Healers need an overhaul

[fulminating]

If you are unable to accept this fact, you will be much happier playing a damage dealer, a role who is rewarded by a party who plays better.

There are games other than ff14 which also have a healer role.

[kyyninen_kirahvi]

Isn't that kind of like being a doctor and complaining all they see is sick people? Healers are in the game for those times when things don't go perfectly.

You don't need heal players who do the mechanics. It's self evident.

If you are unable to accept this fact, you will be much happier playing a damage dealer, a role who is rewarded by a party who plays better.

Doctors don't sit alone in the dark waiting patients like robots in standby. Healing is healers priority, yes, but to have something meaningful and engageing to do while there is no one to heal should be cosidered and designed if battle design can't be changed.

[Silver-Strider]

Isn't that kind of like being a doctor and complaining all they see is sick people? Healers are in the game for those times when things don't go perfectly.

No, this is a Doctor complaining that all they do is paperwork because there's no one that's sick.
Every once in awhile, you have a case that is actually interesting and requires your attention but the rest of the people that show up are just there for a check up and don't have anything realistically wrong with them.

That is a more accurate depiction of Healers than your analogy.

[MintnHoney]

You don't need heal players who do the mechanics. It's self evident.
If you are unable to accept this fact, you will be much happier playing a damage dealer, a role who is rewarded by a party who plays better.

...Which brings us back to Healers needing an overhaul, because this is a game, and healers are part of the game and need to be addressed. Cool.

Next!

[Renathras]

Honestly, ultimately ENCOUNTER DESIGN needs to be changed. Long periods of no damage while a boss casts something, then no damage for 30-45 seconds until the next mechanic, and no damage if people do a mechanic correctly, all make healing pointless or unneeded. That cannot stand long-term. Healing requirements don't even need to be high, they just need to be consistent. Only having damage every 30 seconds means only pressing an oGCD heal every 30 seconds, which is just stupid game design. Worse still, so little healing means Tanks and DPS are often capable of outhealing damage requirements with their long CDs like Curing Waltz. Something that wouldn't work if party damage was less, but more frequent, requiring the occasional Medica 2.

I have a great respect for FFXIV and the devs that create it but...

I think the issue is you have all different kinds of players. You have healers that just want to heal, because that's what they like. You have supporters that want to buff. You have supporters who want to heal...as an extra utility alongside dealing damage. Then you have damage dealers that want faster ques but get bored with non-damage rotations. But many people don't want that, and explicitly pick healers BECAUSE they DON'T have damage rotations.

So then we're left with a conundrum: Who are we designing Healer Jobs for?

1) For Healer players?
2) For Support/Buffer players?
3) For Support/DPS players?
4) For DPS players?

We have 11 DPS Jobs in the game right now, so surely (4) isn't it.
We have RDM, DNC, and BRD in the game, so (3) and (2) are already covered there.

So the obvious conclusion is (1).

THAT.
SAID:

There's another idea that kind of meets in the middle, applying to everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWubxOTUWU
Misshapen Chair: "Healing In FFXIV Is Not Fun"

He makes a summary that I've called "the 4 healers model", which is the idea that we have 4 Healer JOBS, so we can make one that appeals to each of those 4 types listed above. I disagree with some of his points (e.g. that Tank dps rotations are "interesting" or that encounters have always been this way - they have changed over time, like the general removal of boss auto attack crits, and to a point even boss autoattacks since they don't do them while casting anymore), but around 6:10 in the video he makes the argument I've made for a while now:

Leave one healer alone "probably WHM", make AST super focused on buffing and bring back Nocturnal/Diurnal stances, make SCH into more or less its SB incarnation with DoT juggling, and give SGE some kind of galaxy brain rotation with Kardia healing and see if people embrace it or not. And as he notes, "embrace some uniqueness" and "tell people who want to be rewarded with more damage for their complex rotation that their reward is having FUN and not being BORED TO TEARS; shut up about a whole 2% DPS variance".

These appeal to (1), (2), (3), and (4) I listed above, respectively, so that everyone gets an option for playing how they want.

before the tired trite "if you want to dps play a dps"

I mean, it's a valid point.

It's fair to point out that it'd be better if we had more to heal than if we have more to DPS. Especially if one's issue is the 0 Healer clears of hard content. Having more DPS buttons/rotation doesn't change that, it may just make it worse. To change that, we'd need more healing requirements.

every single ultimate has been solo healed.

...which is not what the guy said. Loonies said "why do we not see a lot of groups there without healer". Note the underlined part. Go to whatever DC has lots of PF for Ultiamtes and Savages. Look how many are "TTDDDDDD" with no Healers. Oh, what's that? None of them are? All of them have at least one and most have two Healer slots?

That's what he's pointing out.

It's POSSIBLE, but it's not EASY, which is why the only people that do it are very high end players just to see if they can.

good for you. for many there isnt enough. should the game not cater to many kinds of players?

And for many there is. Should the game not cater to many kinds of players?

there are 4 healer jobs. thats a whole lot of design space.

I actually agree with this. One of my common pitches (shot down all the time in the Healer forum), as I noted above talking about Mishapen Chair's video, is to change 2-3 of the Healers but leave 1-2 alone. My general pitch is to leave WHM as it is, and probably SGE as it is, and revert AST and SCH to their SB incarnations. I think that way, everyone wins. "But not the people who want SB WHM!" (no sane person wants SB WHM, it sucked noodles; HW WHM was better); everyone can't have everything. "What if someone wants PLD as a DPS" or "What if someone wants RDM as a Healer?!"; there are lines drawn somewhere, and with four healers, this is probably the way to do it that makes everyone the happiest.

for the 3249023492th time. its not about how much damage healers do, its about what skills there are to press. 2111111111111 isnt fun

To some people, this is true.

To others, it's not.

A lot of players don't avoid GCD heals like a plague, so they aren't casting 2111111. They're casting 21131411312111513411 etc. Also, objectively, no one is pressing 211111. Even people mostly doing that are constantly weaving oGCDs, which ARE very much buttons. Surely your Divine Benison button isn't a macro shared with your Glare/Dia buttons, right? Is Assize? I'm sure you COULD macro that (/cast Assize, /cast Glare MIGHT work to use Assize on CD and otherwise cast Glare...but would be annoying; maybe /micon Assize, /cast Assize, /cast Dia could work and be less annoying? Though I feel that might do something weird with quing and overwriting Dias...). You're hitting other buttons. You are just ignoring any button that isn't a GCD. That's like ignoring Contre Sixte/Fleche/Manafication/Embolden/Magick Barrier/Acceleration on RDM as if they weren't buttons that need to be pressed.

They could honestly fix this really quickly - change all Healer oGCDs into GCDs that are Instant Cast. BAM! No longer are you just pressing 21111.

...but you probably wouldn't call that "fun" if your goal is "more DPS rotation" rather than "more different GCDs to press".

WHM already does a semi-good job of this with Lilies. Despite the name "Glarespam", WHM casts the least of its spamnuke in encounters vs the other Healers specifically because Lilies/Misery are GCDs. Now imagine if they were oGCDs instead like Indom/Ixochole or Lustrate/Durochole. Or if you prefer, Whispering Dawn/Physis/etc. This already shows the distinction of GCD vs oGCD and why too many oGCDs is bad. In the Healer Forum there's a thread, "Healers, then and now" where we broke down GCD presses per minute and, interestingly, WHM presses more non-Glares now than SB WHM pressed non-Stones (the distinction is slight, but was surprising), and presses less Glares per minute than any of the other Healers press their nukes per minute.

I was kind of surprised by that outcome, but the math is the math.

And the entire reason is that WHM actually has heals on the GCD it uses frequently (three per minute) that lead up to a fourth GCD attack spell (Misery) for four casts that aren't Glare or Dia. Which incidentally beats out SGE (1.3 Plegmas on average, 2 of which are generally spoke for in the burst phase unless needed for movement) and clearly beats out AST and SCH (SCH's biggest offender was less the removal of DoTs and more Broil being 1.5 sec casts, pretty much negating the need for Ruin 2, and the removal of Miasma 2 as a damage optimization since it did more than Ruin 2 if you had the MP and didn't need to be away from the boss to support using it.)

[Zebraoracle]

Isn't that kind of like being a doctor and complaining all they see is sick people? Healers are in the game for those times when things don't go perfectly.

You don't need heal players who do the mechanics. It's self evident.

If you are unable to accept this fact, you will be much happier playing a damage dealer, a role who is rewarded by a party who plays better.

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.

Mythic dungeons in WoW were some of the most fun healing I've done in a video game. There was enough damage going out to the party that I had to properly manage my resources (cooldowns and mana) while ALSO adding to the overall dps so that we met the dps check time limit. Enemies were focused on the tank, but they had abilities that dealt AoE damage or outright ignored tank aggro.

Meanwhile in FF14, you're doing a raid boss and it throws out a raid wide that half the party throws mits at and then the healers use one of their bajillion oGCDs to heal it up. Then there's nothing for like thirty seconds until the next raid wide happens and the other four party members throw mits at it and the healers oGCD it and continue spamming 1.

[Renathras]

One suggestion I brought up a long time ago that's a few people have liked was removing Esuna and adding a trait that causes Cure/Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis to remove a debuff. It doesn't magically make this button amazing since there are less instances of Esuna mechanics introduced each expansion than there are major patches, but Esuna is still a needed action technically. This merges 2 almost never used buttons, clears up a bit of hotbar space for every healer, and allows you to do some chip healing whenever you do need to use Esuna.

Honestly, this would be a good idea. Those base heals are already all identical and don't really see much use, and it's not like it would hurt anything since they'd still have the same MP cost (merging Cure 1 with Cure 2 would require Cure 2's MP cost to be slashed in half).

We healers are very modest with our requests:

• Nerf tank self healing
  
• More unavoidable damage in content

Is this too hard to do SE?

This.

Though I wouldn't say "we healers are very modest with our requests", as many are asking for other things.

But I think these are the points basically everyone agrees on (not EVERYone, but MOST everyone); that encounter design has made healing boring and encounter design needs to change, as well as a reduction in Tank (and DPS) Healing. Non-Healer Job heals, imo, should all be GCDs. Clemency and Vercure are clutch skills, but don't negate Healers existing and actually are cost-benefits that are tradeoffs. There's a reason people get onto PLDs/RDMs spamming them all the time, because it's inefficient and reduces their damage, but it's an option they can employ.

Stuff like Curing Waltz, Nascent Flash, Everlasting Flight are just powerful and don't have any realistic trade-off or loss imposed on their use.

The only thing I'd really like to see changed with healer, Scholar specifically is their Art of War which is an AoE for mobs but it's very close up melee distance
I'd like it to be a ranged AoE like what WHM & AST have
Not having to to run in the thick of it and punch the ground lol

I feel like SCH or SGE one needs their AOE to be ranged. The only ranged one right now is AST, WHM is still centered on the caster. I'd personally like Holy to be like Cure 3 where you can center it on a target of your choosing OR on yourself (if you have no target). I think that would be neat. But Art of War and Dyskrasia are basically an identical ability right now, which is just stupid. Giving SGE's range (maybe the Toxicon 1 animation, though the raining lasers would work fine, too) would make logical sense, but either one could do it. SCH used to have a ranged AOE attack with Shadow Flare, though it obviously worked differently.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Doctors don't sit alone in the dark waiting patients like robots in standby. Healing is healers priority, yes, but to have something meaningful and engageing to do while there is no one to heal should be cosidered and designed if battle design can't be changed.

I understand that. But, the person I was replying to was complaining that parties need less healing the better they do the content. That's a silly argument because, well... DUH!

Healer do need something more specifically because of this issue. Square Enix isn't going to suddenly pull a 180 and make healing more challenging for the average player, nor are they going to give healers complex damage rotations, for the same reasons. We all know that.

The only path open is to make healing, raises, and buffing exclusive to the healer role. Give tanks and damage dealers debuffs in their place.

Reduce both the length and duration of the buffs so they have to be cast more often. Get rid of all the redundant heals which fill our action bars and have a variety of buffs in their place. As less healing is needed, a healer's value will be measured in how much they improve the performance of the party as a whole.

[Semirhage]

I understand that. But, the person I was replying to was complaining that parties need less healing the better they do the content. That's a silly argument because, well... DUH!

Healer do need something more specifically because of this issue. Square Enix isn't going to suddenly pull a 180 and make healing more challenging for the average player, nor are they going to give healers complex damage rotations, for the same reasons. We all know that.

The only path open is to make healing, raises, and buffing exclusive to the healer role. Give tanks and damage dealers debuffs in their place.

Reduce both the length and duration of the buffs so they have to be cast more often. Get rid of all the redundant heals which fill our action bars and have a variety of buffs in their place. As less healing is needed, a healer's value will be measured in how much they improve the performance of the party as a whole.

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.

[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.