Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[IDontPetLalas]

I'm aware that other healers have buffs, but since they're all damage oriented forms of support that you just sort of press once and then forget about, it can make things feel a little bland imo. In my ideal scenario, healers would feel maybe a bit more like bard, solely in the sense that they would have ongoing buffs to consider and way more spinning plates to make up for their abysmal dps rotation. But in order to do this, the entire game would need to be changed since like you said already, people basically manage themselves at this point. As just one dumb example, whenever I do any 4-man oriented daily content with friends, we just WAR/3DPS it. I know it's just dungeons, but that's also a massive chunk of the game where you straight up don't need this role at all depending on your comp, and it's not even a hard comp to set up. Meanwhile, in the game I alluded to earlier, healers felt necessary and vital to a team's success and quality of life in all forms of content, not just the top 1% of stuff that most people don't even bother doing.

But yeah, they'd need to change the whole game to make something like that work. People are too self sufficient as it stands. It's why I don't even bother healing anymore. I need to change my forum profile because it still says WHM, but I haven't played that job much in a while. I enjoyed AST for a bit, but then they went and gutted the fun from that as well. So now I play bard when I feel like supporting, and even that barely scratches the itch, so most of the time I just scrap the desire completely and play blm. I have more fun healing when I play Warrior at this point.

Except that on an AST you don't just press something once and forget about it. AST is the job that requires tracking and applying buffs. I wouldn't want all healers homogenized and put into that same position. i would rather that each one has its distinct identity.

by the way, i don't disagree at all with what you're saying in terms of this role being less vital in certain content, and it could be made more vital in a number of ways. unless they're really going to reverse direction I think that they're going to very likely tweak healer's damage rather than making other jobs more reliant on healers because they don't want to "stress healers" OR stress out other jobs- which is rather a sad commentary on how DF is i guess.

[ASkellington]

I have nothing to add to the current discussion, my apologies. Bumping to bump.

[LisSquid]

They could just add more frequent damage and we'd be busy actually using all the healing buttons we have. I don't care that I only have a handful of dps skills if my fingers are already weaving heals and mitigation.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

They could just add more frequent damage and we'd be busy actually using all the healing buttons we have. I don't care that I only have a handful of dps skills if my fingers are already weaving heals and mitigation.

As much as I wish for the same, I don’t think they really want to do this.

Personally, I’m not even wishing for some hardcore healing requirement. Something as subtle as:
• Dzemael last boss turning at random player for random damage.
• Mobs that ignores tank’s enmity and latches onto non-tanks in Amaurot.
• Random critical hits from auto attacks.
• More AoEs like Pharos sprites casting Banish IIIs.

I’d kill to have those slight randomness.

[Nethereal]

In regards to all the people who want a more engaging system but seem at a loss about what the team could do:
In the last game I played, Tera, healers had a lot of responsibility for managing the group, and failure to do this could make the run really unpleasant. For example, every class in the game used mp to attack. Healers had spells that could restore mana. In essence, healers became a group's mana battery, and failure to use your mana skills off cd would lead to your party members running out of mana and being unable to attack during their bursts. Certain healers also had buffs to keep up at all times; one actually lowered the party's cooldowns on all skills that were used while the buff was up. Basically, you wanted to keep this running 24/7, and people had different rotational setups depending on which type of healer they were playing with, because one healer could change your CDs, while the other provided passive damage boosts. It was really fun. The way damage was processed was also different; you could take hits without it being detrimental. A good healer would heal you up right as you took the damage, so you could stand in bad for uptime and lose nothing with a good healer. Esuna in that game was also a skill you'd tap and it'd go off, and we didn't have to worry about annoying server ticks like in this game, so if you instantly cleansed someone of "slow," they wouldn't still be stuck with it. Then on top of that, you had an actual burst dps phase.

In this game, there's none of that! People just manage their own resources, you're not allowed to touch anyone's setup, and you're basically just there to heal raidwides or occasionally clean up a totally preventable mess.

A fellow healer of Tera oh god. Best healing in the entire trinity industry am I right? Too bad the game is total shit. You like priest or mystic more? I main priest for awhile simply because Mystic had a high skill floor that was basically its ceiling.
But after the rework/revamps mystic got really good/fun especially with the boomerang pulse change from level 65 to level 8 and Vow of Rebirth effecting 3 people instead of just 2. Not to mention apex thrall of life. I literally installed the game again just to press that button. So good it got nerfed. Divine Charge was such a good skill too because of how you could abuse it by animation cancelling the mp restoration while still getting the healing and then just using it again for double healing turning some of your dps skills into healing skills effectively.

It is pretty funny though that they only had 2 healers for all those years with how many tanks(1) & dps they released.

[LisSquid]

As much as I wish for the same, I don’t think they really want to do this.

Personally, I’m not even wishing for some hardcore healing requirement. Something as subtle as:
• Dzemael last boss turning at random player for random damage.
• Mobs that ignores tank’s enmity and latches onto non-tanks in Amaurot.
• Random critical hits from auto attacks.
• More AoEs like Pharos sprites casting Banish IIIs.

I’d kill to have those slight randomness.

For real. We just have so many healing tools that just feel like a waste to use outside of really niche situations. I just want my toolkit that is oh so important to SE for me to have to matter. I shouldn't get aether stacks and immediately go, "Nice, time to burn all of these immediately on ED".

[GrimGale]

For real. We just have so many healing tools that just feel like a waste to use outside of really niche situations. I just want my toolkit that is oh so important to SE for me to have to matter. I shouldn't get aether stacks and immediately go, "Nice, time to burn all of these immediately on ED".

ED should be the one generating Aetherflow stacks and not the opposite honestly.

With charge actions we could have Energy Drain be a 3 charge action with 20s CD, each use giving MP back and an AF stack.

I'd even make it a GCD with 395 potency only to break the Broil spam and to remove the useless Ruin II. Scholar would still be an oGCD heavy healer that now wants to use their healing oGCD with this added flavour of draining/weakening enemies to fuel their spells.

That would clear a lot of jank from the class and Dissipation would finally become the emergency healing buff boost that is meant to be (If its healing buff is extended to actions and not only spells.)

[SeverianLyonesse]

ED should be the one generating Aetherflow stacks and not the opposite honestly.

With charge actions we could have Energy Drain be a 3 charge action with 20s CD, each use giving MP back and an AF stack.

I'd even make it a GCD with 395 potency only to break the Broil spam and to remove the useless Ruin II. Scholar would still be an oGCD heavy healer that now wants to use their healing oGCD with this added flavour of draining/weakening enemies to fuel their spells.

That would clear a lot of jank from the class and Dissipation would finally become the emergency healing buff boost that is meant to be (If its healing buff is extended to actions and not only spells.)

This is brilliant. Would gel extremely well with a return of Bane/Miasma/Fester too, make SCH a soft alchemist with poison/drain damage.

[Shurrikhan]

ED should be the one generating Aetherflow stacks and not the opposite honestly.

With charge actions we could have Energy Drain be a 3 charge action with 20s CD, each use giving MP back and an AF stack.

This gives us more (physically) to hit, but less (cognitively) to do. (Well, technically, if you turn ED into a GCD, you give us less of both, but at least it'd seem to vary up the Broil spam by just reducing your Broil --and total-- cpm.)

SCH's rDPS is already balanced around using roughly only a single ED per AF. Any opportunities you remove beyond that merely remove available skill expression from the Scholar.

In short, you'd remove SCH's unique ability to trade excess healing for extra damage, at no increase to either (since it was already an option to be used only when it favors you).

Instead of a core trait, you'd just have inverted Lilies... likely to far worse effect after the opener. You'd have to cycle in 3 empowered Broils per average minute in order to have access to your healing skills. That makes things less responsive already, but the real kicker is that you'll want to keep those empowered Broils for raid buffs and yet you'll need those healing skills when you need them.

Note also that we've seen different potencies between a SMN version of a skill and a SCH version of the same skill. If you just want Ruin II not to become increasingly a trap skill, you could just upgrade it with every Broil Mastery trait, perhaps even into a competing Ruin III, Ruin IV, and so forth. Or, heck, you could just give SCH its own proc systems, such as by each Aetherflow usage upgrading your Ruin, stacking up to 3 times. There may be some sacrifice, then, if you need to consume those procs within 20 seconds of raid buffs, but you'd then have a further use case for that skill and access to healing wouldn't be locked behind having used those attacks first.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that there is zero value in having Aetherflow over just copying SGE's Addersgall and starting each instance with full stacks for our traditional opening salvo. But locking heals behind EDs-as-Broils-with-100-more-potency creates no new affordances, reduces affordances, fixes no actual problems (as merely having X choice was not a problem to begin with), creates new problems, and run contrary to aspects traditional to SCH. I'd far rather go back to returning complexity to SCH that removing even more from it.

[Reylah]

Instead of a core trait, you'd just have inverted Lilies... likely to far worse effect after the opener. You'd have to cycle in 3 empowered Broils per average minute in order to have access to your healing skills. That makes things less responsive already, but the real kicker is that you'll want to keep those empowered Broils for raid buffs and yet you'll need those healing skills when you need them.
[/U][/B]

So I've been meaning to make a post on WHM and the lilies in these same veins.

If we look at the distribution of buttons, I think its fair to assume that the devs think that healing should be the core of the role and dps should be auxiliary (disregarding how they have designed fights with enrage timers).

Then we look at Lilies and we see that the reward for using 3 lily abilities to heal is dps neutrality/boost (I forget how the current numbers balance out). So its a auxiliary reward for performing the core role.
This feels super weird if you are using all your healing abilities then I would expect you to be in a part of the fight where you need more healing but instead you are throwing heals out and you get a shiny button saying "hit them hard" while you are focused on keeping folks alive.

Conversely, you don't get any reward for hitting your one dps button during down time other than the damage on the button.

So your reward for healing is damage and your reward for damage is damage... If the core of the role is healing then why are all the rewards damage?

WoW Holy priest have a Talent called "Surge of Light" that I think shows a much better reward system. The talent give a 8% chance for both your healing spells and your single target dps button to give you a charge for 1 instant free heal that stacks twice. Its everything Freecure should be. It procs off of any healing so if you are casting a lot of heals you are rewarded with a free bit of more healing AND if you are dpsing during down time you can generate stacks of free heals for when the damage starts up again. both healing and damage reward you with healing which is the core of the role and fitting in dps can generate enough free heals that you don't have to hard cast a heal for minor damage and can continue dpsing.

How I would translate this to FFXIV: Freecure would give a 25% chance(to account for GCD difference) for any cure/cure II or Glare to grant a free, instant, oGCD Cure II. (balance numbers as needed)

For Lillies I think there needs to be a healing reward option for lilies and a dps way of gaining lilies. That way you can generate them and spend them either on damage or healing depending on the situation. If you make it through the heal check without needing to use the healing blood lily reward you could then you could spend it on damage instead but if you still need the healing its there. maybe instead of glare giving a freecure it has a chance to proc blood lily. Whose to say when spit balling ideas?
[1/2]