Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[TheDustyOne]

Admittedly, I haven't touched many older mmos, but from my very basic understanding of some of them, after healing was done you still had moments for MP to regen, which may as well be equivalent to our current DPS downtime. I'll let someone more knowledgeable about them speak instead of me.

But yes, doesn't negate that it wouldn't work with the game as it is now, not without redesigning 10 years of content.

[ty_taurus]

There are many reasons why it's difficult to resolve this issue by trying to replace DPS spam with more healing instead.

1. There has been no notable change in the frequency of outgoing damage between ARR content and current content, or if anything, damage is sometimes less frequent than in ARR/HW content. Meanwhile, every expansion has not only added more healing resources to the healers, but every new resource added has been DPS neutral--either OGCD and thus weave-able, meaning it gives healers more DPS uptime, or GCDs that also deal the same damage as the healer's basic spell, or refund that damage via the blood lily. Meanwhile every healer attack spell has been streamlined to a 1.5 second cast time, meaning every GCD gives you room to weave any of these resources. We have more DPS uptime than ever before because of all these reasons.

2. Other roles have received increased levels of sustain, particularly Paladin and Warrior who are able to answer to the already diminished instances of necessary healing. As has been discovered, there's enough non-healer sustain that a healerless party was capable of clearing Ultimate. While that is not a normal expected playthrough, it speaks to the above points about how little healing is needed vs how much healing is available to use.

3. Consider that a player has the ability to cast a new spell every 2.5 seconds. If your goal is to rework healers to heal with their GCD more often than they attack with their GCD, how often do you think damage needs to be delivered to the party in order to sway healer gameplay away from DPS and toward healing? Consider points 1 and 2 as well. You would probably need raidwide damage every 3-7 seconds in all forms of content, even dungeons, to demand healers stop attacking and heal given our current resources.

4. FFXIV healing has vastly more accessible forms of AoE healing than WoW does. Generally, party damage can almost always be resolved in 1-2 GCDs ignoring all of the OGCD healing resources at our disposal. WoW does have AoE healing, but far more often has to rely on single target healing because their AoE healing doesn't have the same power and availability as FFXIV AoE heals.

5. If you want to change the the environment for healers to prioritize healing over damage, you're going to need to make some drastic changes to a combination of both healer kits and fight design. This would inevitably require reworking every single fight in the game to ensure the new model for healing encourages healing over DPS, and is also doable with whatever changes the healers receive to their resources, even if that's just rebalancing HP to account for considerably less healer DPS. It should go without saying that this is a truly monolithic task and would be incredibly time consuming and expensive to accomplish.

The truth is that FFXIV has always been an environment that promoted a very offensive healer playstyle--more combat medic if you will. Whether intentional or not, it has also only ever continued to feed into that environment with every expansion. Constantly providing more and more free healing, incredibly powerful AoE healing, faster DPS cast times that enable weaving, and more non-healer sustain than the game has ever had before. All things that lend themselves to maximizing the time healers get to spend DPSing instead of healing.

[Shurrikhan]

I would rather to see...

• targeted increases to relative healing requirements (the amount of incoming damage relative to available "free" sustain resources, such as tank miti and healer oGCDs) by increasing frequent damage to tanks and random targets, in less predictable timings that nonetheless are not too closely placed to existing damage bursts,
  
  
• nerfs to inflexible and/or time-insensitive tank sustain (Brutal Shell, Aurora, Heart of Excog; Divine Magic heals, lv82 on-demand HoT; Equilibrium trait HoT, Bloodwhetting healing per-hit instead of based on damage; etc.),
  
  
• nerfs to AoE heals (and to intensive back-to-back AoE damage as not to thereby break encounters) so that they don't so often eclipse all other options with their up to 10x the healing or 8x the MP efficiency,
  
  
• and maybe even trim a couple of our long CDs while...
  
  
• making the GCDs heals themselves more prevalent/useful and MP more of an actual/compelling mechanic, and
  
  
• improving our downtime kits by 2-4 actions, rather than making us outright DPS w/ oGCD heals.

I'm all for having far more complexity available to our downtime, but let's also do what we can for the healing part of healers.

There's no reason to mistake an outcome that is basically a result of sabotage with a fundamental issue; healing can be interesting. It's just that no system will be more interesting than its context allows and, right now, that XIV's contexts of/for healing are pretty awful.

[WaxSw]

Obviously, they need to keep the DPS spells to do solo content, but make them insignificant for DPS checks while raiding.
The game should put you in a position where you have to reactively or predictively decide how you apply your heal kit on every GCD or OGCD.

In essence, I would rather be busy healing my group back up as filler than throwing a bunch of glares at the boss.
It ruins the job fantasy for me.

If they make the dps irrelevant not only solo instances become a slog but it would also hurt the skill growth of players since their optimization would not be impactful

The game already puts you in a position where you choose wether use oGCDs or GCDd already by using precisely the dps as bait. Its that dps lure that puts brakes to the mindless heal GCD spam, its the dps lure that make healers focus on how much they can squeeze out of their healing cds and ultimately is that dps mindset that make healers triage wether a heal is necessary or not. Healing is about efficiency, not hps, and dps is a key part of that.

The filler wont ever be healing because there will always be downtime, its ingrained in the nature of the game due to gear scaling and healing optimization, thats also why dps actions are so important. This is a lesson mmos have known for years but XIV devs somehow forgot

[Katish]

I honestly think a good solution would be, since we are going to 100, take the median level 50 and bring all the healing skills from now and slotting them to be replacement upgrades (or consolidated buttons [1 button 2 skills]) for old healing skills (prob around lvl 30-60) while also bringing down the older skills to be learned much early on. Then just introduce more dps\buff skills that contribute to damage while also amplifying these existing healing skills from 50+. It makes healing more complex by removing options, helps the healers learn their job by teaching them that dps skills are okay, gives them more options if they are having difficulty healing in general early on, and it gives a feeling of job progression (the more you level the less reliant you are on your healing). After 50 you should know the premise of your job, what healing skills do what. And after 60, you should start learning to intergrate what you learned so when you do get to max level you have been taught how healers work in this system. Obviously some skills will need some potency changes.

[ty_taurus]

I would rather just see...

• targeted increases to relative healing requirements (the amount of incoming damage relative to available "free" sustain resources, such as tank miti and healer oGCDs) by increasing frequent damage to tanks and random targets, in less predictable timings that nonetheless are not too closely placed to existing damage bursts,
  
  
• nerfs to inflexible and/or time-insensitive tank sustain (Brutal Shell, Aurora, Heart of Excog; Divine Magic heals, lv82 on-demand HoT; Equilibrium trait HoT, Bloodwhetting healing per-hit instead of based on damage; etc.),
  
  
• nerfs to AoE heals (and to intensive back-to-back AoE damage as not to thereby break encounters) so that they don't so often eclipse all other options with their up to 10x the healing or 8x the MP efficiency,
  
  
• and maybe even trim a couple of our long CDs while...
  
  
• making the GCDs heals themselves more prevalent/useful and MP more of an actual/compelling mechanic.

I'm all for having far more complexity available to our downtime, but let's also do what we can for the healing part of healers.

There's no reason to mistake an outcome that is basically a result of sabotage with a fundamental issue; healing can be interesting. It's just that no system will be more interesting than its context allows and, right now, that XIV's contexts of/for healing are pretty awful.

What I've said before is I would like to try and go back to needing to bounce between attacking and healing on the GCD at frequencies that we used to, such as during Stormblood. But that will only get us so far, of course, which is why we also need to address the DPS side of the equation.

The problem should be approached from all angles, not just one angle.

[TheDustyOne]

I'd love it if we just cut out like 90% of our oGCD heals in favour of a handful of DPS actions. Not only does it give us the hotbar space for a small rotation, but now we actually have to choose when we need to stop damaging to heal, instead of slapping on an assize or tetra and calling it a day.

Ideally I'd like for every healer to have a lily-like system where the healing spells meaningfully and uniquely interact with our DPS spells (like maybe having AST heals proc a powerful buff instead of a DPS bomb like Misery, SCH having a strong DoT on shield break, etc.), but still, baby steps.

[Allegor]

Increasing DPS variety is far more beneficial then adjusting all encounters to require more healing.

-Solo content that requires DPS would be improved
-Healing downtime interaction would be improved
-Situations where your party is overgeared, better skilled or both would be improved
-Healer combinations that reduce the need to heal as much (or in some cases not at all *cough24mancough*) would be improved

Our job quests, quests and instances specifically and exclusively designed for healers, have us spamming our 1 dps spell more than healing anything most of the time. That's how bad the situation is.

[Katish]

I'd love it if we just cut out like 90% of our oGCD heals in favour of a handful of DPS actions. Not only does it give us the hotbar space for a small rotation, but now we actually have to choose when we need to stop damaging to heal, instead of slapping on an assize or tetra and calling it a day.

Ideally I'd like for every healer to have a lily-like system where the healing spells meaningfully and uniquely interact with our DPS spells (like maybe having AST heals proc a powerful buff instead of a DPS bomb like Misery, SCH having a strong DoT on shield break, etc.), but still, baby steps.

Ideally, would all healers want that? Personally, I would rather them just make things unique (still focusing on the damage aspect though). I understand the whm philosophy is alright but for all healers they should all excel in something the other doesn't. For whm that would be bursting, sge maybe dots, ast buffs, sch debuffs? Maybe.

[vetch]

Increasing DPS variety is far more beneficial then adjusting all encounters to require more healing.

-Solo content that requires DPS would be improved
-Healing downtime interaction would be improved
-Situations where your party is overgeared, better skilled or both would be improved
-Healer combinations that reduce the need to heal as much (or in some cases not at all *cough24mancough*) would be improved

Please note that the item "people who enjoy playing a more supportive role can enjoy the game more" is conspicuously absent from the list.

None of these 'improvements' apply if I'm indifferent to DPS buttons and only hit them out of obligation. I want to heal more with my healer. And this is not an uncommon opinion. It's like the dominant opinion on the JP side.

And it's not necessary to adjust all encounters. Just do the ones going forward.

To be fair its not that some skills should be removed but that they should be reworked into upgraded versions of earlier abilies adding more effects as you reach higher levels and engage stronger enemies.

Part of the problem is that enemies don't become stronger as you reach higher levels. The ARR Coils raids still deal the most incoming damage relative to max HP totals, and it's not close.

By level 60, any gaps in the healing kits have closed up unless you're counting Divine Benis and Neutral Sect which used to be available in ARR/HW and were taken away, and there's not really any natural gameplay niche left to add new heals into anymore. You just get crap like Liturgy of the Bell that doesn't do anything that Asylum+Medica 2 couldn't.

It's all been bloat and duplicate abilities for 2-3 expansions, so much so that what damage we do get is fixable instantly for free, which means the enjoyable healer minigame of 'reaction, triage, resource management' is gone. And that sort of bad healer design also has knock-on effects in the encounter design. Since you basically can't meaningfully pressure healer resources anymore (not that they're even trying to), mechanics have to have truly awful-feeling penalties like instadeath/twice-come-ruin, damage down, and bodychecks/raidwipes for enforcement, because if you ever took anything as simple as straight damage from a failed mech, the healer would top you up instantly with one of his free oGCDs that wasn't going to get used anyway and it would be like it never even happened.

To get it back to where healer kits are actually fun and not having a toxic knock-on effect on encounter designs, healing abilities need to be culled, or they should be made weaker across the board and then given interplay and conditionals that need to be fulfilled to get the full benefit you used to get for free by just hitting the button.