Do we really need two healers per alliance in 24 mans?

[ForteNightshade]

I say we do for a few reasons:
1: raises, if you have no SMN or RDMs, once healer goes down unless other parties wipe ya up ya done for.

While I agree. This statement alone highlights how terribly designed healers are right now. They exist to basically make content like 24 mans not an absolute chore to run through instead of actually being a fun and engaging experience for the player opting to play that role. A skilled DPS player will benefit a run by making up for less experienced players while still enjoying their role themselves. A healer has no such privilege. You either hope for a disaster so there's actually a reason to bring two healers or you're a gimped DPS spamming one button endlessly. Maybe if the job design team were forced to run 24 mans every day for a month or two, they'd come to realize how dreadfully boring spamming Dosis III gets.

[NobleWinter]

Healers are meant to be a crutch for the rest of the party. They don't have gameplay to continuously enjoy. They are supposed to watch everyone's HP bars and react to them immediately so that no DPS or Tank ever has to worry. You can tell DPS players are behind the class design for every roll and want to be catered to.

[LeonKeyh]

This is why I've generally asked for:
- More DPS/DPS support options. Downtime is a thing, to stop it being a thing is way too big of a job. Let's accept it and fill it. Make it engaging.
- For future content, design encounters to make better use of our healing kits.

[snip]

I take their advice and play SGE. For SGE to be engaging I have to play it badly (and I do for that reason). I tried playing SGE well and found my use of Dosis increase. I Toxicon fish so that I spam Dosis less. But in Aglaia, there's not enough damage to even justify trying to get Toxicon procs. So it's just a Dosis spam for the most part.

I really hope they change their mind. Because the only solutions without redesigning elements of the game (which would be a huge undertaking) require them to do what they said they won't do. I think there's been plenty of suggestions from the community that would retain accessibility whilst adding enough complexity for experienced players. And the great thing about adding better DPS options is that it is not needed for the vast majority of group content with healers. But IMO it does need to be accompanied with the goal of more mechanics for healers to heal...just tweaked appropriately for the level of content...because we are healers and thus want to actually heal.

Sure, absolutely. Personally, I'd rather see healers have more support options. I'd love to see an increase in healer DPS kits, but that just makes them a DPS that needs to heal every once in a while.

I think WHM should stay the "simple" healer. Give it maybe a couple more DPS spells and have it Heal and DPS and that's it.

AST is a decent foundation already for support. I'm not sure how to "improve" it, but the idea that you give DPS buffs to party members is good

SCH I'd maybe give a charged ability that cycles through different "Tactics"; Basically 2 charges, 30 second cooldown which cycles between "Offensive Tactics (Group Damage buff)" -> "Defensive Tactics (Group Damage Mit)" -> "Healing Tactics (Increases healing received)" -> "Attack Speed Tactics (Increases SpS/SkS)". This would give SCH a few additional burst window abilities to throw down. They would hold onto a charge and try to get both Offensive/Attack Speed buffs out at the 2 minute marks then have 2 defensive buffs to fit in the middle of that where they want.

SGE would be interesting if they expanded upon the DPS kit. Have some attacks that deal more damage but heal less through Kardia so you kind of have to make decisions on what attacks to cast.


Not perfect ideas, but I feel like making healers focus on doing DPS "through other group members" might be a little bit more interesting than how it is now.

[Silver-Strider]

Are there any healer mechanics in 24 man raids that actually require 2 healers? I can think of some 8 man raids that split the party that would warrant 2 healers but when it comes to 24 man, I kind of draw a blank. Thunder God Cid would be the closest with his group wide Doom effect but it's totally possible to solo heal that mechanic so I can't really think of any

[Dzian]

I'll say yes mostly because the fluctuation in players is massiveeeee. and theres still fights like diabolos hollow where i feel its rare to see a tank stay on there feet the whole fight.

but players aside. alliance raids dont even need 24 people. 12 at most maybe for mechanics. cant think of any mechaninc that requires more than 12.. so 3 light parties could clear jsut as easily...

and with the disparity between players a decent party of 12 would probably be just as quick if not fasther than your average group of 24

[Magiqa]

So I ran Aglaia tonight as sage. Throughout the raid I would be preparing to heal the party and my cohealer, an Astro in a full crafted set (I say this so nobody thinks they were in full BiS or anything) would instantly get everyone back to full HP. Aside from a few raises and a couple uses of ixochole/pneuma, I didn’t have to heal anyone at all. This makes me genuinely wonder, do we actually need two healers per alliance in alliance raids? I did it as sage on release day and I recall it being pretty easy to heal even when nobody knew any mechanics. Thoughts?

I thought the same when I started doing Aglaia on my fresh 90 WHM. Like 1 button and everyone is back up again. However, healers can also make mistakes and having a back up would be nice. Also if you are new to healing end game content it is nice to have someone else in your team. And if you need to do a lot of resses you have a nice back up.

I did an ARR synced raid, and we wiped because people didn't understand the Doom mechanic. So 1 healer in my team "disconnected", while we all know you do not have problems with your internet, we are not voting to dismiss because then you get what you want... So, that basically left me healing the party on my own, and the tank in my group decided to main tank without using his CD's ofcourse. Well as a level 50 healer with like 5 healing spells this becomes interesting XD.

On the other hand, when a raid goes really well and nobody fails mechanics... as a WHM you're basically spamming 1 button and managing 1 dot.

[Saefinn]

Sure, absolutely. Personally, I'd rather see healers have more support options. I'd love to see an increase in healer DPS kits, but that just makes them a DPS that needs to heal every once in a while.

I think WHM should stay the "simple" healer. Give it maybe a couple more DPS spells and have it Heal and DPS and that's it.

AST is a decent foundation already for support. I'm not sure how to "improve" it, but the idea that you give DPS buffs to party members is good

SCH I'd maybe give a charged ability that cycles through different "Tactics"; Basically 2 charges, 30 second cooldown which cycles between "Offensive Tactics (Group Damage buff)" -> "Defensive Tactics (Group Damage Mit)" -> "Healing Tactics (Increases healing received)" -> "Attack Speed Tactics (Increases SpS/SkS)". This would give SCH a few additional burst window abilities to throw down. They would hold onto a charge and try to get both Offensive/Attack Speed buffs out at the 2 minute marks then have 2 defensive buffs to fit in the middle of that where they want.

SGE would be interesting if they expanded upon the DPS kit. Have some attacks that deal more damage but heal less through Kardia so you kind of have to make decisions on what attacks to cast.


Not perfect ideas, but I feel like making healers focus on doing DPS "through other group members" might be a little bit more interesting than how it is now.

Whilst I would like more support options than just DPS, but the game sadly isn't designed to support anything other that skills that help DPS. But adding more DPS moves won't make them into a DPS that needs to heal every once in a while because the balance between healing and DPSing is maintained by the content and the efficiency of your healing, and well, we already are DPS who occasionally heal, just the DPS aspect is dull as heck. But yeah, I more or less agree.

I think the concepts I've favoured most so far are:



White Mage - Lean more into its "powerful" heal role. I feel like it could take inspiration from level 50 Black Mage in the DPS department and its DPS focus is on stronger DPS spells. I mean, it would be badass if WHM got Tornado and Quake, as an example. It stays simple, but it is more engaging.
Astrologian - I like that their general benefit is to boost other people's DPS, so keep them. But I would bring back the old Major Arcana from 3.0/4.0, replace Astrodyne mechanics for Royal Road mechanics again, use Minor Arcana from 5.0 and Redraw from 6.0. IMO the benefits are: all cards have unique bonuses again, Royal Road can make use of cards you don't want to provide an added bonus to your next card, if you definitely cannot make use of that card, you still have Minor Arcana and this version of Minor Arcana should be a slightly weaker version of The Balance. And then 6.0 Redraw means you're not spamming it. So there's no need for fishing the Balance and has variety again and the elements people wished for without useless cards. I realise there's potential balance issues. But in terms of enjoyment, I think this would be a good improvement.
Scholar - For the DPS side, I would love for it to embrace DoT mage again. They dropped this aspect from SMN and it was always more suited to SCH and I think 3.0 SCH's DPS kit was at the right place, and that included Selene as a support faerie and I would like the support side of Selene to be embraced more. It could be through Selene there's general DPS boosts.
Sage - I like that "dual purpose" aspect skills get with Eukrasia, I feel like they could embrace that more, especially to build up Addersting. If they buff Toxicon, I feel like there's more incentive to fish for Addersting procs and I think that would help too. Because at the moment Addersting fishing is less efficient than using oGCD heals & Dosis. There is an added bonus too, your SGE has less of an incentive to play "how low can you go?" because their optimization would come from shielding allies, whereas current healer optimization comes from using as few heals as possible.

And I think all those ideas lean into their respective identities.

And on that SGE point, maybe if they did design healer DPS around the incentive to heal, reduce incoming damage & buff allies, then they could help resolve complaints like "my healer is too focused on DPS and isn't healing us". Though not ideal, because it's overhealing and we of course want to have challenges as healers, but it'd still be an improvement.

Which makes me wonder:
what do they want us to do?

They constantly lowered indirectly lowered the healing requirements by keeping the incoming damage itself roughly the same but progressively buffing heals while also giving everyone, healers and non-healers, more tools to heal and mitigate damage.
They also explicitely stated that they do not plan to increase them because they want to keep healing easy, relatively failsafe and accessible.
So that means actively healing the majority of the time isn't what they envision for healers, they think it would be too stressful for new and learning healers so they keep the healing requirement at a minimum.

They constantly deleted dps buttons, going so far as taking away ED, because they do not want healers to get shoehorned into dpsing and believe that by reducing the amount of buttons dedicated to dps it will make clear that healers are not supposed to dps and that it's pretty much optional. They also stated that they do not expect healers to dps (and I don't mean that out-dated quote about HW raids, I mean their more recent statements about the role in general).
So that means that actively dpsing isn't what they envision for healers either.

They constantly deleted more and more forms of support, replacing them with buttons dedicated to healing.
So they probably don't see us as supporters that multitask either.

What, then, do they envision for us?
I genuinely want to know but I don't get it. What is their vision for healers? What do they think healers do or should do?

When I compare that to other games, most noteably WoW, Rift and SW:TOR, there was always a very clear expectation of healers. You noticed from the toolkit and the content design what the devs want healers to do and how they constantly tweaked things to account for that. That doesn't mean that balance was always perfect or there weren't issues but they had a clear vision and they also communicated said vision through the toolkits, the content and several statements; they gave healers clear weaknesses that punished you for trying to make it into something that it's not supposed to be.
And here I feel like the entire role is stuck in this obscure limbo of not really being anything in particular and just existing to lower the chance for a wipe.

The cynical part of me says "healbots who stand around doing nothing else". It seems their intention isn't to keep healers happy but those who complain about dying because of the healer. When you compare what healer mains and non-healer mains (one who rarely or don't heal) want from their healers, there is some disparity. Healer mains want to have fun in their preferred role, non-healer mains want to stay alive...so that they can have fun playing their preferred role. And I guess it still ties in with their desire to keep the game accessible, but the game is still accessible if there's an improvement to DPS, because DPS for the vast, vast majority of the game is optional and the content people can make a case for mandatory healer DPS is for content you need to be an experienced and competent healer for anyway. So I just feel like that part is just born out of "our healer is focusing too much on DPS and let people die." Though the irony is, that's still a problem and if anything people are more susceptible to tunnel-visioning than they ever have been.
I think people, maybe the devs included have this misconception that: fewer DPS abilities + more healing abilities = more healing focus, less DPS focus. What maintains healing focus over DPS focus is the healing requirement and your tools to fulfill it.

[Risvertasashi]

It turns out, you don't even need 2 healers for ultimate.

[Marxam]

It turns out, you don't even need 2 healers for ultimate.

Ucob was done with only tanks so don't even need dps but those are fringe cases. Regardless, it currently shows how under-tuned 90% of content in the game is, excluding savage/ultimates and optimized strats. Funny how easy content is now compared to ARR/HW. For reference Dun Scaith is the only 24 man first boss to have a soft enrage with death tiles. It's really slow but I recall seeing it a few times when ppl keep getting yeeted off and having weakness.

3 Tank/Heal would help alleviate dps queues for 24 mans, and even cases when you are stuck at 5/6 healers.

[Mortex]

Sure, absolutely. Personally, I'd rather see healers have more support options. I'd love to see an increase in healer DPS kits, but that just makes them a DPS that needs to heal every once in a while.

I think WHM should stay the "simple" healer. Give it maybe a couple more DPS spells and have it Heal and DPS and that's it.

AST is a decent foundation already for support. I'm not sure how to "improve" it, but the idea that you give DPS buffs to party members is good

SCH I'd maybe give a charged ability that cycles through different "Tactics"; Basically 2 charges, 30 second cooldown which cycles between "Offensive Tactics (Group Damage buff)" -> "Defensive Tactics (Group Damage Mit)" -> "Healing Tactics (Increases healing received)" -> "Attack Speed Tactics (Increases SpS/SkS)". This would give SCH a few additional burst window abilities to throw down. They would hold onto a charge and try to get both Offensive/Attack Speed buffs out at the 2 minute marks then have 2 defensive buffs to fit in the middle of that where they want.

SGE would be interesting if they expanded upon the DPS kit. Have some attacks that deal more damage but heal less through Kardia so you kind of have to make decisions on what attacks to cast.


Not perfect ideas, but I feel like making healers focus on doing DPS "through other group members" might be a little bit more interesting than how it is now.

I don’t think any job should stay “simple”. You have the entire lvl phase to evolve every job too the point it has a decent skill ceiling. Why do people want that some jobs are “simple and easy” to play. People have over 80 lvls too learn a job and it’s tools