Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Carighan]

If not DPS they could at least give healers actual buff/debuff/etc spells to play around with in the vast space of time nobody needs healing lol

There’s an entire playstyle they just threw to the wayside lol.

It's funny how much the overfocus on balance in numbers in raids has reduced healer design space in particular. Back in older MMORPGs you had a single game that had these four healers:

* A pure healer, with a cleric stance like thing they had to go into or out of to even be able to deal any damage at all really.
* A buffer, who could actually heal a fair bit but... indirectly. Like you could give someone very short buffs to their absorption or so, like external 40% DRs. In return, weaker heals and damage was also indirect via buffing people. Since all your buffs were casted + short, you were quite busy.
* One healer that gave their own health away via a mix of heals and HoTs, and then constantly had DoTs on enemies to drain health back to fuel this. High overall output, but fragile if there's ever a gap.
* Lastly a healer that designated a target and then went melee, causing healing around them and on that target.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

[PyurBlue]

I means, if ~40% of our DPS came from spells and ~60% from short CD abilities (4 or 5 sec cooldown), we would prioritize healing spells over healing abilities when healing are required.

Abilities take priority when healing because they have no cost. Adding DPS abilities won't change this. It's only when you run out of abilities that spells are given a second look.

But there are some reasons why one wouldn't want their damage tied to healing.

Very true. I'm hesitant in going in that direction because to me it doesn't seem like a good idea. I've seen a lot of comments, especially about SGE, asking why healing from damage isn't utilized more. That sounds like it would make for a terrible healer experience because SGE would no longer be a healer, but a DPS. It also makes things like Assize on WHM boring. You press it on cooldown, that's it. One of the upsides to healing vs dealing damage, at least on paper, is that you can optimize outside of maintaining uptime. That goes away when damage and healing are connected because damage is all about maximizing uptime.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

We shouldn't be trading one of the other. Balance is a good thing because it allows for a wide range of party compositions and lets players focus on the classes that they find fun. The balance tightrope in FF14 comes from encounter design. You can memorize everything and even calculate how a class will perform without being in a battle in the first place. If encounter design was less straight forward classes could be built around strengths and weaknesses that would all be important consideration in party composition.

[Connor]

It's funny how much the overfocus on balance in numbers in raids has reduced healer design space in particular. Back in older MMORPGs you had a single game that had these four healers:

* A pure healer, with a cleric stance like thing they had to go into or out of to even be able to deal any damage at all really.
* A buffer, who could actually heal a fair bit but... indirectly. Like you could give someone very short buffs to their absorption or so, like external 40% DRs. In return, weaker heals and damage was also indirect via buffing people. Since all your buffs were casted + short, you were quite busy.
* One healer that gave their own health away via a mix of heals and HoTs, and then constantly had DoTs on enemies to drain health back to fuel this. High overall output, but fragile if there's ever a gap.
* Lastly a healer that designated a target and then went melee, causing healing around them and on that target.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

I mean we arguably already have the foundations of these ‘healer styles’ with the jobs too, they’ve just been so undeveloped or homogenised that it’s purely superficial.

WHM could easy have been the first one, a ‘pure’ healer with direct healing and high potency attacks, cleric stance type deal, whatever.

Second one could easily be either Astrologian or Scholar. Though, while Astrologian is more damage buff-oriented job with extremely high healing power, Scholar (conceptually) is more of a balance between tactical use of both buffs debuffs and mitigations in place of healing (and it also has extremely high healing power lol). Interestingly though at their respective releases both Astrologian and Scholar were fairly weak in healing output compared to White Mage because they were supposed to use buffs/debuffs and the like to compensate. But Astrologian was too weak so they were like ‘hey let’s just make this busted strong at healing and just make the buff system super boring!’ lol.

Third one we don’t really have on healers but ironically this very much describes tanks, particularly Warrior (which tbh is probably the best healer in the game rn lol…).

Last one, of course, would be Sage. I mean, they even have the vestiges of ‘melee style’ with Phlegma being mid-ranged and Icarus allowing rapid repositioning for easily moving between melee/range.

Ironically despite each job only having like 1 healing spell I’d say these ideas come through so much more clearly from their PvP design than PvE. White Mage being an offensive leaning ‘pure healer’ with some crowd control, Astrologian is the straightforward party buffer (and super op lol, laughs in Macrocosmos), Scholar is the more convoluted buffer/debuffer spreading effects across party/enemies, placing fairy for shields, etc. Sage idk I haven’t played as much but the Kardia effects are actually dependant on the spell rather than the exact same thing every time, which is already an improvement lol

[Supersnow845]

SCH and WHM also had the balance axis of single target (SCH) vs AOE (WHM) in ARR that no longer exists based on how differently they played around cleric stance

I’m not a massive fan of the shield/regen split because like every “split” in the healer dynamic in 14 it basically just becomes “okay who is going to be SCH’s partner” but if tanks would play along returning the single target vs AOE balance axis may be an option as well, when all healers don’t have do to everything they have more room for damage

[Kabooa]

It's funny how much the overfocus on balance in numbers in raids has reduced healer design space in particular. Back in older MMORPGs you had a single game that had these four healers:

* A pure healer, with a cleric stance like thing they had to go into or out of to even be able to deal any damage at all really.
* A buffer, who could actually heal a fair bit but... indirectly. Like you could give someone very short buffs to their absorption or so, like external 40% DRs. In return, weaker heals and damage was also indirect via buffing people. Since all your buffs were casted + short, you were quite busy.
* One healer that gave their own health away via a mix of heals and HoTs, and then constantly had DoTs on enemies to drain health back to fuel this. High overall output, but fragile if there's ever a gap.
* Lastly a healer that designated a target and then went melee, causing healing around them and on that target.

Were these balanced? Not in the slightest. Were they fun? Hell yeah!

...Warhammer?

Because I can tell you that in almost every scenario, Chalice off hand healers were superior. The others could get the job done, but you almost always, without exception, wanted the Chalice healers.

[Carighan]

...Warhammer?

Nah, super-simplified description of the Cleric, Shaman, Blood Mage and Disciple in Vanguard Saga of Heroes. The game flopped hard, but it had some really intelligent design choices that would not work well with where modern MMOs as a genre went but are still extremely smart in a vacuum.

To make some of these designs work, the game did some wild things. For example, you had a defensive and an offensive target at the same time. So a Blood Mage would use graft skills to heal their defensive target while performing various drains on their offensive target without having to swap targets. Funky stuff. Disciplies needed their defensive target to designate where their healing from their attacks goes. Though to be fair, the Monk in WoW recycled a lot of that concept but sadly also massively watered it down a bit later.

[Rithy255]

The main complexity of a healer should be choosing to Dps or heal, but in ff14 you can do both at the same time. Which some people enjoy but I'd prefer actually having trade offs to healing rather then having like 10 OGCD healing skills knowing I'll be fine, managing them isn't really that difficult i find myself not using all those skills, so I'll never really "fall back" on GCD heals.

Personally I don't think healers need rotations, but they should certainly have possibly different dot timers (even more then one dot on some like scholar), gcd cast times, some might have proc skills, high costing mp attacks (which could bring back "mana management") plenty of ways to make the kits way more interesting. Ways to feel "different" dps wise from one another.

I'm mostly in favour of doing something, it's clear that healer design is very flawed for most content.

[mallleable]

I maintain the sentiment that healers need better spam. Like they should have some kind of damage mechanic that interacts with their spam spell. Like WHM could have a spell that becomes available after X number of Glares, SCH could get a second DOT spell that has a different duration from Biolysis, AST could get a spell that has its recast time reduced whenever Malefic is cast, and change Toxikon to actually be a part of SGE's damage rotation.

[PyurBlue]

I maintain the sentiment that healers need better spam. Like they should have some kind of damage mechanic that interacts with their spam spell. Like WHM could have a spell that becomes available after X number of Glares, SCH could get a second DOT spell that has a different duration from Biolysis, AST could get a spell that has its recast time reduced whenever Malefic is cast, and change Toxikon to actually be a part of SGE's damage rotation.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but in order to break the monotony of the current healer DPS rotations I think tiered attacks like the ones being proposed require some minimum amount of complexity that allows decision making. I'd prefer Toxikon because of its flexibility and scarcity over having every Xth Glare buffed without any meaningful input from me. At the very least being able to store those buffed attacks and spend them when I want would make me think about them a little, and now that I'm considering it, it sounds similar to Glare IV and PoM on a shorter CD.

[Lorika]

I maintain the sentiment that healers need better spam.

I maintain the sentiment that healing need to be fixed first.
A better DPS rotation is just a band aid on gaping wound that will make us just a third rate DPS that nobody will want.