Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Ixon]

Honestly I think SE are stuck between a rock and a hard place that is half of their own making, and half just the progression of a game. What I mean by that is, as far as I see it: In the beginning, they made the game based around the trinity: Tank, Healer, DPS. Tanks had kits more focused on defense over offense (Think like Flash and Shield Bash, old Inner Beast), Healers were focused on healing, having mostly GCD heals and not as much oGCDs, and DPS were DPS(minus Titan Egi best tank). Healers had dps abilities, but they weren't really a focus, just something to do when everyone was full HP, and to have something in the solo content. Tanks had dps mostly for enmity's sake, having enmity modifiers to ensure they kept threat through the modifier instead of just overall DPS.

Then HW came, and you saw two things. First, and probably the most important, the raid tier that was released pushed everyone into a DPS mentality. See, in ARR dps mattered, but not nearly as much. As long as no one died, and you did the mechanics, you cleared. In Gordias though, you had to do more than just the mechanics, you had to do a lot more dps than what was usually required. This lead to Tanks tanking with their tank stance off for more damage, and healers squeezing in Cleric for more damage, when I feel SE never intended for that to happen. I don't honestly think they ever intended for the main focus of the trinity to change, but it did as a by product of Gordias, and the community pushing it out as a whole to "EVERYBODY IS A DPS". This lead to conflict specifically with the tanks and healers. You had healers pissed off at bad tanks tanking with tank stance off and just eating dirt, and you had tanks pissed off at healers for letting them die because they were DPSing with cleric on or just not keeping them up with tank stance off. Then you had people who weren't comfortable with MTing with stance off or Cleric stance swapping feeling guilty for not being able to do so and hating the general dps mentality. The next raid tier did not have as huge of a spike in DPS difficulty, but the damage was done and the mentality was in place. The other item was that a lot of jobs were considered by the majority too difficult to perform even at a mediocre level(like DRK) and while jobs were probably the most unique at this point, it also pushed out jobs to the point where they were excluded from the PF. You also had a lot of jobs with a CHOICE of offense vs defense, but the issue was because everything was so DPS focused, almost nobody went for the defensive option as it was less damage, like sacrificing a Fell Cleave for an Inner Release, or using Dark Arts for Dark Mind instead of any offensive ability.

In SB, Cleric Stnace was removed. Imo it was removed before tank stance because you will have an off-tank in most fights. There is no guarantee who that OT would be, and it made sense to have them be a psuedo DPS more than the healers because the healers still had to keep everyone alive regardless of who was tanking. Unfortunately you still hat MT's with Tank Stance off so it didn't really fix the issue. The issue mostly being bad tanks tanking with stance off and pissing off their healers or losing threat on a boss. However, the "DPS means everything mentality" was still the name of the game. You also saw the first steps of homogenization between the jobs because that's the easier way to avoid jobs being excluded. Jobs that were deemed to have too high of a skill floor were simplified, but you started to see the first inklings of a power creep. When a new expansion hits, you buff the job primarily based off it's role. Tanks get tankier, healers get healier, DPS get dpsier. This is standard to make the jobs feel more powerful each expansion. The problem is with tanks and healers specifically, is that when tanks get more defensives, healers get more healing, healers have LESS to do. However MT's still tanking on off-tank stance didn't make it feel as bad as it does today. Healers DPS kits weren't as simplified as today, but I feel that was because SE was still not acknowledging that healers HAD to dps. Tanks with STR accessories existed here too, and I remember my healers complaining about bad tanks who had them in DF as well.

Now we are in ShB, and it's at this point where I personally believe SE finally recognized that the community as a whole wanted everyone to DPS. To avoid stance-less MT's they just remove Tanks stance entirely, and to not feel they were overwhelming their healers, healer DPS kits were severely simplified. This is the biggest point of contention with healers, as most healers were absolutely fine with their larger DPS kits and maintaining healing, but presumably SE was concerned that if they were going to accept that everyone was a DPS, having a larger DPS kit on a healer would shy them away from the role. You can believe it or not, but there are still forum threads to this day saying that healers don't need to DPS. Tales from Duty Finder type stuff. Now do I think they took away too much from the healer DPS kit? Probably, but they played it safe. You saw more homogenization amongst the roles to avoid exclusivity, but in the background, you had the power creep again. Tanks got tankier, healers got healier, DPS got dpseir. Again, this was mostly felt by the healers, needing them to not heal or GCD heal as much, but now with a simplified DPS kit, the boredom was felt even more so.

That leads us to where we are today in EW, where I personally think a couple of things happened. First, the power creep. Tanks and healers are the strongest they have ever been. This means that unless you have massive amounts of damage going out, the tanks and ESPECIALLY the healers are going to feel they have bloated, boring kits. The other issue is that SE knows their game has gotten massive over ShB. You have more people playing your game than ever before. So, they played it safe. I think everyone can agree that the dungeons and trials were the easiest ones to ever come out in an expansion(there are no wall to wall pulls in any dungeon this expansion). This further highlighted the simplified dps kits healers have with most of their healing kits being oGCD, and having so many healing abilities in general.

Power creep of defensives for tanks and healing abilities for healers + SE playing it safe in content on their biggest expansion to date by not slamming damage into content even though the tank and healer kits are more than enough to handle it + SE accepting healer DPS but not wanting to shy away new healers who aren't comfortable with dpsing = where we are today. I personally think they best thing the can do is remove/combine healing abilities on healers so that they have less options to respond to damage with, possibly making you have to GCD heal at least once, and replace those open hot bar slots with DPS options. I don't feel they can just add on DPS abilities without taking something away, and if healing is too easy, taking away or combining an ability or two might not be a bad first step. They could also just flat out remove the 30% mit tank abilities and Rampart as well. That would be a quick bandaid to make things more engaging for the healers imo, though that won't help the most top end raiders in scripted content. Perhaps adding more random mechanics or random damage, any healers missing Bosses Crit Auto's yet? Anyway, that's my tin foil hat on how we got to where we are today, and I am sure I mis-remembered a few things to note. I don't think SE fully realizes this, and I don't expect any major reworks to healers come 6.1 as the attitude from Yoshi is "it'll get harder", but we'll have to see.

[Deceptus]

And you know what? I casted Stone 4 several HUNDRED times during that pull. I spent the absolute majority of my time in there going Stone Stone Stone Stone Stone Stone Stone Aero Tetra Stone Stone Stone Stone Stone Stone Stone. I wanted to rip my 1 key off my keyboard after that fight. My group had the weapons they wanted after that clear. I looked at my casts and realized that if my group were to clean up and reclear more times? If I were to get my healing more streamlined, better planned with my cohealer? I'd be rewarded with spamming Stone even more.

This is the basic healing problem the FFXIV Devs refuse to address (no other role has this issue):

The "reward" for playing a healing job well in FFXIV is worse gameplay.

That is a basic, fundamental job design flaw. Until they realize there is a problem there, they can never find a decent solution that can appease all players.

[ASkellington]

snip

Oh they can absolutely take healing abilities away. I'll use my AST as an example (I say mine, as in my playstyle as I'm sure other ASTs use some abilities more than I do due to preference)

On the chopping block:

Synastry
Collective Unconciousness
Benefic 1
Neutral Sect
Celestial Intersection

Synastry is a no brainer. It only works on Benefic 1 and 2. The first is useless well before lv50 content the latter we only use when oGCDs are gone and we need single target healing (which is rare). If it isn't going to work with Aspected Benefic (our HoT) CI, ED, and Exaltation, remove it. I would prefer it works with them so

Celestial Intersection *can either lose a charge or lose its place in our kit entirely. AST is no longer a hybrid healer. And honestly it and WHM should lose its shielding. Exaltation fits what CI does better (thematically) and for the most part straight up replaces CI for me (ie I use it for tank busters and TBs in EW come up so little in content I can do so).

Collective Unconciousness is only good to me in 60-70 content and no where else because I don't have as many tools. In EW I can and do ignore it. ES, Horoscope (the occasional Lady of Crowns), and Celestial Opposition do literally everything that I could use it for.

Benefic 1 is obvious. Like Cure 1 it should trait upgrade to 2. Remove Free Cure and Crit Benefic please.

Neutral Sect I would not mind loosing either. I don't use it. Much like Synastry I would prefer if it actually worked on our oGCDs and I don't see why it shouldn't. While under Neutral Sect we could give CO and CI (hence why I have it *'d) back Nocturnal Sect properties instead of it just affecting A. Helios and A. Benefic (we don't need or want the extra healing tied to it). If it isn't going to work on our oGCDs and you aren't going to push us to GCD more.

Obligatory consolidate Draw/Play options into 1 button.

There that is at least 4 button's removal (benefic 1/CU + play options) with CI added if you please (and either move Exalt or make CI into a weaker Exalt and trait upgrade to Exalt) for another 1 (to 5), and arguments made for either changes to Synastry/Neutral or their removal to bump that up to 7 if you wanted.

Plenty of space for a dps button or two.

And as I said, this is MY AST playstyle. Others could make good or better arguments for other skill's removal. I'm not saying all of these should be removed, but what I am saying is that they can be to make room.

[SeverianLyonesse]

And as I said, this is MY AST playstyle. Others could make good or better arguments for other skill's removal. I'm not saying all of these should be removed, but what I am saying is that they can be to make room.

This to me just communicates a similar thing I have observed playing SGE: I *like* having redundancies and options for healing in casual content. Just like I *like* having redundancies and options for tanking mitigation in casual content. And as you observed, it seems different people prioritize different abilities, so removing any of them would probably be divisive no matter how you slice it. I would also speculate that in Ultimate content, both the healing and tanking kits actually come pretty close to fully used so any argument for disposing of kits is going to be a hard sell.

I think the healing redundancies are totally fine. I don't need a totally meritocratic, streamlined kit to enjoy playing a job. I just need more gratifying play when I'm not healing, if not from debuffs/mezzing/crowd control (which the devs are so averse to for some reason, even in casual content), then in the form of more DPS variety. Even as simple as a 1-2 combo would literally *double* the job's rotation complexity.

I get mildly angry every time I come back to this thread and re-read the title. There are 3 Ultimates. Even if everyone *were* playing on Ultimate level, that would mean only 3 instances of fun, engaging healing content out of literally hundreds of instances. There are--WITHOUT including Endwalker at all--ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-NINE dungeons, trials, and raids--not including extremes/savages (which add another 80 instances). What Yoshi-P is basically saying is that less than 1.5 percent of the content is designed to make healing fun/engaging. And that is even less when you consider that Ultimate is only for top-tier players and not even close to casual content. So what Yoshi-P is actually saying is that precisely none of the the common content that the bulk of the casual and midcore players engage in is designed to engage healers.

At that point, it isn't a content problem when the healing problem literally applies to all of the content that 90% of the playerbase will ever see. It's that the devs don't care about or know how to design fun healers.

PLEASE Yoshi-P. Just give us some combos. Some tiny 1-2 combos.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I think healing would be a lot more interesting if they reworked every of its class to have 60% healing/buff abilities and 40% Damage abilities. Right now its pretty much 90%/10% in their toolkit and certain big heal abilities rarely get used in normal content unless you're like me and use them even when its not completely necessary because you feel like its a waste having it go unused. Here, I'll pick some healing abilities that could just be either cut or reworked to instead be a dps skill.

Sage - Drouchole: Not needed because Taurochole does the same thing just stronger and adds a buff to boot. Replace Drouchole instead as an Addersgall DPS button or better yet another DOT
- Diagnosis: Not needed because almost always you'd want to use Eukrasian Diagnosis for the shield effect anyway. Instead make Diagnosis a spell combo for Dosis. Now we have a 1,2 rather than just 1,1,1,1

White Mage - Cure I: Have this get upgraded to Cure II rather than keeping them separated because nobody casts Cure I for the free Cure II proc, its an unnecessary trait. Instead, convert this into a spell combo for Stone/Glare.
Cure III: In my experience I rarely use this as its too MP heavy and Medica I is a more efficient AoE heal anyway. Convert this button into an AoE spell combo for Holy that applies a DoT to all enemies.
Assize: Give us 3 stacks of this so that we can get some more extra damage in as well as better means to give some MP back as a White Mage.

Just a couple of ideas of mine thrown here, but I feel that already this changes up the dps monotony of these two classes a lot.

[IDontPetLalas]

I think healing would be a lot more interesting if they reworked every of its class to have 60% healing/buff abilities and 40% Damage abilities. Right now its pretty much 90%/10% in their toolkit and certain big heal abilities rarely get used in normal content unless you're like me and use them even when its not completely necessary because you feel like its a waste having it go unused. Here, I'll pick some healing abilities that could just be either cut or reworked to instead be a dps skill.

Sage - Drouchole: Not needed because Taurochole does the same thing just stronger and adds a buff to boot. Replace Drouchole instead as an Addersgall DPS button or better yet another DOT
- Diagnosis: Not needed because almost always you'd want to use Eukrasian Diagnosis for the shield effect anyway. Instead make Diagnosis a spell combo for Dosis. Now we have a 1,2 rather than just 1,1,1,1

White Mage - Cure I: Have this get upgraded to Cure II rather than keeping them separated because nobody casts Cure I for the free Cure II proc, its an unnecessary trait. Instead, convert this into a spell combo for Stone/Glare.
Cure III: In my experience I rarely use this as its too MP heavy and Medica I is a more efficient AoE heal anyway. Convert this button into an AoE spell combo for Holy that applies a DoT to all enemies.
Assize: Give us 3 stacks of this so that we can get some more extra damage in as well as better means to give some MP back as a White Mage.

Just a couple of ideas of mine thrown here, but I feel that already this changes up the dps monotony of these two classes a lot.

That split is a lot closer to other games where I've played a healer or a support class. Whether it was by having skill trees, specs, whatever you want to call it. Even if i played a game that had a very strict healing spec, that limited me to extremely few DPS options - I had options to mix talents/skills/specs to change this up and choose more DPS options, buffs, etc when i wanted to solo, or if a full heal spec wasn't needed.

In these games, we tended to see that while new content might need more support from healers, as people got better gear, less healing was needed, so healers could use their DPS spec if they wanted to, or stick to support. This kept things fun for everyone.

[RinaShinomiya]

I think healing would be a lot more interesting if they reworked every of its class to have 60% healing/buff abilities and 40% Damage abilities. Right now its pretty much 90%/10% in their toolkit and certain big heal abilities rarely get used in normal content unless you're like me and use them even when its not completely necessary because you feel like its a waste having it go unused. Here, I'll pick some healing abilities that could just be either cut or reworked to instead be a dps skill.

Sage - Drouchole: Not needed because Taurochole does the same thing just stronger and adds a buff to boot. Replace Drouchole instead as an Addersgall DPS button or better yet another DOT
- Diagnosis: Not needed because almost always you'd want to use Eukrasian Diagnosis for the shield effect anyway. Instead make Diagnosis a spell combo for Dosis. Now we have a 1,2 rather than just 1,1,1,1

White Mage - Cure I: Have this get upgraded to Cure II rather than keeping them separated because nobody casts Cure I for the free Cure II proc, its an unnecessary trait. Instead, convert this into a spell combo for Stone/Glare.
Cure III: In my experience I rarely use this as its too MP heavy and Medica I is a more efficient AoE heal anyway. Convert this button into an AoE spell combo for Holy that applies a DoT to all enemies.
Assize: Give us 3 stacks of this so that we can get some more extra damage in as well as better means to give some MP back as a White Mage.

Just a couple of ideas of mine thrown here, but I feel that already this changes up the dps monotony of these two classes a lot.

I think Healers could benefit a lot from a new Skill system that fuses cooldown skills with non-cooldown skills.
For example since you brought up Druochole, fuse it together with Taurochole. Every 45s you'll get Taurochole when pressing the button but when it's on cooldown it becomes Druochole. That way you reduce button bloat without "hurting" the toolkit.
It's possible to do this right now with Macros but it's obv. not optimal because the macro system is what it is.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I think Healers could benefit a lot from a new Skill system that fuses cooldown skills with non-cooldown skills.
For example since you brought up Druochole, fuse it together with Taurochole. Every 45s you'll get Taurochole when pressing the button but when it's on cooldown it becomes Druochole. That way you reduce button bloat without "hurting" the toolkit.
It's possible to do this right now with Macros but it's obv. not optimal because the macro system is what it is.

Mhmm! we could also even have Eukrasia to apply to other spells for different effects besides just dosis and diagnosis, which easily expands the sage's toolkit even more without having button bloat too. But yeah, stuff like this is what I think is needed. Just trim some of the healer's healing abilities and replace them with dps skills or useful buffs!

[Rika007]

SNIP

Yeah don't know if i'd agree on your chosen skills but condensing for more hotbar space for some DPS skills would literally be so damn easy across all 3 of the older healers.

For me it would be:

WHM:
-Cure 1 changes into Cure 2.
-Axe Cure 3 Entirely.
-Medica into Medica 2.
-Upgrade Devine Benison into Aquavail and carry over its Shield Effect and charges into Aqua Veil
-With the above changes probably also have to remove Plenary but I would rework it to trigger off oGCD heals as well, as I'd also want to rework Rapture and Solace into oGCD's

SCH:
-Condense your fairies into one button that just changes based on whichever fairy is out
-Physick changes into Adlo
-Remove Ruin 2, as it is far less needed with the changes to cast times now.
-Recitation morphs into Deployment tactics, as that currently is literally the only way you would want to use it since they share the same cooldown

AST:
-Remove Undraw entirely
-Remove play and crown Play and just let them play off the original abilities.
-Remove Synastry
-Remove/rework Minor Arcana into something that doesnt feel awful.

And remove repose from literally all the healers. Unless I can sleep a boss in raid to interrupt something, it really doesn't play a use. And look at that enough space to add 2 new non healing centric abilities to every healer AND have space for new abilities in 7.0

[SeverianLyonesse]

I think Healers could benefit a lot from a new Skill system that fuses cooldown skills with non-cooldown skills.
For example since you brought up Druochole, fuse it together with Taurochole. Every 45s you'll get Taurochole when pressing the button but when it's on cooldown it becomes Druochole. That way you reduce button bloat without "hurting" the toolkit.
It's possible to do this right now with Macros but it's obv. not optimal because the macro system is what it is.

I think the point of having Druochole separate from Taurochole is so that you can ST-heal without destroying Kerachole. And similarly Ixochole is separate from Kerachole so that you can group heal without destroying Taurochole.

That may not be how players actually play them and maybe there is a priority list that just works for most if not all situations. But in theory, I understand why they exist, and (again, in theory) I like the flexibility of Addersgall uses.

And remove repose from literally all the healers. Unless I can sleep a boss in raid to interrupt something, it really doesn't play a use. And look at that enough space to add 2 new non healing centric abilities to every healer AND have space for new abilities in 7.0

Repose is for dungeons. It might not get much use, but it still has a niche and it's not hurting anyone being in healers' kits.