Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

Actually to be faire. thats pretty much how healer has been intended since day one.

This is just more proof of what I said above. We hear this a lot, but there's no actual truth to it. I've explained it in depth before, but the shorter version is healing in ARR was not like that, and that wasn't how Healers were all played. It's a much more complicated topic, though. The highlights are probably:

1) For that era, Healers were given a handful of damage spells for soloing content but weren't expected to use them in Raids (this was also largely true of most Healers in WoW during that same timeframe, which was Wrath of the Lich King, I believe, where WoW Healers had likewise very skimpy damage rotations; Paladin famously only had 2 DPS buttons, Judgement and Holy Shock, 3 against Undead since you could add Exorcism once every 30 seconds or so)

2) WHM was never designed to play as a DPS Job. We even saw this as late as SB, and really even as far as 6.0 (Lilies not being DPS neutral because the Devs felt that DPS shouldn't be the focus of the Job). In ARR, the only WHM oGCD heal was Benediction once every 6 minutes or so. There was no way you were healing a raid with one cure every 6 minutes. WHM was very much designed from the ground up for GCD healing. Even moreso if you look at 1.0 as its proto-type. 1.0 WHM was...well, I'll let this video speak for itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unpWwn00mJs

That was WHM healing in FFXIV originally.

You could argue the game was changed away from that, but I've also seen (and posted before) 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 WHM end game gameplay in Hard/Extreme Trials and First Coil. That was the prototype upon which ARR's WHM was built. With a few changes, you can still see all our ARR staples were there. Shroud of Saints, Cleric Stance, Benediction (as a full PARTY Fullcure, but on a 15 min CD), Cure, Cura, Curaga, Regen, Stoneskin; the gang's all here. Well, except Medica/Medica 2. Apparently (if you pause you can see) they have an ability with a 90 sec CD that makes their cast spells take longer to cast but become AOE. They also seemed to have some "Lifetap" type ability that would take a chunk of HP off but give you MP regen from it.

But here's some early 2.0 gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPEBRF6zL1Y

Note this is a solo healing WHM, but while there are plenty of Cure casts and the odd Regen, note how little Stone/Aero is going on here. There are plenty of other cases like this. I've got a couple tabs open with other healing configurations and the same basic idea. They aren't hard to find on YouTube. Here's a THREE (?!) healer setup Titan run:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nIo0vFmQlw

Notice again the lack of Stone/Aero. Even the SCH is casting Adlo and Physic (?!) a ton. (And I felt that "DON'T BREAK ME YET!!") I'd like to say "Look at Titan's healthbar/debuffs to see", but this WHM didn't even TARGET TITAN, much less cast damage spells on him.

This wasn't 1.0. This was 2.X. This was FFXIV when I started playing it.

You can argue people weren't playing optimally, but you can't argue the encounters at the time required them to do damage (because they weren't doing damage and were still clearing). This seems to be how the game, with the ARR redesign was designed to be played. Note that what the Devs intend/design and what is optimal are not always the same. I remember when NIN was released there being a brew-ha-ha because the community determined there was a more optimal rotation than the one the Devs intended, leading to NIN being able to do higher damage than they had tuned it for. But it's clear what the intent was. Notice how much less movement intensive these fights were, allowing for Healers to stand and hardcast more reliably.

From "day one", Healers in FFXIV (1.X) were clearly not designed as "Green DPS", and from "day one" of ARR, even after the redesign, they were clearly not designed as "Green DPS". Like NIN, SCH happened to have some capability to do that due to the quirk that Lustrate was a flat percentage heal and Eos...existed. But that was more a quirky accident that allowed a second style of healing gameplay, not the intended method of gameplay.

As I've pointed out before, FFXIV wasn't the game you guys say until late HW at the earliest. It was actually SB where that shift really started to occur, and only for SCH and AST. WHM was still a GCD focused healer that did not have a damage focus. This didn't change for WHM until ShB, and because of Misery. And even in ShB, it was still a GCD focused healer, just it had Lilies for those GCDs, a playstyle it has retained today.

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When I say "The game wasn't designed this way, it was designed for the 'pure/Sylphie' Healers; it's only changed from that over time", this is what I mean. You cannot appeal to history of the game to support the "Green DPS" model, since it wasn't even accepted by the Raiding community until HW with only late ARR Coils runs flirting with it, and it wasn't accepted by the general community until SB. And it arguably STILL isn't accepted by the Devs.

The "appeal to history" favors the "Healers are for Healing" side, not the "Healers are Green DPS" side. That wasn't solidified until SB, and even then only at the very high ends of gameplay and only for 2 of the Healer Jobs. "Healers are Green DPS" has only be absolutely true since ShB...ironically, considering their damage kits were gutted going into that expansion...

Honestly, it's kind of impossible to tell what on Earth the design team actually wanted from the healer role out of the get-go, what they want of it now, and what they would like to do, but feel like they can't.

Not really. As pointed out above, from the get-go, it was clear they wanted a "Healers are for Healing" model. The base kits were largely designed for that, and Lustrate getting around Cleric Stance was a quirk (like NIN's optimal rotation), not an intended design feature. To their credit, the Devs didn't squash it and allowed it to grow. They very clearly did NOT "want(ed) healers to dance between offensive windows and healing windows". Recall at the time auto-attacks were pretty potent and could crit. Watch the Titan clear video above. Notice the Tank's health bar and how he basically has one WHM dedicated to casting Cures on him constnatly. Where is this "infrequent" damage to the Tank in that video? The damage to the Tank seems to be CONSISTENT, not infrequent. The same is true of the Ifrit video. What is clear is they did not, in fact, intend or want Healers to be acting as part-time damage dealers (or full-time ones) in ARR. The clunk of Cleric Stance indicated they wanted it to be a toggle, probably for soloing, rather than a stance that was danced in an out of. If they wanted it to be just a damage boost, they wouldn't have crippled healing while it was in effect and it might have been something more like "Increases attack magic potency by 25% while increasing mana cost of attack spells by 50%", sort of like how Arcane Mages in WoW worked in Cata-Mists-Warlords (probably still do, but I haven't played WoW in a while to be sure.)

It's also pretty clear that's true now. The Healer kits are are heavily tilted towards healing power and variety, not damage, and even the "heals by doing damage" SGE has a slimmed down but powerful and robust healing toolkit vs a damage kit that can best be described as "minimalistic".

The reason for the "healers need to be coddled" mentality derives from a healer shortage in late HW and going into (and through) SB. The Devs (rightly or wrongly) decided it was because there became too great a focus on damage and it was alienating players that wanted to heal. That's why they simplified Cleric going into SB since late HW was seeing a lot of Healers quit because they were being bullied into being Green DPSers or berated for not being so. This led to Cleric being outright removed and the DPS kits simplified going into ShB. If that's not proof the Devs don't want "Healers are Green DPS" as the mentality, I'm not sure what is.

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I do agree that the modern encounter design doesn't really mesh with this well...but the fact that Healers are producing the required damage to clear the content essentially by pressing one button seems to indicate that the Devs don't want Healers to be Green DPSers. All the arrows are pointing to that, including "Go play Ultimate". Healer DPS doesn't even contribute as much as a Tanks. While Tanks are about 50% of a DPSer's output, Healers are only around 1/3rd (give or take)

Now, you can argue whether it's a good design intent or not, but it's pretty clear the Devs are not trying to make a game where Healers have a huge focus on DPS, even now.

The only solution that would make (most) everyone happy would be to split healers like ARR did between WHMs and SCHs, as I've proposed before. But that was alienating to you guys on the contra side, so I honestly don't see healing changing at all from what it is today because they realize that even the solution that would give everyone some of what they want would alienate people. And they aren't going to make a change that 100% appeals to the "more DPS rotations" crowd because they know it would cause a massive crash in Healers that would be very unhealthy for the game. So since a partial solution is rejected by the pro-DPS side, we won't likely get any change at all other than some very minor nibbling around the edges maybe...but probably not.

[ty_taurus]

Not really. As pointed out above, from the get-go, it was clear they wanted a "Healers are for Healing" model. The base kits were largely designed for that, and Lustrate getting around Cleric Stance was a quirk (like NIN's optimal rotation), not an intended design feature. To their credit, the Devs didn't squash it and allowed it to grow. They very clearly did NOT "want(ed) healers to dance between offensive windows and healing windows".

If you don't want to design a car to drive, don't put wheels on it, or install an engine in it. If they really didn't want healers doing damage, why design fights to give you an exorbitant amount of time where no one needs healing? Why include a tool like Cleric Stance? Why make the moral of the entire Conjurer class questline, the first and only questline available for the healer role at level 1 that introduces fresh players to FFXIV's world and its gameplay state, that healing is not about only healing--but about balancing healing with defense and destruction?












This was not a coincidence, nor was it a mistake. This was very intentional from day 1, else this entirely storyline makes no sense. "Learn to embrace your elemental spells and master the balance of destruction and salvation... lol jk."

This isn't about what you, I, or anyone wants from the healer role or expects from it. This is carved into the Rosetta Stone of this game. The devs clearly aren't happy that this direction created conflict and try to keep the role sterilized, but this was the direction they chose in the beginning, whether you, I, they, or anyone else liked it then, or likes it now.

E-Sumi-Yan was going to exile Sylphie from the Conjurer's guild for learning Raise without learning Stone, Aero, and Fluid Aura. What does that say of the stance the designers had for the healing role at launch?