Healers need an overhaul

[Nethereal]

The problem with healers in MMORPGs is always the same:
- In order for you to feel like you're needed and your job is challenging the party has to take enough damage that they would die if you weren't there.
- In order for you to succeed in your role the party has to not die from all that damage.
- Since no content can be completed unless the healer succeeds in their role people simply expect the healer to negate all regular damage.
- Once regular damage never kills anyone there need to be mechanics that kill people even when they do get healed.
- Once every fight contains mechanics that can't be healed through those become the de facto challenge to stay alive in the game.

Basically healers are victims of their own success. In order for healers to be needed people need to die without them. In order for healers to succeed once they are needed people need to never die. The game has to invent new mechanics just to create danger that healers can't negate. Those mechanics become the real challenge of the game. Healers become kind of irrelevant simply because they were so good at their job that they had to be made irrelevant to still have any challenge.

One thing they could do to make actually casting healing spells a little more attractive would be adding something like an overheal bar to people, where if you heal them when they are at full health they become powered up. That extra power can be burned off to make attacks stronger, so a healer can indirectly contribute to DPS by keeping the DPS characters topped off with overheal to burn rather than having to be a pseudo DPS themselves.

This is only an issue with games that heavily punish you for dying.

In another game I played the damage was very heavy people died a lot but the only real punishment was a slight loss in dps and sometimes resources.

Healers managed debuffs, buffs, health, mana, and even death. Contrary to popular belief death isn't a bad thing unless the developers make it work against you.

Death was so common you specialized your revive skill so it could be used faster, took less mana, and revived said person with full hp and mana.
None of this was a large issue because of the way they dealt with enrage.

Enrage wasn't just some timer where you all die at once, enrage was literally that, the boss went berserk.
The boss's actions would become so fast it would clip their animations, their damage would increase and this process would continue until everyone was dead or the boss was defeated.
They also had consistent inconsistent damage (E.G. 5-20 seconds of straight damage to someone or the party where if left alone for 5-10 seconds said person would die) across the board.

Most damage you were able to dodge in fact it was rare to ever see a mechanic you couldn't dodge if good enough and that's how they kept healers balanced.
The base level required healers, as you got better and did harder content healers were even more required, even as you got so good you avoided all damage healers were still needed because they needed to give you mana and cleanse debuffs on you and buffs on the boss, sometimes you would even need to heal yourself to grab aggro of mobs to kite.

This careful balance between the skill floor and the skill ceiling and understanding that the game is punishing while alive but doesn't punish you much for dying is how healing was kept relevant across all levels.
What I just described weren't even the mechanics of the bosses/mobs but simply what the basic healing experience was across the board regardless of what choices you made in specs or class.

The fact healing isn't engaging in FFXIV is entirely a self inflicted wound created because of YoshiP's obsession with total and absolute inclusion.

[Nizzi]

Posting this from another thread:

Indeed, there is! You can find it under System > Support Desk > Contact Us as "Leave a Suggestion"

It's my most used Systems button.

I think everyone who is not satisfied with the state of healers should let the developers know directly in game. Using every option available to us gives a better chance of getting our voices heard.

[Allegor]

The fact healing isn't engaging in FFXIV is entirely a self inflicted wound created because of YoshiP's obsession with total and absolute inclusion.

And is a double standard too. Melee dps have in average a ~10 buttons rotation*, including tanks, and that's not counting ogcds and being aware of positionals, but apparently managing 1 button, 1 dot and healing like once every 30 seconds or so is already too much mental/emotional strain for the average healer player. It feels extremely patronizing

* to clarify, I'm not saying more buttons = more engaging, I'm saying that the devs understand that the average dps/tank players can manage that many buttons, but healers apparently can't.

[D6Damager]

The fact healing isn't engaging in FFXIV is entirely a self inflicted wound created because of YoshiP's obsession with total and absolute inclusion.

And I'm OK with that.

[MintnHoney]

And I'm OK with that.

Well, I'm not.
There are better ways to go about being "inclusive," ways that don't totally ruin the game for people who have improved beyond the basest level of skill. I don't want to "ruin your fun" by any means, but there are improvements that need to be made for the role to thrive and be successful for those who do intend to master it.

[Tychonius]

This is only an issue with games that heavily punish you for dying.

I mean, if you can rez people during a bossfight reliably and all you lose is a bit of DPS it's fine, but if the whole party wipes and everyone's time is wasted over and over eventually that is simply a failure to be a good supporter.

[MintnHoney]

I mean, if you can rez people during a bossfight reliably and all you lose is a bit of DPS it's fine, but if the whole party wipes and everyone's time is wasted over and over eventually that is simply a failure to be a good supporter.

There's only so much support you can provide to people in any situation. If party members keep dying, and the answer is "you better keep their HP at max OR ELSE" then fine; but if party members keep dying, for FFXIV, the answer really is "get good," per Yoshi P once upon a time, because there aren't many encounters where players should be dying over and over unless they're actively doing something wrong (such as standing in the wrong place at the wrong time).

[Eorzean_username]

The fact healing isn't engaging in FFXIV is entirely a self inflicted wound created because of YoshiP's obsession with total and absolute inclusion.

Even this doesn't seem to be accurate, because it didn't make healers any more appealing, accessible, or "playable", since almost all content could already be cleared even when Healer DPS was in the "optional fad" era of community perception.

Like... long before the gradual Stormblood → Shadowbringers mutilation of Healer action kits, you still had people who never used Cleric Stance, or Alliance Raids where healers were using nothing but healing GCDs... etc... Effectively, it was "their choice" how much to engage with the DPS aspects of the rotation.

So all that the later changes really did was begin excluding people that liked using the full DPS kit, which is... bizarre.

[Semirhage]

Even this doesn't seem to be accurate, because it didn't make healers any more appealing, accessible, or "playable", since almost all content could already be cleared even when Healer DPS was in the "optional fad" era of community perception.

Like... long before the gradual Stormblood → Shadowbringers mutilation of Healer action kits, you still had people who never used Cleric Stance, or Alliance Raids where healers were using nothing but healing GCDs... etc... Effectively, it was "their choice" how much to engage with the DPS aspects of the rotation.

So all that the later changes really did was begin excluding people that liked using the full DPS kit, which is... bizarre.

If the frothing irrational hatred for ACT (not harassment, but the existence of silent stat gathering somewhere in the game that doesn't involve them) on the forums lately is anything to go by, it's because the overwhelmingly catered-to toxic casual portion of the community can't just exist alongside a high skill ceiling. They *require* it pancaked to the floor; job mastery must NOT embarrass them even by implication, even in their own minds, even if nobody is accusing them of anything.

[ty_taurus]

If the frothing irrational hatred for ACT (not harassment, but the existence of silent stat gathering somewhere in the game that doesn't involve them) on the forums lately is anything to go by, it's because the overwhelmingly catered-to toxic casual portion of the community can't just exist alongside a high skill ceiling. They *require* it pancaked to the floor; job mastery must NOT embarrass them even by implication, even in their own minds, even if nobody is accusing them of anything.

I just don't understand it. It's so far beyond what I am capable of comprehending as a human, like an alien language. I've heard arguments about wanting to keep some jobs as "brain dead" so they don't have to think about anything when doing their roulettes, but like... If they gave any of the healers a more engaging DPS rotation, and Susan over here is upset because she just wants to one-button-spam and not think about anything, then just do it.

News Alert: Any job can be brain dread if you just do your basic rotation and nothing else. So no, I don't' think we should have jobs where the skill ceiling is still brain dead because every job is brain dead if you want it to be. If you're someone interested in brain dead, you clearly don't care about being optimal anyway, so who gives a rats ass? How does no one understand this?