Healers need an overhaul

[Deceptus]

What bizarro parallel reality FFXIV are you playing? In the years I've been playing, not once have I ever seen anyone kick a healer for not doing DPS
Even as a former healer main I don't bother to kick people for that in casual content because it literally does not matter

Even if it did happen, it would only be in Savage or Ultimate. Two things:

1) Their party, their rules. No one is owed a slot. They can kick you for literally any reason.

2) At that level, if you're not providing a decent amount of DPS as a healer you are actively hindering the group.

[Recon1o6]

I saw a healer kicked for not doing dps once or to be more precise, attitude leading to not dpsing. It was called A1s and we wiped to faust. One quick look at the stream the dark knight was running and upon being questioned the healer responded "I cba to do damage. The dps shud git gud"

kicked out of the pug group so fast I didn't get chance to type out my wtf response on my ps3.

[Floortank]

If regular content becomes impassable because casual healers can't clear it, everyone will quit the game.

[Recon1o6]

If regular content becomes impassable because casual healers can't clear it, everyone will quit the game.

This is bait but there is something of merit here.


A minimum amount of effort and skill is important for everything that's not a tutorial. Currently the minimum effort is literally zero for the majority of the casual content.

raising that so all these "I oNlY hEaL" folks either quit the role or contribute, or it forces yoshida to actually overhaul healers would not be a bad thing in the slightest

[Maltothoris]

Well here was some stuff from, the liveletter when they were taking questions.

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

[ty_taurus]

Well here was some stuff from, the liveletter when they were taking questions.

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

It essentially boils down to this:

A significant chunk of strong, dedicated healer players who would have the skills and willingness to keep up with the higher healer requirements have abandoned the healer role at some point between the release of ShB and now. The new healing requirements are pushing away less experienced and/or flex healers who might only have P1-P4 Savage raiding experience. This leaves a much thinner selection of healers remaining.

[GoatOfWar]

FF14's healers are beyond braindead. The 1 button rotation and the amount of time the game demands the player to spamcast it is an insult to the player's intelligence.
Kind regards, an ex healer main.

[GoatOfWar]

I saw a healer kicked for not doing dps once or to be more precise, attitude leading to not dpsing. It was called A1s and we wiped to faust. One quick look at the stream the dark knight was running and upon being questioned the healer responded "I cba to do damage. The dps shud git gud"

kicked out of the pug group so fast I didn't get chance to type out my wtf response on my ps3.

I mean if the healers don't do damage then you're going to struggle with the enrage timer. Kicking the healer who openly refused to deal damage was the right call.

[Deceptus]

Well here was some stuff from, the liveletter when they were taking questions.

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

It seems like he has realized they've designed themselves into a corner. I hope something fruitful comes of it.

IMHO they need to stop worrying so much about the numbers, and focus on if the jobs are FUN and engaging. Because if they're not fun, what's the point?

Re: The phrase, "try to play a healer" - Why don't YOU try to play an expansion as a healer Mr. Lead Designer? That way you can see what we go through, how utterly boring it is. Walk a mile in our shoes.

[Banriikku]

Well here was some stuff from, the liveletter when they were taking questions.

*snip*

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.[/B]

This is a sad answer from the Yoshida. Because it means he does not understand and know how healers are played in FF14 at all. Yoshida and his team created this "healer thing" with the "only dps will be rewarded" mentality. They could review this but no, its always they players fault and not the bit gigantic incentive for more dps. Big sigh...

Its funny he could test it, very fast and easy: play an encounter as a healer.
Dps is rewarded nothing else BECAUSE healing is not random and on top of that binary.

They created it, not the players. Also why the frick does he cater to ALL PLAYER should be able to play healer ? No other job has this nonsense attached to it...
BLM - not good enough than drop it
NIN - too many bunnys ? Lern it or leave it!
MCH, your ping is bad ? Please f-off.

Why is the healer job the only one with "even my 90 year old unlce from Alabama can play it" mentality attached to it ? Makes no sense and is damaging. WE have many jobs so you can PICK ONE/SOME you like and CAN PLAY not you can play everything.