Is healing going to get harder?

[Michieltjuhh]

The only enjoyable and challenging thing as a healer in this game is healing as little as possible. In other words, it's only enjoyable when you're logging for dps, which isn't even technically allowed.

So long as the healers are designed this way, the game will never be as complex as its competitors, because it takes away one of the fundamentals of a boss encounter: fear of dying even when you execute the avoidable mechanics correctly. While savage certainly does do decent damage at min ilvl, it's still simple to outheal. The only difficulty comes from not overhealing, which comes at a cost of (usually) needed dps. But that's not complex healing itself.

[UkcsAlias]

Why is it that we can't have more than 2-3 dps buttons?

With proper balance you dont need more buttons, because you should be healing.

The issue however is that if you make healing too difficult, you generaly cause the team to rely on 1 person. Unlike the tank which can be compensated by a healer. It will cause healers to get blamed for losses. This is what causes a healer to become obsolete.

But i think that the solution is simple enough if damage becomes more constant during a fight. So the healer isnt completely being pressed into difficulty, but at least gets the requirement of frequent healing. The more the healer is forced to heal, the less DPS he has to dish out, so less abilities are required.

To counter the issue of making the healer the only one in the team to decide the outcome, other classes must be able to compensate in turn. I think giving other classes a revive option is generaly a way to handle this as if the healer for some reason fails, they would be able to get the healer back.

Also, healing checks can be handled in more ways, even if there is a bad healer, the limit break for the tank could be used as counter. And i think this would also cover the part in which the tank can compensate for a bad healer. LBs are now only used by the DPS anyway as a finisher, i think this is something that could be adjusted.

[Raven2014]

With proper balance you dont need more buttons, because you should be healing.

May I suggest playing AST? There are so many buttons that it's completely bloat. If you give me one more button for DPS or anything else really, I don't even know where it gonna go on my bar!

[UkcsAlias]

May I suggest playing AST? There are so many buttons that it's completely bloat. If you give me one more button for DPS or anything else really, I don't even know where it gonna go on my bar!

Not exactly how i ment my comment. I ment that instead of adding more DPS buttons, they should make healing more relevant. And when that happens, you are going to be using the DPS buttons less often, making it feel like only having a few of them is enough.

As WHM (before the reductions) i far too often notice that i can just heal the tank using just regen (in hard dungeons). And even now using regen with an occasional cure 2 is more than enough to cover most fights. Even though hard isnt ment to be overly difficult, this is however on a too low end.
And i know WHM is ment to be approachable (which is generaly a playstyle i like - instead of getting more buttons, i prefer system in which timing the buttons becomes more relevant). But in this case half of the kit is obsolete as there simply isnt enough damage taking place. And thats when you notice having only a few DPS abilities feels strange.

The other thing is however, if too much healing gets required, some healers might not be able to use any DPS abilities with it. Making too much healing required, a problem for those classes. This can be covered by making DPS boost some healing though, but if that happens, WHM should either get stronger DPS, or more DPS buttons. Both of those are approaches that can either be unbalanced, or make a class more difficult again. But even here, WHM can have mechanics in place that do compensate:
if i would try to get a WHM to dish out more DPS, i would make the lillies charge faster for each stone being casted, and then cause the heal ability to heal a bit more in turn. The charge duration would then also be extended to balance it out (so it for example becomes 45s instead of 30s).

Balancing is difficult, especialy because you dont want the team to entirely rely on the healer. Making a single role blameable will after all make that role unpopular (even more than it already is now).

[Kira_Yaeger]

The only enjoyable and challenging thing as a healer in this game is healing as little as possible. In other words, it's only enjoyable when you're logging for dps, which isn't even technically allowed.

So long as the healers are designed this way, the game will never be as complex as its competitors, because it takes away one of the fundamentals of a boss encounter: fear of dying even when you execute the avoidable mechanics correctly. While savage certainly does do decent damage at min ilvl, it's still simple to outheal. The only difficulty comes from not overhealing, which comes at a cost of (usually) needed dps. But that's not complex healing itself.

It's not hard to add in heal checks into fights that are not something crazy though, like someone said before the only real healing you have to do is when other people get hit by mechanics. Does no one remember the first turn of SB raids? People complained there wasn't enough healing so they added in some more for the next two turns. But then they made the same mistake of in the 2nd turn of Eden, boring 1 button spam. I understand the point of optimizing DPS as a healer, and I also find that part the most fun aspect. But damn it'd be nice at some point to have to maybe think a little bit about what heals I can use and what I have to save because of a big heal check coming up. Again though, with all the different ways of mitigating and all the new tank abilities and self sustain the actual healing part of a healer is going away. I barely have had to cast a heal on a tank at all so far except in dungeons where a certain tank is just so undertuned that it's basically a babysit tank pull every pull. I guess we will wait for savage but if I know square then healing is basically going to be the same as last expac which was nonexistent

[Melorie]

I don’t understand why everything always have to be hard. Can’t we just have some things be easy and be happy with that?

Why everything always have to be easy, though? A good chunky of the content is already quite easy (or if you have any difficulties at first, you don't often need to insist a lot in order to catch). Asking to feel challenged in a content that it's MEANT to do that is pretty natural, if anything I'm surprised you would ask people to feel happy by something being easy if the content was made to make them feel like they're pushing themselves. Makes no sense.

Alas, my problem is not even regarding difficulty, but when it comes to healer design in this game, easy typically means it's not engaging. If I have fun doing a certain rotation I can have fun even in easy/trivial things, however with healers this option isn't available, there's nothing for YOU, there's only something if your team is lacking.

Anyway, to answer the question of the thread, my 2 cents is: no. Specially given the amount of mitigation and even healing we have coming from other jobs. Some people will say that often the two EX trials are supposed to be on the easy side anyway, however I don't see this getting better since SE never really delivered their "we will push healing" promises.

[Jin-]

I don’t understand why everything always have to be hard. Can’t we just have some things be easy and be happy with that?

Some things easy? I thought it's 99% of the game already

[ClaudeHerel]

We can't have healing be hard because cure 1 healers and 0 mitigation tanks couldn't clear story dungeons.

[Rhysati]

Even if SE knew that only a small percentage of the playerbase completed these challenged it should not be something that is overlooked EVER in and MMO.

I'm curious: Why? What value is there in focusing on content that is played by less than 1% of the playerbase?(Since we don't have numbers for FFXIV raid participation I'm going with what was said in Vanilla WoW by the devs. Less than 1% of everyone that played wow(many millions of players) had killed Ragnaros).

I'm not saying they shouldn't make them. It doesn't bother me in the slightest that they exist and I have no desire to play them. But I'd really like to hear why you feel that no MMO should ever overlook challenging raids. What value is there in keeping that tiny fraction of the playerbase happy for a little longer?

[technole]

Too soon to speak on the subject.

Let's rewind. We had Titania and Innocence extremes and they were 'easy' to heal, then Titan Savage came out and laughed at the healers.