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

[loreleidiangelo]

I stand corrected then. I swore hearing WoW raids had been considerably reduced in their difficulty similar to FFXIV. Granted, their respective tiers are expected to last longer since they won't be another until the following expansion but fair enough.

This is also incorrect though. :/ WoW has had four raids since Legion's launch last August - Emerald Nightmare, Trials of Valor (lol), Nighthold and now Tomb of Sargeras. It's not really relevant to the OP so I AM sorry to keep badgering semantics, but WoW has consistently delivered on engaging difficult raid content every three months or so with Legion.

I mean, the nuances of their raid design is a source for a whole other topic, though, and not exactly pertinent to the discussion here. In the interests of fairness, pushing progression Mythic raid healers on Tomb were actually expected to churn out SOME DPS, but nothing quite compared to the quantity we do here.

Here's the logs for all the groups that have actually uploaded their KJ (final boss) parses to Warcraftlogs. You can see that outside of some very ambitious Discipline Priests (the healer class that literally heals through DPSing enemies), all of the healers are hovering around positively MINISCULE DPS values otherwise. About 1/20th the value of actual DPS classes,
for reference. In XIV terms, this means that healers would be doing about...250 DPS on average on Neo Exdeath, and I'd hazard that the "average" healer is probably pushing closer to 1k - 4 times the value of what's expected/possible from WoW healers.

Even looking at Wildstar, which follows similar raid schematics to FFXIV/WoW...their top healers are doing about 1/10th the DPS of their top DPS - half of what we're doing here. And that's Redmoon Terror, a raid that guilds have had on farm for a while because Wildstar has such infrequent content updates due to its low population. (It came out almost exactly a year ago, to wit.)

Now, who can say what the aggregate causes of this disparity actually ARE? Could just be damage modifiers, where healers are maybe spending the same CPM doing DPS spells that we are here, just ours are insanely highly tuned? Could be that actual healing mechanics are balanced in such a manner that they're the focus of a healers' gameplay and not finding generous damage windows? Could be that resource generation in those two games is set up in a way where healers have "downtime" conserving mana, and thus don't DPS? (I know it's not that way in WoW anymore, but could be in W*.) I mean, it's hard to pin down actual factors, but if I had to hazard a guess it really is just that healing is set up to be too powerful in this game, likely because the developers didn't want newbies to fail at it and didn't quite perceive how it would affect gameplay at the higher echelons of skill. The result of that is that the actual mechanic of floofing life bars is relatively trivial, and that the true "challenge" of healing in FFXIV is to see how much time you can spend doing something that isn't commonly associated with your given role.

I mean, more to the point, I GUARANTEE the developers of this game aren't going to do anything to change that - they can prattle on about how they don't like Cleric Stance or how healer DPS isn't "expected" or WTFever, but the fact is that short of a massive blanket healer nerf to potencies and cooldowns, the healer DPS meta is here to stay and they ABSOLUTELY will not risk doing said nerf because of how it would potentially make the role "new player unfriendly"...the total antithesis of this entire games' design.

[Naunet]

Even looking at Wildstar, which follows similar raid schematics to FFXIV/WoW...their top healers are doing about 1/10th the DPS of their top DPS - half of what we're doing here. And that's Redmoon Terror, a raid that guilds have had on farm for a while because Wildstar has such infrequent content updates due to its low population. (It came out almost exactly a year ago, to wit.)

I bet a lot of those healers are also spellslingers using dual fire, which does both damage and healing and becomes a very useful spell once you obtain the slinger healing RMT rune set. I know that my only damage ability on my esper is Pyrokinetic Flame (a buff spell that attaches to an enemy, creates an aoe damage field around it, and also increases the assault power of those hitting the enemy) and if I feel like it, right clicking the mob. I might be able to do about 1-1.5k dps like this. Meanwhile comparably geared dps can pull upwards of 25-30k dps.

I wish you were wrong about your last paragraph. I hate their stance of draining all the challenge out of this game. I also disagree with the hypothetical that requiring healers to heal more instead of dpsing somehow makes it more difficult. IMO it just makes it more engaging. If I were playing Chloromancer or Discipline Priest, where dealing damage is a key component of my healing, then that would be one thing... but spamming one nuke and a dot spell does not equate to compelling gameplay.