White Mage Attraction

[flowerfairy]

Glare & Dia function as WHM's damage. What I want is for those buttons to have more flavor to them rather than mashing the same thing forever. GCD healing will always be a DPS loss because you aren't dealing damage. Glare being 1 button only or being split into 4 different buttons will never change that predicament healers have to deal with. Lilies as they are now are DPS neutral GCD heals (and actually plus if it's half-charged before burst), isn't that great for a GCD-based healer? I don't see how changing Glare affects that at all. I'm not asking for more damage, I'm asking for unique ways to output that damage.

I agree with your arguments in the hyperlinks. Healing just isn't very engaging or rewarding this expansion. Bosses fart a raidwide once every minute and then it's back to Glare spam. And the solution to that isn't easy to think about because only changing future fights to be more heal-dependent neglects old content and it'll be a snoozefest to revisit them. What I and other people propose is to add more engaging gameplay for healers. When there's no one to heal or raise in a fight, give them something else to look at. SCH's old DoT rotation was a good example of how a healer can contribute to damage. They're just buttons you press when the boss isn't being hurt by it anymore. It's minimal pressure on the SCH to both deal damage and heal the party. Why do we want this out of the game?

[AmiableApkallu]

What point are you trying to make? It's currently a DPS loss to GCD heal as well, you just suck it up and do it when you (almost never) have to.

Eh? 4 GCDs spent on Glare = 3 GCDs spent on Rapture/Solace + 1 GCD on Misery, or "DPS neutral" as people like to put it.

The point being that a GCD-based healer will always be constrained and limited compared to an oGCD-based healer, especially when the "the community" assigns zero utility to healing and mitigation. (And for WHM, as long as combat values mitigation more than HP restoration...)

[vetch]

Eh? 4 GCDs spent on Glare = 3 GCDs spent on Rapture/Solace + 1 GCD on Misery, or "DPS neutral" as people like to put it.

Oh, I see what you mean. But, as long as you're not overcapping on lilies, you still lose potential DPS from your maximum by using them to heal instead of saving two to dump during GCDs where you can't Glare (due to the boss being offscreen or whatever), so oGCD healing would still be preferred. No?

The point being that a GCD-based healer will always be constrained and limited compared to an oGCD-based healer, especially when the "the community" assigns zero utility to healing and mitigation. (And for WHM, as long as combat values mitigation more than HP restoration...)

It's not that healing isn't valued. It's that having the most healing power isn't any kind of identity when one of the game's design goals is that all comps need to be able to clear, meaning all that healing power can't be required by the content. 'Guaranteed surplus healing' can't be an identity when one of the cornerstones of MMO combat gameplay is 'surplus is a waste'.

Mitigation is properly valued at the extreme high end, however, which leaves WHM with the least and worst mitigation of any healer, also least valued.

[Punslinger]

...especially when the "the community" game design assigns zero utility to healing and mitigation.

FTFY.

The "community" assigns zero value to healing because the game design assigns zero value to healing. In most scenarios that most players will encounter, healing is not necessary. When everything except for two Savages and three Ultimates can be cleared without healers at all, that is a pretty strong sign that the game design does not prioritize, require, reward, or value healing. So why would any rational player place a value on something that the game doesn't value?

When every fight is on a static script, and when healer kits are absurdly overpowered relative to the pitiful amount of incoming damage, and when avoidable mechanics are frequently one-shots or give a damage down debuff, and when enrage timers are tuned as they currently are, the game is practically screaming at you, "I want you to DPS, not heal!"

[AmiableApkallu]

In most scenarios that most players will encounter, healing is not necessary.

Most scenarios that most players will encounter will involve normal mode content with standard party comps of players of average skill playing their jobs and mechanics less than perfectly.

But anyway, a rational player would place value on healing so that the game design itself might come to value it. Why would a game designer ramp up damage so high that a healer would find it necessary to use GCD heals when the players complain that "GCD heals are a DPS loss"?

[vetch]

Most scenarios that most players will encounter will involve normal mode content with standard party comps of players of average skill playing their jobs and mechanics less than perfectly.

But anyway, a rational player would place value on healing so that the game design itself might come to value it. Why would a game designer ramp up damage so high that a healer would find it necessary to use GCD heals when the players complain that "GCD heals are a DPS loss"?

Your horse and cart are backwards. The community has developed an emphasis on green DPS as a response to FF14's design degenerating to value DPS so nakedly. If enrages had stayed as loose as they were in ARR, outgoing damage as high, and healer design as difficult to DPS effectively with, then you wouldn't even need to explain to players that healing is important; they'd know it (as they did know it) from having experienced the disastrous outcomes of healers DPSing away when they should heal.

You can't blame players for learning how a game works and adapting their behavior to be better at it -- that is the point of playing a game.

[AmiableApkallu]

You can't blame players for learning how a game works and adapting their behavior to be better at it -- that is the point of playing a game.

Yes and no. I can certainly appreciate healers determining how best to play the game as it is given to them, and I can still insist that it's a travesty that they don't fight harder to demand that the game evolve (or return to its roots -- apologies for having played FFXIV for ~1 year) so that their nominal role be valued.

[Supersnow845]

Yes and no. I can certainly appreciate healers determining how best to play the game as it is given to them, and I can still insist that it's a travesty that they don't fight harder to demand that the game evolve (or return to its roots -- apologies for having played FFXIV for ~1 year) so that their nominal role be valued.

It’s not like 14 healers wouldn’t want more healing, ask any savage 14 healer who Parses even a green what they think is wrong with healers and you’ll get 2 answers

-damage is too boring
-there isn’t enough healing to justify my kit

The first one is both the homogenisation of healer DPS and a facet of the second one, we would be happy to accept more healing if it was actually introduced but we instead are forced to ask for more DPS options because square utterly refuses to raise the amount of healing needed in the game to the point where you don’t even need a regen healer till like phase 6 of a current ultimate even in chill level parties

Give us one or give us both but currently we are stuck with neither

[Rilifane]

Yes and no. I can certainly appreciate healers determining how best to play the game as it is given to them, and I can still insist that it's a travesty that they don't fight harder to demand that the game evolve (or return to its roots -- apologies for having played FFXIV for ~1 year) so that their nominal role be valued.

Except that healers of all gameplay levels asked for more to heal for years.
We got told to wait until next tier or next expansion but nothing changed until Yoshi finally went on record saying that no, they're not going to increase incoming damage because muh poor stressed baby healers ~<3.

The reason why healers ask for better downtime gameplay is because every other attempt at making healers more engaging was ignored or met with flippant dismissal and excuses. Want a recent example? "Go play Ultimate" - except that Ultimate is and never was a heal check, it was always about mitigation and execution, not to mention it's only the tiniest fraction of battle content in this game and playing Ultimate would do nothing to improve the experience in solo duties, fates, treasure maps, dungeons, normal raids, alli raids, extremes and savage.
If we were lucky enough to even get acknowledged we got a tone-deaf answer or were met with flippant dismissal.

Good healers don't say that GCD heals are a dps loss because they don't want to heal. They say that GCD heals are a dps loss because pointless GCD heals are and a GCD heal is pointless when you have literally anything else available. If you use Medica II when Aslyum or waiting for Assize would've done the trick, you simply wasted a GCD and that has nothing to with not wanting to heal and everything to do with healing efficiently. So linking the fflogs calculations of rDPS, aDPS and nDPS proves nothing.

As long as the devs don't give healers a good reason to use GCD heals of course they won't. Why would anyone want to play intentionally worse?

lso please make another healer accessible at level 1, having so many threads where people ask for “what’s the best starting healing” and as an experienced healers you know WHM is the worst to start with because it teaches all the wrong habits but having to level something else up to get another healer when they can just pick CNJ massively biases WHM for no other reason than outdated game design

Preach.
Every time someone recommends playing CNJ/ WHM because it's sooo easssyyy :3 and starts at lv 1, I die a bit inside. It's the worst healer for learning by a huge margin.

[Punslinger]

Yes and no. I can certainly appreciate healers determining how best to play the game as it is given to them, and I can still insist that it's a travesty that they don't fight harder to demand that the game evolve (or return to its roots -- apologies for having played FFXIV for ~1 year) so that their nominal role be valued.

We have. Repeatedly. There is a 130-page healer quit thread going back three years. There is an 81-page thread with a very detailed, and repeatedly-updated first post outlining everything wrong with healers in FF14: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues.

YoshiderP has instead said that he doesn't want to "stress" healers by making fights that require them to do their job. He kicked the healer off of his internal play-testing team for being "too good" (note: said healer was just starting to clear EXs, while BLM-maining YoshiderP parses orange in Savage). He has made it abundantly clear that he wants healing to be the Little Timmy role, the one you give to the slow kid in the FC so that he can feel like he's contributing, without worrying that he'll mess up and hold you back from clearing. It has an absurd amount of healing to deal with a pathetic amount of incoming damage, and it isn't allowed to have more than two DPS buttons, because that would fry Sylphie's brain, and then Sylphie would get mad that she no longer gets a free carry just for putting a green icon next to her name.