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

[TakumiHarada]

Go to Savage or Ultimate fights if you want to use GCD heals.
The game is balanced around those contents and casual contents will essentially require less healing.

[Supersnow845]

Go to Savage or Ultimate fights if you want to use GCD heals.
The game is balanced around those contents and casual contents will essentially require less healing.

I mean savage doesn’t need GCD healing at all and ultimate doesn’t need that much of it once you have organised mitigation

[QooEr]

Go to Savage or Ultimate fights if you want to use GCD heals.
The game is balanced around those contents and casual contents will essentially require less healing.

say you dont do savage or ultimate without saying you dont do savage or ultimate

[Espon]

Having only 2 main damage buttons wouldn't be as bad a problem if healers had a reason to use their other GCDs. Incoming damage is too light and oGCD skills are free and plentiful. Bosses tickle the tank and will put out no damage for several seconds when casting abilities. If people die, it's usually not due to lack of healing but because they failed a mechanic.

When I used to raid hardcore in WoW, incoming damage high and frequent. As a tank, my number one priority was maximizing my survivability, not how much damage I could do. Doing mechanics was still a thing, but healers needed to constantly spam heals or people will die from other damage. Avoiding defensive stats should be something you do when you overgear an encounter, not when first stepping into a new tier. There's something wrong when healers rather meld Direct Hit over Determination when the DPS increase is extremely small and provides no healing benefit.

Incoming damage should be high enough that healers want Determination and Piety over Direct Hit, and tanks should want Tenacity, but this would require them to completely rethink how encounters should be designed and add a cost to and change many oGCD healing abilities. A big revamp like that would be something best done in a new expansion.

[Sebazy]

Go to Savage or Ultimate fights if you want to use GCD heals.
The game is balanced around those contents and casual contents will essentially require less healing.

This doesn't really stand up well anymore though. To try and highlight how far off the mark content is vs our kits now I'll use the same P1S log I linked earlier:

The fight was 7:20, it wasn't clean, we had 2 deaths and 2 additional damage downs ontop of that so hardly smooth. Also note it was in 6.0 so no 20 second lily yet.

I had room for approximately 14 Lilies, 4 black lilies, 4 PoMs, 2 Benes, 5 Asylums, 10 Assizes, 9 Thin Airs, 7 Tetras, 15 Benisons, 7 PIs, 3 Temperances, 7 Aquaveils and 2 Lilybells (With those numbers varying slightly depending on if I use the ability on pull or early).

In reality I used:

14 Lilies, 4 black lilies, 4 PoMs, 1 Bene (To keep someone alive through their missed mechanic), 3 Asylums, 10 Assizes, 0 Thin Airs, 2 Tetras, 8 Benisons, 2 PIs, 1 Tempereance, 1 Aquaveil and 1 Lilybell. In doing so I out healed my co-healer and had ~40% overheal.

Take out the abilities that I'm spamming for damage and I'm not even using half of the oGCD healing available to me. And this is P1Savage, far from an especially challenging turn, but still worlds beyond what something like Aglaia dishes out. Should I do this for the current 24 man? I suspect it'd look even more horrible.

IMO the answer is right there, add more utility onto fluff healing oGCDs and we will use it more. This is why shorter cooldown abilities like Asylum and Soil are so good now even if they don't have actual damage potency themselves, the additional effects make them worth using more often which in turn helps alleviate the glare monotony.

[Somnolence]

The encounter design is primarily the reason why we have this situation. Incoming damage is scripted and is in 95% cases either raidwide or tankbuster.

For the latter tank kits are so strong that tank busters don't need that much attention, especially when in savage people use invulns to make the job even easier for healers.

For raidwides besides the rare ones that set HP to 1 they generally do fluff damage so even shield healers don't bother with pre-shielding and for harder savage raidwides if it kills somebody then party just uses more mitigation next time.

So encounter design + competent party makes healer kits like that redundant. Only w2w pulls and people playing bad cause healers to use most of their kit.

Ironically I think w2w pulls might not be viable in upcoming savage dungeons so healers there will likely play like in savage raids as well - as glare bots with oGCD heals.

[Supersnow845]

The encounter design is primarily the reason why we have this situation. Incoming damage is scripted and is in 95% cases either raidwide or tankbuster.

For the latter tank kits are so strong that tank busters don't need that much attention, especially when in savage people use invulns to make the job even easier for healers.

For raidwides besides the rare ones that set HP to 1 they generally do fluff damage so even shield healers don't bother with pre-shielding and for harder savage raidwides if it kills somebody then party just uses more mitigation next time.

So encounter design + competent party makes healer kits like that redundant. Only w2w pulls and people playing bad cause healers to use most of their kit.

Ironically I think w2w pulls might not be viable in upcoming savage dungeons so healers there will likely play like in savage raids as well - as glare bots with oGCD heals.

W2W might not be viable for the simple reason tanks have completely unbalanced survivability in dungeons. Scale it to challenge a WAR and it would be impossible on DRK, scale it to make it challenging to DRK and WAR could do it asleep

[Katoar]

A big revamp like that would be something best done in a new expansion.

Unless they clearly state that they will be changing healers by introducing fun and engaging DPS kits with interaction that requires thinking I will not be waiting for a new expansion. Also, they will have to communicate the changes before they get implemented and listen to feedback regarding them.

Healers should have been given DPS rotation back in Shb. We are half a year into EW right now. The GCD nuke spam is years old. And we still have people arguing about healers only healing, an argument debunked countless times over and over again.

[Raikai]

The encounter design is primarily the reason why we have this situation. Incoming damage is scripted and is in 95% cases either raidwide or tankbuster.

I feel that more or less this the breaking point - no matter how creative a healer design gets to be, healer as an activity (meaning JUST the act of not letting people die) will only have more excitement to it if they stray further from this formula. Sadly, the conundrum here is that if they change a healing philosophy, they would have to adjust all encounters in the game, which could be quite the work.

Not surprising that when healers get to put their triage hats to work is exactly when other people (or themselves) mess up from the tight script and they have to get creative to minimize their dps losses when the inevitability of using GCD heals is looming over.

[Atma]

The healing situation isn't getting unsustainable, it's been unsustainable since mid-ARR. I used to complain about it back then in my FCs, but after getting shouted down by people who just wanted fast dungeon runs I stopped bothering. I watched as they added more and more OGCD healing bloat, watching healers actually start talking about "DPS Uptime" unironically.

This isn't a new problem, it's always been like this. Things being a touch undertuned and the amount of raw cooldowns + OGCD healing available is just making the problem more easily evident. Green DPS should have died as a concept forever ago, but after everything from "Healers DPS in FF per lore!" to "just stfu I want dungeons to go faster.", my opinion is that players were willing and eager participants in making this bed and now they're going to have to sleep in it. We need an entire fundamental rework of what it means to heal in FFXIV, and it's not gonna happen in one patch or likely even in an entire xpac.