Proposal the embrace the green skin.

[ForsakenRoe]

Maybe make ogcd heals more limited, make dps spells more expensive and make gcd heals return resources?

One idea i had for Sage was to lean fully into the 'augments it's spells' aesthetic, by making Dosis and Phlegma cost 0 MP, and instead have MP costs on Eukrasia, Zoe (would now affect damage spells too), couple of other modifier skills that would be added (maybe a 'crit chance is raised'), so the MP economy of the job would be around balancing when to power up your DPS spells vs when to chill a bit, kinda like Arcane Mage in WOW in a sense. Though I suppose this would be too much like Dark Arts spam of old

Anyway, I acknowledge the issue players have with 'if healing is more complex then ill stop healing', that complexity would drive people away. Hence, we suggest adding complexity only to the DPS side of the healers. Keeping the party alive shouldn't require rocket science degrees, that can stay as accessible as it currently is. But we can do more with the damage side of things, and possibly add interactivity between the DPS kit and Healing kit, so DPSing effectively allows you to heal without needing to drop into GCDs (time to shill my WHM idea again).

One thing I will note about the desire to 'have to heal more' however: I've done TEA. There's a phase where it's just constant damage on the raid, the J-Waves phase, a test of healing throughput and mitigation. You'd think 'ah yes, you need to heal a lot here, this is what I want healers to be like!' and no, it's quite the same as the current GlareSpam fiesta, just instead of pressing my Glare button, I pressed Medica 1. Now, there was some slight interesting things I could do, such as spending my lily heals first while damage was low enough for me to throw out the Misery safely, then using Thin Air later in when the damage was outpacing Medica, so I could easily afford to move up to Cure 3. But all in all, this was a phase based on 'more healing' and it's not that interesting. Rather, planning out mitigation as the other healer seemed the more interesting part, I was WHM my job was to press Temperance at 5 stacks. But since then I've done P8S as SGE and working out how to ration out mit for the final enrage is a lot more interesting than WHM's job there.

I had an idea, and I've asked friends but only one of them is as deep into healing in this game as me, so I'll ask it here. Anyone who has done P7S: The raidwide Spark of Life no longer has a bleed attached (the main burst of damage still hits as hard as current, just no bleed after). To compensate, every time the boss does Bough of Attis (the fist slam into punch), slamming the arena causes proximity damage from the center of the two front platforms. This means there are extra raidwides to deal with through the fight, but the ones we have currently are not as 'dump every mit on this'. Does this make the fight more 'interesting' or 'fun' to heal?

[KelTheKeeper]

I've been lurking and reading the healer discourse for some time now and I'm wondering if this proposal can satisfy both sides:

1) Return cleric stance and complexity to the damage side of the healer kit.
2) Cut the maximum potential healer damage output to half of a tank's.
3) Design fights so that healer damage helps out in a weaker party, but is ultimately irrelevant to beating the enrage.

Personally, I think this would allow for skill expression from the veterans while allowing the healers who dislike doing damage to also not be harassed since doing damage on a healer would then be irrelevant but fun.

Thoughts?

I think keeping the healer damage the same is fine, or even increasing it to match a tanks. At the end of the day, Savage and Ultimate are higher end tasks in the game that not everyone can complete and that's okay. The people who complain about needing to do damage as a healer are not the ones playing in the upper tiers of this game. That's fine, most normal dungeons are fully completable without a healer at all. Hell, even some trials can be completed without them.

I think adding to the healer damage complexity is a great idea, but that should come with more damage. If someone had to put more effort in to get less results, that's going to make healers even more upset than they are. If you go and take away 2 button spam and replace it with a large kit that does half the damage, I don't think many would be happy with that. It would feel like we were punished for wanting more to do. Give healers a better DPS kit, but reward them for using it well.

I think Pnuema is a fantastic example. Its a button that does damage *and* heals! I wish it was a gain to use it, but I digress. I think that baking some healing actions into damage buttons and vice versa would be a huge improvement. Imagine if SCH/WHM bubble did damage to enemies who stood in it or if casting a heal made the next target to hit that ally take a bit of damage. It would reward smart healing with better numbers. Add some extra healing that isn't scheduled or planned to give us something to dynamically respond to and it'll be a good time.

[Nizzi]

I think adding to the healer damage complexity is a great idea, but that should come with more damage. If someone had to put more effort in to get less results, that's going to make healers even more upset than they are. If you go and take away 2 button spam and replace it with a large kit that does half the damage, I don't think many would be happy with that. It would feel like we were punished for wanting more to do. Give healers a better DPS kit, but reward them for using it well.

I highly disagree. Balancing based on "complexity" for healers would only eventually return us to where we are at now; within any given role there is always going to be one job that is considered "the easiest" by SE and also the community. WAR, DNC, RPR, SMN, etc. Further, I see no reason for why healers should be doing more damage than they're doing now. We were actually doing more damage than the tanks in Shadowbringers, but they changed that in Endwalker and nobody is complaining about it because the issues with healers have nothing to do with us doing 2k damage or 5k damage.

Thinking that putting in "more effort to get less results" is bad is exactly how we got here. Just look at Stormblood Scholar's 2 main DoTs, Bio II and Miasma. Bio II was 35 potency on 30s, and Miasma was 35 potency on 24s + 20 upfront potency. Together, that's 350 potency for Bio II and 300 potency for Miasma. Endwalker Scholar's DoT, Biolysis, does 700 potency, sound familiar to the 650 of the two old DoTs? Scholar is doing relatively the same output of damage it was back in Stormblood now, but it's doing less actions. However, having Bio split back into two DoTs on different timers would be infinitely more fun and engaging than SCH currently is at the moment. I wouldn't mind if the more "simple" healers were doing as much damage as I was with my "complex" kit because I'm able to have fun.

The reward for having a better DPS kit should be getting to have more fun and not having to slam your 1 key so much; it doesn't need to be more damage. A hypothetical return to an older SCH kit would not suddenly mean SCH "deserves" more damage compared to other healers with "less complex" kits, the fun and engagement is reward enough. I'm fine with the fact we aren't doing as much damage as we were doing in Shadowbringers. I'm not fine with how boring our downtime kits currently are. Hitting 5k rDPS right now on a healer isn't a reward, it's boring and I could not care less about my numbers as a healer. With a more engaging and involved kit though, that 5k number would probably feel really good. It would feel really good if it was 3k, because I would be able to know I did my best to achieve that.

[Alpheus]

Yea as much as it would make sense for healers to get a numbers bump with added complexity it isn't necessary, whats necessary is giving non AST healers their fidget spinner Job mechanics that they've been missing ever since ShB smooshed them into an AST template. But what absolutely needs to change is for the Devs to prioritize healers when it comes to design because they only ever prioritized healers when it came to stripping things away and just kinda hoping the playerbase puts up with it.

We've seen this kind of thing with the Devs before with the Gyr Abania side of SB*. When the Devs aren't super into it (on any given thing) it shows and as understandable as that is, its also untenable when it's affecting an entire role the way it has been affecting healers.

*Yoshida had gone on record saying when it came time to vision/mood board/plan for SB that the lore team was legit "Well its not really a big area so we can only do so much with it." My point isn't "oh the Devs didn't care" it's that the issues with Gyr Abania were brought up and heard and not repeated for ShB b/c there were stakeholders within the Dev team to hear and incorporate that feedback into their future writing. Similarly when BLM has an issue Yoshida himself is able to listen and incorporate that/let the Dev team know to follow up on it and come up with solutions. But I can't think of anyone on the Dev team who's willing to do so for healers and it's THAT absence I'm calling attention to. Obviously things fall through the cracks but there is VERY CLEARLY a standing order, even after all these years, for WARs to NEVER get to a point like they were in the 2.0-2.1/2.2 state that they initially shipped in in ARR (which I get, its the box art Job blorbo, its CGI dude's first Job [w/ Archer being his first class]). And I just wish a similar directive could be made for Healers in any capacity.

And aside from AST getting attention through its plethora of reworks and adjustments there's just.....none of that for the healer role and I hope its something that changes going forward. If they can make it one of their priorities I'm sure they can knock it out of the park and I say that knowing full well that from my PoV from the cheap seats there are numerous factors I'm not privy to as to why that hasn't been possible before but I think it's time they commit some time into figuring out how they want this role to be because this whole vibe from the Dev team when it comes to healers isn't cutting it anymore "Oh but it's healing its not sexy the way DPS or Tanking can be." well then be experimental and get weird with it, but this constant attitude of "Well the #'s are good so we can just leave it be and just add some accoutrements to it and call it a day" isn't going to work going forward unless they seriously want to triple down on this design and have SGE be the last healer they implement.

Like even the role in need bonus for DF doesn't even respect healers, its always tank in need even tho when i roll a tank it takes like 3mins for a queue but if i switch to healer its a instant queue despite Tanks being listed as being in need, so not only do healers get geared last in statics they also don't even get the pocket change from doing DF when they're in need. And obviously that's out of the Devs hands (aside from maybe having the role in need check be run a smidge more often) but there are things they can do to not make healers feel so.....tacked on and I look forward to seeing what they can do to tackle these issues and for w/e its' worth they still have my faith in that endeavor which isn't gonna be easy because they probably don't want to change things in a way that messes up any of the Ultimates or Savage fights they have released thus far/are in the planning stages for. Like if there's one reason for why they haven't addressed healers its because it would throw off their schedule but that's all the more reason why someone should have been on this issue 2 expansions ago to figure out how to piecemeal implement fixes to this situation with all these moving parts.

[AmiableApkallu]

I think Pnuema is a fantastic example. Its a button that does damage *and* heals! I wish it was a gain to use it, but I digress.

If it were a gain in single-target (as it already is in AoE), then I think I'd call it a badly designed button:

Do I push it on cooldown, for the damage, or do I hold it for when the heal is actually needed?

Attaching healing and damage both to a button works when incoming damage is more or less constant: the heal is likely to be useful, and the damage is always useful.

[Recon1o6]

snip

for df at least, its because they put an "in need" bias on tanks back in either ARR or HW (i don remember when) and they just never took it off

[Elizasylen]

If it were a gain in single-target (as it already is in AoE), then I think I'd call it a badly designed button:

Do I push it on cooldown, for the damage, or do I hold it for when the heal is actually needed?

Attaching healing and damage both to a button works when incoming damage is more or less constant: the heal is likely to be useful, and the damage is always useful.

I think something that refunds you for healing would be good like the lily systems. For example Using Aetherflow on healing instead of Energy Drain is a DPS net loss, but Using Aetherflow gives you fairy gauge. What if you moved the damage from Energy Drain to a spell that costs Fairy Gauge instead?

[ty_taurus]

I think something that refunds you for healing would be good like the lily systems. For example Using Aetherflow on healing instead of Energy Drain is a DPS net loss, but Using Aetherflow gives you fairy gauge. What if you moved the damage from Energy Drain to a spell that costs Fairy Gauge instead?

I detailed my own take on how I'd redo SCH if I could and it basically does this in reverse: Aetherflow is used to turn your DPS spells in to stronger spells for one cast, and the Fey Gauge gives you GCD heals that earns you Aetherflow.

[Elizasylen]

I detailed my own take on how I'd redo SCH if I could and it basically does this in reverse: Aetherflow is used to turn your DPS spells in to stronger spells for one cast, and the Fey Gauge gives you GCD heals that earns you Aetherflow.

I think as long as there some form of "rebate" through the system it'd be good either way.