Healers need an overhaul

[Silver-Strider]

good lord its like the entire point i'm trying to make went over your head. the whole point was giving healers something other to do than healing that isn't being a dps in all but name. so i offered adding support spells, not more dps spells as an alternative solution.

The 2 are not mutually exclusive though. You can have support skills that also add to your DPS rotation. That was a thing before. Miasma and Shadowflare were DPS skills that had added utility in the form of a Heavy and Slow effect on enemies and more can be done with that concept to expand on both options.

A DoT that puts a debuff on the target that heals party members as they damage the target in a similar vein as Bloodbath.
A Shield that reflects damage back on the attacker.
A Damage attack that lowers the target's damage.

There is literally no reason they can't be added to satisfy both sides of the argument. You get more options to support your group, we get more DPS skills to break the monotony of Filler spam.

[Banriikku]

I am very courious and intrigue by this discussion but one thing borthers me.
The argument "no more dps more buff/debuff/meaningfull healing etc." has a major flaw.

My hypothesis:
Healing is binary this means only enough or not enough and healing has no other outcome besides survival (enough healing) or death (not enough healing).
With this the healer role is not even necessary and can be discarded from the game without breaking anything by just giving all other jobs more sustain. This can be achieved even without increase of buttons. Therefore the healer role is unnecessary.

Test:
Take a group of people (Group A) and chose a fight. this first group will perform und the idea "healer should heal". Track down how long it takes, how many tries etc.

Now another group (Group B) this time the group will perform under the idea "healer heal wiht OGCD and the rest of the time should DPS"

last but not least a control group (Group C) whithout any premise

The result i predict is:
For all content related to MSQ or Normal difficulty - a slight increase of completion time , Group B > Group A
For all content Extreme related a more measurable and faste completion of the duty, Group B > Group A
For all savage content slight increase in speed for completion in compersion to extreme, Group B > Group A
For Ultimate there is huge gap in completion time between the two ideas. The idea "healer heal with OGCD and the rest of the time dps" has a higher success rate and faster completion time over "healer should only heal".

With this we learn:
Healing with OGCD or not will only matter if you play Ultimate and maybe to savage last fight (i dont see this point because i played with 3 diffrent statics and all this years my dps was not necessary for success) and you will have the same result: clear the fight with both attitudes. This leads to the conclusion that the healer is here only to elevate poor performance of other player and if all players play medicore the healer is redundant. The only two jobs that need to be here because the design dictates it are tank and dps.

Now to the point of more healing or buff/debuff:
The healer role is not in the battle design included at the moment and your proposal would make it necessary to design the fight with a healer in mind. This would make it necessary to rework the complete battle design of 2 Expacs or more and this is in my opinion very unlikely to happen (we ask for a redisgn of the glamour system now for atleast 3 expacs, we asked for ARR quest change for years only to get a partly solution).

[Lilapop]

The 2 are not mutually exclusive though. You can have support skills that also add to your DPS rotation. That was a thing before. Miasma and Shadowflare were DPS skills that had added utility in the form of a Heavy and Slow effect on enemies and more can be done with that concept to expand on both options.

A DoT that puts a debuff on the target that heals party members as they damage the target in a similar vein as Bloodbath.
A Shield that reflects damage back on the attacker.
A Damage attack that lowers the target's damage.

There is literally no reason they can't be added to satisfy both sides of the argument. You get more options to support your group, we get more DPS skills to break the monotony of Filler spam.

either i'm bad at explaining things (prob) or you just are trying to spin it so no matter what happens, healers always be dps in all but name no matter what, so i'll try a different way of explaining;

a healer's primary focus is to heal, it is in the name. since healing isn't required very much (which is where we agree), to break up the "filler spam" as you call it... instead of making it pretty much a dps with heals (hello summoners!), add buffs and debuffs. debuffs to the enemy in form of an aoe or single, buffs to the party in form of entire party or single target, shields, while already are a thing to prevent damage from even happening (pre-emptive healing, even), it's an an "attack" that lowers a target's damage, that is a textbook definition of a debuff, which falls under the[ B]support[/B] category, which is my whole point. make healers more support and less green dps. it both breaks up the "filler spam" and doesn't make it a green dps. which, ideally, should satisfy both parties. (the ones who want healer to not be a dps, and the healers who are bored with the mind-numbing simpleness of the "rotation".

considering my point here is to separate healer from being lumped in with the other dps, they are mutually exclusive, which is the whole point.

[Nizzi]

In a world where the developers actually cared about how healers played, we would definitely have more supportive skills, CC options and even a few more DPS spells again. They need to stop treating us like we're the role for idiots who want an easy clear and instead respect that we're just as intelligent as our tank and DPS party members. Our job is to SUPPORT the party - that's why we heal and DPS.
When Yoshida was talking about how good Holy was because of its stun and how they were looking at adding something similar to SCH and AST, I was actually excited because that's the type of thing that healers need and would benefit newer healers immensely in situations where things go wrong if they had buttons that can handle mobs for a moment so they can recollect. Of course, we didn't get Heavy/Slow/Disease/Malady or anything on our AoEs because why would healers get anything actually beneficial or fun?

Why did healers lose Eye for an Eye, a barrier w/ a chance to make the enemy hit for 10% less and instead get Repose? That seems way more useful in almost every situation than Repose is. Was replacing a supportive tool for a shitty ST Sleep that still has the old 2.5s cast time really necessary? Why did SCH lose Virus and DPS got it as Addle? All we have now are just "heal big, heal bigger, mitigation some, mitigate some more" fire and forget bullshit that leaves every job in this role feeling flavorless and like the exact same job. It's stuff like this why I really laugh at the idea that these healer changes are designed to make it easier for newer players. How? Newer players have no CC anymore, they couldn't even bother to make Repose like Sleep and make it AoE, at least then it might have some usefulness in bad situations a healer needs to control. Outside of pressing heal buttons over and over, you don't have any supportive control over situations as a healer, especially in lower levels when players are trying to learn these jobs.

You know why healing continues to be "stressful" for newer players? Because there's LITERALLY nothing they can do except spam buttons and watch health bars ping pong. They can't apply Shadow Flare to slow down mobs anymore. They can't use Fluid Aura to knockback mobs and bind them anymore. They can't use Celestial Opposition to stun them anymore. You know one of the reasons people love playing WHM in dungeons? Because having the ability to do some freaking CC is incredibly helpful and there's never a situation where Holy is not useful in dungeons. But no, SE really thinks that we just love more healing buttons. SE has created and exacerbated this problem of people who only want to heal and only want to GCD curespam, because for 50+ levels now there's NOTHING they can do other than that. If they ask for advice on what to do in these situations, it's pretty much just "yeah spam heals to sustain your tank" and there's no growth, and bad habits start to set in very quickly on what a healer should be doing.

We're very blessed to have these designers that can clearly make well designed healers and put thought into the role and interactions within their kits, and then for some inexplicable reason they remove it all and then tell us to deal with it and that we're never ever getting old job design back. It's stupid and insulting.

[Shurrikhan]

good lord its like the entire point i'm trying to make went over your head. the whole point was giving healers something other to do than healing that isn't being a dps in all but name. so i offered adding support spells, not more dps spells as an alternative solution.

Given that the amount of healing to already be done is almost always capped at less than the free (no potency cost) healing available in our kits, adding yet more free healing will only push existing heals out of use.

Think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

While Kardia is lazy design, not building on it will just leave it in that state. SCH at least tried to make the Fairy more than just passive regen whereas Kardia doesn't feel developed at all and needs more for it to feel distinct in its own right.

Also, this. There's a lot we could do to make Kardia more than just another lazy copy by which to "be SCH, but less clunky".

[Payotz]

I have said it once and I'll say it again... long rotation doesn't = riveting gameplay. if you like the busywork of pressing buttons that don't build up to anything, have fun with that on some other class. healers, in their kit, have what they need tp unfortunately be a top dps as well as what should be, not even sure why this is debatable, their primary goal... healing.

It doesn't have to be. WoW Holy Priest's dps rotation is this:

- Apply Holy Fire and keep it up
- Chastise on cool down
- Apply Shadow Word: Pain and keep it up
- Smite (until Chastise is up)
- Shadow Word: Death when the target is below 25%.

That's literally just two extra dots and one nuke that you have the option to press. That's a bare minimum DPS rotation, that's literally three more buttons "that are optional" when there's downtime.
If you want to spot heal every 20 seconds raid wide, then feel free to do it. You can ignore the two dots just fine.

But with how powerful each healer's healing throughput is, and with how encounters are designed around "mitigation" checks rather than actual heal checks, you're going to end up healing once ever 30 seconds, and only to fill the party back up in 2 GCDs after every mitigation check raidwide. That's just the reality of how SE designs fights, and I've got a feeling they're not gonna change that anytime soon.

Honestly, a LOT of things need to happen in order to pivot FF14 healer design from literally a "heal only after every raidwide" role.

Healers need less healing tools, and less healing potencies so they work for their heals. Cap Medica 2/Succor/RaidWideAoEHealButtonHere to only affect 4 people in the party in Cure 3 range, and make it so that you have 2 charges of it that refreshes every 30 seconds. Make benediction not fill up to full, and only heal up to 50%. Scholar succor only applies shields and not healing, and buff physick to be at least the same potency as Cure 2, yada yada you get the drill.

Content should stop having most damage go out as massive mitigation based party busters. Actually having a raid wide tick throughout the fight, stacking after every raid wide, is a good step in the right direction. The healchecks at Phase 3 TEA enrage, E12S enrage, E4S tumults are all good examples of raidwide damage. Add more of those rather than binary "did you mitigate? no, you die" checks.

This will make healing rotations an actual thing in FF14. A series of buttons you have to press to get the most optimal healing output from your kit at the moment, and will make healing a lot more engaging than "press 2 GCDs and fill the party back up!" But keep in mind, this will not stop healers from dpsing, because there will always be downtime. There needs to both be a healing and dps rotation for healers to remain engaging and to have a pretty high skill ceiling. This will also unfortunately make healers a lot more inaccessible which I don't think Square should and would do. I don't think raising the skill floor at the risk of alienating players that got used to how low it is right now, is the right move.

[Lilapop]

You know why healing continues to be "stressful" for newer players? Because there's LITERALLY nothing they can do except spam buttons and watch health bars ping pong. They can't apply Shadow Flare to slow down mobs anymore. They can't use Fluid Aura to knockback mobs and bind them anymore. They can't use Celestial Opposition to stun them anymore. You know one of the reasons people love playing WHM in dungeons? Because having the ability to do some freaking CC is incredibly helpful and there's never a situation where Holy is not useful in dungeons. But no, SE really thinks that we just love more healing buttons. SE has created and exacerbated this problem of people who only want to heal and only want to GCD curespam, because for 50+ levels now there's NOTHING they can do other than that. If they ask for advice on what to do in these situations, it's pretty much just "yeah spam heals to sustain your tank" and there's no growth, and bad habits start to set in very quickly on what a healer should be doing.

that's stressful? it's stressful for healers to... heal in dungeons? and yet healers want... more things to do to stress them out even more when their primary goal is a stress factor? confusion. maybe if... teamwork... was applied to keep the healer alive, this wouldn't be a problem. this is a foreign concept in this game for some reason. don't see why healers are expected to be dps/support/with enough hp to practically tank all in one? there are too many healer buttons, which is about the only thing in this little chunk that makes any sense. if you see someone telling one of these "bad habits" why don't you step in and correct them, then? though personally, i haven't seen anyone say "oh just curespam the tank and they'll be fine" at all. anyone who is curespamming simply isn't aware of how to utilize the rest of their kit and figures that they can barely get by with it, and they can. so why would they change if its working for them? there's no motivation to do so.

[Shurrikhan]

that's stressful? it's stressful for healers to... heal in dungeons? and yet healers want... more things to do to stress them out even more when their primary goal is a stress factor? confusion.

"The only thing stressing healers at most levels of play is tedium and a lack of agency."
-> "Well then surely anything added, even as it would decrease tedium and increase agency, would overstress the role!"

???

[Nizzi]

that's stressful? it's stressful for healers to... heal in dungeons? and yet healers want... more things to do to stress them out even more when their primary goal is a stress factor? confusion. maybe if... teamwork... was applied to keep the healer alive, this wouldn't be a problem. this is a foreign concept in this game for some reason. don't see why healers are expected to be dps/support/with enough hp to practically tank all in one? there are too many healer buttons, which is about the only thing in this little chunk that makes any sense. if you see someone telling one of these "bad habits" why don't you step in and correct them, then? though personally, i haven't seen anyone say "oh just curespam the tank and they'll be fine" at all. anyone who is curespamming simply isn't aware of how to utilize the rest of their kit and figures that they can barely get by with it, and they can. so why would they change if its working for them? there's no motivation to do so.

I have never seen someone so brazenly miss the very obvious point of a post and then try to argue something it isn't saying. I'm not going to enact the Sisyphean labor of trying to explain what it's saying to you, but you can continue to argue with phantoms if you wish.

[Lilapop]

"The only thing stressing healers at most levels of play is tedium and a lack of agency."
-> "Well then surely anything added, even as it would decrease tedium and increase agency, would overstress the role!"

???

if healing stresses out a healer in what universe does it make sense to also add more when they can't even manage their primary task?