Healer design is still terrible and I'm tired of apologizing for it.

[Rilifane]

And who can forget that Yoshida quote that I can't be bothered to hunt down the infographic for: the bewilderingly out of touch "The White Mage would be doing all the healing while the Scholar DPSed away", when in fact Scholar was pulling higher DPS and HPS because oGCD healing is a thing.

It's a set of situations that only begins to make sense if you step into the shoes of a DPS main with only a vague, Sylphie-informed opinion on how healers "should" play. It's not just a snarky dismissive piece of hyperbole. If you imagine being a DPS main, who doesn't particularly like playing healers, looking at your party menu when you're punching or spear poking away. "What's that healer doing? I'm taking damage and I don't see them casting Cure! I'm going to di-oh I'm fine. What's that, Tetra? They blew an emergency tool on me instead of healing like a healer should!" "All I see is Broil on that cast bar! That healer is really lazy, they only cast their DPS spell and they aren't paying attention to our health bars! I'm not going to connect the dots with the fact that we made it through the content. Why aren't they healing!?" "They pick the role to enjoy casting healing spells or something. They should enjoy all of the healing spells we gave them then."

Healers occupy the "oh right they exist too, better throw a raidwide in there or something. Ehh whatever. Good enough! Back to designing other mechanics" mental space.

This is a lot more accurate than people give it credit for.
I have several friends who main dps and haven't touched a healer in any MMO ever. Whenever they hopped into DF to do roulettes or something with me, they audibly panicked. Like a partywide from a dungeon boss hit, party at 60%, I glared away while waiting for Assize and they went like "Uhh... Elli? I dropped really low. Elli? Aren't you going to heal? I'm really low and ohmygodthebossiscastingsomethingI'mgoingtodiiieee" and whenever we exchanged DF stories, they praised the random healer if they were always topped. "He was really good, I didn't even drop from the aoe because they preshielded the whole party before every aoe" "The aoe barely hit and I was already topped, that was a really good healer" and so on.

One of them did dabble into healing lately and he behaved exactly as he imagined healers to be when coming from a pure DPS main perspective with the vague idea about what healers do: he was topping people off all the time, shielding them for good measure when he was done topping them off, sprinkling a few dps casts but the moment damage hits it was healing to full into shielding everyone again right away. He treated GCDs as bread and butter and oGCDs to "support" GCD healing during high damage phases. And high damage phase was something like the party dropping to 50% once and nothing happening for the next 20s+.
He couldn't, for the life of him, wrap his head around the idea that healers can heal most content with oGCDs alone. When I told him I usually don't touch GCD heals outside prog (or if things go really, really wrong) he was genuinly surprised because he used them so frequently so he couldn't imagine healing an Extreme, let alone Savage boss, with oGCDs alone. It sounded completely impossible for him, he was sure the whole party would die after 2min tops.
He openly said that anything below 80% is a no-go for him and if a healer frequently lets the party drop this low, he considers them bad and not comm them and that "empty" (=below 70%) HP bars make him anxious because his job is top to top off first, prepare for the next damage next and lastly maybe sprinkle in a dot or a nuke here and there.
The HP bar anxiety was almost hilarious.

I know it's just anecdotal but I can well imagine where they're coming from if they never played healer or only briefly tried it to have one healer maxed. This is how pretty much every DPS main I ever met that tries healer for a bit played them. Top party off. Shield if you can once topped.

[Connor]

I’ve been saying for like 6 expansions but I think GCD support/utility should be the way to go for healers. Like adapting Bravery and Protect from Bozja for PvE, make them like 30s or 15s duration and add them to role skills. Protect would obviously be largely redundant but just using it as an example lol. Plus they already exist in-game so less work for SE. And they could give the healers their own unique ways of supporting the party.

White Mage could get more direct buffing spells like Stoneskin that tie in to its job gauge somehow. Like, ‘if a buffed party member falls below 80% hp you generate a lily’, or ‘if shield breaks grants blood lily’. Tie into their damage somehow, basically. Scholar could get DoTs with lower potency than Biolysis but debuffs like reducing damage by X% or increase damage taken by X% (again just an example because a gcd with that effect would be disgustingly op lol). Astrologian could get it’s time manipulation effects back, like imagine if you could use Time Dilation on the GCD.

Sage is a bit more difficult since their utility is merged with their healing, so maybe it would be best for them to continue down that road rather than trying to make up stuff to give them lol. I think it’d be cool if Sage had a dps spell that had less potency than Dosis III but a higher Kardion effect, so you could decide depending on the amount of damage the tank is taking whether you want to continue with Dosis or take the damage drop for a healing boost.

Idk I mean, they don’t want us to have a lot of dps or anything. Honestly I think at this point they’re being more philosophical than practical about it. It’s not that they aren’t aware that healers need more dps options, they just don’t believe that adding those options would be appropriate relative to ‘what healers truly are’. And I mean I don’t even really disagree. But why can’t we have fun healer things to do that they are traditionally known for lol.

Like they want healers to match the traditional ‘heals and support the party’ style FF generally has…then add nothing to heal, no way to support, no damage rotation or options to fill up the void. I mean at least if we had ways to support the party that were GCD we could do something in the time between heals, if they really want to avoid making healer dps that much

[GrimGale]

The only source of unpredictability, currently, is other players.

And that unoredictability boils down to raising them when they die instantly to mechanics.

Most things will either one shot, or two shot players in this game and the way latency works, good luck having your heal actually conect and save that dps about to take damage.

[Melorie]

WHM is in a strange spot where players aren't picking it because it's designed well and strong, they're taking it because their other options aren't fun. I'm playing WHM myself. I think it's the worst healer and used to be an AST main, but AST wasn't fun to play and our group has a Sage, so here I am.

Same. WHM is bad designed but at least it is not weirdly clunky. I never touched another class after I picked AST in HW but after SHB I couldn't bring myself to play it.

[Silver-Strider]

Same. WHM is bad designed but at least it is not weirdly clunky. I never touched another class after I picked AST in HW but after SHB I couldn't bring myself to play it.

I honestly play my PLD more than I play my WHM now. I can heal and mitigate just as well as a WHM but I have more than a mindless 1 button rotation to keep me occupied.

[LuciaMirain]

Progging third savage fight as whm/sag/sch and we are healing purely through ogcds, with help of groups mitigation ofc. Lilybell is useful as hell and basically negates a mechanic in the third fight that could otherwise be harsh because of the large arenas. It was obviously created for these specific fights.
All in all both me and cohealer are dpsing most of the time. Healer design or encounters need to change. In the third fight there is even times where the boss is untargetable so I can spend lilies to get a misery.

[Thoosa]

Progging third savage fight as whm/sag/sch and we are healing purely through ogcds, with help of groups mitigation ofc. Lilybell is useful as hell and basically negates a mechanic in the third fight that could otherwise be harsh because of the large arenas. It was obviously created for these specific fights.
All in all both me and cohealer are dpsing most of the time. Healer design or encounters need to change. In the third fight there is even times where the boss is untargetable so I can spend lilies to get a misery.

That’s pretty bad - hopefully the last savage fight requires some gcd heals? Not sure if this tier is comparable to the e1s tier at all in terms of difficulty?

If they feel like they don’t want to put pressure on the healers in fights, they could give instant rez’s to the tanks and then vastly increase the incoming damage?

[LuciaMirain]

That’s pretty bad - hopefully the last savage fight requires some gcd heals? Not sure if this tier is comparable to the e1s tier at all in terms of difficulty?

If they feel like they don’t want to put pressure on the healers in fights, they could give instant rez’s to the tanks and then vastly increase the incoming damage?

I think the issue lies in the fights being very scripted so damage is very predictable. The aoe bleed mechanics all come every 3 minutes which ofc fit lilybell perfectly. The damage is high, one aoe that phoinix does will straight up wipe the party without serious mitigation and even then, week one, it drops us to 5%health. But there is time before the next big hit to just heal it up with asylum and fairy plus assize on cooldown.

[Anxin]

While I still enjoy the game, the scripted nature of, well, everything is tired. Dance Dance Final Fantasy isn't fun when you have low motor skills and/or latency. It also breaks with suspension of disbelief. Instead of bosses and creatures actively trying to kill you, they are just focused on doing their rotation regardless of what you are doing to them. "Oh, you have me at 1/3 health! I will just keep doing the same thing faster and hope it works against you!" Bosses and critters should be reasonably adaptive and try to kill you instead of following a script. Or they should try to survive by retreating into other mobs, having healers themselves, or other tactics.

It wouldn't make the game all that more difficult, but it would make it interesting if critters were less predictable. And, in turn, this would make healers more important. This would also allow control-skills and debuffs like heavy to be useful. For example, a boss suddenly turns and waltzes toward the healer to kill the healer with a tank buster. A DPS then uses a bind skill so the healer can get away, and the tank can run up to eat the buster instead. But this wouldn't always happen. Sometimes the boss would flurry aoe or sometimes it would target a dps that was especially hurting. Dynamic. Interesting. Heal worthy. The patterns would come from knowing the boss's temperament. One boss would hate bards, for example, while another would hate healers above all. Or another would attack high dps and tanks. A boss would prefer single target attacks or aoes or debuffs or damage over time. Just make the behaviors match the boss's personality and have them make an honest effort to kill the party.

I don't expect this to happen, of course, nor is it even the best solution. But it is an example of how an AI design change would make our current healer kits (and those of other classes) more interesting. The unchanging, scripted nature of the game is the root of the problem.

[Leigaon]

I’d be happy with a second DoT to manage on healers. Pre-ShB WHM had Aero II and Aero III—both were different durations...


Yes, actually. That’s how AST used to be designed. Each card did something different—3 were offensive buffs and 3 were utility cards. Royal Road could Extend, Enhance, or Expand the buffs; they weren’t just rinky-dink single targets all the time. ShB changed that to make them all 3%/6% buff cards and threw the Seal mechanic on there as justification for keeping all 6 versus trashing 4 of them...

Okay, this makes more sense now thank you. It is tough when someone suggests changes and just go "more diversity." because I do not know what that means. I've been around since 1.0 and have gone through plenty of changes. This clears things up for me along with another post drastically as to where the mindset is coming from. I can safely say that I'm good with my understanding and can walk away without asking anymore questions as I know where this is all heading now. Thank you, and good luck to you all in the future of FFXIV!