A summary of healer issues

[Avoidy]

Healing in this game is boring as hell. Even when it's intense, it's rarely fun; it just feels stressful because people are fucking up and now that's falling on you to deal with. In the game I used to play (tera), healers handled the group's resource management. So you replenished the team's mana, you boosted their attack speed/recast times, and you kept them topped off so they could cheese mechanics. People planned for this, and so a good healer was critical for actually being able to pull off your rotation properly. The difference in that game between a good healer and a bad healer was that with a bad healer you'd run out of mana during your burst, but with a good healer you wouldn't. Or with a good healer, you could straight up ignore certain mechanics, but with a bad healer you'd lose uptime dodging everything because you couldn't trust them. This game punishes you for getting hit with vulns and damage downs, so good luck playing with that for very long. You would also regularly debuff the boss in this other game, and optimal play meant keeping that debuff going for the entire fight so the rest of your group could do more damage that way as well. It felt good. It felt meaningful. People would literally say "I want to go for a personal best, and I need you healing for me to do it." In this game, 90% of the time I just spam a single button to contribute some speck of damage and that's pretty much it in the absolute best case scenario. Like, spamming 1 button is the optimal situation I'm striving for as a healer. The longer I can do that, the better. That's not enjoyable for me. Hell, I'd wager it's not enjoyable for anyone, which is why every time I queue up a daily as a healer it pops immediately. Nobody's lining up to be bored as hell. In a lot of the normal content, you don't even need a healer. People go out of their way to avoid recruiting one so they can finish faster.

Unfortunately fixing it means changing how the entire game works. XIV utilizes a system where everyone operates independently of one another (compared to other team based games, slapping a party buff every 2 minutes is nothing), so support jobs in general feel a bit empty. Hell, I used to love AST for having more stuff to deal with, but then they ripped the sigils out of divination and put them on a self buff that I frankly don't give a shit about, and other flavorful things like sects or the cards themselves were gutted to appeal to metawankers who won't be happy until they've minmaxed the fun out of the game. Frankly, I've given up on healing in XIV. I just play SCH when I don't have any other choice, or when I want a queue to pop. Watching yoshi say that lapis manalis would have something new for healers to grapple with, and finding out that he was talking about using esuna on doom, solidified my stance that nobody on the devteam actually heals in this game and it'll never get better.

And oh my god, watching them tell healers "if you want to be engaged, just bang your head against an ultimate" was such a slap. Tera was a free to play kMMO with an incompetent staff that ran it into the ground, but even they found a way to make healing feel engaging in all content difficulties. That game's dead now, but it has a private server, and guess what? When I went to play it, they had a healer surplus. As in, I queued for something as a healer, and it didn't pop for several minutes. But when I queued as a DPS, it filled immediately. It turns out when you make healing feel important and valuable and rewarding and engaging, people actually want to do it.