What exactly is the design philosophy underlying the healer role?

[Supersnow845]

In my opinion, there are two types of Healers,

Sustain Healers: Sage and Scholar

and

Pinch Healers: White Mage, and Astrologian.

Of course, Regen and Shields apply as well as designations for healers, but let's focus on the other aspect right now.

Sustain Healers either through action or automatically continuously heal their party members, always giving them heals indirectly thus making the burden of keeping them alive less stressful overall. Sage does this with a combination of its shields and its offense imparting minor healing to the primary target of its Kardia ability. While Scholars Fairy regularly/automatically cast healing spells on party members who seem to need it the most, as well as the scholar itself buffering members with shields. This allows both jobs to regularly assault enemies with dps. There downsides, in my opinion, is their limited (by resources), ability to pinch heal. Yes using their job's limited resource gauges they can momentarily give out strong instant heals, they cannot, however, sustain it for too long.

Pinch Healers, the white mage, and AST excel just that, healing in a pinch, both have potent healing abilities that can take a party member from low to near full hp relatively quickly, though the White Mage does it way better than AST. Thanks to AST's Lightspeed she can dump Benefic II instantly multiple times over the duration of Lightspeed this is her path to Pinch healing supremacy but Lightspeed has a long cooldown, and if mismanaged really limits her ability to be a pinch healer. In a similar vein, WM has Presence of Mind which increase the speed they can dump out a lot of GCD healing like AST but not instantly, still, their OCGDs for healing outnumber AST and thus these are her path to healing supremacy.

Now that I think about it, Pinch could probably better be described as Burst healing.

So yeah, those are the design underlyings of the current healer role in my opinion.

Lightspeed doesn’t increase how much healing you do it just means you don’t have cast times on your GCD’s which doesn’t matter anyway because AST is literally drowning in oGCD’s not to mention having the single most broken OP skill in the game in neutral (god seriously pls delete neutral it is actually disgusting)

But this doesn’t change that shield healers are just designed better for the way the game plays, mitigation is infinitely more useful than burst healing and SGE’s enormous regen capacity combined with its mitigation just makes it play better to the content than the regen healers do (to say nothing of SCH’s OP kit in literally every facet of healer gameplay

The whole regen shield split is so flawed because of the game design mitigation will always be better, it’s why in hard mitigation gated content like DSR AST is always preferable because CU is just so much more useful than temperance

[Punslinger]

If you want a vision of the next 10 years of XIV, all you need to do is look at Sage and remember that Yoshida unironically believes that that boring, sterile trashpile of a job is somehow the high skill "DPS" healer for players who want more to do.

"A fun, engaging healer role? I don't want it! I want healers to only spend GCDs on healing and nothing else! Even after the Ultimates are on farm, I want healers to do nothing but heal, for ten years at least!" - YoshiderP, probably.

[Supersnow845]

The design philosophy is one of mediocrity and neglect. The developers don't care and have never once set out with the intention of designing any of these jobs with how the encounters are designed and how the game wants you to play them, nor have they ever set out to design any of these jobs in a way that the actual people who main them want. Healers are designed by DPS mains who take DPS players complaints regarding healers as the golden source of healer feedback. If they have a vision, it is so far removed from objective reality that it would be more of a comfort to hear that they simply don't give a shit rather than hearing they've actually tried to put any thought into these jobs. The design is so obscenely awful that any actual good ideas still present within these kits are there not because of meaningful design decisions, but because the developers have been too incompetent to remove them yet. If you want a vision of the next 10 years of XIV, all you need to do is look at Sage and remember that Yoshida unironically believes that that boring, sterile trashpile of a job is somehow the high skill "DPS" healer for players who want more to do.

Through healers you pass into the city of woe, through healers you pass into eternal pain. Abandon all hope, ye who heal in XIV.

People who unironically think that sage is difficult actually make me laugh, it’s so broken in dungeons that I cannot believe it was actually balanced that way, the class is brain dead and you get so much power from it that it makes me worry even after this many years of forum complaints square still has no idea the problems we have with healers

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

People who unironically think that sage is difficult actually make me laugh, it’s so broken in dungeons that I cannot believe it was actually balanced that way, the class is brain dead and you get so much power from it that it makes me worry even after this many years of forum complaints square still has no idea the problems we have with healers

Didn’t the dev themselves had mentioned something like “We feel that maximizing damage while minimizing the amount of time spent on healing is not something a Healer role should do.”(paraphrasing) sometime in the past? CMIIW.

Honestly it’s both unsurprising & quite depressing considering how much contradictions in that statement in comparison to their thought about SGE.

[Supersnow845]

Didn’t the dev themselves had mentioned something like “We feel that maximizing damage while minimizing the amount of time spent on healing is not something a Healer role should do.”(paraphrasing) sometime in the past? CMIIW.

Honestly it’s both unsurprising & quite depressing considering how much contradictions in that statement in comparison to their thought about SGE.

I honestly believe the start and end of their design philosophy with SGE was “people want a DPS healer but we can’t isolate our cure 1 spammers so let’s make the healing as inconsequential as possible then everything else can just be the rework we were going to give SCH”

[SenzorialBoundries]

design philosophy is to give you the illusion of healing heavily scripted encounters. Was looking at some logs of mine in p4s the most gcd heals i pressed with whm were 5 for the whole encounter. A whooping 5... 2 medica 2's and 3 cure 3's. (i didint count lillies since using a lilly is the same as casting a glare.)

[Gemina]

design philosophy is to give you the illusion of healing heavily scripted encounters. Was looking at some logs of mine in p4s the most ogcd heals i pressed with whm were 5 for the whole encounter. A whooping 5... 2 medica 2's and 3 cure 3's. (i didint count lillies since using a lilly is the same as casting a glare.)

Those are all GCD heals...

If you were using that many GCD heals, I can definitely see why you used so little oGCD heals. Not that I blame you, GCD heals are far more fun to use.

[SenzorialBoundries]

Those are all GCD heals...

If you were using that many GCD heals, I can definitely see why you used so little oGCD heals. Not that I blame you, GCD heals are far more fun to use.

Huh? as i said i dont count lillies since its the same as casting glare and its better to cast rapture or solace if you are at 3 lilies to not overcap and built misery for 2 minute window.

[Supersnow845]

Those are all GCD heals...

If you were using that many GCD heals, I can definitely see why you used so little oGCD heals. Not that I blame you, GCD heals are far more fun to use.

I can’t think of a single GCD heal (ignoring dps neutral heals) that feels more impactful to use than kerachole, seraph or celestial opposition, GCD heals just feel like last resort trash

[Gemina]

The more I think about it the less I understand.

My first assumption was “to heal”, however there’s very few occasions where an ogcd will not do or even be overkill. Except for a few back to back raidwides often enough the natural regeneration is sufficient.

My next thought was “to contribute damage and help out where necessary”, yet the damage rotation is frankly dull and unengaging, amounting to little more than dot and filler.

I briefly considered that it could be a support role before remembering white mage and sage don’t have any buffs beyond the 1% role bonus.

I’m currently on the theory that they’re designed for a game that no longer exists and yet they never saw, but it’s not like people complained about the stormblood healers that much, is it?

I have no other impression of SE's design philosophy when it comes to healing other than: Keep yourself alive. Fix mistakes. Do damage when not doing the first two. This isn't one lick different than the core concept taught to us in the Hall of Novice. I kid you not. It hasn't changed at all over the entire course of FFXIV's lifespan. Everything you have stated in your post is all player generated. Every word. While there are genuine issues with healing, an extremely large chunk of complaints stem from a desire for healing to be something that is is not in FFXIV.

And to answer your last question, everyone was still complaining about healing back in SB. This "golden age" of healing so many seem to refer to is looked at with rose tinted glasses, and forget about Cleric Stance and a time when the community was truly split between healers who did damage, and healers who did not. Now all healers do damage. Every single one. There might be some stragglers out there, but nothing like the days of 3.0.

I know there are many who will never concede to this, but healing was actually fixed a ways back. It is now this perfectly trimmed Bonsai inside a terrarium, much to the dev's liking. It does still have issues that need to be addressed, but for the most part these have nothing to do with the demands from some members of the healer community. Especially in terms of their offensive capabilities via the GCD.