Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[T-Owl]

I know what would drive me away: Healers having damage rotations. I'd quick healing in ANY high end content and the healer shortage would get worse.



This is honestly not a bad thing, but keep in mind how WoW does this is by having variations in healers. For example, WoW's Holy Priest (and Resto Druid if Balance subspeced) play almost like a Sylphie WHM in FFXIV today. But they do this alongside having melee healers (Mistwalker, Healadin), and the heal by damage Discipline Priest (RIFT had the Chloromancer, too). And all these variations on healing are allowed to co-exist in the same game at the same time.

There's zero reason FFXIV couldn't do the same, especially since it already did this back in ARR where both the pure healer (WHM) and support heal/dps hybrid (SCH) were accommodated and played in high-end content at the same time.

Wanna know what the joking irony is? Holy Priest has a more involved DPS rotation than most FF14 healers and it is basically the healer whose entire identity is being babies first healer. It has the generic filler in smite, a dot in shadow word pain, a stronger dps instant in holy word chastice but also a nuke with a short dot with holy fire and an execute in shadow word death. And holy word chastice has the benefit of having its 1 minute cd decreased with each smite and in the DF ptr there are some interesting damaging talents in a 30 seconds cd spell that increases the duration of your holy fire nuke and lets you use 3 without cd, therefore spreading it and one where the holy fire dot increases the dps of your filler. Balance affinity on the other hand gives you two dots, a dps spender and basically cleric stance to juggle around. So actually even less offensive oriented healers in WoW have more offensives which are more regularily used than healers in FF14. And Holy Priest isn't even that desirable half the time, but if it would be introduced in FF14 it would be the hardcore dps heavy healer. So your thesis of having your example of an absolute easy mode 1 dps rotation yet competetive dps healer in WoW is wrong. The difference is not how easy these classes are to dps but how well their healing synergizes with their dps. Some classes generate ressources or maintain healing through their dps rotation while others don't synergize at all and instead gain increased dps opportunities through proper maintenance and efficent healing, similarily to FF14.

And again, why are you advocating for your idea? Most Sylphies won't dps even without a dps rotation, having more things to press to dps would actually give them an additional excuse not to do so and in content where healer dps matters, players who can't perform a barebones and simplistic rotation, thats all anyone asks for, probably are not good enough for said content. If you can't press more than 1 button and weave a healing spell on the occasion, you wouldn't have the appropriate skill level to enter as any other role.

My point is, they've made healing "less boring" and people are quitting in droves. The argument "healing is boring and causing a shortage" no longer adds up. It seems that making healing "less boring" has CAUSED a shortage, not the other way around.

Which also dovetails with what I said: If the people wanting "less boring" healing don't quickly step into the gap and put their money where their mouth was, if there are continued PF healer shortages, then SE is likely to revert the changes, not continue forward with them. So if you want healing being "less boring", those who feel that way, anyway, you collectively have to step up and fill those empty PF healer slots. People who don't want "more exciting" healing sure aren't going to do it for you.

Have you considered that the issue may be the difficulty spike and that the issue is, that SE didn't design encounters so far which would slowly raise average healers towards the appropriate skill level? I mean, imagine if you would let DPS players jump from their level 30 rotation where they barely got their 1-2-3 rotation immediately to their level 90 one, where they have to interact with gauges, burst windows and weaving. Guess how many DPS would jump the ship in that case. But then again, what do you want healers to be? Do you want them to be the role of low expectations which can enter high level content at a much lower skill level than any other job and are basically reserved for the least skilled members of a party or do you want them to be a job equally engaged and challenged on all levels of content as others? If its former, I think its the later, the issue is in the difficulty courve introduced by SE. And I can tell you, Healers so far are the only role which in its entirety get easier while leveling up, because their toolkit is fashioned in a way that instead of their gameplay becoming more involved, you get more and more tools thrown at you to weave while dpsing without a change in the games damage profile to let the added tools at your disposal be accompanied with added requirements in healing.