Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[ForsakenRoe]

Hasn't there been maths done that show that you cannot clear Ultimate at all without healer damage contributions, and that to beat final Savage tunrs, you need a high-purple/orange team of tanks and DPS, in BIS (ie, needing the gear that comes from said Savage fight) to make up the difference in missing damage from healers?

Looking at my first clear of P12S in week 1, me and my cohealer had 5.6k and 5.9k RDPS respectively. Where are we meant to find 11k more damage, without getting BIS on EVERY player besides the healers, if 'Healers are not expected to deal damage'? For the statement to be true in current raid design, this is the differential a group would have to overcome. It might have been true back in ARR, but it sure as heck wasn't true when the statement was made (Gordias iirc)

Looking again at the video linked in the OP, and re-reading the answer Yoshida gave:



The tone of it, at least to me, seems to aim more for a 'we don't want to force people to do damage as a healer if they're not comfortable', more aimed at the 'feel', and not so much about 'raid tuning'. When they say 'we do not want to make healer DPS mandatory', though, that part seems like it can be construed as referring to raid tuning, and if it is referring to the maths rather than the 'feeling', then they've missed the mark entirely for 6 years

[UkcsAlias]

The tone of it, at least to me, seems to aim more for a 'we don't want to force people to do damage as a healer if they're not comfortable', more aimed at the 'feel', and not so much about 'raid tuning'. When they say 'we do not want to make healer DPS mandatory', though, that part seems like it can be construed as referring to raid tuning, and if it is referring to the maths rather than the 'feeling', then they've missed the mark entirely for 6 years

The thing is, if as healer you can dps a lot, it indicates the team is doing well. And being able to do meaningfull dps in that case rewards that. If the dps would be meaningless, why even bother being a healer then? Now while it is less than a dps, its still meaningfull dps that can make dps tresholds easier to reach.

The real problem is healing demands in most duties. In most duties you arent being forced to heal at all. Power creep makes this worse at an excessively quick speed making duties just 2 patches older trivial. Its just very bad balance towards healers.

If healers were more reliably demanded to heal, the 1 dps button wouldnt have been an issue to begin with. The real problem is lack of healing demands which causes healers to focus to dps. And that also made the '1 dps button' a problem. You want variety in actions. 90% of the time using dps is not that. Even if you are using that 1 button 50% of the time for your GCDs (which is still a lot) it would be fine, since healer dps is about optimizing your gcds to enable as much 1 casts as possible. And dont underestimate a reduction from 90% to 80% in GCD dps casts. This is still a doubling of other abilities being demanded! 90% vs 60% requires 4x as much GCDs for other purposes. Thats how much a bit more healing demands could affect DPS casts.

[Aravell]

The real problem is healing demands in most duties. In most duties you arent being forced to heal at all. Power creep makes this worse at an excessively quick speed making duties just 2 patches older trivial. Its just very bad balance towards healers.

SE tried to solve this in Abyssos. Their method of solving lack of healing required is to make raidwides that deal more than the max HP of the party so you just die unless you mitigate it, which(to no one's surprise) made double shield healer a much better option than 1 shield + 1 regen.

I don't think the fight designers truly understand how to make a proper healing-intensive fight, which is weird, because Barbariccia is a good fight design that fits the bill of "more healing requirement" rather than Rubicante/Golbez and their mechanics which can just kill you from full without mitigation.

[UkcsAlias]

I think that server side framerate limitations are preventing too many actions from happening at once. So they are often required to do hard hitters instead of a more constant bleeding damage. Yet such sort of damage can do quite a lot on the healer side.

But i might have an idea that can force healer requirements, increase esuna usage (and with variety in strategies on usage), and is easy to understand:
Each raid wide aoe the boss does adds 1 special vuln stack. This stack lasts until the end of the fight, but can be removed by esuna.

The effect of this is that if these arent mitigated, the incoming damage simply becomes too high to mitigate. And the way these can act can even vary:
- We can make the stack only affect the next aoe cast and cause it to apply an additional fixed damage value (20% max hp per stack), while it can be mitigated, it wont be easy to mitigate 100% damage hits repeatedly
- The vuln stack simply is a counter. After having X, you die.
- It simply increases incoming damage as we know now. Can still be a hassle without changing much otherwise.

And some more notible ideas:
- Boss aoe applies doom to everyone with 60s countdown. Esuna cures this. Easy, but breaks any non healer meta.
- Team missing health causes next boss aoe to deal that missing health as damage (no more staying below 50%). And with modifier could also be made a 66% or 75% (double or triple missing hp in damage)

But i think the vuln stack idea could on that be a good way to adjust fights in a more generic way.

[Absurdity]

SE tried to solve this in Abyssos. Their method of solving lack of healing required is to make raidwides that deal more than the max HP of the party so you just die unless you mitigate it, which(to no one's surprise) made double shield healer a much better option than 1 shield + 1 regen.

I don't think the fight designers truly understand how to make a proper healing-intensive fight, which is weird, because Barbariccia is a good fight design that fits the bill of "more healing requirement" rather than Rubicante/Golbez and their mechanics which can just kill you from full without mitigation.

But that brings us to the usual problem, even if they made proper healing-intensive fights they will still be 100% limited to just savage, ultimate and maybe the odd extreme. So in the majority of content, expert roulette, alliance raid, normal raid, treasure maps, etc you will still be bored to death.

Not to mention that if you take a good hard look at healer's healing kits they're not very interesting either, outside of very few exceptions like Haima, Liturgy and Macrocosmos. So you've replaced spamming Glare with spamming Medica, the most bland "make HP bar go up" spell ever, GG.

[ForsakenRoe]

But that brings us to the usual problem, even if they made proper healing-intensive fights they will still be 100% limited to just savage, ultimate and maybe the odd extreme. So in the majority of content, expert roulette, alliance raid, normal raid, treasure maps, etc you will still be bored to death.

Yes, this is the point that gets lost in the sauce it seems. It's not a case of 'healer is boring in Savage because 111111', it's that if you've done {whatever level of content} and gotten accustomed to that level of gameplay, then anything below that is more bland because 111111. Changing Savage to hit harder so we have to heal more, for example, does not address the tedium of 24mans or EX roulette, they'll still be as monotonous as before, because we cannot bump them too much or casual players will suffer (supposedly). So instead, a simple, yet focused 2 or 3 changes to each healer's damage rotation, balanced in such a way that ignoring the new additions is a smaller potency loss than something like 'ignoring your DOT' is right now, is what to look into, I think. If someone is skilled enough to use the new rotation, they can. If they are not, they can ignore parts of it until they get more comfortable with the job and start to throw in more and more of the rotation. Nobody is going to cause a wipe in Lapis Manalis because they could not work out how to effectively use their new Miasma DOT on SCH. They might, however, cause a wipe if they cannot keep up with the fact Cagnazzo has learned how to make his water AOEs do 30% more damage, or that they had to press more healing spells, ran out of MP for the first time in their time playing FFXIV and could not cast any more spells.

None of us went from zero damage spells to instantly full blast. We started by throwing in our DOT here and there, then maybe a Stone or two, and working our way up. In fact, I would put real money on the following statement being true:

'Back in SB, when SCH had Miasma at 24s and Bio2 at 30s, a fairly large chunk of the playerbase settled for just refreshing both at the same time when Miasma needed refreshing, clipping Bio by 6s each time for a small DPS loss.'

It wasn't 'required' for SCHs to make sure to NEVER clip Bio's duration in the way described above. Those two lost ticks per 24s would not have been the make-or-break thing that causes a clear vs enrage, especially when AST existed in the form that it did. But some love to imply that any amount of extra complexity will have casuals causing wipes left and right due to missed DOT ticks and losing casts due to analysis paralysis on 'what damage button do I press next'

[Tint]

Yes, this is the point that gets lost in the sauce it seems. It's not a case of 'healer is boring in Savage because 111111', it's that if you've done {whatever level of content} and gotten accustomed to that level of gameplay, then anything below that is more bland because 111111. Changing Savage to hit harder so we have to heal more, for example, does not address the tedium of 24mans or EX roulette, they'll still be as monotonous as before, because we cannot bump them too much or casual players will suffer (supposedly).

With the amount of healing and mitigation tools non-healers have available they pretty much can increase the healing requirements in easier content. When the casual healer can't keep up then the rest of the party can step up their game.

[ForsakenRoe]

With the amount of healing and mitigation tools non-healers have available they pretty much can increase the healing requirements in easier content. When the casual healer can't keep up then the rest of the party can step up their game.

Not all damage is avoidable, though. Should SE tune healing required from the healer around the party standing in every AOE, zero AOEs, or some point in between? And if it's some midpoint, where, 50% of AOEs stood in? 75%, 25%? When you consider how much damage EG the thunder tiger guy in Aetherfont can put out if you stand in every AOE, it's ridiculously high. But you're not meant to, you're meant to dodge those AOEs. And if you dodge every AOE, suddenly the damage he does to you is woefully low. So, do we need less dodgeable damage and more raidwide damage? Maybe that's got the beginnings of an idea, but again, it'll potentially cause some casuals to be unable to keep up and cause wipes. If 'more damage buttons' is not the solution for that reason, then more healing required sure isn't, imo

Imagine that every time that thunder guy does a jump to place lightning tendrils to dodge, he also does proximity damage from where he lands. Suddenly, even with dodging those four back to back jumps, and dodging the lightning they spawn, you still have to worry about taking say 30%-50% of your HP bar per jump (based on gear and distance), and the threat of someone getting combo'd by that damage, into a lightning they didn't quite dodge, means you have to be more on the ball with healing. But again, what if the healer is unable to keep up? What if they cannot heal because they're too focused on trying to dodge the mechanic, so someone dies? Or worse, what if it's the healer that dies to this extra damage? It's been used as a reason in the past, to keep things more approachable for casuals: 'if the healer is the only source of Res and goes down, the party is all but doomed to a wipe, so SE tries to keep the stress of the healer role lower to avoid that outcome'. Adding more healing required in this regard would run counter to that design approach

[PercibelTheren]

Not to mention that if you take a good hard look at healer's healing kits they're not very interesting either, outside of very few exceptions like Haima, Liturgy and Macrocosmos. So you've replaced spamming Glare with spamming Medica, the most bland "make HP bar go up" spell ever, GG.

I honestly think this is the core issue of why healers feel so boring. The healing abilities themselves are effective tools, but they're not FUN. I would like them to diversify what they do. I like delayed healing abilities like Macrocosmos. Lean into some healing tools giving a heal over time but little spot healing. Make some abilities spot healing without the regen. Make me use the correct tool for the job. Right now every raidwide is solved by "just use whichever OGCD is not on cooldown."

[Renathras]

And even in the very rare case they do let healers wear metal (laws order is the only class specific example I can think of) they have to add a frilly dress extension to it just so you don’t forget you are a healer and healers wear robes

Don't forget the Ronkan (I think?) gear from ShB. It's chianmail, which is very much metal.

Got any data to back any of that up?

Fast forward to Stormblood and you started to see a real shift. Cleric Stance in it's original form was gone, WHM finally had MP to spare and all 3 healers had access to solid oGCD heals at this point. This is where the DPSing healer became the norm at all levels of endgame content rather than the exception.

Do you?
Or is this just your heresay again?

You made a claim first. Can you prove it?

ShB was when just about every Healer felt comfortable DPSing...because the DPSing was so streamlined that it was almost down to "if no healing is needed, press this button over and over until healing is needed". This is when midcore content and even casual content adopted the policy, as well as Extremes and even Experts, and it was the expectation across all levels of endgame content, not just Savages. Note that "Endgame" does not mean "Savages", it also includes Expert roulette and Extremes.

The real problem is healing demands in most duties. In most duties you arent being forced to heal at all. Power creep makes this worse at an excessively quick speed making duties just 2 patches older trivial. Its just very bad balance towards healers.

If healers were more reliably demanded to heal, the 1 dps button wouldnt have been an issue to begin with. The real problem is lack of healing demands which causes healers to focus to dps.

Hammer -> Nail's Head

This is the reality of our situation.

Too much power creep, too many overpowered oGCDs reducing the need to GCD heal, encounters designed to be mitigation checks rather than healing on unavoidable damage AND for avoidable damage to outright kill most players so that healing to make up for mistakes often isn't possible, and in more casual content (and some hardcore content, like the Ultimate TOP that was 0 healer cleared) Tanks and DPSers having too much healing as well. (Look at how much healing DNC can output sometime; it's insane and makes 4 man fights trivial to clear without a Healer, and obviously I don't need to explain WAR at this point, right?)

But that brings us to the usual problem, even if they made proper healing-intensive fights they will still be 100% limited to just savage, ultimate and maybe the odd extreme. So in the majority of content, expert roulette, alliance raid, normal raid, treasure maps, etc you will still be bored to death.

Not to put too fine a point on it: But this will always be true from highly skilled players doing casual content.

"But not DPSers!"

...yes, DPSers, too. A lot of high end players get bored doing AOEspam wall-to-wall pulls and see Experts as a chore to DPS, too. And for people used to doing DPS rotations while avoiding complex mechanics in the Savage dance, doing an optimal DPS rotation during one-mechanic-every-60-second octopus at the end of Aetherfont is "bored to death", too. Same for Tanks. There's nothing unique to Healers about that.

If high end content engages you, that's what you're going to be doing more of, and with the advent of Criterion, they don't need to change-up "casual" content to be "not boring" for high end players if you have valid alternatives to grind for tomes/etc.

To put it simply, you likely CANNOT design content that is non-trivial/non-boring for high end players to do over and over and over again that ALSO is still accessible for normal players in a general environment. And this community has generally accepted that MSQ is for everyone, not just hardcore people, who tend to only do it once before moving on to content more engaging to them. (Note Expert roulette is MSQ content, thus is MSQ). At the end of the day, some content is just going to be boring for you if you're a hardcore raider. That really can't be helped. The goal should be to make it where such players don't need to keep doing the content (most everyone's fine with the one run for the story, but not the weekly grind for tomes) and can get their tomes from content they find more enjoyable.

Honestly, Criterion is an interesting design choice going forward since it has both solo, casual, and hardcore versions. It just needs to provide tomes commensurate to that.

Yes, this is the point that gets lost in the sauce it seems.

I don't think it does, it's a different argument.

Think about it - how in-depth would a healer rotation in Lapis Manalis have to be for you not to be bored? Would a 1-2-3 not still be boring? (As noted in that ongoing discussion in the Healer forum right now, everyone seems to agree that wouldn't do it). What about a SMN rotation? No, that gets called boring all the time as well. So it would have to be a full on DPSer rotation before "more DPS buttons" would really fix the problem. Dia having a Thundercloud proc would be novel for...a week. A 1-2-3 Stone-Aero-Water combo would be boring overnight.

I think the issue is that nothing WOULD actually make 4 man casual content NOT boring for high end players such as yourself or others like you, unless we get something either high APM like GNB or DPSer level difficult like BLM. And at that point, we run into all the attendant issues of Healers having full on DPS rotations.

Moreover, an additional issue:

UNLESS the damage gap between optimal and "glarespammer" is small, then when you get a Healer that does the bare minimum, now you're extending the time the run takes to the point of really annoying regular people, and we run into people just dropping healers and doing 1T/3D premades (even more than they do now). Meaning people's "get in, get out" runs will take even longer, leading to even...more...complaints.

Also:

With the amount of healing and mitigation tools non-healers have available they pretty much can increase the healing requirements in easier content. When the casual healer can't keep up then the rest of the party can step up their game.

No I agree they don't want healers to be more offensive. They just haven't faced the reality that unless you give healers something else to do (buffing, debuffing, cc cleansing, more healing) they're going to be more offensive because that's all a healer's kit is.

More or less, this.

I honestly think this is the core issue of why healers feel so boring. The healing abilities themselves are effective tools, but they're not FUN. I would like them to diversify what they do. I like delayed healing abilities like Macrocosmos. Lean into some healing tools giving a heal over time but little spot healing. Make some abilities spot healing without the regen. Make me use the correct tool for the job. Right now every raidwide is solved by "just use whichever OGCD is not on cooldown."

This, and that we're so oGCD healing focused, it leaves us with a LOT of "dead" GCDs to fill, so we fill them with the same damage nuke spam. If all oGCD heals were GCD heals (or, at least, a lot more of them were), that would change that a lot. WHM right now has the least oGCD healing and the least Glarespam (ironic, given the name) of all the Healers.