Healers need an overhaul

[Kacho_Nacho]

This would be great.

It's also the line between the "give us more to do during downtime" "camp" and the "NO! Some people just want to HEAL!" "camp".

Increase healing requirements. Move healing back to the healers. And also give healers a skill ceiling to reach for when they get good at healing. That last part? That's the part that always sticks in peoples' craws. Why? For what reason is that such a controversial statement? Why do we need to "leave one healer as-is", with effectively no skill ceiling and just Glarespamming to look forward to as the endgame activity? It doesn't matter how much you increase the healing requirements; they'll go down over time. There has to be a gap that allows unskilled healers can still clear, and Square wants it to be a generous one in most content.

Leaving one healer with its current kit isn't a "focus on healing". It's a mirrored, upside-down focus actually: it's a focus on not having anything to engage your brain outside healing. With healers designed to "appeal to different types of players", you're going to be healing just as much as the others do. You're just going to bonk Dosis over and over again once you're done with it.

All of the grandstanding on here you run into about "designing healers to appeal to people who want to heal" is noise. Press the issue even a little bit, you find out it's always "I want a healer designed to be improvement-proof once I've finished topping the party off". Infer whatever you like about the speaker from there. I prefer Occam's Razor.

Well said.

You completely miss the point dude.

Let me give an example. I'm going to do the dreaded bad thing here and bring up WoW.

I think you're missing mine. All I'm saying is good parties will always need less healing than bad parties. Complaining that it's bad game design is like complaining that red is red. No matter what any game company comes up with, it will be the case.

HOWEVER, that's not to say something can't be done about it. As you point out, WoW has( had? it's been awhile) a healer having to manage both their mana, their aggro, and cooldowns. I loved it!

Now the question is, what can Square Enix do to bring that same level of engagement for healers? Will they be willing to do a Cataclysm level overhaul to healing in FFXIV? Because that would be what it would take to make healing fun for the veteran healers.