Healers need an overhaul

[Thorio]

Healer complaint topic #255

[HyoMinPark]

Not necessarily rotations. Keeping the role identities matters, but i'd be all for giving healers more procc options. The problem is that if you increase their dps without affecting their healing output then you essentially buff the role and have to adjust the rest of the endgame content around that, and if you make it a choice then you will see people posting about healers not doing their job. Overall, it's not worth the effort to appease the minority of people who feel that endgame is not keeping them busy enough with healing. Not to mention people who raids savages are already a minority..

Please read the actual arguments that healers are making before you respond.

We are not asking for increased DPS for healers.
We are asking for a more in-depth DPS system for healers.
In other words, more DPS BUTTONS for healers.
More DPS buttons =/= wanting to deal higher damage.

In all my time in the healer forums on here—which is a lot—I’ve rarely seen healers ask to deal more damage. That’s not the argument we are making. If anything, we always argued wanting to HEAL MORE, but the developers will not let us heal more because then new healers/baby healers would be “too stressed out”, and heaven forbid there’s any sort of “stress” involved with anything in this game.

We spend 80% of our time—if not more—in ALL FORMS OF CONTENT (read: not just Savage raids) dealing damage, so why not at least make it a bit more interesting than Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis 100+ times during a single encounter.

This is not to appease those nasty raiders.
This is for ALL HEALERS because even the NON-RAIDER HEALERS are getting bored spamming one button.

If anything, NON-RAIDER HEALERS have it worse than RAID HEALERS do because casual content is not even that demanding—to the point where CASUAL HEALERS don’t even use their entire kit. I can do entire pieces of content without touching things like Macrocosmos, Seraph, Pneuma, and Lilybell because the content simply does not ask for that much healing. Even Savage borders on that, since I use Pneuma maybe once or twice in any given fight—and sometimes it’s still an overheal.

I am beyond exhausted seeing these “not everyone wants Savage-level content”/“it’s not worth it to overhaul for the minority of players” arguments. They completely miss the point of what healers on here are even saying. And really, this goes for all roles. Asking for some kind of engagement or a little bit of complexity for a job/role does not equate to asking for ANYTHING to be Savage-levels of challenging. It’s not that black and white. You can have engagement and complexity somewhere between “drool on keyboard easy” and “finger gymnastics/concert pianist/Math Lady Meme hard”.

[Nizzi]

Healer complaint topic #255

Thanks for the bump, feel free to keep doing it!

[Ayche]

You could remove the slack additional healing power gives, but that will just make progs and struggle normal trial/raid runs more painful.
One man's overhealing is other's saving grace.

[ASkellington]

You could remove the slack additional healing power gives, but that will just make progs and struggle normal trial/raid runs more painful.
One man's overhealing is other's saving grace.

Or... you could remove some of our oGCD heals and replace them with some extra dps/support buttons so we

1. GCD heal more because part of the problem is that we never have to touch it because we have too many healing tools
2. Give us something to do when we're no longer healing

[einschwartz]

If anything, NON-RAIDER HEALERS have it worse than RAID HEALERS do because casual content is not even that demanding—to the point where CASUAL HEALERS don’t even use their entire kit.

Non raider here. It's true.
Even in Shadowbringers I forgot Seraph (a level cap skill!) exist at one point because I barely even need it.
And now, Expedient another level cap skill that I often forget except when running from one boss to the next in Aglaia.\

I have to constantly remind myself these skills exist and I could use it.

[HyoMinPark]

What i am to fail to understand: Do people not know how FF14 encounter are build ?
After all this discussion i still hear "let the bosses do more damage" - This is not how FF14 encounter are designed and if you are changing this in that way many encounter would break. FF14 Encounter are build as a dance, you remember the steps and do them correctly and beat the encounter.
There is not much rng goin on. WoW Encounter are more build as constant dps check and not much as a dance..

I am not asking for random damage/RNG damage. All I said was that I’d prefer a more even balance of healing uptime and DPS uptime—something closer to 50/50. I’d even take 40/60 healing versus damage. Anything but 10/90 like it is now.

Personally, I don’t care about WoW encounters and how they are built. I played WoW for a day in 2007 and that was it. Was never my cup of tea, and I don’t think FFXIV needs to be just like it. I don’t know anything about its encounter designs, and I’m not talking about its encounter designs here.

You can have a more even healing-to-damage uptime ratio without adding in random outgoing damage that falls outside of the predictable/scripted nature of this game. It’s as simple as just adding in additional raidwides during a boss—or even just make them hit harder instead of barely tickling. As fun as Aglaia is, there are very few raidwides in those encounters. Even Savage doesn’t have as many as it could, and they don’t have to be random. They can be scripted/choreographed.

Crit auto attacks were also a decent way to keep healers on their toes back in SB, in my opinion. And they were actually random. They made healers need to pay attention to the tank versus virtually ignoring them. Especially when they happened after a tank just took a buster. Aaaaand the devs removed those because they were apparently “too stressful”.


I am well aware that the things I would like to see will not happen, so you don’t need to reiterate that for me. This isn’t my first rodeo here. I was merely expressing my wishes in response to someone asking if making GCD heals mandatory in content would provide the engagement healers are wanting. I think they need far more than “you gotta use your GCD heals now”. I don’t find being a GCD cure bot any more interesting than being a Glare Mage.

I also think that healers aren’t even so much of a resource to tanks and DPS. It’s my personal opinion that healers exist in parties because the Duty Finder dictates one (or two) need to be there. But they aren’t hardly as necessary as they should be—due to a variety of reasons. If it weren’t for standard comp rankings on FFLogs, I’m certain top groups would already have dropped the second healer for a fifth DPS. You barely need one a lot of the time—and you simply don’t need two.

[Ayche]

Or... you could remove some of our oGCD heals and replace them with some extra dps/support buttons so we

1. GCD heal more because part of the problem is that we never have to touch it because we have too many healing tools
2. Give us something to do when we're no longer healing

But the skill expression and proper reaction times exist in the oGCD space. Like if you could manage all healing checks by spamming Succor, that would be pretty boring too.
And if you only had Cure 2 at your disposal when you are trying to desperately keep people taking spot damage when the next raid wide is already being cast, it would be too slow for the job.
Is more hard casting actually the solution?

[Thorio]

Thanks for the bump, feel free to keep doing it!

No need, there are enough such topics popping up every minute.

[ASkellington]

But the skill expression and proper reaction times exist in the oGCD space. Like if you could manage all healing checks by spamming Succor, that would be pretty boring too.
And if you only had Cure 2 at your disposal when you are trying to desperately keep people taking spot damage when the next raid wide is already being cast, it would be too slow for the job.
Is more hard casting actually the solution?

At no point did I say to replace 1 button dps spam with cure/benefic/physick spam. I don't think you're understanding what I'm getting at.

I want to dip more into my GCD heals because that means my oGCD heals are actually a resource to manage now.
It is infinitely more fun for me to go in Orbonne Monestary and have nothing but ES, CU and CO and 1 charge of ED than my entire heal kit at 90 because the damage is more frequent and I can't just use the same oGCD for the same raid wide. I actually have to plan it out.

I don't want GCD healing to replace oGCD healing. I want more engagement when I heal by making my oGCDs more of a resource to manage (by limiting how many I have) than it is to simulate a better balance between doing DPS and healing.

You can also do this by adding in more dps buttons to press.