A summary of healer issues

[AmiableApkallu]

In fact, every time I go in, I encourage players to switch off healer.

With raise and cure, healers are absolutely useless in Normal variant dungeons.

That's literally why Raise and Cure are Variant actions: So that you're not required to take a healer in with you. That is by design; no news there.

Here's my question, though: I went in as a two-person party, me on tank (PLD), a friend on healer (SGE). Funny thing: We had almost the exact same max HP. Mine was what I expected, which means my friend's/the SGE's HP was scaled up by quite a bit. Does that mean their damage was also scaled up, meaning they wouldn't be as useless as you might otherwise think?

[Kabooa]

That's literally why Raise and Cure are Variant actions: So that you're not required to take a healer in with you. That is by design; no news there.

Here's my question, though: I went in as a two-person party, me on tank (PLD), a friend on healer (SGE). Funny thing: We had almost the exact same max HP. Mine was what I expected, which means my friend's/the SGE's HP was scaled up by quite a bit. Does that mean their damage was also scaled up, meaning they wouldn't be as useless as you might otherwise think?

The HP of the boss scales depending on how many players enter. It's possible that the HP might scale up depending on number and job, where tanks and healers increase the HP by less than a DPS would.

Criterion absolutely requires healers though.

I highly recommend doing Criterion completely blind. It is some of the most fun I've personally had in this game.

[ForsakenRoe]

yeh variant is designed like POTD, 1-4 players of any role. the variant actions are there to fill in for the missing roles, eg a non-healer will have access to raise because you cant guarantee that dps will be a RDM or SMN, so instead everyone has access to a raise. when i said 'criterion' at the end of my little rant, i meant 'another sildihn subterrene (normal)'. there it is scaled for 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 dps, but my point is that, as with any content in the game, as the party gets more familiar with the mechanics, the amount of 'oops i stood in the ice' etc kind of mistakes goes down. we get to the point where the only damage we take is the 'unavoidable damage', we work out how to most efficiently mit/heal through that damage, and eventually we're back where we started: an ever growing amount of glarespam.

i know some players want to see more healing to do but i fear that the devs cannot work out how to do 'heal more damage' in a fight without excluding parts of the playerbase. we see this tier that healers stopped playing healer in PF because it took more mit to survive, so clearly 'it hits harder' isnt the solution. if the devs added raidwides more 'often', or a 'raid bleed' like P3S's fire rain, i feel like that would just be factored in to the healing rotations once we're geared, a sort of 'ok we use a medica2 here to counter the firestorm' and then back to dpsing. personally, going from current glarespam to 'current glarespam, but you also cast medica2 once every 15s to counter a constant bleed' isnt going to suddenly make the role more engaging.

this is why i think the solution is to have healing requirements a little more lax than what we have in current tier (instead of raidwides doing 140% of your max hp before mit, i think 120-125% so you can afford for the melee to forget what Feint is occasionally, numbers are estimates/for comparison, not exact values for this tier), and have the skill expression come from our dps rotations. players can say 'i play healer to heal' but the design of this game just does not lend itself to that concept. there is too much 'dead time' where there is no healing needed, so we fill it with dps to help kill the enemy faster. ideally in my mind, we'd have ways to either cause healing, directly or indirectly, via doing damage, or at the very least, stuff like macrocosmos or pneuma where it's damage neutral to use the tool. for example, i suggested a WHM gauge that fills when using stone, aero or water, and at 50 gauge you get a massive, strong, instacast aoe heal, almost as strong as Cure3 but costs gauge instead of MP, and via a refund system, works out to be damage neutral. players who want to do damage can use this tool to be rewarded with healing tools when they do damage, players who dont want to do damage dont have to use this tool and can instead stick to medica and cure3.