Is the "healing portion" of healers hitting a wall in EW?

[Silver-Strider]

Seems like you guys are mainly talking about the problems WHM has but let us not forget Sage. Sage is king in this healing world we dps to heal or die trying. Sage in my opinion is better than SCH and AST .... Sage rocks this world.

Not really sure what this has to do with my post really. I'm just pointing out that Healers haven't gotten anything really new in awhile and most of it is just recycled stuff they removed, WHM just has the most examples of them is all.

Art of War is just the old PvP skill Aura Blast
Horoscope functions in the same way that SB PI did.
Lord and Lady of Crowns were changed in ShB to just be stronger card buffs but then changed back to their SB version as AoE skills.
Seraph is just Rouse with shield functionality.
SGE is literally just SCH with QoL updates.

None of this is new. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, with Macrocosmos, Pneuma, etc. but the majority of Healers toolkits are just rehashed crap from the past. What's the next expansion going to do for Healers? Give WHM back Stoneskin 2? Give AST back the stun on Celestial Oppression? Give SCH back their old Haste buff from Selene? Again I ask, why were they removed in the first place if all they're going to do is give them back as "new" skills?

[Jeeqbit]

Sage and Scholar are almost exactly the same. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't compared the actions properly. I got my Scholar hotbar and replaced it with Sage's version of the same actions. The only difference between them is that your abilities aren't delayed while the pet casts them and Sage has to unlock the dot and shields with Eukrasia. Sage heals while doing damage, but Scholar's faerie heals while doing damage as well. What Sage does that is unique is to buff the heal they do from dealing damage instead of things like Fey Union. They also have a gap closer (big reason for me to choose it sometimes).

A lot can be said about Blue Mages, but I feel that their healing model is way more interesting that the regular healers, because they have the other way around: a big portion of the GCDs need to be used with healing, but on the other hand, you have a ton of oGCD things to put in between.

Blue Mage healing is a lot better. I recommend it to dissatisfied healers.

[Amenara]

Sage and Scholar are almost exactly the same. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't compared the actions properly. I got my Scholar hotbar and replaced it with Sage's version of the same actions. The only difference between them is that your abilities aren't delayed while the pet casts them and Sage has to unlock the dot and shields with Eukrasia. Sage heals while doing damage, but Scholar's faerie heals while doing damage as well. What Sage does that is unique is to buff the heal they do from dealing damage instead of things like Fey Union. They also have a gap closer (big reason for me to choose it sometimes).

Blue Mage healing is a lot better. I recommend it to dissatisfied healers.

100% agree.

I think SE has designed themselves into a corner that I don't think they can get out of without reworking all the healers or rethinking how damage from mobs is dealt in fights. Unfortunately I don't have faith that they will do either and in the future you will get 2-3 more healing spells, no new dps spells, and content that still rarely requires GCD healing.

[QooEr]

I recall something about cure/physick/etc being useful at some point in ultimate in the past because it's very mana efficient.

its only useful when solo healing ultimates, and with the changes to lucid dreaming im not even sure if its that true anymore

[Imora]

its only useful when solo healing ultimates, and with the changes to lucid dreaming im not even sure if its that true anymore

Yeah I don't know about anything recent.

[Gemina]

healing actions learned beyond lv 70 or maybe even lv 60 are entirely superfluous. you can clear ultimates and the hardest historical savages with just soil succor and medica.
every healing action learned since shadowbringers only serves to enable more dps spam since theyre all mostly off global cd (except rapture)

Understand that this is all anecdotal, ok? I can't speak for Ultimates, but I've had my entire healing kit exhausted during W2W pulls in dungeons.

This is accurate. And frankly, this issue feels like a rabbithole that the players and developers keep pushing each others down further and further. I don't know who started it, although I have a feeling it's started by the developers.

The devs are in no such rabbit hole. They have stated multiple times now that this is how healing is. It is totally by design how things are. There are just a subset of green DPS players who will never concede to this style of play for healing in FFXIV.

- From the start: healer's contribution toward DPS only grew more and more as times goes by.

100% true

- This lead to: a portion of healer players adopt a DPS first and healing (a distant second). To them, a GCD heal is a "loss of performance".
- This lead to: the mentality of "regular healing" should not be used unless absolutely necessary.

False. Those players never adopted that mentality. They always had that mentality. Optimizers, or META. They do it with all roles in the game, including healing. We can't argue with them either, can we? How can you when 2+2=4 is their argument? We try with 2+2 =/= fun, but it does not compute. It does however, lead to bitter and spiteful healers and the dichotomy within the community.

- This lead to: a lot of grief for parties due to "selfish" healers.

See?

- This lead to: SE decided to give more and more oGCD as a way to allow healers to greed while still keeping their party alive (mostly).

And this is the part of your post that really grabbed my attention. Why would you think this when the consensus among healer woes is SE devs don't really want healers DPSing, or focusing in too much on it? Greeding is the exact opposite of what they want healers doing. They even gave us an ability to yank DPS players who are about to greed themselves to an early grave because for some reason they have decided that shaving off a second or two is worth risking adding a minute or two.

Healer oGCD are there to support the healer. That's it. They can be used both to assist with offense, or support. It is up to the healer. What the meta does is force one style of gameplay unto healers, and then the very same players curse the devs for 'boxing' them into that corner. The desire to change up healing is nothing more than a ruse of the demand for the devs to add more offense to the healer's kits. All for the name of optimization because these players want/need more challenging ways in which to do so. Regardless of the varied skill levels and playstyles among the game's other healers. That's what they want, and the dev's response is, "No."

Now, don't get me totally wrong. I am not entirely in opposition to adding some DPS skills. I think they are a fine way to reward the healer, and the party. Skills like Misery and Astrodyne are absolutely wonderful additions to the healer kits, and this definitely needs to be extended to the other healers, particularly SCH. But offensive GCD skills that are a normal part of the rotation will never come back. Like, ever.

And I don't think they can change it tbh.

Of course they can change it if they wanted. But that is not the direction they have chosen to go. They've been clear about this for two expansions now.

[FoxyAreku]

Research healers in WoW and you can see quite a few possibilities that this game is missing. Healers in this game are actually way too simple, while wow has 6 healers that all have unique tools.

It taking them until endwalker to even have something resembling damage to healing conversion says a lot.

[Raskbuck]

Healing seems to be a non-factor here when compared to other games. I find it interesting there's so many ways to top someone off with a single button, as opposed to games like WoW where it takes a more focused effort to heal someone back.

A Cure II crit heals for what? More than 50% of the target's HP? And that's without counting all the regens and off-GCDs options we have. You usually don't see those numbers in other games, generally speaking.

I think it's also very telling they redesigned the new PvP mode without healers in mind; in the sense that everyone is responsible for their own HP through the use of Recuperate. I sincerely believe the healer role has a weird identity crisis where the designers can't conceptually conceive anything other than damage as the one true metric to encounter designs.

I remember during the ARR Beta, Brayflox Longstop had a somewhat interesting difficulty spike where you actually had to use Freecure procs (gasp) to keep up with your MP management. Of course, they nerfed it when ARR was released properly, making Freecure lose its relevancy. Then again, I suppose ARR healer design was a lot different back then, with Cleric Stance being the defining factor between a decent and a great healer.

[Gemina]

Healing seems to be a non-factor here when compared to other games. I find it interesting there's so many ways to top someone off with a single button, as opposed to games like WoW where it takes a more focused effort to heal someone back.

I can't speak for WoW, but I am also not sure how relevant it is because the healing in FFXIV is relative to the damage in its most punishing state. This typically translates to a 'two-strikes' you're out rule in FFXIV PvE content. IOW, get hit once, you're ok. Get hit again within a minute or two, and you're cooked. The healer has the ability to take away one of those strikes, or bring you back in case you do fail twice before they can fix you. Healers have more than one resource to help them with this, as for what should be obvious reasons, there are 3 to 23 other players they are looking after.

[Raskbuck]

I can't speak for WoW, but I am also not sure how relevant it is because the healing in FFXIV is relative to the damage in its most punishing state. This typically translates to a 'two-strikes' you're out rule in FFXIV PvE content. IOW, get hit once, you're ok. Get hit again within a minute or two, and you're cooked. The healer has the ability to take away one of those strikes, or bring you back in case you do fail twice before they can fix you. Healers have more than one resource to help them with this, as for what should be obvious reasons, there are 3 to 23 other players they are looking after.

It's just a difference in encounter design, and neither is good or bad as it mostly depends on personal preference. My main gripe with the current healer design is that, once people have mastered a fight, it makes healers lose their relevancy besides handling the occasional AoE or Tank Buster that happen on a very scripted and predictable interval.

Just look at Aglaia for instance. It was fun when it first came out, specially fixing one of those two-strikes you mention. Nowadays it's mostly Glare, Glare, Glare, with the occasional off-GCD heal when an AoE comes. It obviously depends on the player's skill, and whether they are familiar with the encounter or not, but that's the general trend I see. Another example is how some groups prefer to run 1 Tank, 3 DPS for the Expert Roulette.

I like the whole "green DPS" meme as much as anyone else, but if I'm being serious for a moment, at that point I wonder why not just strip the role completely and just handle the healing responsibility to each person like in PvP.