Healers need an overhaul

[Mapleine]

Healing in XIV is pretty much a fake role that could be nigh effortlessly replaced with a handful of role actions and buffing personals.

In doing so, the game would likely become more accessible and have more depth, so not only is the healing role phony the mere presence of it is possibly a detriment.

This is the only MMO I've ever played that I don't main healer in. It is the single worst part of this game and it borders on the incredulous how the developers are OK with slop design like this.

I wouldn't be shocked if a segment of the community turned on the game a bit if 7.0 doesn't at least try to move a few mountains. I love the thing but at some point the sweeping of huge and obvious problems gets tiring.

[Sebazy]

<snip>

The thing is, you're making these huge sweeping statements but the whole thing completely falls apart at the feet of a simple question.

What am I supposed keep myself busy with in something like a fairly smooth Aglaia run?

We used to have a powerful set of debuff tools = all gone.

We used to have to hardcast our mitigation on the GCD = all gone.

oGCD twitch healing was a highly limited and valuable resource = all gone.

We used to have to watch our agro closely = all gone.

Remember when bosses frequently had agro resets or dangerous adds with clean agro tables? = all gone.

Remember when we had to watch our MP closely? = all gone.

Remember when we had to keep track of multiple dots on different timers? = all gone.

Remember when bosses had often had tank busters on fast cooldowns that didn't have a 5 second cast bar cue? = all gone.

I was the champ of 'Sylphies' back in the likes of Gordias, Midas and Creator.

I want to be healing, I want to be buffing, I want to be debuffing, I want to be the support superstar but the game just doesn't offer any room to do that anymore. Instead I'm another 'greedy green dps' because that's the only way in which I can help improve my party now. Sure, Savage gives me a little more room to play it safe and I'm fortunate enough to have been able to land particularly chad co healers over the years, but in casual content even that doesn't work. There's just not enough to heal and nothing else to do beyond that and spamming Glare.

If I actually wanted that I'd go play Cookie Clicker.

[Lauront]

2. They refuse to expand on their dps kits because that would prove the heal-only purists wrong and cause even more drama. Nor do they want to admit that they've pretty much ignored healers in favor of dps–the majority of their playerbase.

It's strange to me that SGE wasn't used as a testing mechanism to see how players would respond to a healer with an actual dps rotation - my guess is it would be very popular if it did have this. Instead, it's pretty much the same as the rest.

[Nethereal]

It's strange to me that SGE wasn't used as a testing mechanism to see how players would respond to a healer with an actual dps rotation - my guess is it would be very popular if it did have this. Instead, it's pretty much the same as the rest.

I think the overhead for the development team knows what they want, something that already "works".

I think the devs have gotten lazy, they only have 4(?) people developing and balancing all these jobs and none of them main/play healer and they've shown consistently that they don't understand how healers in this game function/play.
I also think the feedback is curated not only from outside sources but inside sources probably censor themselves as well.

The dev team has simply gotten lazy imo or overworked. They simply refuse to hire more staff to get the job done.
There are far too many examples:

•Going Blade having more initial dps(390) than Rage of Halone(330) from level 54 to until you got Royal Authority at level 60(420)
•Aero 2(60, 30s, 200mp) simply being a better Dia(60, 30s, 400mp)
•Medica 2(1000) heals more than cure 2(800) on a single target
•Blood Lily(1,240) is a straight dps gain from Glare(290) below level 82
•The fact macrocosmos interacted the way it did with the kill mechanic in p3s(It was a dev oversight don't pretend they actually know what they're doing)
•Warriors get access to Surging Tempest through Mythril Tempest at level 40 despite it being designed to be accessed at level 50(never addressed, just another dev oversight)

There are probably a few more I missed but put simply nobody being paid to run this game is producing A+ Quality anymore. When was the last time we even had a new event that wasn't recycled?

I said it in another post:

Sage was just a developer "f*ck you." to the community, specifically the healer community because they begrudgingly had to give SCH Energy Drain back after they took it away.

So they just copied SCH without Energy Drain, did a few touch ups and released it as a new healer, 2 birds 1 stone. They even advertised it as the "dps healer" for that chef's kiss.

[Sebazy]

It's strange to me that SGE wasn't used as a testing mechanism to see how players would respond to a healer with an actual dps rotation - my guess is it would be very popular if it did have this. Instead, it's pretty much the same as the rest.

This should be printed out and stuck to Yoshida's door. DNC was a missed opportunity too. Yoshida's team need to take a long hard look at the healer experience in this game top to bottom and I can only see threads like these continuing to get louder and louder until something changes. The problem is.....

I think the devs have gotten lazy, they only have 4(?) people developing and balancing all these jobs and none of them main/play healer and they've shown consistently that they don't understand how healers in this game function/play.

It's more the second IMO. As I detailed here, I don't think Sato's team has forgotten what made ARR's WHM and SCH gel together so well, but rather the game has just gotten too complex for them to devote sufficient time to the role. Calling them lazy is unfair imo, they are anything but to manage as long as they have with the increases in job count, complexity and player demands over the years. I'm not sure if the blame is with Yoshida stubbornly believing they are still up to the task or if SE's finance and HR aren't willing to let him spend the sort of money required to fix it, but it's almost certainly one of those two things that's ultimately to blame for this situation now.

[Nethereal]

I'm also more inclined to think they're overworked.

It's so common in companies to simply not hire more people to develop a better product because overworking staff and producing B tier or C tier product is good enough already.

[Lauront]

•Going Blade having more initial dps(390) than Rage of Halone(330) from level 54 to until you got Royal Authority at level 60(420)
•Aero 2(60, 30s, 200mp) simply being a better Dia(60, 30s, 400mp)
•Medica 2(1000) heals more than cure 2(800) on a single target
•Blood Lily(1,240) is a straight dps gain from Glare(290) below level 82
•The fact macrocosmos interacted the way it did with the kill mechanic in p3s(It was a dev oversight don't pretend they actually know what they're doing)
•Warriors get access to Surging Tempest through Mythril Tempest at level 40 despite it being designed to be accessed at level 50(never addressed, just another dev oversight)

There are probably a few more I missed but put simply nobody being paid to run this game is producing A+ Quality anymore. When was the last time we even had a new event that wasn't recycled?

I said it in another post:

Some of the names were just weird as well. Glare to Glare 3, Holy to Holy 3. I thought these were just media tour errors but... nope.

[Deceptus]

Remember when we had to watch our MP closely? = all gone.

Hey now, Sage can run into some MP issues if they're not dumping Addersgall on useless heals to get back that MP.

Sage was just a developer "f*ck you." to the community, specifically the healer community because they begrudgingly had to give SCH Energy Drain back after they took it away.

So they just copied SCH without Energy Drain, did a few touch ups and released it as a new healer, 2 birds 1 stone. They even advertised it as the "dps healer" for that chef's kiss.

100% correct.

Sage's Kardia / Kardion system is nothing more that what the old Embrace Macros used to do. Force a heal on a DPS spell.

All the abilities with the extra + healing or + mitigation is nothing more than a replacement for the fairy.

[AwesomeJr44]

Some of the names were just weird as well. Glare to Glare 3, Holy to Holy 3. I thought these were just media tour errors but... nope.

Glare 2 and Holy 2 were the combo actions planned for healer but Yoshi P wanted more dev focus on his favorite job, so WHM didn't get them added in.

[Semirhage]

You know the meme about people people reading only the headline and go ballistic without a glance at the article itself. It's similar to that here, even worse actually because it would like you only read half of the headline. Because if the very same sentence I mentioned that "chad" healer, I also said:



Not only that, I had repeatably stated my opinion is form from long and frequent history with PF. So either you are just being extreme selective and cherry picking just to dismiss my opinion, or just are not even put in the afford to have an argument in good faith.

So ... please put in more effort?

Sylphies don't have "good faith" arguments. There's a bog standard list they pick from, and the only variation is in the wording. Said list is very, very rarely updated.

1) Healers should HEAL ONLY! It's in the name!
2) Complexity is SCARY, you're just a mean gatekeeper who hates new healers!
3) If you want to deal damage go play a DPS! Unless you fixate all of your attention on the healing side of the kit, you're not a *~real healer~*
4) I watched someone casting Stone while I died once, therefore healers shouldn't be allowed to do anything but healing spells and /dance emotes! Being allowed to make mistakes harms the community, so it NEEDS to be foolproof!
5) I'm the best healer I know because I HEAL unlike those dirty DPS healers I see casting damage spells. They aren't even touching Medica 2! I'm clearly doing all of the healing in an instance. *I'm* the one who knows what I'm talking about.