Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[ty_taurus]

From my own perspective, that seems more ideal, so healing is more rewarding as a concept instead of an afterthought

In the beginning, healing was a dance. Healers had a larger library of attack spells--mostly DOTs--to supplement healing downtime with something more engaging--something that had a gameplay loop. At the same time, you more often needed to stop your DPS in order to heal, because OGCD healing methods were limited, or nearly non-existent (if we're talking about ARR). ARR White Mage had exactly 1 OGCD heal: Benediction on a 5 minute cooldown. That's not to say that more OGCD healing wasn't a healthy step forward for healers, because the added cooldowns provided by HW were a really good addition to each healer, as that gave them more flexibility in things like mobility, MP management, and DPS windows to meet their healing goals. But the problem with constantly adding more and more OGCDs is that the demand for healing has not scaled to meet the increase in healing powercreep we've seen from one expansion to the next. This has been very unhealthy to that balance between offense and recovery that was once the star of healer gameplay and what set FFXIV healing apart from WOW healing.

[ForsakenRoe]

Not gonna lie, it would be kind of interesting from a playstyle perspective IF you made a DPS rotation of sorts, that it rewarded correct use of your dmg skills with oGCD heals, thus tying the two together in a management system where you cant rely heavily on one side or the other, but I also imagine that might be hell to balance.

For over a year now, I've advocated for something along the lines of this for WHM (and SE is free to use all/parts of it), a system wherein casting any non-Lily GCD (damage or healing) contributes to a new gauge, that goes from 0-100. With 50 Gauge, you'd be able to use a new AOE healing GCD that I referred to as 'Blessing of the Elementals', but you could call it Cure IV if you wanted. Said heal would then grant you three buffs upon use (or 3 new thingys on a job gauge, to prevent buff cap issues), corresponding to Earth, Water, Wind. These buffs would each allow for one 'empowered' cast of Stone/Glare, Aero/Dia (reworked to be 12s) and Water/Banish (a 15s CD instantcast GCD, akin to Fluid Aura of old but on the GCD, about 40p stronger than your current Stone/Glare), turning them into Quake, Tornado and Flood respectively. Said skills, when you take 'the difference between the regular and empowered form's potencies' of all three, and add them together, would add up to be equal to the one Glare cast you lost casting the AOE heal GCD, making it damage neutral to execute. For example, I had been working with Glare being 310p, Dia 430 total, and Banish 350, making Quake 410 (+100), Flood 450 (+100) and Tornado 540 (little unique, +30 to the cast, +20 on each tick).

To a casual player, I would expect such a system to be 'cool I get a powerful new heal, and I get to use these cool attacks after using it'. For an optimization-minded player, think about Misery. We use the heals outside of raidbuffs, even if we don't need them, to put the Misery in raidbuffs, effectively 'transplanting' three Glare casts from outside buffs, into buffs. This would be similar, albeit with lower overall impact, moving only one Glare from outside raidbuffs (by casting the heal AOE) into raidbuffs. The peak level of 'optimized 2min burst window' on the system would see your Raidbuff burst window go from something like:

Glare (POM), Dia (Assize), Misery, Glare x however many until raidbuffs fall off

to something more like:

Blessing, Blessing (POM), Flood (Assize), Tornado, Misery, Quake, Quake, Glare, Tornado, Flood, Glare away

And it doesn't stop there, because... what if we simply add the text 'and 50% less to all other enemies' to the tooltips of those new elemental skills? Suddenly, with Holy being able to generate gauge for us in AOE (I had it as '2 per enemy hit', so a 7-mob pull would be +14 per cast), using this healing skill in AOE would not only help keep the tank alive, but also give access to three new, more-damage-than-Holy, skills for the AOE rotation (On secondary targets, Quake being 205, Tornado's total inc DOT being 270, Flood being 225, compared to Holy's 150). Being able to bank gauge at the end of a boss fight, double Blessing the tank as they gather up the mobs, and then letting rip with 6 GCDs of pure elemental devastation, I find it hard to believe there'd be many players (regardless of skill level/time committed to role) turning that down

So yeh, I think that 'having damage and healing aspects of the kit complement each other, rather than feel like two disjointed halves vying for the player's full attention' is the way to go. If we can have 'use heals, get repaid with damage' via Misery, why not go a step further with 'use damage, get repaid with heals, use those and get repaid with damage again' and create a full loop?

I'd also change the Toxikon proc from shield breaks on SGE from what it is, to 'one free use of Phlegma without regard to cooldown or cost' ala Dark Arts on DRK. it's still a 60p loss to prep a shield that way, but it's a lot better than the current 330p we lose at the moment, and could lead to some 'well actually it's a gain' situations re: movement

[Maltothoris]

It mainly just wanting something to do during downtime which very abundant in this game and the reason we pick dps is that its the lowest hanging fruit outside of more healing interactions (which has a chance of raising the skill floor) or buffs and debuffs (which requires more focus on balancing and changes to how they view classes with sch and astro as the buffers and whm and sge as the selfish ones.)

[Deceptus]

I mean isnt this essentially saying hte problem is actually outgoing damage?

If you can complete content without a healer present, it means that (basically) damage is so low that healing is redundant cause tank/dps skills can cover for it.

Giving healers more damage so theyre more akin to DPS/tanks doesnt actually solve the problem cause then it still is "Just bring an actual DPS instead of a psuedo DPS".

Then again, healing being so non useful is also an issue of dumbing down teh content to much for non EX/Savage/Ultimates, while overpowering some classes. I like the concept of a sustain tank, but lets be real, Warrior Sustain is to good for what it should be and probably for overall health of the game needs to be nerfed.

Which is why a some healers are suggesting pivoting from meaningless damage to more group utility, increasing the damage that the others should be doing through engaging systems (buffs / debuffs )

I mean that could work, but again that shifts the role of the class to be more inherently DPS orientated. Again, not saying its bad, but it does come with baggage.

Healers already are DPS oriented because every job in FFXIV is DPS oriented. The difference is other roles have multiple buttons to express that and we have the exact same 2 buttons from lvl 4 to lvl 90 (and probably lvl 100) to accomplish that task, one of those 2 buttons only being used once every 30s.

[typeaxiom]

Honestly at this stage I genuinely don't know.

If it was my job I'd be massively stripping back and simplifying the healing oGCD bloat and I'd be looking at ways to make bosses steamroll tanks once again like they used to back in ARR/HW through crits, non telegraphed mini tank busters etcetc. If a WHM feels like Regen is a wasted GCD on a tank against a boss, that boss isn't hitting hard enough, no ifs no buts. Giving us a much more streamlined kit with shorter cooldowns on multifaceted abilities that force us to think about our positioning relative to the group would go a long way towards stopping the brain rot as you sit on your mark with little to no care.

A random spitball idea for positioning, but what if a healer's biggest healing AoEs were kind of like meteor mechanics in which the further you are, the less healing you receive. This forces either the healer or the ranged DPS (or depending on the mechanic, melee DPS) to adjust for group healing like they do now for Cure 3. If it forces the healer to move, then they have more things to do, and the dps certainly won't do the moving since they barely move now anyway.

[Merrigan]

For over a year now, I've advocated for something along the lines of this for WHM (and SE is free to use all/parts of it), a system wherein casting any non-Lily GCD (damage or healing) contributes to a new gauge, that goes from 0-100. With 50 Gauge, you'd be able to use a new AOE healing GCD that I referred to as 'Blessing of the Elementals', but you could call it Cure IV if you wanted. Said heal would then grant you three buffs upon use (or 3 new thingys on a job gauge, to prevent [...]

Where can I vote for you ?

[Maltothoris]

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...88aee7c743a98d

Seems we are finally getting a bit of news in March for dawntrail but of course whether or not they talk about healers is an entirely different question.

[Solakor]

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...88aee7c743a98d

Seems we are finally getting a bit of news in March for dawntrail but of course whether or not they talk about healers is an entirely different question.

I dunno how you can keep up the copium.
Subjects on the chopping block: Every job, positionals, MP, skill range and more. Pls look forward to it.

Game went from huh, dungeons are kinda fun to run to why does my class gameplay suck everywhere.

[Maltothoris]

It isn't so much copium but rather this is the biggest thread to call Yoshi-P and his team the morons that they are when it comes to healers.

[Nizzi]

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...88aee7c743a98d

Seems we are finally getting a bit of news in March for dawntrail but of course whether or not they talk about healers is an entirely different question.

They won't talk about healers at all until the media tour live letter where they talk about job changes and show the trailer for job changes... and even then we'll get the shortest amount of time of any role lmao