Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[UkcsAlias]

They want the game to be very easy for anyone to pick up, and easy to pick up doesn't have to come at the cost of skill expression.

In any normal content healers do not have to do a single bit of dps and duties are still patheticly easy to complete. Healer checks can often be done with just 1 ability, and otherwise a combination of 3 buttons if they have to be done faster. So any addition into the dps wont hurt this skill floor part at all, as especialy for less good players the focus has to be on keeping the team healthy anyway.

But i hope they will use the condensing of abilities (as they already do for some msq battles), would be used on a healer. While 111 spam might be dull, using it as a base is still welcome. You then can chain in additional abilities that for example is usable every 3rd 1 cast. By condensing you can make quite a combo system with some flexibility, but not having it take up many buttons. With 3 buttons it can be made quite extensive (1AB being the base buttons on the hotbar): 1 being a 123 combo on its own. 2 grants 'A', 3 grants 'B'. Using A converts B into C, or if B was already used, D. And suddenly those 3 buttons already involve 7 dps attacks and 2 branching possibilities (12AD3B,123ABC,123BAD). While at the same time making it barely more difficult (the ABCD buttons only need to grant a little bit more potency and missing one barely hurts, making the GCD part still more relevant)

EDIT: and note, DT doesnt have to instantly make all 3 branching paths either. This can be seperated through several expansions. And provide additional effects towards its chaining.

[Afras]

Earlier in the thread some others have talked about the glut of oGCD's so I wanted to also share my thoughts on this. I think the large amount and power of oGCD heals combined with the shorter cast time change for all healers has made them a bit less interesting. I'm hoping for new GCD abilities for scholar in dawntrail.

[Rithy255]

Earlier in the thread some others have talked about the glut of oGCD's so I wanted to also share my thoughts on this. I think the large amount and power of oGCD heals combined with the shorter cast time change for all healers has made them a bit less interesting. I'm hoping for new GCD abilities for scholar in dawntrail.

cast time changes really hurt white mage, I really liked the long cast times.

OGCD heals need to be rare, healers should actually have to GCD heal, this makes utility extra abilities from other classes also really good as a side effect, right now healers don't really care about utility from other jobs because both can handle healing through ogcds alone. Upping the auto attack damage also making tanks actually have to use defensives properly to help healers, ect.

I actually think a lot of the utility, healing and tank related issues are pretty much down to the abundance of OCGD healing in the game with the lack of damage. (obviously other points outside that, but we really need to get rid of the massive ogcd kits of healers).

[TakumiHarada]

Agreed. If the problem in every expansion is button bloat, then get rid of some of the healing oGCDs and add more DPS skills.
Healers have too many "free" heals and in most contents casting a GCD heal is considered the wrong move.
Make healers actually use their GCD heals and make DPSing more fun.

[Connor]

While I do totally agree that healing oGCDs are way out of hand, I feel like it’s going to be difficult to convince the developers to ever change that.

From their point of view, if they cull oGCDs and move the healing over to GCDs, then newer healers are going to become headless chickens and kill everyone on the planet (even though you don’t have many oGCDs at lower levels lol). Similarly with if they inverted the potencies so gcd was stronger; they’d see it as punishing the newer heals by making them ‘work harder’ to keep everyone healed.

It’s also worth mentioning, they have designed most savage+ content specifically with healers dps’ing in mind. If they had to gcd heal to a much greater extent they’d not be able to hit those ‘maximal dps targets’ they need/are supposed to hit, which might necessitate rebalancing a ton of raid content.
Ironically though that’s kind of the point - people don’t generally want healing to be about ‘hitting maximal dps targets, while using healing abilities to spend as little time and thought as humanly possible on not-dps’ing. But I feel like the devs are going to be super resistant to it because they’ll be like, ‘well, you said you wanted healers to dps!’.

Then there’s also the potential of them going for a ‘you have to have one or the other’ scenario. That is to say, they’ll come with the ultimatum of choosing between ‘good healing’ or ‘more dps’. They’ll say that if we have more healing then healers can’t be expected to dps; if they have more dps, they’ll say they can’t be expected to gcd heal.

[Icecylee]

It’s also worth mentioning, they have designed most savage+ content specifically with healers dps’ing in mind. If they had to gcd heal to a much greater extent they’d not be able to hit those ‘maximal dps targets’ they need/are supposed to hit, which might necessitate rebalancing a ton of raid content.

No reason to rebalance stuff on an encounter end, this is easily solved by adding another DPS button or two and/or just increasing some potency on your filler spell to make up for the Now-Mandatory GCDs you're dropping into heals instead of damage. Not like potency inflation is anything new to 14, duno why you wouldn't think that would happen before changing numbers on bosses lol

[Renathras]

From their point of view, if they cull oGCDs and move the healing over to GCDs, then newer healers are going to become headless chickens and kill everyone on the planet (even though you don’t have many oGCDs at lower levels lol). Similarly with if they inverted the potencies so gcd was stronger; they’d see it as punishing the newer heals by making them ‘work harder’ to keep everyone healed.

This argument makes no sense.

As you point out, you don't even get oGCDs, meaning newer healers aren't using them.

In a more general sense, as skill goes up, oGCD use goes up and GCD use goes down. Lower skilled - or even lowEST skilled - healers aren't using oGCDs. There's the reason "Cure/Medica spam" is the meme it is, because that's how unskilled healers heal. It's not "more work" it's "what they're doing already". Having GCD heals being stronger relative to oGCDs would help the newb/low skilled/spammer healers, and there's no argument on the planet that cycling through your oGCD healing plan is easier than pressing Medica over and over would be.

I've seen this argument used a lot, but it's never by new healers, it's always by experienced ones. Ones that rely on oGCDs and tend to like doing so, and are using this argument to defend keeping them around, incidentally.

There are arguments for oGCDs - the movement heavy fights are one of them - but not that they benefit new healers. oGCD use is one of the things new healers are REALLY bad at. A lot of people even treat oGCDs as GCDs when they start playing FFXIV because the concept of oGCD weaving is relatively specific to this game. Like in WoW, healer CDs are generally on the global cooldown. You can often see this with new healers casting their last GCD, then hitting the oGCD and waiting around 2.5 sec before their next action. Because they haven't figured out that oGCDs are different. And the game doesn't teach that.

So while there are arguments for keeping around oGCDs, this isn't one of them.

[Shurrikhan]

From their point of view, if they cull oGCDs and move the healing over to GCDs, then newer healers are going to become headless chickens and kill everyone on the planet (even though you don’t have many oGCDs at lower levels lol). Similarly with if they inverted the potencies so gcd was stronger; they’d see it as punishing the newer heals by making them ‘work harder’ to keep everyone healed.

We have no reason to expect that that is how they feel about it, not (quite) the least of which is simply because... that'd make no damn sense.

The lower the relative power of oGCDs, the greater portion of maximum output can be managed through even just a few keys (or, viewed from the opposite end, the more the returns diminish from/with each additional button one must track).

Siphoning power away from oGCDs towards GCDs would in net effect, make healing more accessible in most content/encounters (i.e., in all cases except where one must now specifically bank further oGCDs in order to meet minimal eHP thresholds extremely bursty healing requirements, such as back-to-back top-off checks).

[HappyHubris]

This is my first FFXIV expansion where I do not plan to level a healer at all. I love MMO healing, but the game just refuses to give us much to do outside of oGCDs and glare spam. So DPS it is, because I can always tune my efficiency more instead of having less and less to do as the group gets better.

[Connor]

I mean, that was what I was trying to get at lol. Their actions/statements for healers don’t make sense, contradict each other then lock the role into an endless cycle of mundane misery.

Maybe I am completely wrong and they’ve been working on addressing all the feedback about ‘boring healers’, but their recent comments about (mostly) continuing with the 2min meta info Dawntrail (because ‘it’s what we wanted’*) don’t give me much hope they’ll be making any kind of significant or worthwhile changes beyond like an extra DoT button and some more oGCD heals between 90-100.

And I mean, maybe I’m just being overly critical of them. But given these are the same guys that gave us ‘Scholars shouldn’t have Energy Drain because they’re forcing their cohealers to do all the healing’, I really wouldn’t be shocked if they were still pulling these kind of mental gymnastics (i.e ‘weaker oGCDs will hurt newbie healers who don’t even have them yet’).

If they somehow manage to make healing and contributing dps and whatever other stuff they’ve got going on (ast cards SCH fairy w/e) then I’ll be the first to praise them lol. But given that - as of now - they haven’t still acknowledged there even is an issue with healers (to my knowledge), I just find myself fairly doubtful they’re going to get the message in time for the next expansion.

Like if they had even just said at any point ‘we’re aware healers are unhappy and are looking into it’ or w/e I probably wouldn’t even be on the forums. But the closest we’ve got is ‘go play ultimates’

* (I’m well aware that we literally did ask for it, but at the same time, I dunno that the ask was ‘just make it all the exact same’ lol, at least do some 30/60/90s stuff.)