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

[Semirhage]

Can't say I relate at all

Just run savage and unreal and there you go. What's the big deal?
You mad that the unwashed masses are allowed to see cutscenes? Big whoop.

Also not really true. Even in normal you will wipe almost every 60+ dungeon if you truly took it to the extreme you are saying of having no healer.
True it is not often riveting or adrenaline producing but again.. just go raid harder content. It is going to be alright

I raid Savage, Unreal, and Ultimate.

If you run most dungeons with competent people, you literally -do not- need a healer. I've done this multiple times, with more than one dungeon. Tank self-sustain and mitigation is absurd, especially as you approach level cap.

In Savage and Ultimate, if you have a competent group, you spend a much, much, much larger portion of your time than you might think casting one filler damage spell over and over and over and over and over again. It's not fun. It's not interesting design. Most of us are bored of the same 4-5 excuses given over and over and over again for why we "need" to have poorly-designed healers. I'm not trying to gatekeep you dirty casuals out of cutscenes. All I want is for the four jobs in this role to be designed in a way that doesn't funnel them into a tedious, mind-numbing, awful garbage dump of terrible 11111111111111111111111111 spam spam spam spam spam as the skill "ceiling".

Evidently that's just totally unfathomable, both to the job designers and to a generous portion of the playerbase. Which is also absurd, because it's not like FFXIV invented healing ex nihilo ten years ago.

[RinaShinomiya]

Can't say I relate at all

Just run savage and unreal and there you go. What's the big deal?
You mad that the unwashed masses are allowed to see cutscenes? Big whoop.

Also not really true. Even in normal you will wipe almost every 60+ dungeon if you truly took it to the extreme you are saying of having no healer.
True it is not often riveting or adrenaline producing but again.. just go raid harder content. It is going to be alright

This is a weird accusation tbh. We started getting normal versions of raids 6 years ago, if anyone was upset about casuals watching cutscenes it was then.

[Recon1o6]

Just for an indication of how much we spend pressing our single nuke

I cleared p1s last night. There were 6 deaths, 3 of which were during fourfold shackles (a 4th died straight after due to autos) that I barely escaped from the mess to lb3 heal and rez

I don't parse on principle but according to my co healer of my 282 casts 175 were the same Dosis button and he thought it would be higher as I was playing sage (he had a similar ratio as a whm)

Thats about 63% of all my casts being dosis or eukrasian dosis and you can add another however many eukrasia casts to it since i didn't use a eukrasia on anything but the dot and a single Euk-diagnosis to save a mistake during intemperance.

So if you take Eukrasia into account thats probably something between 65 and 70% of all my casts being the circle button on my controller

I did not have 100% uptime, I was calling mechanics and not 100% focused on my "rotation" as a result and I sure as hell played less than optimal given I fat fingered some abilities and mistimed others, accidentally left the plegema balls on 2 stacks for nearly a minute, nevermind the overheal between myself and the whm thanks to us not working out much other than what points in the fight do I cast pneuma.

[LuciaMirain]

I raid Savage, Unreal, and Ultimate.

If you run most dungeons with competent people, you literally -do not- need a healer. I've done this multiple times, with more than one dungeon. Tank self-sustain and mitigation is absurd, especially as you approach level cap.

In Savage and Ultimate, if you have a competent group, you spend a much, much, much larger portion of your time than you might think casting one filler damage spell over and over and over and over and over again. It's not fun. It's not interesting design. Most of us are bored of the same 4-5 excuses given over and over and over again for why we "need" to have poorly-designed healers. I'm not trying to gatekeep you dirty casuals out of cutscenes. All I want is for the four jobs in this role to be designed in a way that doesn't funnel them into a tedious, mind-numbing, awful garbage dump of terrible 11111111111111111111111111 spam spam spam spam spam as the skill "ceiling".

Evidently that's just totally unfathomable, both to the job designers and to a generous portion of the playerbase. Which is also absurd, because it's not like FFXIV invented healing ex nihilo ten years ago.

Game keeps catering to the casual players. They decided healers can't even handle two dots while making all content very predictable. And the casual players love it because they dont bother optimizing it.
With that said, I would love to heal more when it is actually needed. The most fun, besides ultimates, is when shit goes south in alliance raids. When I actually have to utilize my kit.

[HyoMinPark]

Can't say I relate at all

Just run savage and unreal and there you go. What's the big deal?
You mad that the unwashed masses are allowed to see cutscenes? Big whoop.

Also not really true. Even in normal you will wipe almost every 60+ dungeon if you truly took it to the extreme you are saying of having no healer.
True it is not often riveting or adrenaline producing but again.. just go raid harder content. It is going to be alright

I have no idea where you’re pulling the cutscene argument. It’s irrelevant, but people literally don’t care if others watch cutscenes or not. It has no bearing on the conversation at hand—which is about healing design in this game.

Anyways…

I’ve cleared every tier of Savage since SB (I started in Creator but didn’t clear A12S due to simply focusing on farming the EXs instead), almost every EX except the Weapons in ShB because I took a break, and I’ve cleared all 3 Ultimates. One on a healer. Even in these fights, the amount of active healing is less than 50% of what a healer is doing. When optimized, there are high-end fights that you can heal strictly with just oGCDs. Every Savage and Ultimate fight has even been solo-healed. Heck, the two current EXs can be done without a healer at all, and with 2 tanks + 6 DPS.

The fact of the matter is, is that any healer who is skilled at their job will spend more than half of their time pressing their damage buttons versus their healing buttons. When I cleared UCoB on AST, I played super safe—I even stopped DPSing entirely (!!!) during certain parts of Golden Bahamut to ensure we didn’t wipe there—overhealing like some kind of crazy person—and still most of my casts were damage abilities. Not healing ones. Not even the harder content gives healers what they want—which a lot of the really good ones would like to actually be required to heal more.

The reason I enjoy progging week 1–especially on a healer—is because the fights will actually hurt. But my heals will not be nearly as needed once my my cohealer and I figure out our optimized healing strats. Right now we’re just playing it super safe in P4S just to ensure we get to see more mechanics.

This argument of “just raid Savage” is tiring and overused. And it usually tells me that the person using it has very little idea what they’re talking about. At the very least, it shows they don’t actually do Savage or Ultimate if they think suddenly healers have this increase in active healing time. That said, it would make for pretty boring design if only the hardest content in this game—that most players won’t do—requires any significant amount of healing.

[Semirhage]

This argument of “just raid Savage” is tiring and overused. And it usually tells me that the person using it has very little idea what they’re talking about. At the very least, it shows they don’t actually do Savage or Ultimate if they think suddenly healers have this increase in active healing time. That said, it would make for pretty boring design if only the hardest content in this game—that most players won’t do—requires any significant amount of healing.

Right? There comes a point where difficult content only slightly increases the amount of outgoing unavoidable damage. What harder content does much more frequently is throw in avoidable mechanics that instantly kill someone for failing, or wipe the entire party for one person's failure. That's not exactly an increase in healing interactivity, especially since the lethality of those mechanics encourages players to get better at dodging...which puts us pretty much back at square 1.

[OtakuSempai]

I raid Savage, Unreal, and Ultimate.

If you run most dungeons with competent people, you literally -do not- need a healer. I've done this multiple times, with more than one dungeon. Tank self-sustain and mitigation is absurd, especially as you approach level cap.

In Savage and Ultimate, if you have a competent group, you spend a much, much, much larger portion of your time than you might think casting one filler damage spell over and over and over and over and over again. It's not fun. It's not interesting design. Most of us are bored of the same 4-5 excuses given over and over and over again for why we "need" to have poorly-designed healers. I'm not trying to gatekeep you dirty casuals out of cutscenes. All I want is for the four jobs in this role to be designed in a way that doesn't funnel them into a tedious, mind-numbing, awful garbage dump of terrible 11111111111111111111111111 spam spam spam spam spam as the skill "ceiling".

Evidently that's just totally unfathomable, both to the job designers and to a generous portion of the playerbase. Which is also absurd, because it's not like FFXIV invented healing ex nihilo ten years ago.

I literally could not have said it better, and I'm much more of a casual than anyone here imo.

Always refreshing seeing posts from Semirhage and HyoMinPark, conveying my thoughts much more eloquently than I can. It's a shame devs don't seem to pay much attention to highly knowledgeable players like them.

[ASkellington]

I literally could not have said it better, and I'm much more of a casual than anyone here imo.

Always refreshing seeing posts from Semirhage and HyoMinPark, conveying my thoughts much more eloquently than I can. It's a shame devs don't seem to pay much attention to highly knowledgeable players like them.

What's sad is your first sentence imho. It just goes to show its not just "hardcore" healers who feel the same way. Healers from all walks of skill level can see and feel how poorly designed we are.

[Melorie]

What's sad is your first sentence imho. It just goes to show its not just "hardcore" healers who feel the same way. Healers from all walks of skill level can see and feel how poorly designed we are.

The community always ends up the discussion into this "casual vs hardcore" (even though the bridge between these are not even that big imo, specially not on this game) as if just being a casual means you have absolute zero interest into the combat aspect of the game and doesn't want to use your two braincells for a single thing which is far from true. Of course there are people like this, but at the end of the day this is a combat-based video-game as well, and I doubt the majority would go towards this mindset. If anything, casual people suffer even more from the combat of the game since they don't have the means (time, patience, whatever) of tackling more difficult stuff and are left with your usual roulette-level of gameplay which can be a snooze-fast.

Doesn't help that Yoshi P fuels this mindset by excusing healer design because "casual players need it" or something.

[Truen]

Yeah...healer design IS boring. But, all the jobs in FF14 are heading in that direction to be fair. Simplification is happening--and judging by what we've seen so far devs are trying to dumb the game down to basic 1-button spam, 1-2, and/or 1-2-3 button combos for everyone.

This isn't going to get better. Outside of the lore and story, if complexity and detailed character design matter to you then it might be time to move on from this title.