The Healer Double Standard

[Deceptus]

TL : DR "If you want to DPS play a DPS" only applies to healers and not tanks. SE took away their (Tank's) damage penalty and took away our (Healer's) damage options.

The healer DPS mentality exists because of the way the game has been designed for the last 6 years. Low sustained incoming damage, a damage spike, followed by large periods of downtime.

Apply Dot, Spam filler 12 times, repeat until dead from level 4 to level 70 just isn't fun.

Edit: This playstyle is still the same at level 80 and level 90.

We have another interview out that has a few healer related questions

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...h_yoshida_bit/

And the important part is that Yoshi-P finally states this:

Q: On to the Healers, Scholar seems to have lost a lot of DPSing abilities, we feel like this will be an adjustment where opinions will vary a lot. Can you go into detail on what the thought process was while deciding on changes needed to balance the Healers?

Yoshida: We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be, so we adjusted all 3 Healers to be more balanced while keeping their original characteristics alive.

This is the same guy that said a few days ago "We feel like Tanks are just DPS with some cooldowns, but we don't want that" and then proceeded to defend that design choice the rest of the interview.

They took away the tank damage penalty and gutted healer damage.

Imagine (if tanks) just have 1 dps button, 1 dot button, provoke, tank stance and the rest of your skills defensive CD, thats what the equivalent of what the devs are doing to the healers.

Does the possibility exist that the developers will design the game in the future with increased damage so that healers will have to heal more?

Yes

But we have history to go on and history has shown time and time again (Aurum Vale, Vault, Bardam's Mettle, Steps of Faith, Shinryu) that the average player simply can't handle advanced mechanics and high enemy NPC damage. Most never touched their Diversion ability (reduces threat on attacks for those reading in the future, this was removed in 5.0). Most have no idea that Bloodbath or Second Wind exist.

It's becoming more and more clear that these developers have no idea how healers play or what to do with them:



Another pretty blatant example of a healer double standard.

In the latest Live Letter it was announced that

1) Healer MP will be capped at 10K mana
2) Piety will affect MP regen rates.
3) Main stat Materia can't be melded and will no longer be obtainable

Ok Cool. So all we have to do is start stacking piety to increase our mana regen to offset the loss of Refresh and Mana shift. Sounds reasonable right?

Except Piety is a terrible stat, just like tenacity is. It doesn't give enough back to justify it's melding.

Stuff like this is why so many players think that the developers are absolutely disconnected from the player base and have no idea what they're doing or have poor team communication. It's not the first time Yoshi's been caught flat footed on what his team does.

Yoshi-P on Red Mages (2 part GIF):



Meanwhile on Scholar



Double Standard on healing reporting

I spent a bit scouring the four major interviews with YoshiP following the media tour and release of role-action information, and out of roughly 223 questions there were 92 question related to roles/classes.

Of those 92 questions, only 3 were focused on healers. And they all came from a single interview.

Now, this may be somewhat set off balance by the introduction of a new tanking/DPS job. But having an entire role that's undergoing some hefty changes and was already in something of an uproar/fervor over the lack of information following the Fan-Fests and previous live letters, having only 3.26% of your role questions being healer oriented is insufficient. In fact, some interviews went out of their way to avoid addressing healers ("As for the job balance, setting aside healers...") in favour of other roles.
Simply put, we've been left largely in the dark to stew over the changes with little official statements on our concerns, and that's not something you want to have happen with your consumers.

(emphasis mine)


I'm not saying healers have to be DPS machines, but I want our jobs to be fun and regarding healers, there's nothing to do after everyone is topped up but do damage.

And Apply Dot, Spam filler 12 times, repeat until dead just isn't fun.

Because ultimately:

The real question about healer DPS has always been, and still remains: What else do they expect us to do during downtime?

Most people don't want DPS options for the sake of having big numbers, but because there's literally nothing else to do most of the time.

Update for 2021 Patch 5.0: This problem is still occurring. Our basic DPS skills are still a single dot and a single spam from lvl 4 to lvl 80. When the FFXIV devs say they are concerned about healer "accessibility" they don't feel the same way about tanks.

Update for 2022 Patch 6.0: This problem is still occurring. Our basic DPS skills are still a single dot and a single spam from lvl 4 to lvl 90.

What this shows is that a healer spend 70% of their entire casts spamming a single button only to out damage a tank who was using 13 abilities. The mage had as many Glare attacks as the PLD had auto attacks.


Source: Nizzi

I did a 'lol who needs tanks' Titan HM in 2.0 on WHM using Medica II to build a comical agro lead over a group compared mostly of the EU 1st BCOB team's DPS. Medica II got changed to prevent this a week or two later.

People started using Summoner's Titan to tank RamuhEX removing the need for a tank there. This also got nerfed a week or two later.

Figure out a way to do an Extreme or Savage without Tanks and you can bet it's going to get nerfed ASAP. Do the same with no healers and SE don't seem to bat an eye lid at it.

Update for 2022:

SE for a long time has said they don't want to change healers in the middle of an expansion for this reason or that reason, yet have zero issues doing massive changes for both DPS and Tanks. In Live Letter 70 Yoshi-P said (Paraphrasing)

"Yes we understand we're doing these changes to job right before Ultimate is released but we're confident in players abilities to adjust."

Except they explictly said they werent doing any drastic changes to healers since it was too close to ultimat....yet thyere fine making drastic changes to dps jobs? Yeah no sorry, its just more stalling being done by Yoshi p because he has no idea wtf hes doing in regards to healers(and other things if we look at the latest hrothgar controversy." We've been told for 6+ years to just wait, wait till this patch, wait till this expansion, and theyve done nothing. Only have made things worse.

[Ilenya]

It feels like, in a vacuum he's not wrong. Tanks have to be able to DPS due to how Enmity works, but if tanks job is supposed to be just soaking up damage, they would need to have almost nothing but "Increases Enmity on target, increases Enmity in area, Lowers target's enmity" skills that do no damage. I bet tanks would absolutely riot if that happened, though.

[guardin]

It feels like, in a vacuum he's not wrong. Tanks have to be able to DPS due to how Enmity works, but if tanks job is supposed to be just soaking up damage, they would need to have almost nothing but "Increases Enmity on target, increases Enmity in area, Lowers target's enmity" skills that do no damage. I bet tanks would absolutely riot if that happened, though.

if you play your job skillfully as intended, you should be able to heal and dps efficiently.

[Ilenya]

if you play your job skillfully as intended, you should be able to heal and dps efficiently.

Hi, I'm a SCH main who DPS's when I can. I think I am aware of that. There is a reason I was saying "In a vacuum."

We know SE will never put the damage in casual content to such that anyone couldn't viably heal it. The few times they did people screamed for nerfs (Steps of Faith, Shinryu).

I am about 95% sure the issue with Steps of Faith was "We can't reset when it's obvious we're not going to win," especially with the fact that dead people could quickly get up and back in the fight.

[reyre]

I am about 95% sure the issue with Steps of Faith was "We can't reset when it's obvious we're not going to win," especially with the fact that dead people could quickly get up and back in the fight.

Ok so they did not changed the HP or overal outgoing dmg of stepes of faith? They just made it easier to go back into the fight or gave the players a easier way to restart the instance?

[Ilenya]

Ok so they did not changed the HP or overal outgoing dmg of stepes of faith? They just made it easier to go back into the fight or gave the players a easier way to restart the instance?

Pretty sure they just lowered the boss hp and/or increased the damage the various mechanics did to the boss. Hard to gauge when gear increases happen.

[Kabooa]

Ok so they did not changed the HP or overal outgoing dmg of stepes of faith? They just made it easier to go back into the fight or gave the players a easier way to restart the instance?

As someone who did it when it was in its raw form, Steps of Faith didn't fail because of healers not doing damage. It failed because the mechanics were more influential to damage than anything else.

If you weren't killing adds with cannons, you were going to wipe, because the damage to kill them without cannons meant you weren't plinking the boss. It also meant your npcs were more likely to die to their AoE

If you missed a dragon killer, you were probably going to wipe.

The actual damage going out was minimal, and it was -actually more important to heal- than do healer damage, because if you got a stack of 30 NPCs going, you were adding a huge amount of damage. Each npc may have only been about 50-60 DPS but get 30 of them rolling and they would wreck that boss's face.

[Evumeimei]

It feels like, in a vacuum he's not wrong. Tanks have to be able to DPS due to how Enmity works, but if tanks job is supposed to be just soaking up damage, they would need to have almost nothing but "Increases Enmity on target, increases Enmity in area, Lowers target's enmity" skills that do no damage. I bet tanks would absolutely riot if that happened, though.

My friend who plays tank (WAR) doesn't see the issues with the healer changes. I told him, "what if you only had one 2-3 ability combo to keep aggro and do damage and the rest were just 'tanking' abilities." I think tanks would complain if that happened.

[Kabooa]

My friend who plays tank (WAR) doesn't see the issues with the healer changes. I told him, "what if you only had one 2-3 ability combo to keep aggro and do damage and the rest were just 'tanking' abilities." I think tanks would complain if that happened.

Have you ever considered that vocal tanks don't represent every tank?

You tell me I get more traditionally tank stuff like counter attacks, target debuffing, ally protection, and short term active mitigation, and I'll be the happiest tank.

[Ilenya]

Have you ever considered that vocal tanks don't represent every tank?

You tell me I get more traditionally tank stuff like counter attacks, target debuffing, ally protection, and short term active mitigation, and I'll be the happiest tank.

With a comment like this, I have to ask...Is it normal in most MMOs for 'healers' to really just...Heal? Is that common? I came from City of Heroes before this, where even the most healery of healer sets had buffs to utilize and attacks to work with.