Healers need an overhaul

[Semirhage]

Good players can do this, but i am not a good player, i won't get better. When there was not much content and story anymore for me in WoW, i tried FF14 and now i am happy to have back lot of more easy content with a lot of story. I just do normal dungeons, i leave more difficult runs as savage and ultimate for the better players.
So maybe expert, savage and ultimate runs should be more a challenge for heal as well, but this can be done without more dps buttons.

And this is where I'm sorely tempted to put my mean veteran healer hat on, because the non-sequitur at the end tells me all I need to know. Riddle me this. If you don't engage with your kit to anywhere near to its fullest, and you -acknowledge- that you don't, and the skill ceiling were to increase without affecting your regular dungeon runs, the problem is.......?

Ah right, I know exactly what the problem is. This is Healers Should Heal Only making its rounds yet again.

See, I hear constant cautioning that veteran healers slow their venom, lest they make casual healers feel bad. Sure, that's an important caution to keep in mind. But I'm also going to point out something less obvious, but I feel is no less important: Sylphies don't want vets having fun either. And you can tell, because their arguments center around making sure that parts of the role they admit in one breath don't affect them stay unfun for people asking for more in the next. This is where the argument graduates from "But the role would be less fun for me if X" and moves into "NO! Healers should HEAL ONLY! Don't give those other healers more damage buttons! That's not your role!"

[Nethereal]

Sylphies don't want vets having fun either.

I imagine that Sylphies don't like that by adding more damage buttons while it might not effect their play it does widen the skill gap and make them look bad, therefore they're against it happening.

iirc Yoshi himself said he was trying to lessen the healer gap by removing damage abilities and consolidating them, therefore making the skill gap look not as bad as it is, a fucking cliff.


Maybe remembering wrong.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

iirc Yoshi himself said he was trying to lessen the healer gap by removing damage abilities and consolidating them, therefore making the skill gap look not as bad as it as, a fucking cliff.

Maybe remembering wrong.

To be frank, I think this is their ultimate goal for all jobs. Except maybe BLM. But then again, his comment about Enochian button removal proves that not even BLM was off the hook.

[MiaShino]

iirc Yoshi himself said he was trying to lessen the healer gap by removing damage abilities and consolidating them, therefore making the skill gap look not as bad as it as, a fucking cliff.

Never really understood this way of thinking. If the content can be cleared with someone performing at 40% then why rip the fun from the ones who can perform at 100%? You are unable to see damage meters without third party software fricken anyways. Developers spend way way too much of the time worrying about skill gaps that will always exist. Not everyone is as good at everything as everyone else.. You would think this is obvious as anything. Tis fact of reality. Make it one button or twenty and someone will find way to outperform another.

This mad dash to place the skill ceiling so low it merges with the floor only results in boredom for some and stifles the chance for others to grow.

[Grann-Goro]

Support has always had lower engagement then other roles because of perception of it being high stress. You can see this from Overwatch to FF14. Even now with all these many changes deeps queue times are still ridiculously long on Primal (watching friends riiiiight now in sixteen minute queue).

What developers should understand is that type of person willing to play role vital to the parties survival then main that role does not think like most other players. Most of us experience the happy chemicals when we succeed despite adversity. For those moments when you recover from near tpk, at the least I do. That one clutch heal, that clever utilization of party buffs to circumvent what should have been one shot mechanic. We enjoy the "high stress" that oft comes with playing healer.

When you strip all of this away you are left with a role that veteran healers no longer wish to play and casual healers never wished to play in first place. Eventually the role dies and the lesson developers take from this is; "Welp! No one is playing healer thus no one wishes too so yeeeet boy!". It is why true support is fading from most major cooperative games. One of the reasons I am here playing FF14 is because it has support classes and proper holy trinity...

Dev team makes content do able without healers so that should you roulette with bad healer you can still clear. This is.. awful design. Can understand their fear of players failing to complete content as those players tend to be particularly loud but still.. please.. by the twelve stop. Healer - Support is not for everyone and this is okay! There are many many other jobs for those types of players.

Precisely !
I couldn't have said things better.

The whole point of a trinity based game is that : 3 different experiences, 3 different profiles.

For instance : I myself must say I am pretty bad in dps rotations. I don't know... It's not easy for me to do them while constantly moving on the field.

But I'm better in ressource management and I am stimulated by stress urgency , so the healer role fits me naturaly better.

[Nethereal]

I find the balance team has this thing where they give a job an identity(skill), tie a punishment to said identity in the name of "player choice" and then are surprised when it's not being utilized because the players are being punished for using said identity.

And from the lack of utilization they see: "Well the only thing people want is balance guess we should make everything balance." Instead of "Maybe we shouldn't have tied damage increases to utility."
Almost as if their hubris blinds them to their design failures. "Oh you don't want to use AST cards? Don't worry you won't have any cards to play with when I'm done with you."

And when they removed energy drain from SCH, trying to force SCHs to heal. "Why won't you heal!?!" and then when the backlash came they had to begrudgingly give it back only to release another class later with essentially the exact same skills(SGE) except in a different paint job without energy drain, "You can't complain about no energy drain if we don't give you energy drain. NOW YOU HAVE TO HEAL!"

With the way SGE was additionally touted as being the "damage healer" pre-Endwalkers release you would think they would've figured out you can't tie damage on healers to support skills, but no.
It's the same way all the other healers are and it's a level below the way healers were in Stormblood, every healer in Stormblood(save AST) had more damaging skills than SGE does and SGE is the "damage healer" what a joke.

The fact the healer has to choose between damage and support in a game where damage is everything is a hilarious oversight that the devs have continued to perpetuate up until just the last update to lilies making them damage neutral.
And they can't even give us the common courtesy of making Toxicon damage neutral.

It's as if they're punishing the healers for choosing the superior option, damage, every single time.
"How dare you play the game the way it's supposed to be played you're supposed to heal!"

It's somehow the healers fault the entire game is based around damage not the developers.

The complete disconnect the dev team has to healers is now so obvious to me looking back on these past few years. The first iteration of lilies for WHM was a perfect example of a punishing identity that served no purpose other than to simply exist. Nobody paid attention to it, most people wanted to figure out if they could actually turn off the bar itself instead of just minimizing it. They left it like that for so long hopefully not thinking: "This is fine, everything is working as intended."

Hopefully they get someone on the dev team that understands it's not the identity the players dislike it's the punishment they add to the identity.

Edit:

Oh yeah here's a snippet from a past interview with Yoshi.

We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be, so we adjusted all 3 Healers to be more balanced while keeping their original characteristics alive. Content can be cleared on any of the Healers, but Scholar in particular had a much bigger toolkit for attacking and player feedback on Healers always focused on the ease or difficulty of putting out DPS numbers. This is why we wanted to precisely redefine the role a Healer has while balancing all 3 and then giving them characteristics through their attacks. A big part was that we sorted out the remainders you had as a Scholar from being an Arcanist first. Please try to look at the changes as us trying to balance Scholar as a Healer and not just trying to lower the DPS output of a Scholar.

Also Yoshi

Almost all healing spells the Whitemage had required you to cast, they had high healing potency, but you always where in a situation where you had to time your heals to the incoming damage and you had to precast your heal in most cases. You couldn’t start moving until you had finished your healing cast which left very little space for DPSing and the feedback we received indicated that this was causing more stress to the Whitemage players compared to players who played Scholar or Astrologian. Because of this our adjustments on Whitemage tried to focus on increasing possibilities for your next action and making it easier to move instead of just buffing DPS potencies. You can choose to use this mobility for DPSing or preparing for the next heal. In any case main focus for Whitemage adjustments were to increase mobility and give the player more freedom of choice for their next action. In addition, we felt like Healing Lilies were difficult to use efficiently, so we changed these to automatically start charging up once you enter battle. When a Lily is charged, you can use it for instant heals and increase mobility.

[MiaShino]

snip!

Many thanks person!

snip 2

Damage is umm, damage is the great equalizer for resolving issues in most video games.

You cannot heal the boss to death and you cannot beat Dark Souls by chugging Estus. Because of this damage will always be prioritized during high difficulty content. Damage = dead = no more healing required = clear.

Every mmo I have played I do damage on my healers. Every mmo my uncle has played (30+ year mmo vet) he tells me healers did damage, even in WoW.

You cannot force a veteran healer to do more healing and no damage because we will always identify times where damage is possible. Uncertain why they struggle buss with this concept..

"We wish to encourage healers to heal more" > Implements mechanics that tickle in all midcore content to not stress out healers then makes Savage fight clearable without any healers. ???

Meanwhile over in Swtor land my Sorcerer's largest burst heal was triggered by using my burst deeps skill. Bosses in there also hit significantly harder then they do in FF14.

This is the same job design team that thought it was okay for tank invuln to kill the tank. Kinda runs contrary to purpose of invuln skill dontcha think? Punishing is okay when combined with recovery (new Living Dead). Punishing because reasons (old lilies) is not okay. Why were deeps negative lilies our movement tech but Black Mage gets two charges of Triple Cast? Dumb. Big dumb.

[Iedarus]

Here I present you the new healer tutorial in FFXIV :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlc-...4M_18NhpPR3ojs

[Silver-Strider]

So, some general suggestions.

Every Healer gets an AoE DoT. For the sake of differentiating jobs, let's say the ones for WHM/SGE do NOT stack with their ST variant while the ones for SCH/AST do stack.
Several removed skills make a return as low level versions of existing skills (Divine Seal for Temperance, Rouse is Seraph, etc). This is to make the leveling experience more enjoyable/accessible since, let's be honest here, anything below level 70/80 is absolutely awful and needs to be addressed.

WHM:

• Regen/Medica 2 will gain a proc akin to Thundercloud that turns Aero/Dia into free cast skills that deal their DoT duration damage as upfront damage in a similar fashion to BLM's Thunder.
• Water/Banish is added and will provide WHM a 5% damage increase for the next 30s.
• Divine Seal, Fluid Aura, Protect and Stoneskin all return as low level versions of Temperance, Assize, Aqua Veil and Divine Benison respectively.
• Afflatus Rapture and Solace unlock at level 30.
• Freecure upgrades Cure 1 into Cure 2.

SCH:

• Bane and Miasma return.
• Eos and Selene are now slightly different.
  1. Selene's Whispering Dawn will heal for less upfront but has a longer duration, while Eos will heal for more quickly but have a lower duration but both will heal for the same total potency.
  2. Selene will receive Fey Covenant to act as an inverse of Fey Illumination, reducing the damage the party takes by 10% instead of 5% but only increases healing received by 5% instead of 10%.
  3. Fey Blessing will be lowered down to level 30 and will provide a Shield effect for Selene or a Heal with Eos.
• The Fairy Gauge now unlocks are level 20 with Whispering Dawn and starts off at 100 upon entering an instance and each fairy ability will now use 25 gauge to utilize. All your GCD attacks will restore 5 gauge each, Aetherflow abilities will continue to restore 10 gauge. DoTs have a 50% proc to restore 5 more gauge per tic.
• Aetherpact will no longer tether your fairy to a party member but will summon your unused fairy to the target, causing them to heal the target only. This frees up your fairy to continue to utilize her other abilities without the clunkiness of applying and reapplying the tether if you wish to utilize her other abilities.
• Energy Drain is changed to a 1m oGCD attack with 2 charges that, upon use, will turn Art of War into Shadowflare and Ruin 2 into Ruination. Shadowflare will cause a slow on all targets hit while Ruination has the same potency as Broil and will reduce the damage the target does by 5% for 15s with. Both these effects have a 1 minute CD.
• Rouse and Eye for an Eye return as low level Seraph and Protraction. Protraction can be spread with Deployment tactics.

AST:

• New AoE skill called Nebula is added.
• Cards are now divided into Major and Minor Arcana.
• Balance, Spear and Arrow will be Major and provide D.Hit, Crit, and Determination.
• Bole, Spire and Ewer will be Minor and provide Mitigation, Healing Received and Shielding.
• Seals are gone entirely and Astrodyne is turned into a 120s CD with all 3 benefits consistently on it.
• Time Dilation returns as low level Exaltation and Synastry is reworked to be low level Celestial Intersection

SGE:

• Given a 1-2-3 Combo. Finishing the combo grants 1 Addersting.

I can't really think of much to really add to SGE so I just went with a basic thing to make Addersting more accessible.

[Ralt21]

Just like to add my own 2 cent. Can we also give some mercy to people wanting to level up WHM, SCH and AST. What if the player wants to go through the MSQ and play it as an healer? Or go do relic weapons for the healer.

Tl;dr: healers need an overhaul.

Idk why i have to point out this out. But ff14 has more content than dungeon, trails, savage and ultimates. I have gone through heavensward MSQ twice (i have 2 characters) once as what ever job i wanted toghter with a friend of mine. And once as WHM not only for the expiernence of playing as healer. But that sweat sweat insta queue. But thats were is notice playing healer is boring. Having to press 1 button until i killed everything.

People can say just play dps through the portion that doesnt require you to play as healer. You not only are ignoring a flaw to healer but are also 'taking away' the freedom to play how some may like to play the game. Like do you pay their sub or something?

So for all the people defending glare mages.
All i ask for people is play new game plus as healer. From arr to what ever. Heck make a new character even. And just stick to healers. Maybe you'll see what i mean or maybe not.