JP Players healer feedback is...

[Colt47]

The current design of the game doesn't really require healers as much as support that have healing skills. It's a completely different thing from having firehose healing and it sounds like the JP crowd are expecting traditional trinity firehose healing.

The two true recovery skills that have to exist...

1. A single target heal
2. An AOE heal

ALL of the support Skills that exist in FFXIV under healers...

1. Health Regeneration
2. Temporary HP
3. Shields (Which are really temporary HP without a healing component)
4. Damage Reduction
5. Damage Increase

So the issue is that they crammed all this extra junk in for exactly two healing skills because they changed how healing works once you get past a specific level, and then threw up a bunch of support skills and divided who gets what between the shield and the pure healers. Ranged DPS were supposed to handle the majority of the support skills but they got reduced to a dps rotation that buffs people, rather than having dedicated buff skills. And the reason this happened is because healer DPS is not supposed to matter, but then what do healers DO? Well, I guess they babysit and buff / shield people. So yay your support job tasks are now all on the healers shoulders. I guess I should say shield healers shoulders since they get the dps buff, because who the heck needs a mit when the tanks already do it with the caster DPS and melee DPS having dedicated mit buttons?

And FYI I am not attacking the development team of SE over the way that they have things setup right now. This sounds like a boatload of work to even begin to fix because the support skills that are on healer would have to be moved BACK to the ranged dps before they could make room to allow for more dps skills. If they add another attack button to the healers it gives the impression of fixing the problem, but the reality is it would make healer harder to play because now the healer has to balance a bloated healing kit with also managing more on damage on an MMO hot bar. Remember, EVERYTHING in this game is built on using multiple buttons to combo and make sure the player finds the game engaging, and that includes the healing. We got to combo 3 buttons just to free cast a rez, or combo 3 buttons to get a super shield up on a scholar.

I don't know, I just do not like either side of the arguments on healer. I don't like the idea of not having any way to do damage besides one button, but I also do not like the idea that now a healer would be expected to maintain a rotation when they got so much busywork to do just to get an effect off. The real crux of the problem is that because they engineered the healing to be a combo system they can't make the dps rotation too intense, even if the healer combos are only used sparingly across a fight.