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

[Banriikku]

The Meta is the reuslt of "incentiv" and "what is possible" this is created by the Dev's and this is in fact SE. Healing in FF is binary this means heal 1 point above what the boss is doing and you done. So all feedback with "increase the healing" is nonsense from people that have no clue or idea of how healing in F14 works.
And no the dev team does nothing but cater to people that hate healing and want it to be as easy as possible. I tell you, i looked at the healing history of FF14 and the thing is what healers want is something to do. I never encountered or heard of "i want more dps" form main-healer like myself. Its more like, give us something to do and not one button smash. We complaint about the RNG of the AST, or the weird Lilys or that the Fey is annoying to use but NEVER is the mainpoint more dps. Its SE that promotes DPS lately to hell and back (look at the tanks) and takes away interactions. So we are left with DPS and now you telling me hey everybody now can do DPS and embrace this except healer because F*** them ?

IN my opinion SE has 3 ways to go about that: 1. Healers get DPS options 2. Changing the healing demand and how the kit interacts 3. buff/debuff mechanics for healer and embrace the supporter role

but sadly it will be the option number 4. Ewww... healer, take the DoT away and make the healing an aura and we need to complete a dance QtE to heal (this is sarcasm, thank you)

[IDontPetLalas]

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.

One of the things that i always found odd in FFXIV is that as a healer in a game that is supposedly based upon the trinity, i don't have a way to revive myself. In other games i typically had a skill to do so. In one game it was available anywhere on a very long CD, so basically in a dungeon running 20 minutes it could be set before the dungeon, used (if necessary) in the dungeon and would be available once more in the dungeon.

as you said, a healer can die in a bad place, those revival skills typically had a timer- in one AOE I had 2 minutes- so if I died in an AOE, that should give time to get up. Of course it doesn't solve every problem, but it's interesting that it isn't available in this game.

[HyoMinPark]

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.

Okay…and who designed Gordias? The playerbase? No. The developers created it. And they overtuned it. They outright admitted that—and I can respect that they acknowledged their own fault when it came to Gordias; and to a lesser extent Midas, since A6S had to be nerfed during its period of relevancy. But, at the end of the day, they were the ones who released the overtuned product, and started the entire “healers DPS” thing. Which, it’s my understanding that healers still contributed to damage in ARR, so its not like healer DPS is some kind of new phenomenon that came to be in HW; and, before, healers just stood around waiting for damage.

You can try to blame the playerbase for enforcing a healer DPS meta, but it never would have been necessary in Gordias if the fights hadn’t been that poorly tuned.

Since then, healer damage has steadily increased and continues to be a not at all small contribution. Again, this seems to be an intended design by the developers. They aren’t designing healers to deal piddly damage—instead, two good healers can net more combined DPS than the highest parsing DPS job. In ShB, healers were dealing more damage than some of the tanks. Currently, healer contribution to damage is high enough that any healer who refuses to deal damage is straight-up griefing their party. Then, we need to turn to the actual healing requirements of any given fight. They are all quite low—even in Ultimate fights, healers playing super duper safety gamer can spend less than 50% of all their GCDs on healing abilities. So what else is there for them to do? They certainly can’t stand around doing nothing, because how is that fair to the other party members? Not to mention, how is that not incredibly boring? So they DPS.

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.

Have you ever stopped to think why there is such an emphasis on damage? Maybe it’s because every other interesting aspect of combat has been steadily removed.

Debuffs? Well, you have DoTs (those that are left, anyways), but you certainly aren’t utilizing any other sort of crowd control like Slows or Stuns to affect the boss. The only CC that gets used now is the occasional Interrupt. We’re maybe lucky to see it once in a raid tier. And you don’t get cleansable debuffs that affect the party very often either—the last one I can even think of is Throttle from TEA. Before that? The Doom in Exdeath normal mode (it doesn’t make an appearance in Savage).

What about enmity? Well, tanks look menacingly at a boss now and gain aggro. There’s no more enmity management on behalf of the DPS or healers to go alongside tank stance dancing.

Damage to tanks? Tanks started stance dancing for damage, yes—but there was also very little to gain by being in tank stance when incoming damage to them could be mitigated by their cooldowns or by their party members. The decrease in damage from old tank stance’s defensive gain was not nearly as valuable as the damage they gained by being in their DPS stance.

Mitigation? Everyone and their mother has AOE mitigation to protect the party, so any mitigative skills that healers have (Temperance, Collective Unconscious, Neutral Sect, Sacred Soil, Fey Illumination, Kerachole, Holos), become even less frequently used since tanks all have an AOE mitigation, physical ranged all have one, Addle and Feint work on both physical and magical raidwides now with varying mitigation percentages, and RDM got Magic Barrier in EW. Everyone has mitigation for days, and it becomes an issue where 1. The raidwides do significantly less damage, which requires less healing; and 2. The mitigative tools healers have in their kits lose importance and use.

Resource management? With the exception of WHM, all healers are MP positive. So they don’t really need to focus on mana conservation.

And finally: healing? Healers can heal current Savage with just oGCDs and not much else because outgoing damage is so infrequent and nonthreatening. So what do we focus on instead? Damage. The only attempts the devs seem to make at forcing GCD healing are heal-to-full mechanics, which aren’t that interesting and end up being more of a waste than anything else. They give us plenty of shiny toys, but all are oGCD and they lessen the need to GCD heal. It’s also quite annoying that our toolkits are bloated with healing tools, but they are not necessary to put to use in most content. I can think of a few tight healer checks, but they are very few and far between. And a lot of them become less threatening the moment people start getting better gear and outgearing them.

This game has become damage-centric, and you cannot pin the blame entirely on the community. Not when the developers remove the other aspects of combat, and lessen the amount of healing needed despite healer mains asking for there to be higher healing requirements. The community is adapting to what the game is becoming: more “accessible”. A lot of these more nuanced things have been removed for accessibility reasons—and while I don’t believe accessibility is inherently bad by itself, I do believe it becomes a problem when job engagement is traded for it.

As it stands, I’m only engaged on a healer when everything is going to shite. But even then, I have so many tools at my disposal, going into damage control is fairly easy. When things are smooth? Well, I’m pressing my single-target nuke until my thumb falls off.

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.

Healers as they stand now are gimped damage dealers. We aren’t even healers, considering that healing requirements in any halfway competent party are incredibly low. They’re virtually non-existent in a stellar party. And we have so many tools to deal with the clown fiestas, the only time I feel like I break a mild sweat as a healer is Day 1 of a new 24-man alliance raid.

I never asked to be turned into a gimped DPS. If anything, I’d prefer more to heal—a lot of healer mains would—but the developers won’t do that. They have said that increasing damage dealt and incoming damage to a party would “stress out new and inexperienced healers”, so veteran healers just have to be bored for the majority of a fight; and steadily wear down their damage nuke hotkey.

[Semirhage]

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.

You got me. We've been begging for Square to make healer gameplay into 11111111111111111111111 for years, and now it's all our faults.

But not me. I'll buck the system. Instead of 1111111, I'll play healers as they were intended. Spamming Medica 2 at random and using various dance emotes in the other 40 seconds of that minute.

After all, it's the *players* who designed the jobs to have those choices in gameplay. The devs can't help that healer mains are heads of cabbage who didn't make it past the object permanence stage of development.

Or....ooooor... They were designed by a bunch of DPS mains who see healers as resources rather than as classes anyone would actually want to play. That's just my guess.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Healers as they stand now are gimped damage dealers. We aren’t even healers, considering that healing requirements in any halfway competent party are incredibly low. They’re virtually non-existent in a stellar party. And we have so many tools to deal with the clown fiestas, the only time I feel like I break a mild sweat as a healer is Day 1 of a new 24-man alliance raid.

I never asked to be turned into a gimped DPS.

Fantastic write-up.

I agree that it sucked to be gimped out damage dealers, but that just is the direction FFXIV's gameplay has evolved. The game's preferred method of "challenge" now is more in scripted DDR-style attack avoidance rather than healing. Because that is a much more tangible, intuitive thing players can pick up rather than having to decipher dozens of tooltips. So I think green/blue-DPS is going to stay.

However, I don't think *just* fixing DPS options for healers is necessarily what the devs should do. It's the easy, obvious option to give each healer a DPS mini-game, but it's also the absolute minimum they deserve. Other things that I think would help:

1) Give healers higher DPS, comparable to tanks. It just isn't fair right now when RDM and SMN can heal and rez and still do comparable DPS to physical DPS. I know the devs don't want to obviate tank roles, but that shouldn't mean totally gimping an entire role to do it. Make healers a tad squishier or give them some movement limitations so that they can't totally replace tanks, but at least let them do damage if that is what they are doing 90 percent of the time.

2) Give healers CC/Debuffs/DoTs. I don't care about the failure that was DR, debuffs should still be a large focus of the game. They are fun and can add so much variety to playstyle. This wouldn't fix raids/trials much because they are scripted (except for adds), but they would make dungeon runs a lot more engaging for healers and that's like half the battle.

3) Give healers more buffing utility like we got with SCH's movement speed ability. Go beyond Shields and Regens, eek out a couple more unique things they can do like maybe Astrologian having a foresight ability that increases party members' evasion. It would give them just a tad more agency in trials and raids, shoring up their role in ways Debuffs can't.

Basically, healers *need* to be acknowledged as a legit DPS role, and also need to be given more of a "condi" utility in the game. They need at minimum DPS mini-games and a little more DPS output, and/or they also need to be given more differentiated identities through enemy debuffs and party buffs. The lack of either is just abysmal design.

[ForteNightshade]

1) Give healers higher DPS, comparable to tanks. It just isn't fair right now when RDM and SMN can heal and rez and still do comparable DPS to physical DPS. I know the devs don't want to obviate tank roles, but that shouldn't mean totally gimping an entire role to do it. Make healers a tad squishier or give them some movement limitations so that they can't totally replace tanks, but at least let them do damage if that is what they are doing 90 percent of the time.

They tried this in Shadowbringers. It was not well received.

White Mage reached a point where forcing the PLD to Clemency was a DPS gain over Cure II, which considering how badly that can mess up PLD's rotation says a lot. Regardless, it never made sense for healers to have a higher DPS output when tanks have a rotation to maintain. Dark Knight, for example, has the second highest CPM (Casts Per Minute) in the entire game during the opener. Gunbreaker, I believe, is fourth, but will overtake DRK as the fight progresses. Healers, meanwhile, never come close to this—not even Astro despite its card management. So you're essentially asking jobs who press more buttons and have to be mindful of raid buffs to deal less damage compared to jobs spamming a single button. And the trade-off is movement restrictions.

Neither actually benefit a healer. Most prefer engaging gameplay to raw damage. Not to mention, limiting their movement will frustrate both roles as there may be scenarios where forcing a tank to disengage is better than forcing a healer to move yet tanks disengaging can completely screw up their rotation.

All in all, this just... wouldn't accomplish anything but further reducing the tank role while not actually improving healer gameplay.

[HyoMinPark]

Fantastic write-up.

I agree that it sucked to be gimped out damage dealers, but that just is the direction FFXIV's gameplay has evolved. The game's preferred method of "challenge" now is more in scripted DDR-style attack avoidance rather than healing. Because that is a much more tangible, intuitive thing players can pick up rather than having to decipher dozens of tooltips. So I think green/blue-DPS is going to stay.

It is incredibly unfortunate that healers are a healer in name only—and I don’t have an issue with healers dealing damage, or being a “green DPS”. But I want my gameplay to be more engaging than it is—or, rather, is not. I like the idea of juggling healing and damage, and that was why I was drawn to healers back in HW. And, I honestly found Cleric Stance dancing really fun once I got good at it. I still kind of miss it to this day.

Does it feel fantastic when you can get away with healing a difficult or high-end fight with only oGCDs and never touching a GCD spell? Absolutely. But everything I do between prepping for damage (or reacting to it if I’m on a regen healer) is fairly dull. I’m wearing down my X button on my controller playing any of the 4 healers. Give me something more to do than spam Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis. I don’t even care if it’s something as simple as a second DoT to manage. I honestly love managing DoTs, and I think they break up the nuke spam monotony. Plus, if the timers are different, then I have to watch them and make sure I keep both up consistently.

Another way would be to move support and mitigation aspects away from DPS and onto healers, with maybe creating an exception for the physical ranged role, since they have traditionally been the support-esque role in this game. I do think that there is an overabundance of AOE mitigation spread out among the roles, but that could just be me. It’s nice to coordinate it and basically invalidate the incoming damage of a mechanic, but that also leads to less need for healing. oGCD or otherwise.

I can adapt to the low healing requirements; I have adapted to how little healing I actually do. I won’t be entirely happy with how little I perform my primary role, but I can enjoy it enough with more rotational engagement on the damage dealing side. I’m not even asking for anything terribly complex on the healers either. I saw someone suggesting something like a 1-2-3 building up to Misery on WHM; AST continuing to keep it’s 1 DoT, 1 nuke, but the cards become a bit more engaging; SCH getting its DoTs back and becoming a DoT healer; and then SGE having…something I can’t really remember right now, but maybe it could have some extra insta-nukes like Phlegma. I liked that idea. It gives each healer some diversity, so they aren’t carbon copies of one another; and that diversity gives players a choice to pick a healer that feels “right” for them. Whether it be a DoT healer, or a 1-2-3 combo healer, or whatever.

[Thoosa]

I honestly think SE just needs more Devs that they can dedicate to the different roles. Overall I think they do a pretty good job on dps jobs, but tanking and healing needs more attention and I think WoW does them much better.

[Deceptus]

It is incredibly unfortunate that healers are a healer in name only—and I don’t have an issue with healers dealing damage, or being a “green DPS”. But I want my gameplay to be more engaging than it is—or, rather, is not. I like the idea of juggling healing and damage, and that was why I was drawn to healers back in HW. And, I honestly found Cleric Stance dancing really fun once I got good at it. I still kind of miss it to this day.

That's pretty much the entire point of "shield" based healers is the ability to not absolutely need healing for a bit and go into a dps mode.

You used to Adlo > Stoneskin on the pre-pull and swap to cleric stance. Lustrate used to be % of HP based so it ignored the Cleric stance penalty.

That's when the job was well designed. With THOUGHT.

A + B = the ability to easily do C

Another way would be to move support and mitigation aspects away from DPS and onto healers, with maybe creating an exception for the physical ranged role, since they have traditionally been the support-esque role in this game. I do think that there is an overabundance of AOE mitigation spread out among the roles, but that could just be me. It’s nice to coordinate it and basically invalidate the incoming damage of a mechanic, but that also leads to less need for healing. oGCD or otherwise.

Yoshi-P said long ago that he wanted Protect to still have a place because it's an iconic ability. If the devs were able to remotely think outside the box the solution is literally right in front of their faces.

Remove all the mitigation from the DPS. They rarely use it ever anyway. Give it to the healers so they can be the support they're supposed to be.

Feint given to healers in the form of Protect. A short CD , short duration physical damage reduction

Addle turns into Shell. A short CD, short duration magic damage reduction.

These are both Role Actions so they are available to each healer. Remove Repose.

There. You have 2 iconic spells added to the game for almost zero thought.

Add it Bravery as a physical damage up buff and Faith as a magic damage up buff and the support role is filled out.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]Another way would be to move support and mitigation aspects away from DPS and onto healers, with maybe creating an exception for the physical ranged role, since they have traditionally been the support-esque role in this game. I do think that there is an overabundance of AOE mitigation spread out among the roles, but that could just be me. It’s nice to coordinate it and basically invalidate the incoming damage of a mechanic, but that also leads to less need for healing. oGCD or otherwise.

I feel for this, a lot.

A couple months ago when my static were still progging P3S, both SAM and SMN in our group actually said "Well that's up to Reiner to figure out how to mitigate that raidwide..!" just because I fill in the static as the Barrier Healer. They were pleasantly surprised when I mentioned that they literally have Feint and Addle to use which are powerful tools to mitigate and is outside my control. Their initial reaction was not so favorable because apparently they were 'having a hard time' trying to adjust their 'new' button to press in addition to their own rotations. Eventually they get used to it and start proactively using it more in first two floors and in general contents.

Oh boy... I would take that 'burden' off from them and use those mitigative tools myself if I could. But apparently to SE's standard, that's too much to handle + stress for Healers.

/smh