why every FF14 healer is berserk healer

[Absurdity]

How would a group of people who tend to have and favor far, far more intensity than XIV's healers tend to have access and who equally DPS when able (and may even have heals that specifically require DPSing via a damage kit more complex than ours)... have ruined / dumbed down our offensive capacities???

The OP is bait that may as well carry its own giant label as such.

Yes, far more healing is required in WoW, but it's also damn near impossible to avoid non-healing kit -- which is also deeper than is offered here anyways.


HP goes up fine without having catered to people who want to have more space for GCD healing. We have far more room for offensive GCDs than we ever had pre-Shadowbringers and yet simultaneously also the greatest relative punishment for missing an filler attack GCD we've ever had.

The two directions of change (less offensive kit and more punishment for not using it atop less GCD healing being necessary) are not sanely reconcilable.

Again, ignore the bait. "Princess healers" have been by and large an XIV since 1.x/ARR; no xenophobia is required to explain their presence. More importantly, though, the changes would be nonsensical even if trying to pander to them, as the changes have only obliged healers to be more and more miserly with GCD heals / punished them more for using a good quarter of their kit while shrinking the part that --through its CDs and DoTs-- previously reduced the throughput penalty of using that quarter of the kit.

While this is not an issue imported from current WoW, because even in WoW with it's much higher frequency of incoming damage any halfway competent healer in that game is still dealing damage when it's sensible to do so.

It is still distantly related to a subset of WoW players.
The "Princess healers" from early XIV probably came from WoW and any princess healer in the current year is still stuck in that 2004 mindset, the only time where "healers only heal" was a real thing.

They basically want that vanilla WoW gameplay, where the peak of healer skill was spamming a downranked level 30-40 healing spell (probably why a lot of them still use Cure 1 at level 60+) and then standing around doing nothing when there is no incoming damage, to "regenerate their MP".

[Shurrikhan]

The "Princess healers" from early XIV probably came from WoW and any princess healer in the current year is still stuck in that 2004 mindset, the only time where "healers only heal" was a real thing.

Based on... what data?

I can only go off several thousand dungeons worth of anecdotal data, but... I've yet to meet one who's come across from WoW. EQ, or RO, sure. But generally, XIV was their first big MMO, period.

They basically want that vanilla WoW gameplay, where the peak of healer skill was spamming a downranked level 30-40 healing spell (probably why a lot of them still use Cure 1 at level 60+) and then standing around doing nothing when there is no incoming damage, to "regenerate their MP".

You... see the problem with that theory, right?

We don't have granularly-varied MP costs based on rank; our ranks are rarely even equivalents (Aero I, II, and III, Miasma I and II, Bio I and II, etc. each had significantly different profiles). We don't have the weirdly varied MP efficiencies. We don't have the separate CDs per rank. We don't have a significant Piety stat (or its equivalent in Spirit/MP5). And in dungeons, we didn't have MP concerns, period, outside of the original Holy spam (for the highest burst damage in the game but nearly a fifth of max MP per pop).

(Granted, WoW dungeoneers generally also at least maintained DoTs; the "only heal" was only for in case of otherwise going oom in long fights. C'mon, in the less intensive dungeons, Druids would even cat-weave atop said DoTs, spending GCDs to change stance and fully DPS, in the less intensive dungeons in 2004. That's not an environment particularly conducive to princess healing, and it's only gotten less hospitable to that with time.)

People still occasionally use Cure because (A) it's sometimes enough and (B) it has the complexity mentioned in its tooltip and per traits to look like it should be useful. And people used it in ARR in part because enough of the damage came from far more efficient DoTs (originally, Thunder, Aero, Bio, and Aero II), you were casting a mana-intensive Holy occasionally, and there were some hard hits you'd want to top the tank off before without necessarily needing to heal them for 40% of their HP.

All that's beside the point, though, which is simply... what possible purpose does it serve to scapegoat another game for problems we've had since Day 1? Hell, even if WoW weren't one of the very settings least likely to produce the kind of panicky and underperforming (even in terms of healing) healers we see among those who refuse to use their DPS kits, how would the obligatory "f*** these players I presume are from X other game" help literally anything?

(And that's to say nothing for when the comment comes from a player who clearly hasn't played the other game or even this one in the time period they're commenting upon.)

[Absurdity]

Based on... what data?

I can only go off several thousand dungeons worth of anecdotal data, but... I've yet to meet one who's come across from WoW. EQ, or RO, sure. But generally, XIV was their first big MMO, period.

Obviously I have no empirical data, simply the observation that this is really the most likely place to come from.
The "healers only heal" playstyle simply didn't exist anywhere else. Clerics in D&D (or healers in pen & paper in general) don't function like that, healers in older FF games don't function like that.

You... see the problem with that theory, right?

We don't have granularly-varied MP costs based on rank; our ranks are rarely even equivalents (Aero I, II, and III, Miasma I and II, Bio I and II, etc. each had significantly different profiles). We don't have the weirdly varied MP efficiencies. We don't have the separate CDs per rank. We don't have a significant Piety stat (or its equivalent in Spirit/MP5). And in dungeons, we didn't have MP concerns, period, outside of the original Holy spam (for the highest burst damage in the game but nearly a fifth of max MP per pop).

(Granted, WoW dungeoneers generally also at least maintained DoTs; the "only heal" was only for in case of otherwise going oom in long fights. C'mon, in the less intensive dungeons, Druids would even cat-weave atop said DoTs, spending GCDs to change stance and fully DPS, in the less intensive dungeons in 2004. That's not an environment particularly conducive to princess healing, and it's only gotten less hospitable to that with time.)

The theory only falls apart of you assume the people practicing princess healing are even thinking about the intricacies of healing back in vanilla WoW in the first place.

They aren't doing nothing to conserve MP, they aren't even thinking about their MP, or you wouldn't find some of those same people spam Cure 3 and empty their MP in seconds. They're just doing nothing because there is currently nothing to heal and healing is the only thing they even remotely pay attention to.

That's how a lot of healers operated back then as well, hell most of the healers back then didn't even know about how the rules for mana regen functioned.
I stopped counting the amount of times we had Priests in Molten Core run out of mana despite doing nothing for most of the fight. Because while they knew that they had to stop casting, they didn't actually know why or the system behind it.

All that's beside the point, though, which is simply... what possible purpose does it serve to scapegoat another game for problems we've had since Day 1? Hell, even if WoW weren't one of the very settings least likely to produce the kind of panicky and underperforming (even in terms of healing) healers we see among those who refuse to use their DPS kits, how would the obligatory "f*** these players I presume are from X other game" help literally anything?

(And that's to say nothing for when the comment comes from a player who clearly hasn't played the other game or even this one in the time period they're commenting upon.)

Of course it serves no purpose. But my comment was also also never meant to scapegoat WoW players, merely an observation that this kind of playstyle is employed by people stuck in a time period that hasn't been relevant for over 15 years.
A playstyle that mostly just existed because it was 2004, MMOs were new and a vast majority of players back then were simply bad at the game.

[Shurrikhan]

Obviously I have no empirical data, simply the observation that this is really the most likely place to come from.
The "healers only heal" playstyle simply didn't exist anywhere else. Clerics in D&D (or healers in pen & paper in general) don't function like that, healers in older FF games don't function like that.

It didn't exist outside of long raids there either, though. And those wouldn't be the places for panicky healers like we then saw here. Across 20 years of WoW, I ran into maybe one. In a couple years of GW2, one. In a few years of Aion, maybe two.

In my first few months of XIV, I ran into dozens, wanted to know why they thought that was a good idea (did they just lack experience, etc.), and in almost every case, XIV was their first 3D MMO, or had tried others back in the day (WoW included) and found them too stressful. They don't need to have come out of somewhere else in a game that took a stance even in ARR beta that asking someone to do more than they wanted / were comfortable with could be considered "harassment".

Hell, my first time being reported was from as little as "I'd like to do the full pull here. Your Holy will help us deal enough damage to kill the enemies before running out of TP and help keep me alive more than Cure II alone will. I'd recommend that you Swiftcast Holy, then Regen, then cast another." This was Wanderer's Palace of all places. And that healer had --by their words at least-- played nowhere else before. And it went beyond "only heal" to "only follow the shiny lights" (Cure 1 -> Cure II on Freecure -> Cure III on Overcure [auto-crit C3, since removed]).

Of course it serves no purpose. But my comment was also also never meant to scapegoat WoW players, merely an observation that this kind of playstyle is employed by people stuck in a time period that hasn't been relevant for over 15 years.

Sorry, I should have better specified that my comment was just on the general, many-year trend ("People are only bored with Endwalker because WoW players are unappeasable!" / "Raids are all DDR now to appease WoW players!" / "GW2 Fractal runners turned Criterion into high-difficulty slop!" and similar BS), not your post specifically.

[Carighan]

Obviously I have no empirical data, simply the observation that this is really the most likely place to come from.
The "healers only heal" playstyle simply didn't exist anywhere else. Clerics in D&D (or healers in pen & paper in general) don't function like that, healers in older FF games don't function like that.

That's an extremely limited scope and nicely avoids listing anything where healers actually, genuinely, only focused on healing.

EverQuest 1, DAoC healer specs, early WoW when all you did other than spamming heals was wanding for manaregen, plus the absolute mountain of non-MMORPGs that have such playstyle.

Mind you, healing is a spectrum. Even in EQ1, you did not only spam Complete Heal on the tank on a rotation. Because you ran out of mana. So the other half of the fight you were regenerating mana (note: This does not mean attacking, you were doing quite literally nothing in most cases, sitting down having the spellbook open which enables mid-combat mana regen). Was this good design? Of course not. This is why even by WoW, you now had a wand "autoattack" that you could use while regenerating mana. Retribution Paladins spamming BoK into the raid used most of their mana for that so their only offense was an auto-proc self-buff they used. Was this good design? Quite likely not. DAoC was a bit smarter in this regard, their buffs on the main healer classes were usually "concentration buffs", instead of consuming mana they could only have a certain total amount applied (and they had a plethora and they were all single target, so you had to mix&match) with effectively infinite duration while kept going. Was this good design? Well no, as you still did ~nothing when not healing, you needed to regen mana.

But importantly, if you then look at the design right after (WoW is a good example because it cycled these design paradigms in a single game!) then you had a gameplay flow that was very much meant for spam healing: You had a fast, high-healing, mana-inefficient heal, a slow, super-healing, inefficient heal and a slow, low-healing but super mana efficient heal. Plus each healer had their way of regenerating mana, Shamans for example wanted to get hit by some stuff as this procced their water shield charges.

You had time to attack in between. Sure. But when push came to shove healing was your #1, #2 and #whatever priority, so you focused on having mana and using it to heal.

This is the part FFXIV is missing, not more damage abilities (as trivially evident from other games). If we had actual healing to do and this healing had any challenge to it at all, then finding time to use the two GCDs we have for damage would already feel like luxury. You want to, but you will nearly never manage to.

I don't play healer to be "bad DPS caster". I also don't play healer, and this seems to be different than everyone else here, to be "mediocre DPS caster".

[Crafoutis]

Who is Yuuki Asuna?

[Carighan]

The "Princess healers" from early XIV probably came from WoW and any princess healer in the current year is still stuck in that 2004 mindset, the only time where "healers only heal" was a real thing.

It's sometimes confusing to hear how young other people are. WoW wasn't the only time that was a real thing, WoW was what replaced it. You can see the transition in it, Vanilla and early parts of TBC were still heal/manaregen like all earlier MMORPGs and even some later ones, and mid~late TBC when they also made the tanks asymmetrical is when healers got filler abilities and alternative manaregen systems for each healer like Resto Shamans wanting to be hit by stuff to deplete water shield or Priests deploying their Shadowfiend for manaregen.

But then also, importantly, this wasn't a universal change. And that's an important aspect. There are more than two states here. You compare "Healing is my only ever priority" to FFXIV's current "Healing is never my priority, I only do it when I absolutely have to". But WoW itself already shows a plethora of iterations on this and at least a dozen states in-between these. Just think of the Valithria Dreamwalker fight, when healers had 3 base types of single target heals and their unique masteries on top and how this slotted different healers into different roles in that fight based on what they wanted and could do and how much of it!

[Carighan]

Who is Yuuki Asuna?

Pseudo-Red-Mage from Sword Art Online.

[Absurdity]

It's sometimes confusing to hear how young other people are. WoW wasn't the only time that was a real thing, WoW was what replaced it. You can see the transition in it, Vanilla and early parts of TBC were still heal/manaregen like all earlier MMORPGs and even some later ones, and mid~late TBC when they also made the tanks asymmetrical is when healers got filler abilities and alternative manaregen systems for each healer like Resto Shamans wanting to be hit by stuff to deplete water shield or Priests deploying their Shadowfiend for manaregen.

But then also, importantly, this wasn't a universal change. And that's an important aspect. There are more than two states here. You compare "Healing is my only ever priority" to FFXIV's current "Healing is never my priority, I only do it when I absolutely have to". But WoW itself already shows a plethora of iterations on this and at least a dozen states in-between these. Just think of the Valithria Dreamwalker fight, when healers had 3 base types of single target heals and their unique masteries on top and how this slotted different healers into different roles in that fight based on what they wanted and could do and how much of it!

I mainly mentioned WoW because it was what catapulted MMOs into the mainstream for a while and the most well known game with this type of healing. I know there were other MMOs that did it first, many of the vanilla WoW devs were former Everquest players and the game borrowed heavily from it.

I've also been there for all those healer changes over the years (2004-2017), but this is not what we're talking about with the "healers only heal" and "princess healer"-types.
When you mention that phrase it usually implies a specific playstyle.

They say they only want to heal, but they're also the first to crumble on the rare occasions where an XIV fight becomes more healing intensive than the single raid wide every 30+ seconds, which is still a long way away from the constant pressure of attrition healing that WoW had for a very long time.

[Shurrikhan]

They say they only want to heal, but they're also the first to crumble on the rare occasions where an XIV fight becomes more healing intensive than the single raid wide every 30+ seconds, which is still a long way away from the constant pressure of attrition healing that WoW had for a very long time.

Yeah... I have to hugely doubt anyone who fits that bill would be coming from WoW over the "exodus" period, where Heroic/Mythic raids wiped if healers couldn't simultaneously keep up with burst, sustain, and sometimes damage, generally with considerably more elaborate setup required for said burst healing rather than just hitting oGCDs on castbar / Simon Says cues.

the most well known game with this type of healing.

It may be well known, but from all I've seen of both average and upper-end play, its type of healing generally fits your description far less than the other examples provided, be that in WotLK heroics if going with any decent speed, to Cata Heroics and raids to MoP's, to WoD's, to especially Legion's, BfA M+ and certain raids, and later Shadowlands. DF and TWW have been a bit less rewarding of 'downtime' tasks but still enough to keep them plenty obligatory.

..."healers only heal" and "princess healer"-types.
When you mention that phrase it usually implies a specific playstyle.

It does, but enough to make me think they almost certainly hadn't survived WoW, where they'd have been expected to weave in CC, add focus damage where possible, potentially actively set up for burst, manage a DPS rotation, possibly track DPS charts and CDs for durationed external buffs (Seasons, Infusion, etc.), bank particular CDs for particular trash pulls, etc.

I would trust a "princess healer" far, far more here in XIV than in WoW. Still little, but WoW's context would be even more condemning.

Rather, if I wanted to ensure fewer "princess healers"... I'd try to have our healing be more like that of Shadowlands or Dragonflight-era M+ or Heroic Raids, just with less neutered damage (e.g., nearer to Legion's).

...Sadly, instead, WoW: Midnight is going the way of Dawntrail instead. (Or worse, really, especially by contrast to where it is now and had been going before this upcoming massive jump towards simplification / mobile-game level kits.)