An idea about how to solve some of the healing problems

[Semirhage]

Why not, I'll give some feedback.

every player should have a status attached to them that changes how much damage they deal based on the percentage of HP remaining they have. The status should also increase the amount of damage dealt when you are above 95% HP.

Ooh. That's going to affect a lot of the game in very unforeseen ways. What happens when a Monk gets caught up doing a FATE? Are they going to get their butt kicked if they pull more than one mob? They're going to have a hard time staying above 95% health by themselves. What about Deep Dungeons? Or even soloing Deep Dungeons? Is Eureka/Bozja style content going to become much more difficult unless you stack constant heavy regen effects on yourself or bring a healer? Unless tuned very carefully, needing to stay at full health to access your full output could easily slaughter solo content, and that's just a repercussion off the top of my head.

If everyone is topped, you DPS

There would need to be absolutely no changes to any raids or dungeons whatsoever to facilitate this.

Hmmm, I don't believe this will change as much as you might think. For one, it changes the "good" HP threshold from "enough to survive the next mechanic" to "full". Which has two flags for me. One, holy overhealing Batman. Two, in most cases that changes the number of heal casts to deal with a mechanic from an average of 1-2 to maybe 2-3. And then it's back to 1111111111111. Making every HP lost a soft White Hole mechanic doesn't change the fact that outgoing party-wide damage is also infrequent, and healing a party to full from 1 takes relatively little time.

This doesn't suddenly make DPSing on healers fun, you'd still be pressing 1 for eternity, but maybe you be encouraged to use your GCD heals for once because it might actually result in a DPS increase for the raid which is what everyone wants right?

That's a personal no from me, but I get where this is coming from. I don't personally think "encouraging more GCD healing" in a vacuum would make the healer role more fun for me, because I think healer GCD toolkits are just as dull and horribly designed as the damage kits. *shrug*

[Haadrak]

Why not, I'll give some feedback.

Ooh. That's going to affect a lot of the game in very unforeseen ways. What happens when a Monk gets caught up doing a FATE? Are they going to get their butt kicked if they pull more than one mob? They're going to have a hard time staying above 95% health by themselves. What about Deep Dungeons? Or even soloing Deep Dungeons? Is Eureka/Bozja style content going to become much more difficult unless you stack constant heavy regen effects on yourself or bring a healer? Unless tuned very carefully, needing to stay at full health to access your full output could easily slaughter solo content, and that's just a repercussion off the top of my head.

I certainly see what you're getting at there. I did have the idea of just making it apply in dungeons and raids and that way outside of multi-person content it wouldn't affect anyone soloing anything and the game balance would remain unchanged. Whether that would bother people I'm not sure.

I also agree that as it stands when you're DPSing it is very boring and I don't think I've met a single person who thinks that any of the Healing DPS "rotations" are fun, just varying degrees of bland. I am also aware however that while DPS matters in this game, most people probably selected the Healer role to Heal and I know at least anecdotally about 70%+ of my button presses in instanced content are DPS button presses not healing button presses. This was simply an (potentially misguided) attempt to shift that in the direction of heals a bit more without requiring a giant restructure of the entire game while still allowing healers to contribute positively to DPS.

[Semirhage]

most people probably selected the Healer role to Heal and I know at least anecdotally about 70%+ of my button presses in instanced content are DPS button presses not healing button presses.

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

/thread derail off

[IDontPetLalas]

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

/thread derail off

This is so true, I would enjoy all of the above. However in order to do so SE would have to take a hard look at our toolkit. One of the first things that I really dislike in this game (and still do) is Esuna, i come from games where i had AOE versions of cleansing, so i find Esuna really clunky . i would enjoy more varying fights that have potentially deadly debuffs of other mechanics to look out for, if we were given some rework.

[Rilifane]

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

/thread derail off

/thread derail back on

The first single player and MMOs I played had healers designed to be full-time multitaskers aswell and I'm still as drawn to that design as on the first day I played them. RO had you juggle 6-8 buffs with durations from 15s to 2min, some of them only lasting for one cast or a few hits while healing and debuffing, silence, slow or blind enemies with it's first release, not counting the skills that got added over the years. And the myriad of cRPGs the like Baldur's Gate series and similiar games never encouraged any pure healing; it was ineffective. It was so much better to buff, debuff, cleanse, disable, summon, attack and soak depending on the situation than just spamming the spellbook with healing spells. Nothing like throwing a mass confusion to watch enemies tear at each other.
FFXIV is the first MMO I've ever played that completely dropped the multitasking. It's full deeps mode with healing as sideline activity in case someone screwed up or to occasionally heal the pitiful damage we take.

If I have a toolkit that has synergies, interesting skills and some micromanaging, I don't mind spending a lot of time healing. I think it comes down to micromanagement, whether it's a healing kit or a multitasking kit. I prefer the latter but I can certainly see the appeal of the former, including for myself.
What I absolutely don't like is healing for arbitary reasons, meaning healing for the sake of something that is not threatening and instead just... there. Fill HP bar to X amount. Keep above X % HP for reasons. Heal to stack a buff.
How do DPS feel if a target is attackable but won't drop below 1 HP? They keep attacking it to build resources and because they're bored but it feels bad because they know it doesn't serve the purpose of the role they queued for. Now imagine if that happened constantly throughout the fight.
Or if a tank had to use an enmity combo not so they can tank but because the more enmity they have, the more damage one of their skill does, outclassing the weak dps of their enmity combo. The enmity thing is tacked on and completely meaningless.

PLD had this "higher HP = more damage" with Spirits Within and PLDs and healers hated it. And the effect got deleted (good riddance).
Having to heal without really having to heal because people are not in danger and just want more deeps just feels bad and boring. "Yes, alright, I'll press that stupid unnecessary heal button so you can get your shiny log ffs".