[Petition] Have Naoki Yoshida Play Healer and take off the DPS Gloves for a year.

[Semirhage]

Because your depth should be focused on healing rather than damage

If I'm playing a healer, I want to be concerned with engaging with my tool kit, where it be efficiently healing damage utilizing the minimal amount of resources

Do you see where these two priorities conflict with one another? You want the meat of healer engagement to come from the part of the kit you're actively seeking to spend the least amount of time using. This is why applying the DPS job mentality to healers doesn't work: DPS do damage, so healers heal right?

No. Wrong. Filling healer kits with a dozen copies of boring healing spells makes them less engaging. Healing is at its peak when it's about multitasking. Keeping an eye on health while doing something else. And that something else might be...

It's cool to have time to do some damage but if I wanted to deal damage, I'd just play a DPS right?

The skill ceiling is doing less healing and having more downtime. So you want the act of gaining skill in the healer role to cause you to shift focus from the purposefully entertaining part of your kit, to the less entertaining part.

This "healers should get engagement from healing and you should play a DPS if you want to do something else" approach to healer design is exactly why healers are boring.

[Beddict]

In my eyes there are two ways to make the role more enjoyable

1) Increase outgoing damage in content such that you need to heal more. Or reduce potency of oGCD heals to achieve a similar effect.

2) Leave healing as is and add more DPS buttons. MAYBE remove a couple healing oGCDs to allow more button space for DPS skills. (while adjusting potency of those remaining)

They really don't want to stress new healers so 2 is the only realistic option. Also (1) wouldn't do anything for old content.

Unfortunately, 2 isn't a realistic option either since Yoshi-P shot it down in an Endwalker Media Tour group interview with MrHappy and Reddit. To quote:

Mrhappy1227: Healers in Final Fantasy XIV often discuss how often they are casting DPS spells despite being healers. Often nicknaming jobs like White Mage a “Glare Mage” as an example. The Media Tour build has some new healing skills that also have damage components to them. Has the team taken any feedback from the players on improving interactivity with the healers? Whether that be more interesting DPS skills or more prominent healing requirements.

Yoshida: So I totally understand that those healers that have a very high player skill level and they’ve really mastered their jobs go into these different raids or battles and when they do have some downtime between their heals they do cast more offensive spells. Some of them desire to have more technical aspects of it so they are more active and I totally understand that sentiment. But of course the basis of a healer is to heal so I think the development team and I have this thinking of getting that sense of exhilaration from doing really good heal work.

That being said I don’t think we would do any sort of dramatic addition of offensive skills moving forward. By having these offensive abilities some players, like new healers, might feel pressured like “oh do I have to have good DPS while I’m healing?” or some players might be aggressive like “oh hey you have an offensive skill in your kit, why don’t you use it?” and I don’t think that’s optimal either.

But of course we do have the new job, Sage, which will allow for this unique gameplay where if you land an attack it heals at the same time. Or if there’s like a particular barrier ability that you cast and once that’s depleted it increases the resource which could lead to an attack which is very unique. I think players would be interested in trying that out for sure.

Based off the interview, Yoshi-P believes the following:

1. Only Healers at a very high skill level are capable of DPSing a lot
2. Healers should find healing exhilarating despite the fact that they refuse to increase outgoing damage to avoid stressing baby healers, even in Savage and Ultimate
3. Adding DPS options to a Healers kit will lead to new players feeling pressured to DPS in parties
4. DPS is totally a unique style of DPS oriented Healer

The Healer Role is always gonna be straight up fucked unless Yoshi-P actually starts listening to the community. Outgoing damage will not be increased because it could scare off new players, and his statement of "go play Ultimate" is equal parts bullshit and false. DPS tools will not be increased because it could scare off new players. The feedback and complaints of veteran Healers, the people actually invested in the Role, don't matter to Yoshi-P and his dev team because he only cares about new player accessibility, even to the detriment of endgame content.

[Nizzi]

"By having these offensive abilities some players, like new healers, might feel pressured like “oh do I have to have good DPS while I’m healing?” "

Maybe... don't design Savage encounters that require healer DPS then? Do these developers even play their own game?

[Yeastyloins]

Do you see where these two priorities conflict with one another? You want the meat of healer engagement to come from the part of the kit you're actively seeking to spend the least amount of time using. This is why applying the DPS job mentality to healers doesn't work: DPS do damage, so healers heal right?

No. Wrong. Filling healer kits with a dozen copies of boring healing spells makes them less engaging. Healing is at its peak when it's about multitasking. Keeping an eye on health while doing something else. And that something else might be...



The skill ceiling is doing less healing and having more downtime. So you want the act of gaining skill in the healer role to cause you to shift focus from the purposefully entertaining part of your kit, to the less entertaining part.

This "healers should get engagement from healing and you should play a DPS if you want to do something else" approach to healer design is exactly why healers are boring.

Ideally, I would want incoming raid wide damage to be so high and constant in the game you are almost unable to do anything but heal or shield. It just seems weird that SE would make content that actively tells players not to heal rather than create encounters that require healers to use their whole kit.

[MintnHoney]

Ideally, I would want incoming raid wide damage to be so high and constant in the game you are almost unable to do anything but heal or shield. It just seems weird that SE would make content that actively tells players not to heal rather than create encounters that require healers to use their whole kit.

Given a full suite of interesting and interactive tools at our disposal to counter that high and constant damage, that design could be fun and interesting. I wish I could say that I think it could happen some day, in FFXIV, but I can't, in good conscience, say that we will when YoshiP has already gone on record saying that he won't do that because he worries about [newer/more casual] healers being unable to keep up with the pressure. So, unfortunately, we're left with seeing an Akh Morn once or twice in an expansion or having the tanks give us artificial difficulty by being undergeared and underskilled themselves, whether on purpose or not.

Thus, we need to turn to other possibilities. Requesting more DPS buttons (but not necessarily more damage output, which is a very separate thing) is low hanging fruit, to you, but it's actually higher than what we're being given now. If you consider that asking for higher healing requirements is the tippy-top of the tree, then having been given an action kit where 3/5ths can sometimes feel like button bloat is the lowest hanging fruit, matching well with the height of the skill floor that it's been designed for. We're talking rolling on the ground away from Isaac Newton low. Asking for a DPS rotation is at least still on the tree.

Note that we have several threads on the Healer forums and in the General Discussion forums discussing our options on how to obtain a better gameplay experience and providing feedback to the development team, and these threads and discussions have been going on for many years now. At this point, because we only ever really seem to be ignored or misrepresented, I'm hoping that a GM will one day just copy-paste exactly as written and pass it forward to directly to the dev team, and that someone on the Dev Team reads it and turns to YoshiP with enough courage and gall to say "Hey, could you like... not?"

[Semirhage]

Ideally, I would want incoming raid wide damage to be so high and constant in the game you are almost unable to do anything but heal or shield. It just seems weird that SE would make content that actively tells players not to heal rather than create encounters that require healers to use their whole kit.

So you want the WoW attrition healing model. That would require a complete overhaul of not only the encounter design, but also the healer kits.

It's a fine preference to have, but I personally hate attrition healing. Constantly spamming healing spells is not what I consider the fun part of healing. It's also really uncommon in RPGs as a whole.

If you design healers so that they need to constantly spam healing spells to survive, you dramatically raise the skill floor. With the current crop of Sylphies running the role, how do you implement this? There are people playing healers with a genuine disinterest in gaining any sort of skill. YoshiP wants them to still clear most content. If you tune content such that low skilled healers can clear it, what are high skilled healers doing? It's not constantly spamming healing spells, because the high skilled healers get through the dungeon with... let's say a high skilled healer does half the healing that a low skilled healer does. What's the high skilled healer doing with that half of their time they've carved out for themselves? Picking their nose? Casting Glare a million times?

The skill gulf in this game naturally creates downtime. It naturally creates downtime in nearly all RPGs, except those with attrition healing spamfests as their healing model. That downtime *is* the skill ceiling. It's the reward for playing well.

It needs to -not- be one button over and over and over again.

[Nethereal]

Ideally, I would want incoming raid wide damage to be so high and constant in the game you are almost unable to do anything but heal or shield. It just seems weird that SE would make content that actively tells players not to heal rather than create encounters that require healers to use their whole kit.

There was a game like that it had the best action based combat in the entire industry even up to when it eventually shut down, only being slightly rivaled by Black Desert but because it wasn't a trinity system it could never really be compared.

FFXIV combat is a step above or maybe below combat in FFXV due to the intentional design limitations inherit with their vision of how combat should be there is no middle ground in FFXIV combat it either kills you or it doesn't.
This creates a situation where the skill ceiling is demonstrably increased if you want to have any semblance of difficulty for healers and also why they can't effectively just INCREASE THE DAMAGE.

What they really need to do is decrease the potency & effectiveness of our healing across the board and add random intermittent damage. That's just one change of many that would need to happen.
Another issue is how they deal with death, how the enrage mechanic is designed, and the fact healers only manage health.
Managing health is the bare minimum to be a healer not the maximum extent of their capabilities.

FFXIV really falls short simply in the healer genre because they're scared of change and balancing, don't have enough staff and simply have their bread and butter and are happy with it.

[Yeastyloins]

So you want the WoW attrition healing model. That would require a complete overhaul of not only the encounter design, but also the healer kits.

If you design healers so that they need to constantly spam healing spells to survive, you dramatically raise the skill floor. With the current crop of Sylphies running the role, how do you implement this? There are people playing healers with a genuine disinterest in gaining any sort of skill. YoshiP wants them to still clear most content. If you tune content such that low skilled healers can clear it, what are high skilled healers doing? It's not constantly spamming healing spells, because the high skilled healers get through the dungeon with... let's say a high skilled healer does half the healing that a low skilled healer does. What's the high skilled healer doing with that half of their time they've carved out for themselves? Picking their nose? Casting Glare a million times?

The skill gulf in this game naturally creates downtime. It naturally creates downtime in nearly all RPGs, except those with attrition healing spamfests as their healing model. That downtime *is* the skill ceiling. It's the reward for playing well.

It needs to -not- be one button over and over and over again.

I wouldn't mean you need to spam heals but I'd assume the optimize version of this is provided a mechanic check isn't coming out coming out you might reapply a regen or party wide shields about every 5-7 GCDs, dps for a bit, throw a single target heal on a tank, kind of contending with that loop until mechanics come out.

As for dungeons it would tuning damage numbers a bit higher. I think trash packs are fine for the most part but bosses seem severely neutered. Let's say for example a level 90 dungeon party wide could hit for about 50k unmitigated. That is a hefty amount that if you take too long to heal will cause problems but its still survivable unless you are min-ilvl. Then you have shields if you're a shield healer, and if not you have mitigation from all roles in various configurations such as feint/addle/reprisal and other defenses like Hard Light or Shake. Even if it's just small thing, you've taken that 50k party wide down to 40k which makes it even more manageable. Tank busters should be things that would outright kill a DPS/Healer player but should be able to drop a tank to like 15-20% with auto hitting for like 10% of a tanks health. Then with some light but focused healing combined with the sustain elements of each tank plus their unique defensives, you would get more engaging gameplay not just for healers but tanks as well, but at a level where it is very manageable for less experience players to get used to it.

That's the ideal world I'd like to advocate for.

[Yeastyloins]

There was a game like that it had the best action based combat in the entire industry even up to when it eventually shut down, only being slightly rivaled by Black Desert but because it wasn't a trinity system it could never really be compared.

FFXIV combat is a step above or maybe below combat in FFXV due to the intentional design limitations inherit with their vision of how combat should be there is no middle ground in FFXIV combat it either kills you or it doesn't.
This creates a situation where the skill ceiling is demonstrably increased if you want to have any semblance of difficulty for healers and also why they can't effectively just INCREASE THE DAMAGE.

What they really need to do is decrease the potency & effectiveness of our healing across the board and add random intermittent damage. That's just one change of many that would need to happen.
Another issue is how they deal with death, how the enrage mechanic is designed, and the fact healers only manage health.
Managing health is the bare minimum to be a healer not the maximum extent of their capabilities.

FFXIV really falls short simply in the healer genre because they're scared of change and balancing, don't have enough staff and simply have their bread and butter and are happy with it.

This is what I'd be really interested, though enrages I feel are fine in most cases. The only place I found enrage to be annoying is something like door boss of P4s where 3 back to back decolations is a bit rough. More than doable but it seems annoying in what you need to in order to contend with especially since you can have situations of people spread all over the place after taking heavy damage such if the final Pinax was poison.

[Semirhage]

I wouldn't mean you need to spam heals but I'd assume the optimize version of this is provided a mechanic check isn't coming out coming out you might reapply a regen or party wide shields about every 5-7 GCDs, dps for a bit, throw a single target heal on a tank, kind of contending with that loop until mechanics come out.

As for dungeons it would tuning damage numbers a bit higher. I think trash packs are fine for the most part but bosses seem severely neutered. Let's say for example a level 90 dungeon party wide could hit for about 50k unmitigated. That is a hefty amount that if you take too long to heal will cause problems but its still survivable unless you are min-ilvl. Then you have shields if you're a shield healer, and if not you have mitigation from all roles in various configurations such as feint/addle/reprisal and other defenses like Hard Light or Shake. Even if it's just small thing, you've taken that 50k party wide down to 40k which makes it even more manageable. Tank busters should be things that would outright kill a DPS/Healer player but should be able to drop a tank to like 15-20% with auto hitting for like 10% of a tanks health. Then with some light but focused healing combined with the sustain elements of each tank plus their unique defensives, you would get more engaging gameplay not just for healers but tanks as well, but at a level where it is very manageable for less experience players to get used to it.

That's the ideal world I'd like to advocate for.

If you made dungeon healing require triple the time investment it does now, most dungeons would see me spending about 10% of my GCDs on healing spells instead of zero. And the newbie healers would scream bloody murder that dungeons are now "impossible".

The investment required to turn FFXIV into an attrition healing game would upend the entire game from ARR through Endwalker in order to make it work like that. And even then, once you've mastered your healing down to a flawless use of resources, your reward is....................Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare.

Buffs debuffs. A more robust damage kit. Anything. Anything but spamming one button over and over and over again. Downtime is your reward for improving at the role. Rewards shouldn't be tedious chores. They should be impactful and fun. Healer mains aren't engaged through casting more healing spells. They're engaged through minimizing them and mastering their downtime activities. Simply forcing healers to use Regen and Medica 2 more often doesn't make them fun.