Healer Suggestions Megathread

[Renathras]

Two obvious suggestions, either could work.

-Don't add new damage tools but switch to an attrition and triage model , where damage is slow but constant and random- Something more akin to Barbariccia EX. Give healers interestingly designed healing tools, abilities that don't blaket the group with enormous potency, but something that forces players to triage and think about who to heal, when and with which tool.

-Maintain the current model of encounters but give healers tools to make their filler downtime more interesting while still contributing to the party's progress, either more DPS abilities to juggle with, new expanded forms of support with buffs for allies and debuffs for enemies.

Both of course while trying to maintain a semblance of balance between the healers. Give a party reasons to bring all the healers along.

Agreed, and then some. I said in General something that I think is the core of the problem here:

As a long time Healer both here and in other games, the Healer ROLE isn't the problem. Encounter design and the Tank and DPS roles being arguably OP with heals and mitigation is. Homogenization is, but that extends well beyond the Healer role. The big issue that no one wants to talk about is the battle system is super rigid with Jobs/Roles supposedly having very rigid places in it, but then you get ones that blur the lines (like RDM) in ways that break the delicate balance that the rigid system is pushing for

In a game with a less rigid system, this would be fantastic. But in one with a rigid system, it makes some roles or mechanics broken or trivial or unnecessary or etc. The thing is, it's unclear if FFXIV can change from that rigidity. And that rigidity is what has driven things to the point they're at now.

WoW is different than FFXIV with wild disparities in balance and DPS and even some specs not being welcome in content. But it allows for this because its Trinity is far less rigid than FFXIV's is, and it was even more freeform in the past, with Vanilla flirting with having a full on buffing/Support role. This is true of some other games as well, such as Lord of the Rings Online. MMOs used to be that way, though arguably less by intent and more by accident and oversight and just not being...polished. But FFXIV has been polished to a homogenized morass. I think Sebezy and (maybe?) Roe have also said this - that the more the game's encounters have shifted to being "puzzles to solve", the fewer actual options there are in "how to solve the puzzle", leading to a rigid system with rigid solutions that get boring.

And while some may be tempted to blame FFXIV's technological debt, the fact is, it wasn't this way until ShB and on. Even SB encounters weren't this way, and ARR and HW ones absolutely were not. So it's not exactly some limitation imposed by the game engine itself. (And even if it somehow were - e.g. bosses not being able to autoattack while casting [which they did in the past, so that shouldn't be, either] - there are ways around that such as having untargetable NPCs off the field like the dragons circling Nail in the final fight of Second Coils.)