If you continue to dumb down the game, you will lose half your player base

[Elesh]

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This game does take healer DPS into account, and it has for several years now. Healers are basically support—and they do enough personal damage that, if you aren’t contributing to damage, you are griefing your party. There simply isn’t enough downtime to warrant healer DPS to not be considered meaningful.

I don’t think you realize that two good healers already do more damage than the highest parsing DPS job right now. You’re severely underestimating the impact of healer DPS. As I said above, it is straight-up griefing if you are a healer and refuse to DPS. Healers simply do too much damage.

I also fail to see how giving healers more DPS options would prompt them to heal less. You do realize that healers hardly have much to heal right now as it is, right? Aside from the fact that they blow their oGCD resources first, which can be just as easily done doing a 1-2-3 or managing multiple DoTs as it can be spamming Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis now.



Healers only tend to get annoyed by DPS eating stuff when they are constantly having to pick them off of the floor because the DPS don’t greed responsibly. When I have to waste my 2400 MP on raising them 5 times during a single encounter, it’s irksome. I’m a lot more lenient in new content and when people are learning—but when it’s obvious that the DPS is being carried, then I start to get annoyed. But I also just dislike carrying in general. Regardless of the role I’m on.

My honest ideal would be to intertwine healing and dpsing together. And I don't mean like sage... a very basic example is how lilies work. By healing, I get to do damage. Great. Now that lilies are damage neutrla, I'm encouraged to find reasons to use those heals. That's a smart design. And I'd love if the opposite was true. Give me like a 'petal' bar that increases every time I do damage and when it fills up I can cast a high damage nuke spell that makes my next lily off the global cooldown. Or give me a proc on dealing damage that makes my next single target healing spell also apply regen.

Make doing damage and healing part of the same kit and intertwined in interesting ways. Reward me for dpsing with healing... and reward me for healing with dps. THAT would be my absolute ideal. (but at the same time, I do enjoy what I'm doing now because the fight design is really good so *shrugs*)

[UkcsAlias]

My honest ideal would be to intertwine healing and dpsing together.

Well, i think that dps on its own on a healer generaly already does fine. Its usualy however that the moment a healer has to heal, its considered a negative thing, and overhealing on that considered even worse. The DPS focus is too excessive here. Giving heals compensation in dps to make their heals reduce the effective dps loss is a good way to negate that.

However, the other way around isnt. DPSing should not reward with even more healing, as that would amplify the issue and push the focus more to dps again, instad of pushing the focus to healing. If healing always has the same output. DPS is simply just its reward for efficient healing. If DPS becomes a key aspect for healing, then you essentialy are forced into dpsing more. Consistent healing however should be the key aspect. You want to push a focus towards keeping teammates at high health instead of just avoiding them to get killed at best.

oGCD heals are on that a safe thing as they dont disrupt the dps, and are effective. But also the most dull. So yes, intertwining is the best way to handle this.

But i think some DPS abilities should be tied towards the HP of teammates. If their HP is lower, your dps also will.

[Punslinger]

DPSing should not reward with even more healing, as that would amplify the issue and push the focus more to dps again, instad of pushing the focus to healing.

The focus is already mostly on DPS. What do you think a healer is doing for the 45-60 seconds where a dungeon boss is doing nothing but auto-attacks after a 'buster or raid-wide? What do you think a healer is doing for the 70-90% of most non-Savage fights where no healing is required? What do you think a healer is doing when running the MSQ, where no healing is ever required?

If DPS becomes a key aspect for healing,

It already is.

then you essentialy are forced into dpsing more.

You already are. Regardless of whatever YoshiderP may claim, fights at min iLvl are tuned to account for healer DPS.

Consistent healing however should be the key aspect. You want to push a focus towards keeping teammates at high health instead of just avoiding them to get killed at best.

Why? You don't get more loot or a higher score if you clear with everybody at 100% health instead of 10%. Healing is pass/fail.

And in this game, every attack is scripted. If you know that there won't be any more incoming damage for the next 30 seconds, why bother frantically healing everybody up to full right now? Throw a Medica II/Aspected Helios/Whispering Wind on the party and let the regen tick them up to full. The only reason to keep everybody topped off all the time is if you're worried about unexpected damage killing someone. But in FF14, all attacks are scripted, so there is no such thing as unexpected damage.

[TaleraRistain]

But i think some DPS abilities should be tied towards the HP of teammates. If their HP is lower, your dps also will.

That's certainly an interesting idea and could have merit, but I see a couple of issues.

If someone has a "healer adjust" mentality, the healer will not just have to try to keep them alive when they're increasing the burden on the healer but now they'll be punished if they can't keep that person's HP high.

It also doesn't allow the flexibility to let the team stay at what is still a safe level and push out dps when you know damage isn't coming soon.

I think the biggest issue is that even that idea won't fix the issue of healing not being necessary. It would need a further corollary that party dps overall goes down if HP goes down. But then you run the risk of the rest of the group having to take on the burden of a weaker healer or a healer who is utilizing those instances of low damage to push out dps.

I think the flexibility issue could be fixed by not having the dps loss trigger until a certain percentage of HP is lost. So that would still not require healers to heal every little bit of health. But I'm not sure how to implement something fairly where anyone's dps is based on whether others stay alive or not.