion while veteran players are left with some jobs that are nothing but empty shells of their former selves and this is particularly evident for tanks, healers and ranged dps.

And in EW, it looks like SMN will receive the MCH treatment and become the next simplistic and flashy dps job that, once again, caters to inexperienced/casual players that only want to press buttons randomly and feel good because the can do decently without any effort. They're slowly forcing accessibility and simplicity (rather, shallowness) on every single job.