Nerfing Healer Role Through Content

[Fernosaur]

Silence isn't THAT difficult to have, though.You have PLD, you have NIN, you have BRD and MCH, and you have the trainwreck that is SCH's silence, lmao. There was a particularly deadly Silence mechanic in A6S. Of course, the deadly part was nerfed once A6S made it into Duty Finder, precisely because of the reasons cited above: you could get a party without Silence, and then you're fucked. As Tint said, though, you could have used Silence potions for that, but that's having too much faith in the DF playerbase.

[Tsilyi]

For example, there's no reason that in Sohm Al Hard I should go in as SCH and almost never leave Cleric Stance, even at i267. Selene should not be able to keep the party alive by herself, in boss fights especially. At that point it's too little damage.

you have to consider the minimum ilvl required for this dungeon, I'm not sure you can realistically say "even at i267" you are 37 points over the required ilvl for the dungeon and (i think) 22 ilvls over the level of the drops. then again, we weren't really having problems at i230 depending on player skill either, did have to heal slightly more though.

also you have interesting ideas for savage raids and such but i think that they would require fair reworks of the tanking classes as the average mitigation considering cooldowns are relatively equal amongst the tanks themselves and it might require a mana regen or mana pool rework for the healers if they have to heal that much. a good idea might be something similar to sophia where the TB applies a debuff that (in theory, less in practice, especially now) should require the tanks to at least swap or become hard or impossible to heal.

[technole]

Infrit EX, and A7S are still among my favorites because of healer "swap" mechanics. Getting put into situations where you have to be the only healer while the other has to go-away or they will wipe the party has always been fun. A7S was a more refined version since we had kitty, jails, and balls. So healing-on-the-move was a big emphasis. This was a real good Astro fight where you got to use every skill in your toolkit to it's potential.

Levi Ex was trying to do something similar but with SCH fairy focusing the other tank, and Stoneskin, you were able to get around the healer stun. You had to be really bad White Mage, or the party being that bad to ever hit the maximum stacks.

To a lesser extent, A12S tries to have a healer "swap". Where one healer (usually Astro or Scholar) is solo healing outside with crystal damage, a tank buster, and mitigating the shared heat damage. But with BiS ilvl and a good raid this is completely cheesed with the healer time-gate add being LB'd down by a DPS. The other healer can just stay out as well, or go into a DPS time gate to nuke an add. Maybe if Alex Prime put some sort of "go away" debuff on certain players where they forced them to go into time gates this would have worked better.

You can't count dungeons as much of a challenge, considering the high-end of max ilvl is already over-geared for them. However only a partial chunk of the general population plays up to their ilvl potential. So there is that factor. Although I like more of those large and damaging pulls like the last ones in Library HM. Those things still hurt at i270 tank BiS without decent cool down use (usually use an immunity and hope ranged will LB that junk).

Come to think about it, Library HM was the last decent dungeon we got in HW. The current dungeon line-up is rather poor.

Silence isn't THAT difficult to have, though.You have PLD, you have NIN, you have BRD and MCH, and you have the trainwreck that is SCH's silence, lmao. There was a particularly deadly Silence mechanic in A6S. Of course, the deadly part was nerfed once A6S made it into Duty Finder, precisely because of the reasons cited above: you could get a party without Silence, and then you're fucked. As Tint said, though, you could have used Silence potions for that, but that's having too much faith in the DF playerbase.

Hey now, I had a few clutch Selene Silence saves for Mind Blast back in Midas. Now A8S version, we needed Eos during bot-craze, if the BRD/MCH/NIN missed then I wanted to beat their head with a stick.

[DaulBan]

Honestly if the healing requirement was sorta stiff but you could still DPS that's fine with me. I would rather be able to contribute more and get it done faster than be stick afk spamming the most MP efficient heal I have.

Regardless as long as stuns work it's still just gonna be holyholyholyholy for me anyways.

[Tint]

Honestly if the healing requirement was sorta stiff but you could still DPS that's fine with me. I would rather be able to contribute more and get it done faster than be stick afk spamming the most MP efficient heal I have.

Regardless as long as stuns work it's still just gonna be holyholyholyholy for me anyways.

so holyholyholyholy is good and curecurecurecure is being afk?

[Assirra]

I dont really get the impression that healers want harder heal checks its plenty of healers that still struggle with healing a tank on large pulls , I dont really think we need it to change

Isn't part of the issue is that you need large pulls to get even a challenge in some way?
I wish this game had something like mythic+ from wow legion which make dungeons an actual fun challenge again as a healer.

[DaulBan]

so holyholyholyholy is good and curecurecurecure is being afk?

Because holyholyholy gets your through faster, is actually roughly the number of holys you're going to go for depending on MP on a pull, and still requires you to pay attention to your tank's health as the stun fades. Or in a fight like A9S the stun doesn't even work so you're still dumping a ton of MP for damage while still monitoring the tank's health for the entire duration regardless. It's so expensive that you have to actually plan during a dungeon what you're going to do because going sub-1000 MP is quite easy to do but you still can't let the tank or anyone else die.

And honestly the best way to tank or heal (in my opinion) is the one that gets the most damage so of course I'm going to spam DPS moves as much as I can, but those are always more risky and require more attention than the easy alternatives (tank stance, shoving cures down the throat of a tank at 90% HP).

[NocturniaUzuki]

Honestly, I don't think much needs to change.

Healing has always been about keeping other people alive. So naturally, when you play with high-skill players, even at end-game content like a12s, healing is a breeze... because everyone is competent and knows what they're doing. If it becomes harder for healers to keep the party alive, then that raises the bar on the rest of the party to play flawlessly. So it really just equates to making dungeons harder in general. The more experienced you become at something, the more boring it tends to get in general. It feels less intense and exciting when you've broken everything down into a perfect set of choreography, from where to move when, to exactly when to cast what healing spell when.

If you want to experience more intense healing, play with less experienced players. One thing I enjoy doing is running my WT extreme trials on DF. Yeah, it's kind of like being in a learning party. But it's a lot harder to keep people alive when they're getting hit all the time and/or building vulnerability stacks. And, honestly, there's not much to do at endgame in FF14 either. In other MMOs I've played, I can always just farm gold to buy various things, from fashion to gear for alts. And because it's all really expensive, it keeps me grinding stuff out for longer. But since gear is ridiculously easy to obtain in FF14 compared to other games, and gold has virtually no use outside of fashion (which most people only really want one outfit of anyways), there is nothing to do except... have fun. And focusing on having fun is the way it was meant to be anyways! So go hop in that DF TitanEX queue that rewards you with no worthwhile items! Because in the end, it's the fun that counts.

[Sebazy]

Another alternative option for properly intensive healing, get 8 like minded people who want to be challenged by something different and queue for 8 man stuff at min ilvl.

Even good old Titan HM is utterly vicious done like this.

[technole]

Yeah, we recently cleared Titan Extreme minimum ilevel because of no content to do lately. Of course, stomps gives us healers the stomach ulcers and jumps must be mitigated just like A8S J-Kicks, if you want a comparison of the heavy damage. It also kind of bites because the min ilvl is lower than the gear we naturally had when it was released (i90).

Word of advice as well when doing this stuff, try to scrap-up decent gear stats for doing such minimum level encounters. Since you are sync'd you can have a real "BiS" to make it more palable.