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

[Raskbuck]

Ugh, please no. GW2's little role-less experiment was wholly unappealing. My gripe has more to do with aggro management than healing but I find a solid trinity works best for the content that I like to do.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather replace the Glare spam with a Cure spam and play whack-a-mole with my party's HP. That's the healing style I grew up with, and the one I'm used to. We both know that kind of hot take is incredibly unpopular around these parts, though.

Healing should be, in my humble opinion, a game of attrition where you are trying to manage the group's resources before the timer (aka, MP depletion) runs out. But in FFXIV, MP is plentiful and healing impactful. So the only thing left to optimize is movement and DPS.

[Sebazy]

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather replace the Glare spam with a Cure spam and play whack-a-mole with my party's HP. That's the healing style I grew up with, and the one I'm used to. We both know that kind of hot take is incredibly unpopular around these parts, though.

Is it though? I'd love to see some proper triage checks and it'd be a huge step up over what we have now.

IMHO at least as far as these boards are concerned, the only truly unpopular take is to simply keep things as they are.

[Raskbuck]

Is it though? I'd love to see some proper triage checks and it'd be a huge step up over what we have now.

IMHO at least as far as these boards are concerned, the only truly unpopular take is to simply keep things as they are.

I'd be stocked if we had a proper triage system in my favorite MMO, and I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong. But in a game where DPS metrics is how people measures someone's performance (and worth), I doubt it would be well received.

How do people usually determine if a healer is good? I'd be inclined to say it's through a parser, to check a percentile and see which candidate can squeeze the most amounts of Glares as efficiently as possible. Eliminating that metric would likely make it harder for people to sort others based on performance. Damage is, unfortunately, the only thing people seem to care about.

(Edit: I still remember one time, during a Trial, my co-healer did nothing but cast Stone III on the boss. He left all the healing to me in a seemingly unspoken agreement. When the fight ended, a party member commented on his performance and praised him for it. I think that experience stuck with me, despite happening many years ago, and it made me realize healers are just different in this game.)

I've seen all sort of arguments defending the status quo too. From people feeling anxious about increasing the healing requirements, because they feel the average healer wouldn't be able to handle it; to others being content with dealing so much damage to what's normally considered a support role.

[Sebazy]

How do people usually determine if a healer is good? I'd be inclined to say it's through a parser, to check a percentile and see which candidate can squeeze the most amounts of Glares as efficiently as possible. Eliminating that metric would likely make it harder for people to sort others based on performance. Damage is, unfortunately, the only thing people seem to care about.

Simple DPS percentiles are the most obvious metric, but people who are looking more deeply into things will tend to focus more on a players active rate. A player who can keep their GCD rolling through adversity will almost always be a 'better' player than one who freezes and starts dropping GCDs. They will simply be able to react better mid mechanic.

Ironically in the ARR beta when I was picked up by Solitude (who were one of the top EU raiding FC for a good long time), it was actually my habit of preemptively casting and then canceling if it wasn't needed that got me recruited

(Edit: I still remember one time, during a Trial, my co-healer did nothing but cast Stone III on the boss. He left all the healing to me in a seemingly unspoken agreement. When the fight ended, a party member commented on his performance and praised him for it. I think that experience stuck with me, despite happening many years ago, and it made me realize healers are just different in this game.)

A question for you, did you ever see a log of that fight? Healing in this game can be surprisingly deceptive if you're just relying on cast bars.

If we use this P1S log as an example

In that 7 minute fight, the only healing I did with a cast bar was 3 medica IIs (Which is ironically more than I needed really) and the rest of my kit was barely pressured either so if you were listening out for Tetras, watching for Asylum etc, it would have still looked pretty grim.

I actually out healed my co healer by ~20% there and we were both at around 40% overheal.

I've seen all sort of arguments defending the status quo too. From people feeling anxious about increasing the healing requirements, because they feel the average healer wouldn't be able to handle it; to others being content with dealing so much damage to what's normally considered a support role.

It's a tricky situation for sure. There's a million different angles and it's gotten to the point now where no matter what Yoshida does or doesn't do, people are going to be mad over it.

[Raskbuck]

Ironically in the ARR beta when I was picked up by Solitude (who were one of the top EU raiding FC for a good long time), it was actually my habit of preemptively casting and then canceling if it wasn't needed that got me recruited

I remember pre-casting! That brings back some fond memories, and looking back, I feel like I enjoyed healing back then a lot more than I do now. It's still something I do from time to time, even if it's not as needed.

A question for you, did you ever see a log of that fight? Healing in this game can be surprisingly deceptive if you're just relying on cast bars.

If we use this P1S log as an example

In that 7 minute fight, the only healing I did with a cast bar was 3 medica IIs (Which is ironically more than I needed really) and the rest of my kit was barely pressured either so if you were listening out for Tetras, watching for Asylum etc, it would have still looked pretty grim.

I actually out healed my co healer by ~20% there and we were both at around 40% overheal.

I didn't, no, so I concede there could have been something more to it than that. I'm usually very mindful about overhealing, and I let my regens do the work if possible. But, you are right, it's possible there was something more to it than what I remember.

It's a tricky situation for sure. There's a million different angles and it's gotten to the point now where no matter what Yoshida does or doesn't do, people are going to be mad over it.

Agreed. I think healing in general is difficult to design properly without compromising one side or the other.

[Doragan]

Hell, ST mitigation skills on healers aren't new at all. Eye for an Eye, while proc based, was a ST mitigation skill that got removed years ago for being superfluous and it was much more unique than what Healers currently got, especially since it had special synergy with SCH since they could spread it to everyone with Deployment and had a reduced CD on it vs other healers.

Ah, I really miss it. I wish we would've kept it in some capacity. It was such a great feeling to DT it with Galvanize. I guess that makes sense though, considering they removed most %debuffs. I really, really miss Disable on Astrologian as well. The animation was excellent.

If all SE is going to do for healers is refurbish old, removed skills and give them back as "new" skills, why did they feel the need to remove them in the first place?

To be fair, they atleast added something with Temperence. It's absolutely nothing new of course, but it's the kind of thing that makes me happy to see back in some fashion.
I do agree, though. It doesn't make any sense. Though, I kinda disagree that Stoneskin and Divine Benison are the same. Like, sure, they both do shields, but it gave healers something to do during tankbusters, or when an ally was HP weakened by a raise. It's not exactly the same context (and Stoneskin had a price, atleast), but eh. I do get that.

Protect didn't do too much aside from consuming a healer GCD when someone died, so I can see why it got removed, but I'm still very nostalgic about it for some reason.

That being said though, yeaaaah nevermind. If you put it this way, yeah, they might actually be out of ideas haha.

[GeraldineKerla]

Its crazy to me that Sage and Scholar have so many abilities that are the exact same thing, just one without a fairy.
Is it really healthy for the game that we're designing content around healers requiring like 10 abilities that every healer must have just to be able to function?

I can understand like, a strong single target heal, and a strong aoe heal, and regen and some form of mitigation, but they completely gave up on giving these classes significant identity in exchange for balance.

Physis (this is whispering dawn)
Druochole (this is lustrate)
Kerachole (this is just a better sacred soil but points for it not being exactly identical I guess)
Ixochole (this is indomnitability)
Taurochole (this is their version of excog. Why does excog need to be mimicked too?)
Krasis (the single target buff every healer gets)

When you look at all the tools healers get, it feels like their design pales in comparison to dps purely because they insist on giving every healer a bajillion methods to deal with every mechanic.
They really need to spend time working on strong mechanics that take up far more of a healer's kit than they have now, but play into their healing more.
Even white mage's single mechanic, lilies, is just a single target heal and aoe, then a nuke. Its so basic! There's no flavour in it at all. Healers deserve better.

[Silver-Strider]

Ah, I really miss it. I wish we would've kept it in some capacity. It was such a great feeling to DT it with Galvanize. I guess that makes sense though, considering they removed most %debuffs. I really, really miss Disable on Astrologian as well. The animation was excellent.

That's the worst thing about it, they didn't remove it. They just gave them to DPS roles as Addle and Feint, which I still don't understand why they did that. I can't even remember the last time I saw a DPS consistently use either skill, outside the odd static group that needed a fill in for the night. It's so infuriating that they felt that Virus/Disable needed to be removed from healers, like it was so stressful for us to have it.

To be fair, they at least added something with Temperence. It's absolutely nothing new of course, but it's the kind of thing that makes me happy to see back in some fashion.

They could've just upgraded Divine Seal into Temperance, like they do with pretty much everything else nowadays. It really didn't need to be removed from level 40+ content and just makes the new healer experience worse for its removal. I've been suggesting for awhile now that SE just return all these old skills and make them into low level versions of our existing toolkit so that new player can actually get a good feel for the job and given that they've already set a presidence doing this, given the MNK rework refurbishing Steel Peak and Howling Fist as low level version of MNK's chakra system, I don't see why they can't do the same for healers.

It's like that old saying "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it". SE is failing to learn and are repeating themselves over and over again.

[Zaniel]

DPS complexity issues aside, looking to the four healers today, regarding their healing kits, I simply can't see anywhere to go on 7.0 and beyond apart from animation/potency upgrades.

I don't play Ultimates, so I can't say how the full extension of the healing kits fare there, but for the remainder (given the group performing well), a portion of the healing kit feels like overhealing or redundancy. I wonder if they need yet a new healing oGCD in 7.0.

Is either a (much needed) healing redesign or (besides trait improvements) all that healers wil get next expansion are (also much needed) dps or support actions.

I mean there's always room for novelties, just for example, you could introduce more situational abilities, simple example being a variant on Esuna+Heal, a combo heal that is expensive but gives a good heal as it cures debuffs but the heal only triggers when used on someone with dispellable debuffs so then as a healer you have an active 3-way decision, pure esuna for debuff on undamaged person, HealEsuna for a damaged + debuffed person, Heal for not debuffed damaged person, a shield that when popped provides a small AOE heal around the shielded person for using on tank stack busters. There are also options around buffs eg heals or shields that give small short term buffs or other buffs like a team-mate targetable Arms Length spell etc etc. You could also get fancy with queue and mirror type spells like enchanter style classes in other games, ie the class of spells where you pre-cast before a heal to modify/duplicate/ricochet it. You could also take a leaf from sage's style and adjust some heals to be target at the boss instead of the player, ex heals that are part of the DPS rotation (spell does 100 Pot dmg & -100 Pot dmg to target's next attack)

You could argue these spells aren't "needed" because after all you can just cast Esuna followed by an oGCD heal or just be lazy and brute force heal but there's probably still some room for people to play for efficiency of time/mana.

Tl;dr I think the main direction left available to them design-wise is heals/shields with special effects that aren't +X HP, ex: Heal + arms length, Heal + shave death debuff timer, Heal + reflect dmg, whatever. Personally I also think they need to make the DOT style enemy debuffs put more pressure on the healer, some fights have this but there is still room to increase the global pressure on healers caused by bleeds/poisons/burning etc, things that cause long term efficiency pressures without just being another buster attack. Instead of making an AE that just blows people up give it a vicious burn/bleed that lasts a LONNNNG time.

[Supersnow845]

I mean there's always room for novelties, just for example, you could introduce more situational abilities, simple example being a variant on Esuna+Heal, a combo heal that is expensive but gives a good heal as it cures debuffs but the heal only triggers when used on someone with dispellable debuffs so then as a healer you have an active 3-way decision, pure esuna for debuff on undamaged person, HealEsuna for a damaged + debuffed person, Heal for not debuffed damaged person, a shield that when popped provides a small AOE heal around the shielded person for using on tank stack busters. There are also options around buffs eg heals or shields that give small short term buffs or other buffs like a team-mate targetable Arms Length spell etc etc. You could also get fancy with queue and mirror type spells like enchanter style classes in other games, ie the class of spells where you pre-cast before a heal to modify/duplicate/ricochet it. You could also take a leaf from sage's style and adjust some heals to be target at the boss instead of the player, ex heals that are part of the DPS rotation (spell does 100 Pot dmg & -100 Pot dmg to target's next attack)

You could argue these spells aren't "needed" because after all you can just cast Esuna followed by an oGCD heal or just be lazy and brute force heal but there's probably still some room for people to play for efficiency of time/mana.

Tl;dr I think the main direction left available to them design-wise is heals/shields with special effects that aren't +X HP, ex: Heal + arms length, Heal + shave death debuff timer, Heal + reflect dmg, whatever. Personally I also think they need to make the DOT style enemy debuffs put more pressure on the healer, some fights have this but there is still room to increase the global pressure on healers caused by bleeds/poisons/burning etc, things that cause long term efficiency pressures without just being another buster attack. Instead of making an AE that just blows people up give it a vicious burn/bleed that lasts a LONNNNG time.

I mean heal + x doesn’t change the fact that we still don’t need even half the heals that we currently have, if you add the heal then we get more heals that we don’t need, if you don’t add the heal we just end up with extra button bloat that we also don’t need

At best they could redesign the exisiting heals to have secondary effects but making an entire healer expansion “now kerachole also acts as an Esuna” would be even more boring than what we currently have and doesn’t fix the overarching problem regardless