Healers need an overhaul

[Sebazy]

And GOD no, I wouldn't want old Everquest-style "MP management" anywhere near me. Sitting on your butt in the middle of combat for 8-10 seconds at a time is somehow even more boring than spamming Glare.

Off topic, but as a Shaman main and hardcore raider, I ended up on a model M keyboard and even then, I still polished my 8 key (cannibalise) smooth over all those years

Everquest's style of combat had it's place, but that was in a time where we were on average much younger and could merrily afford to waste entire days on a raid or camp. A modern day raid is done and dusted in the time many EQ raids took to simply prep and setup.

Back on topic:

Constantly spamming healing spells is boring.

If you can count dual purpose abilities as healing, it can be done in a way that's enjoyable. It just requires inventive approaches. SWTOR did this well, Warhammer did it to perfection.

Abilities like current Lilies, Earthy Star and Macrocosmos show that they understand the theory, but haven't got to grips with it yet for whatever reason.

[Midareyukki]

Back on topic:

If you can count dual purpose abilities as healing, it can be done in a way that's enjoyable. It just requires inventive approaches. SWTOR did this well, Warhammer did it to perfection.

Abilities like current Lilies, Earthy Star and Macrocosmos show that they understand the theory, but haven't got to grips with it yet for whatever reason.

Yes, please. Especially on White Mage.

It's jarring when most of your spells are just some variation of Cure but special™
- Cure 2? Stronger cure
- Afflatus? Instant cure
- Tetra? OGCD cure
- Cure 3? Cure 2 but AoE
- Medica? AoE cure
- Medica 2? AoE cure but with regen tacked onto it
- Benediction? Full Cure
- Plenary? Putting cures on your cures

Other jobs are just as simple, but at least they have special effects that don't make the similarities as jarring!
Astro has delayed cures, cures that scale, cure after mitigation... and Scholar and Sage have mitigation, shields, safety nets and heals as well.

I get that WHM is meant to be straightforward in design, which is why it works. But without any further effects, you're really better off choosing the better spells until they're on cooldown rather than have to choose your approach.

[Raven2014]

If you can count dual purpose abilities as healing, it can be done in a way that's enjoyable. It just requires inventive approaches. SWTOR did this well, Warhammer did it to perfection.

Same thing in Tera, as a healer you can help party member dodge damage (by give them an ifram teleport), provide buff, cleansing, MP recovery, not to mention healing come in many different forms. Healing is so simple that if you think about it, would it make any difference for a healer to heal a group of 4, of 8, of 12 or even 20? I think the answer will be no because the majority of the kit is basically a one size fit-all, fire and forget abilities. In other games, the complexity of healing scale with party size.

Buff in FF14 is also extremely simple comparing to many of its peer. Like it always come at specific time, and you basically just press one button. In other games often there are both on demand buff and full up time buff that the healers have to manage and maintain, adding cleansing duty (which notarious lacking in FF14 so whenever it shows up once a blue moon it feels like a gimmick), actually have to manage your MP and the healer basically would have a full pallate. Can they still DPS? Sure, but that would be like the last item on the list, instead of something on the fore-front like FF14.


People only say "more healing is boring" simply because they don't envision the healer role as anything else but just casting a spell to top people off. Someone had mentioned it before, the healing model in FF14 is boring isn't because they have one DPS button, but because it's too one dimensional. Hell, the fact that "oh I don't have cleanse on my hotbar" is a meme should tell you something. While I agree the healing in FF14 can use more "engagement" and should be more "interesting", I simply don't believe DPS focus in the way to go. In fact if I can be so bold, I certainly will claim FF14 is the one MMO where I see healer does the most DPS while also have the most simple healing model.

I wouldn't have a problem if the dev drop their pants and just scrap the trinity system and adapt a model like Guild War, then I would change my expectation accordingly. But for a game that bill itself as using the trinity, having essentially a Red DPS, a blue DPS, and a green DPS just feel ... wrong.

[Sebazy]

I wouldn't have a problem if the dev drop their pants and just scrap the trinity system and adapt a model like Guild War, then I would change my expectation accordingly. But for a game that bill itself as using the trinity, having essentially a Red DPS, a blue DPS, and a green DPS just feel ... wrong.

The point about healing various sizes of party is a good one. One way to make healing more interactive and involving would be to have more of a focus on triage. Right now AoE healing is powerful, abundant and cheap. So much so that even fights like E12S pt 1 are quickly forgotten even though they threw huge amounts of AoE damage at the raid over the duration. Making AoE heals powerful but on much longer cooldowns whilst forcing us to have to prioritise who we heal is one avenue that could be explored. It's this process that made healing vanilla WoW PvP so engrossing for me IMO.

Onto the last point, I really don't think SE needs to drop the trinity system, but a rethink almost to that kind of scale does need to happen if these thick cobwebs are going to be shaken off. A heavier emphasis on hybridisation and buff abilities is a great way to further engage healers. Again, Warhammer Online's Warrior priest is probably the best example of this at least out of any MMO I've played.

[Shurrikhan]

The point about healing various sizes of party is a good one. One way to make healing more interactive and involving would be to have more of a focus on triage. Right now AoE healing is powerful, abundant and cheap.

One age-old suggestion has been to split a portion of the AoE healing. For instance, if a Medica were to do 300 potency per person and then split 200 across all wounded allies in range, it's down to as little as 325 each across 8 people (despite doing its maximum total potency, 2600).

The idea would be to allow AoEs still high total potency without letting them outright replace need for target selection following most raid mechanics.