Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
The thing is, healers are supposed to be healers, not dps-lite or green DPS (no matter how much the community insists otherwise).
i never said theyre not supposed to heal. im saying healers dont always need to heal, and thus need to be fun when not healing too.
i dont want to be a dps-lite or a green dps, but there needs to be something interesting to fall back on because you cant demand 100% efficient healing 100% of the time from everyone.

i want you to think about this: what separates a good healer, from a bad healer? and im talking about only healing here. what differentiates skillful healing from unskillful healing?
just keeping people alive isnt skillful, its the bare minimum. how can you go above and beyond that? maybe you heal them up faster! maybe you keep them alive using less resources! maybe both!
ok so once you learn to heal efficiently, whats next? what are you going to do with the extra time and extra resources you saved from healing well? maybe you use the saved time & resources to play safer, but are you just going to waste the time you bought yourself by doing nothing?
eventually youre gonna get so good, that youll put that extra safety to good use and do something productive with it.

the reward for healing well is getting to dps more. thats not me wanting to be a green dps, thats just the product of becoming more efficient at healing. even in the most basic rpg thats what happens when you maximize efficiency & survivability.

currently the reward for getting better at healing in ffxiv is...... you get to spam 1 miserable dps button for nearly the entirety of the fight. on all four jobs.


Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
1) If we actually had to heal more (and use GCDs to heal), then the healer "filler" kits wouldn't feel so stale.

2) The current dps kits on FFXIV healers isn't really that different than DPS kits on other MMO healers circa 2014, we just have far less TO HEAL, far more oGCD heals to weave instead of using GCDs, and so we lean on the DPS GCD kits much more.
gonna start with #2 so i can go on a tangent for #1
2) this isnt even relevant anyways because ffxiv is its own game with its own design implications. older mmos also had like, actual triage and resource management. i sure as hell would love if ffxiv had triaging, resource management, moment to moment decisions. but sadly it does not. incidentally let me remind you that a lv 16 conjurer in ARR in 2013 had more dps skills than a lv 90 whm does now. fun !

1) the filler kits feel stale because they are stale. people will inevitably notice them. the very fact that theres easy content and hard content means that if you do easy content for any reason youll notice it. the game literally revolves around repeating duties for one reward or another. thats why there has to be something to fall back on to keep healers engaged regardless of skill level. (inb4 "do ultimate")

speaking of ultimate, even ultimate doesnt make healers gcd nearly as often for me to not notice how bad the filler spells are.
below is an excerpt of the first 2 minutes of TEA. living liquid is one of the most heal intensive phases of any fight in the entire game. surely this will keep healers busy and not dpsing! uh wait a minute

still 75-87% of gcds were dps spells. and this is when the party is collectively taking an entire HP bar worth of damage every gcd.

do you have any idea just how ridiculous the damage intake would have to be for not just 1 but both healers to truly dedicate themselves to gcd healing the majority of the time? for me to even consider even touching a gcd heal, the fight needs to exhaust all of me and my cohealers ogcd heals, and then do even more damage so that i finally need to cast a single gcd. and if you want me to keep at it you better throw even more damage because my ogcds are coming off cd soon and youre gonna have to do it all over again! if even the hardest fights in the game dont do this, i think its fair to say its far from realistic to expect the devs to up the healing requirements in normal or even extreme content so much that i cant look at my hotbar and think "wow i sure wish i had something else to cast than malefic for the next 27 seconds!"

Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
One problem is "boring" is up to personal taste. I find current healing pretty engaging when I'm doing Extremes or Savages, but I don't have a static and so don't have anything on "farm", either.
and im happy for you. now if only the role had more playstyles so more kinds of players could enjoy healing.