New healer ideas?

[Anova]

Each healer needs a core set of abilities that will naturally make all of them play similar. They need a cure, regen, cleanse, raise, AoE heal, MP restoration/cost mitigation, healing potency buff, and offensive skills in order to work in this game.

They don't necessarily have to play different, but rather 'feel' different. Giving each of them variations to their fundamental abilities goes a long way in making this happen. Such claim only needs to go as far as a WHM, SCH, and AST's very basic heal spell. They all do the same thing, but make each healer feel very different. Further diversity is where balance issues come in, because when you give one healer something another doesn't have, the other healer(s) need to bring something to the table that compensates for it.

I think an easy way for SE to plug and play with the healers is with their offense. The shear number of DPS jobs shows why this would be so easy. It's just more flexible, and each healer has their own flashy way of doing damage. It's pretty much that way now, and the cause of the imbalance is due to the utility each healer brings. It honestly should be an easy fix imo, but SE just loves to complicate things.

I think a healer like dancer can really bring something different to the table. Those core abilities would still be there, but they would have a different way to go about it, but the HUGE difference would be that we would have a healer that heals damage through either melee or ranged melee attacks. I believe ranged would be better as FF healers typically don't belong in the fray.

The issue on job mechanics for ff14 healers is actually two-fold: AST have cards for buffs, WHM have lilies for CDs, and SCH uses aetherflow management. Most healers also have a secondary mechanic that often appears as a buff, such as Nocturnal/Diurnal, Confession and Free Cure procs, or the presence of a Fairy (which is effectively half of a character). There's a lot of room for creativity on this one, and there have been several proposals, especially for dancer.

As for the healer meta in FF14, which I think the both of you are talking about, there is a demand to move away from heals-over-time and barriers to something new. I think we all understand that healers need to be able to recover hp on a single target and in an area, to remove status effects, and raise players up. Without those core abilities, it just wouldn't be a healer in a MMO trinity. The question instead, is how do we make a healer that doesn't rely on either regen or barrier to help heal through the current or future content.

A damage-leech healer is a popular idea, but I really doubt it would ever be implemented in FF14 because the devs are really cautious about damage creep. It was an unintended consequence of the 2.0 SCH release (because they paired it with ACN and SMN), and it seems they devs have been somewhat split on how to deal with the balance in the job design ever since, hence the SMN and SCH's slightly schizophrenic gameplay. The same could be said to a lesser extent about Warrior as well.

One new idea that's seen some traction are healing orbs that a player can scatter around in an area and with whom anyone can pick up. This is especially useful with a more mobile fighting style and could work very well with a melee healer. This is because the melee healer can simply drop healing orbs that melee or tanks can pick up later for as much healing as they need. Of course, the healer can still provide more conventional targeted heals, but this on-demand burst healing would give the healing class an unique 'dps' phase where they are just trying to gain enough resources to drop enough healing orbs in time for the next damage spike. Mystics from Tera, and to some extent, Medics from Wildstar, are some examples of this type of healing.

[Opus]

A healing ability that restores missing health of a party member by partially draining the rest of the party. Call it like Equistasis?

Scenario:

1) Tank gets hit by a tank buster, e.g. unmitigated vrilled Chanchala Pull of Light
2) Instant cast Equistasis
3) Tanks gets 50k heal at the expense of 25k damage shared among the rest

It could be a heal or a shield.