The Big, Bad, No Good, Very Bad Healer Thread - Healer History from ARR to Now

[HyperiusUltima]

We've been complaining for a long time to the point where we basically stopped somewhere along the way because we were so fed up about not being listened to. Since the current thread that we're now showing our frustration yet again since the Healer Strike didn't really get any attention by Developers.

But, how did we get to this point?

Well, let's start back in A Realm Reborn.

In ARR, we had two healers: WHM and SCH. There was a role action system that was built on leveling various jobs towards certain levels to obtain their cross-class. You had limited slots, and what this did was make Healers have various things: Going from utilizing the old TP System all the way to having mitigation tools, the cross-class system had healers feel really engaging, even at a base level. You could have your Bio, your Virus(currently Addle), your Eye 4 an Eye(removed), and other things like Second Wind.

We had a lot of customization, and this trend continued into Heavensward.

We still had the cross-class system, but we had new bells and whistles: new spells that added onto that engagement that Healers had. Aero III in particular was a huge part of WHM's kit that wasn't just them using Stone II. It added an extra layer and gave us a healthy balance of more damage and healing tools on top of what we already had.

We also had the introduction of Astrologian, which was WHM's pure healing counterpart that was almost effectively the same minus the Cards that granted a variable amount of buffs to the party.

Then came Stormblood. This expansion stripped the Cross-Class system and instead built in key abilities into Role Actions as we know them today. The party also had aggro tools with how the game was made at the time, meaning we'd be using them often to allow Tanks to keep aggro. It left an extra level of aggro management with the loss of some of our Cross-Class damage tools; however, our base jobs still had the damage tools we had from Heavensward alongside more healing tools. It was a very good expansion for raiding; but then came the worst.

Shadowbringers. The Big Reset.

Healers were stripped of multiple damage tools, namely WHM and SCH, and devolved into two buttons, which we know now as a Glare/Malefic/Broil Button and a singular DoT we could apply. It was the start of the worst of Healers, but we did retain some level of brevity in our healing having meaning, even in normal content(unless WAR was involved).

Towards the end of this expansion, Healers started to have grievances about the 1-button spam and how the development team had essentially made every job the core equivalent of WHM, except in their separate flavors in their damage profile while WHM was actually lacking identity towards the end of Stormblood when AST was pushing it out of PF quite a deal due to cards.

Going into Endwalker, things then got worse.

We had the stat squish, meaning we would have to learn an entirely new game and how our healing felt. This resulted in it being okay for a time, though in Endwalker we had the introduction of Sage: Supposedly the "DPS Variant" of Healers where your damage did healing; however through enough playtime and learning, Healers were able to identify it essentially being a carbon-copy of SCH, which heavily disappointed the community.

Even worse, this was the expansion where Tanks got their favorite toys: Short Cooldowns with powerful effects. While WAR was the one at the forefront of this since Shadowbringers' Bloodwhetting, PLD received Holy Sheltron which had a Regen attached to it(not counting Clemency as most PLDs wouldn't use it), GNB got the equivalent of Excogitation in the form of Heart of Corundum; and DRK got nothing worth noting aside from an Invuln rework that was absolutely necessary for it to function better in general instead of draining Healer Resources unlike the other Tanks. WAR also got a Regen on top of their Equilibrium, and later in the same expansion got a healing tool in Shake it Off which was shown to be heavily unnecessary even in the Tank community.

These effects allowed Tanks to take away the healing aspect that mattered, and drove us to a point where our Healing began to not matter anymore. We got pushed further and further down the road with no response even when discussions were happening ad nauseam, which was incredibly frustrating considering Dungeons were being completed more reliably with a good Tank and 3 DPS playing at a decent skill level.

By the end of this expansion, we had gotten no response - and on top of that, there were Ultimate clears that further showed us how broken our role was compared to the other two - we were a shell of who we used to be.

That continued in this expansion. More Healing Tools, but they literally trickled down on Healers by giving them just one 2-minute button to do damage with. An insult to what Healers have been asking for, even when it comes to Sage since this was the time where they actually had access to AoE DoT(No, it does not apply on top of the single target sadly).

Tanks further got buffed, now having stronger mitigation tools in their arsenal through their 30% being increased to 40%, on top of having extra effects. DRK got the Excog treatment with their 40%, giving them a source of self-healing, WAR got a HoT on their 40%, PLD has a heavy Shield on their 40%, and GNB got the equivalent of Thrill on their 40%.

It was a repeat of what we got in Endwalker. And now? We're at a point where Healers are essentially irrelevant unless the content demands a Healer to exist, either for Role Mechanics or due to damage profiles that the development team has accounted for. It does not discount how in 90% of content Healers are by and large unnecessary because Tanks can essentially solo the content themselves through smart cooldown rotation and usage time and again.

So, where do we go from here? I think this is an important question to ask as Healers are in the absolute worst state they've ever been, breaking the Trinity and putting the onus of healing upon Tanks and DPS. As for why, this is a guess, but I want to believe it's because they've been watching the Healer Population.

They tried to make Healers more approachable by giving them strong, reliable healing buttons they could use whenever and bloating it to the point that your basic healers would not have to think much about anything but that. Just. Heal.

They didn't want to add another layer of damage upkeep on healers because they fear it would affect the Healer Population negatively due to skill requirement; but this has been proven otherwise. Adding damage buttons that aren't tied to 2 Minute does not harm the casual healer as if you look at it through a casual lens, they don't have to worry about damage. They just have to heal the party and do their job.

There's also alternatives to adding more damage buttons, but it also creates a unique problem in itself: tweaking damage to scale up against our Healing Options can threaten DPS HP Profiles at a baseline alongside their Defense, making it a hard line to balance properly. Tanks in particular don't have to worry about this due to their massive HP Pool and the mitigations, self-healing, and party tools available to them. Regardless, something has to give.

If we go another expansion where Tanks are supreme and Healers yet again get gutted with more heal bloat that overwhelms the healing profile of the combat content, all discussion about Healers might as well be pointless because Square Enix will have proved itself that they do not listen. What will it take at that point? Will it take influencers to fix this problem? If not influencers, will it take the entire community to do so?

The best thing anyone can do is just keep giving feedback about our role and even if Yoshida himself cherry picks out of QnA if those happen again, the conversation has to continue for Healers to be heard, even if it does sound like screaming into the void for all the years we've dealt with their design. I only am posting this thread because I care about where the game is going, especially for a role that the game is supposed to be balanced for when it comes to recovery.

That is all I'm leaving for this thread, and you're welcome to continue it if you so like. I just wanted to put this down so that we don't forget where we came from, and how we got here.

[Reginald_Cain]

How it feels to ruin an entire role for feeble 2 button dps rotation people as a giga chungus war ee ore

[Carighan]

In a lot of ways, what they did is the correct way of doing things. They probably looked to other MMORPGs for inspiration. Your healers' filler-damage has to be simplistically designed, and ideally they also contribute some damage even when doing their own job, in this case they went the lame route via DoTs, although some classes show extra elements like Astro bomb damage, Sage stuff, that kinda thing.

The issue comes from a combination of:

• The raw amount of buttons on each class by now. People forget this when comparing old expansions, just how simplistic job setups were back then even if the mechanics were less streamlined. In particular the oGCD-weave-mudflation had not happened at the time.
• A desire to make fights more and more complicated. This is entirely natural, and every MMORPG has to grapple with this.
• The inherent need to keep adding things to classes as the game ages, notably with each expansion.

In combination, these three result in a gameplay where each instance of damage the tank or group takes is strictly controlled (as it is already as high as can be without killing someone, basically), all extra damage can be and has to be 100% avoided as it is usually lethal damage, and every healer also has a plethora of non-GCD ways of dealing with damage on the group. Hence the meme-like "Oh a boss ability? Press next oGCD!". And with healing being relegated to the 10-20 CD-based healing tools, all GCDs are "free" to be used for damage.
With tools that are setup like in other MMOs, where you spend 25%-50% of your time dealing damage, and sometimes even less than that.

This inherently cannot be fixed. It's a conceptual dead end. People asking for more damage tools are essentially wanting to put another bandaid over a wound that already is like 5cm thick caked in existing soaked-through bandaids and bandages. At some point, you gotta treat the actual wound.

Through either of (depending on how extreme you want to do it) or a combination of:

• A complete redesign of healer classes, notably removing nearly all healing tools from each and focusing on at-most a handful of all-GCD-based healing effects. This alone would significantly shift the ability-usage breakdown, as you wouldn't have a CD for every instance of damage, you'd have to use your actual tools. A side-benefit of this is that if each class has just 3-5 healing tools, these can individually be made highly class-specific / thematic. This'd then in turn make room for 3-5 new damage or theme-based rotational tools on each.
• Re-implement combat as a whole, on a very basic level. Reduce GCD timer. Move away from oGCD-weaving as a concept, even, if the GCD is short enough. Make damage unpredictable while massively increasing TTK but also TTH (time-to-heal).
• Remove the concept of healing as a role-type. Look at GW2 for an example.
• Inherently make dealing damage and healing the same thing if playing a healer-role class. For an example, the contrast between the Monk and the Disciple in Vanguard, who shared even their class resource and much of their design, but the latter was a healer-variant of the former with a greatly reduced damage output but a defensive target they focus-healed through their attacks while also producing group heals and area heals from other abilities.

Something's gotta give. This is an unsustainable trajectory, and it's not like the other roles don't have equivalent problems in their underlying design. Mostly based on the age of the game + the escalating tightness of combat + the increasing number of abilities and in particular oGCD-weaves.

[Reginald_Cain]

Let's make dark knight heal off dots, this is the best idea Carighan ever came up with. With dark knight healing itself healers could get it's dps buttons back in normal mode! remember aero IV? Pepperidge Farm Rememebers Give scholar back it's VENOM by returning BANE to the kit! Bring back sects and astrodyne to some capacity along with astro damage skills that look cooler than glitter. Give Sage E dykrasia stack back! its the dps healer for fudge sake!

Holy Shirt balls the community has made galaxies of text saying everything they can do to make healing great again and they're like naw its cool bruh give scholar an aoe dot on chain stratagem and call it a day. also its an angel, holy fork tower! Can I have some of the substances the healer and machinist developer is using because its gotta be laced with strong kupo nut extract! Put that in an atomizer and you'll go to ultima thule, fool.

[HyperiusUltima]

I feel your motivational analysis is correct, but your idea of what it resulted in is wrong.

In a lot of ways, what they did is the correct way of doing things. They probably looked to other MMORPGs for inspiration. Your healers' filler-damage has to be simplistically designed, and ideally they also contribute some damage even when doing their own job, in this case they went the lame route via DoTs, although some classes show extra elements like Astro bomb damage, Sage stuff, that kinda thing.

The issue comes from a combination of:
* The raw amount of buttons on each class by now. People forget this when comparing old expansions, just how simplistic job setups were back then even if the mechanics were less streamlined. In particular the oGCD-weave-mudflation had not happened at the time.
* A desire to make fights more and more complicated. This is entirely natural, and every MMORPG has to grapple with this.
* The inherent need to keep adding things to classes as the game ages, notably with each expansion.

In combination, these three result in a gameplay where each instance of damage the tank or group takes is strictly controlled (as it is already as high as can be without killing someone, basically), all extra damage can be and has to be 100% avoided as it is usually lethal damage, and every healer also has a plethora of non-GCD ways of dealing with damage on the group. Hence the meme-like "Oh a boss ability? Press next oGCD!". And with healing being relegated to the 10-20 CD-based healing tools, all GCDs are "free" to be used for damage.
With tools that are setup like in other MMOs, where you spend 25%-50% of your time dealing damage, and sometimes even less than that.

Yet in game design, what even is a "correct" way of doing things? Following trends? Picking up on things that people liked about a game that were successful? Maybe even having a bit of inspiration as well?

There's no straight and correct way of doing things if you're competing in the industry. XIV started to deviate from a WoW-like design come Stormblood, where Cross-Class was essentially what got cut and replaced with Role Actions. However, one rule of thumb we have to remember is this: While the player is not always right, listening to their feedback is what leads to longevity and trust. That's what made FFXIV huge and important back then: They had the community's trust and listened to some of the feedback people gave. However, since the Stormblood criticism of White Mage Lilies being bad(which, they seriously were bad) before the game even launched during Media Tour, they started to hide information so that their developers wouldn't lose motivation due to heavy criticism.

Yet, it is that same criticism that drives a game forward. If the player says that something is wrong with a job and its functions cause clunkiness or say, even make a job feel boring to play, then think about it: If the job is important to fill Duty Finder where you have 1T-1H-2D, then you run into a problem that needs to be solved; but, they know for a fact that even casual players will pick up the job and fill the Duty Finder this way once the veterans have moved onto other jobs. The cycle is essentially the same as the game continues; but the problem persists.

If a problem is technical in nature, then it may take some time to figure out a solution(i.e. The Data Center Problem). Yet, if it is a Role-related problem as we have now, then that is something they should look into and focus on - only because of one reason.

If a role is boring to play, the player will move into a job they feel gives them a good feeling for the time being - but if a role fundamentally lacks player engagement in the form of what the role is supposed to do, then the role is effectively defunct and needs a major change. This goes heavily into why you don't see more healers - it's why you see less healers, because any role outside of Healer has more engaging gameplay than what Healer has to offer if you don't go into EX, Savage, or Ultimate Difficulty Content. Now, with SE's current design approach with every expansion since the beginning of time, they've always used an incremental approach. Unless a job is massively having issues clearing content because of content design or job design(i.e. PLD P8S) within a set time period, then they merely can just bump the numbers up slightly and not bother with a single one of our tools. That's how they've always approached it, and will continue to do so until the next expansion because major redesigns take up a lot of their resources to make.

[Reginald_Cain]

Healer mains to each other be like

[Carighan]

Yet in game design, what even is a "correct" way of doing things? Following trends? Picking up on things that people liked about a game that were successful? Maybe even having a bit of inspiration as well?

Oh yes of course. Plus the sample set is minimal. I meant "correct" as in "looking at other MMORPGs that lived medium~long, and what worked for them vs what didn't work". That's also why I said they might even have done that, looked at how other MMOs did it.

Of course, the reason this design worked in say, EQ1 or even WoW in multiple of its design phases or DAoC or such but not in FFXIV is then the difference in context, namely the raw amount of classes and abilities and the fight design. The idea might have been the correct one, but it is either incorrectly applied here or inherently incompatible with the rest of the game.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Two things that I wanted to chime to OP.

One: shared aggro mechanic in StB never seem to be an appealing mechanism to my eyes. If it make sense at all, it feels like today's healer vs WAR/PLD HPS sentiment. I feel like it would've been better if non-tanks had less agency over aggro-plays so that tanks can have better control with it, and maybe this is part of the reason why they think about giving tanks more healing buttons. They realized how dumbed down the aggro management are in ShB, so they feel they need to compensate with something. They end up cannibalizing healer's plate while giving us nothing.

Two: the damage done by trashologifying everything into 1.50s cast time in EW and onward. It dumbs down and devalues WHM's Lilies. It turns SCH's Ruin II from 'situational gain/neutral or loss' into 'straight up loss'. They've cornered them into a design space where anything that is a 'full gcd cast' is now abhorrent.

[HyperiusUltima]

Two: the damage done by trashologifying everything into 1.50s cast time in EW and onward. It dumbs down and devalues WHM's Lilies. It turns SCH's Ruin II from 'situational gain/neutral or loss' into 'straight up loss'. They've cornered them into a design space where anything that is a 'full gcd cast' is now abhorrent.

I think that second note there has to do with people complaining about AST having a 1.5s and being able to move part of the way during a GCD compared to Broil/Glare back then. There was certainly a bit of a stink over it to the point AST already was outclassing WHM by a mile just because they failed on Lily Design back in Stormblood; it was more apparent in Stormblood, but still carried into Shadowbringers until they finally homogenized it in Endwalker without thinking. However, I think the upside of having a 1.5s GCD Cast is it now freed up some of the limitations on fight design before for healers so they're more mobile every cast, though that kind of identity could've easily been stuck with AST and SGE while SCH/WHM could've stayed at the 2s GCD to differentiate the importance of GCD Heals.

Even still, you could also say it was because they wanted to make a more oGCD-focused gameplay; especially after Stormblood came and went and showed quite a few people utilizing them to the point that their GCD heals were essentially being less and less used through good resource management and timing.

[Valence]

FF14 is now an anime game about tank protagonists where DPS jobs play the supporting cast and healers are the useless cheerleading airhead