Why healing is broken and terrible, and how to fix it...

[RichardButte]

TL;DR: Healers can and will be chastised for both choosing to DPS, or choosing NOT to DPS.

Because of the way damage works in this game (most of it is avoidable), a healer may or may not need to conserve their mana, and they won't know until the end of a fight if they should've done more damage or if they should've conserved mana because there's no way of knowing how many players are going to take avoidable damage until it either happens or doesn't.

EDIT: And to anyone insisting that doesn't happen because it's never happened to them personally (aside from that being a massive logical fallacy), there's a thread on the healer forums RIGHT NOW asking healers why they don't DPS:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-who-don-t-DPS

That one is polite about it, but not everyone is. :P



Here's how the different types of classes in FFXIV currently play:

Tanks: Constantly run through your rotation to maintain aggro and the best mitigation you can.

DPS: Constantly run through your rotation to do the best damage you can.

Healers: Let regen tick on the tank (who's taking a trickle of auto attack damage from the boss) while you either press your few DPS buttons, or conserve mana in case a DPS screws up and gets hit by an AoE.

All this while you wait for the next tank buster or unavoidable AoE that will take you 1-2 casts to completely recover from so you can go back to deciding to conserve mana or pushing a few DPS buttons.

BTW, you have an equal chance of being yelled at for DPSing or NOT DPSing, because maybe no one gets hit and you should've been DPSing the entire time, or maybe several people will get hit (even due to lag) and you're going to go OOM because you DPSed!

You have no way of knowing which was the right answer until after the fight. Have fun, healers!

Angry sarcasm aside, it all boils down to how damage is dealt to players in this game and how potent healing spells are (ie one oGCD heals 50%+ of a tank's HP so we can get right back to DPSing).

Damage either comes out in a trickle, or a deluge. Compare this to other MMOs where tanks take steady damage that healers need to constantly be healing through "maintenance rotations" that allow the healer to make interesting and engaging decisions on how they want to spend resources.

FFXIV is the only MMO I've ever played where healers are basically "Green DPS": they spend ~20% of their time healing and the other 80% dealing damage or standing there to regenerate mana. This is why I gave up my level 70 AST: once I had all of the cardplay down to muscle memory, it became clear just how bland and uninteresting healing is.

And before anyone says, "BUT SAVAGE OR SUPER SAVAGE!!!", no, you should not need to get to literally the hardest content in the entire game before healers become anything but green DPS.

My suggestions to potentially fix this, in order of most likely to happen to least:

1. Make healer damaging abilities either next to free (I'm talking like 10mp at level 70, here) or cost TP instead (since healers have a TP bar for literally no friggin' reason whatsoever).

2. Make healer DPS interact with healing in some fun way, like X% of all damage healers do is refunded to them as mana, making DPSing a net gain in mana, meaning healers are never again going to get chastised for DPSing and running out of mana, no longer having to worry that DPSing is going to spend the mana they were going to need when 3 DPS suddenly screw up and stand in the bad.

3. Make damage come out more consistently and give healers rotations like those of DPS where you're constantly pressing buttons that combo into fun decisions, like using a mana-regenerating ability attached to a weaker heal, but at very least, healers will always be pressing our buttons to HEAL instead being green DPS.

Please, ANY of the above would be better than being a green DPS with the lingering paranoia of going OOM. I've hung up my globe for a gun at this point. I don't even care that MCH is bottom of the barrel on damage parsing because, you know what? The rotation is fun and engaging.

Make healing the same and I'm sure you'll see more healers in queues as a result.