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

[Ixon]

Unfortunately that just boils down to "no you can't have fun with your role, because you have to babysit the group incase they mess up". I pick up a class in an MMO to engage with it and have fun. In the case of healer, that's constantly supporting the team. Not to be a standby babysitter.

There's also the fact that even if dps was far more engaging, the same rules apply as always. Stop dps if you have to hardcast heal. If everything goes messy, you switch priorities. I'll never understand this idea that engaging dps is going to tax new players, you don't have to use it if everything is going chaotic. It's for downtime.

I want to know what games you play where a healer ISN'T a babysitter. And yes, when you pick the babysitter role, your main job is to babysit and fix boo boos first. While, again, the DPS options could be better, I dont think you should be picking healer to DPS. Yes, the amount of DPSing you do should be fun, but it also should come secondary to the healing responsibilities of the healer role.

[Rilifane]

I want to know what games you play where a healer ISN'T a babysitter lol

Healer as a role and a babysitter isn't the same. But if someone only ever touched healer in FFXIV they might get the impression that it is.
A healer is a type of supporter that makes sure that their party survives unavoidable damage and, if the game design allows it, may be able to heal avoidable damage.
A babysitter twiddles their thumbs until someone finally got a boo-boo to kiss because they didn't dodge avoidable damage. They're not designed to have fun by design, they're designed to do the bidding of little Timmy who keeps putting his hands on the hot stove top.

Most MMOs I've played have designed healers to be more focused on healing, making it more or less a full-time job with fairly little downtime. It also meant that you had less leeway to heal avoidable damage because you risked falling behind on healing for your priority targets. Healing was generally engaging and you had more downtime options. The concept of "falling behind in healing" is completely foreign to FFXIV because every button, even your spammable buttons, are designed to solve every problem with one button press.
In FFXIV the healing requirement is so laughably low that it's impossible to fall behind on healing for unavoidable damage. It is completely designed so you can shrug off any unavoidable damage by randomly pressing one of your far too many overpowered tools and have more time to babysit people that stood in the bad and got a boo-boo. That is babysitting. Healers here are designed to only be somewhat engaging and fun when you have a clown fiesta party where you have to babysit the majority of your time because not 1 or 2 but everyone is eating every damage they can.

Imagine a dps only being engaging when everyone just plays as poorly as they can.
So let's say a target has a hard cap and how much damage it can take per minute. Unfortunately your whole party is really good and that hardcap is reached in no time and you're left with nothing to do expect spamming a filler spell that is able to bypass that hardcap. You can build up Black/ White Mana on RDM etc. but you won't deal any damage except with your filler spell spam. So you're hoping for your party to be pants-on-head level of stupid so you can finally use all your shiny toys and do your full rotation instead of doing your nails after doing one 123 combo and an oGCD or two.
Sounds like riveting gameplay and brilliant class design, no?

[WaxSw]

I want to know what games you play where a healer ISN'T a babysitter.

Literally every RPG with either constant medium-high damage, healers capable of dealing massive amounts of damage and/or customizable jobs, which is like the majority of them

your main job is to babysit and fix boo boos first

Depends, healing is matter of eficiency and triage is not as simple as "just fix the opsies"

I dont think you should be picking healer to DPS

As long as you can't heal something to death healing and supporting/dpsing always go and must go together. Healing is binary, you live or you die so more healing than necessary is an efficiency mistake and wasted resources, due to its finite nature a healer needs to have those dpsing and supporting capabilities which are infinite in the way that they are always useful.

Someone that just wants to heal or thinks healing is just that should be kept away from the role or learn how to properly play it, ffs even irl medicine works that way, you want a treatment that treats the symptoms and eliminates whatever is causing them and those who only do the former (palliative treatments for example) get replaced once a treatment that do both is developed.

Yes, the amount of DPSing you do should be fun, but it also should come secondary to the healing responsibilities of the healer role.

No one in this entire 84 page thread have said the opposite, healing is necessary but especially in a game like FF with such low healing requirements that normal mode can be cleared without healer's heals dpsing/downtime is more important than ever

[UkcsAlias]

In FFXIV the healing requirement is so laughably low that it's impossible to fall behind on healing for unavoidable damage. It is completely designed so you can shrug off any unavoidable damage by randomly pressing one of your far too many overpowered tools and have more time to babysit people that stood in the bad and got a boo-boo. That is babysitting. Healers here are designed to only be somewhat engaging and fun when you have a clown fiesta party where you have to babysit the majority of your time because not 1 or 2 but everyone is eating every damage they can.

I suspect that WoW is the reason for this. If the healers are difficult and a mistake of them causes others to die. Those players will instantly start blaming the healer (instead of themselve for taking damage in the first place).

Making healers approachable is on that at least a safer approach. Its just that in low healing situations they just often are lacking. And especialy in skilled situations, it just doesnt scale well if healers are made harder. If the healer dies, the rest of the team cant sustain anymore then, and dies as a result, which brings back the blaming problem.

If healers got a consistent way to get revived without a healer this might be solved, but then again, who is going to do that? If the healer is at a bad place reviving is most likely not going to be a viable option (standing inside a aoe to revive and risk getting killed that way). This is why most games in which respawning exists in a way that allows the healer to come back, simply have better performance on healer classes. A dead healer in those cases makes a fight difficult, but not impossible (usualy requires some retreating, but it can be managed). But bossfights in FFXIV simply do not allow this (and i think that this is a good feature). This is even why 2 healers in a party is often needed. Just so you can revive each other.

Balancing games is often a mess, and only because some players are very likely to blame others.

[Ixon]

snip

Hence why I agree that healers kits are bloated especially for the small amounts of damage we have been receiving particularly this expansion. I would personally rather SE work on the healing requirement to make the healing role more enjoyable and engaging than feeding more into green DPS. It is also why I do believe healers DPS kits should be more engaging as well(as I keep stating), however, I believe the focus should be more on making the healing side more engaging than focusing solely on the DPS side. A healers dps is of course only as often as their team or the fight allows. This bleeds over into many other games and FF isn't an exception. If I am playing a healer/support in Divinity Original Sin 2, I can DPS freely until a teammate of mine gets hurt, then I make sure they are fine, then I go back to DPSing. The same could be said even for a game like Overwatch.

Make the healing more engaging, de-bloat healer kits, tone down the effectiveness of abilities so that GCD healing reaction is required more, fill in the empty healer hot bar space with engaging DPS abilities that do not combat the fact that healers are healers first.

[Azuri]

SE didnt create the damage meta though, the players did. If you look back in history, damage has been the name of the game since Gordias, where the DPS check of specifically Faust was so intense that people were having their healers DPS just to help. From then on it was on a path that couldn't change back.

Rumors become stated facts that spread like wildfire. If you were a tank not in STR gear or not tanking in OT stance, you were bad. If you were a healer not DPSing, you were bad. If you GCD'd as a healer, you were bad. These aren't made up, and were real stigmas that took root back in HW. Then there was the fact that SE did NOT want to enforce healer DPS, as they knew it was a point of contention till they accepted the communities desire to be green DPS in ShB. Though in order to try to appease both the people who wanted to DPS and those that didnt as a healer, they made the DPS simple and approachable so there wasnt a main deterrent from their main job of being a healer.

Y'all can keep playing the victim card and shake in your boots at Big Bad Yoshi no wanting fun, but where healers are now is a by product of a thought process that started in HW and one that the dev team is still trying to get right. Yes, we all feel sorry for every person who chooses a healer and I commend then every instance cause it must be rough.

No. It weren't the players. Nor SE. This is a fundamental objective difference between damage and survivability. A difference between an infinite scale vs. a binary pass/fail check. The former is never useless and "more damage number" always contributes to getting the boss dead. The latter has a hard cut off point. There always is an exact amount of survivability (combined quantifiable healing and mitigation) that is required to survive given encounter. Anything above it is objectively useless. You don't get points for "healing more" or "tanking better". A healer who kept the party alive at 1 HP has done as good of a job as one who never let HP bars drop below 99%. The final result is always exactly the same.

You usually don't win in games by outhealing the boss.

[ThivraK]

SE didnt create the damage meta though, the players did. If you look back in history, damage has been the name of the game since Gordias, where the DPS check of specifically Faust was so intense that people were having their healers DPS just to help. From then on it was on a path that couldn't change back.

who do you think designed that fight? god? the players?

[MintnHoney]

In seven years, AST has gone from having exactly one oGCD heal, Essential Dignity, to having eight oGCD heals: Essential Dignity, Celestial Opposition, Earthly Star, Celestial Intersection, Horoscope, Collective Unconscious, Exaltation, Macrocosmos. (And that count excludes Lightspeed, Synastry, and Neutral Sect.)

Not to take away from what you're saying, but please be aware that Macrocosmos is, in fact, a GCD spell. It's just instant-cast, and, since it deals (AoE) damage equal to Malefic (for the moment), it's not a DPS loss.

[Liam_Harper]

SE didnt create the damage meta though, the players did.

So, players wanted to be useful to their team in a team based game. Shocking. How dare they. There's hardly much of a meta either when PF is full of 60% uptime healers spamming GCD heals and happily being carried through Savage, not to mention regular Duty finder. Good players just want to get the most contribution to the team from their toolkit.

I want to know what games you play where a healer ISN'T a babysitter. And yes, when you pick the babysitter role, your main job is to babysit and fix boo boos first. While, again, the DPS options could be better, I dont think you should be picking healer to DPS. Yes, the amount of DPSing you do should be fun, but it also should come secondary to the healing responsibilities of the healer role.

You don't seem to get it. You don't pick a healer to DPS. I personally pick a healer to support the group. It's also annoying when players who have no clue about the role decide to lecture us on "healing comes first" when that's exactly what we always do. Is the concept of a player being good enough to heal the group while doing damage beyond some people?

I also certainly didn't pick the "Babysitter" role. I'd like to see what happens if the devs renamed Healer to Babysitter. I bet that would go down well.

The class fantasy for healer in good games is the support Mage who can keep the party on their feet but is capable of holding their own and dishing out impressive damage. You want to feel powerful, like the vision of a master healer should be someone who expertly wields a range of abilities to keep their allies safe while simultaneously shredding enemies. It's much more appealing than the vision of the timid group Nanny in the background twiddling their thumbs, throwing an occasional pebble at the boss and keeping an eye on the kids incase they get hurt while playing. That's not what most people dream of being when they level a class.

[AnotherPerson]

Hence why I agree that healers kits are bloated especially for the small amounts of damage we have been receiving particularly this expansion. I would personally rather SE work on the healing requirement to make the healing role more enjoyable and engaging than feeding more into green DPS. It is also why I do believe healers DPS kits should be more engaging as well(as I keep stating), however, I believe the focus should be more on making the healing side more engaging than focusing solely on the DPS side. A healers dps is of course only as often as their team or the fight allows. This bleeds over into many other games and FF isn't an exception. If I am playing a healer/support in Divinity Original Sin 2, I can DPS freely until a teammate of mine gets hurt, then I make sure they are fine, then I go back to DPSing. The same could be said even for a game like Overwatch.

Make the healing more engaging, de-bloat healer kits, tone down the effectiveness of abilities so that GCD healing reaction is required more, fill in the empty healer hot bar space with engaging DPS abilities that do not combat the fact that healers are healers first.

I don't think healer kits will ever be reworked to the point where we have weaker healing. The healing toolkit is meant to work with minimum iLVL, rather than max ilvl as most people are at after they do the content for some time and familiarize themselves with the fight after having to run it multiple times in DF/PF. This isn't an issue with healing per se, but an issue with making things easier for worse or new players who doesn't know anything about the fight and is given leeway for mistakes. And that's fine. No amount of weakening healer toolkits will change how Savage and high-end gameplay will change anyway, since those mechanics are generally instant death mechanics if the player & party fails it, rather than a heavy healing check. Even then, we have tons of abilities to make the healing checks easier if heavy healing checks are in the game. Plus, enrage exists - so no matter how much healing engagement changes, there will still inevitably be a strict hard-cap to it, as doing more DPS is still always more important.

In terms of accessibility, the healing aspect of the toolkit is fine, but it just lacks additional DPS skills to make it well rounded for situations where healing isn't needed to that extent.

Ex: in solo MSQ instances and in the overworld, because those fights will never be designed where a DPS who doesn't have as much healing or tankiness as a healer/tank to clear it, but challenging enough that a DPS can still use their full DPS toolkit without being bored. Inversely, that means a healer who never gets more DPS skills will always be pressing the same button until the instance is over because damage is very sparse. That's something that changing healing effectiveness won't address.