Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[GrimGale]

To be honest, compared to WoW healing mechanics in this game are utterly boring. Everybody has an AOE heal centered around caster (Medica,Succor,Helios and variants), a single target weak (Cure, Physick, Benefic) and a single target stronger heal GCDs (CureII BeneficII ) . Then you get an instant OGC instant (Tetragrammaton, Lustrate, Essential Dignity) , and an AOE instant centered around caster (Assize, Indomitability). Then to "spice" things up, we get Shield with heal or Hot with heal (Aspected Benefic, Adloquium, Regen). (And in Shadowbringers those two things get rather homogenized again.)

Then you get a few more "unique" spells: Excogitation, Earthly Star and Asylum which I hoped we'd get more of in Shadowbringers, but nope. They want to emphasize the "Pure healer" aspect of healers but healing hasn't changed mechanically. It's still the same splash spells, and the little things that are unique and interesting, like the Horoscope mechanic where you apply a heal and then you "charge" it up with an aoe to have it burst with extra healing is handed to both WHM and AST and on a rather long CD. Most interesting spells are on long CDs, so most of the fights you are stuck with spamming boring press-button-cast heal abilities.

I WoW you had bouncing heals, Dps-healing, stacking hots then using a spell to cancel them to apply heal in a burst, chain healing, fountains of healing, duplicating healing on specific targets marked, channelled healing streams.

But then, as opposed to WoW healing, in FFXIV you would spice things up by weaving other actions in, support or damaging actions, and healing would turn into this frantic swithing on targets, enemies and allies, who to heal and who to damage, who to buff and who to focus down. It made healing much more interesting.

Point being, I think pure healing will be boring, because the tools we were given to do so are boring.

[Drayce1]

Please read my comment above regarding why I believe healers won’t “have to actually heal” and let me know if you still believe that they will and that I am wrong. I just don’t see it.

Oh they will. Sorry but the fail green dps b.s gone on long enough. Time to take the toys away.

[Reiryuu]

Oh they will. Sorry but the fail green dps b.s gone on long enough. Time to take the toys away.

I have a thread for you to read: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Titania-Fight

TL;DR: No, things are about the same as they are in Stormblood now.

[Nedkel]

If they make damage higher so healer has to spend 90% time healing, it would actually kill the diversity in duties, not allowing for aoe mechanics, because that would be too much for a average skilled and geared teams.
Even today healers do no have easy job to keep everyone up in trials or raids, especially in alliance raids where there a ton of people dying and taking damage and you have to keep up healing them all from it.
Now imagine how it will look if a healer was not that good and would have a weak gear or dps taking all damage possible or tank not using CD's.
There would be wipes non stop.
I personally never played a healer, but as a tank i could tell you there are a lot of healers who arent the masters of their profession and their mistakes causes a wipes a lot of times. Bigger damage means more strain on tanks and healers at the same time, and it could ruin duties for pugs.
Healer had a lot of downtime with a skilled and geared teams, there is really nothing much they could do about it, the differences between someone with gear and skill and someone who has none of it is like 2-3 times on the DPS so its obvious that a healer at one point will have less work to do.

[Bahati]

If they make damage higher so healer has to spend 90% time healing, it would actually kill the diversity in duties, not allowing for aoe mechanics, because that would be too much for a average skilled and geared teams.
Even today healers do no have easy job to keep everyone up in trials or raids, especially in alliance raids where there a ton of people dying and taking damage and you have to keep up healing them all from it.
Now imagine how it will look if a healer was not that good and would have a weak gear or dps taking all damage possible or tank not using CD\\\\'s.
There would be wipes non stop.
I personally never played a healer, but as a tank i could tell you there are a lot of healers who arent the masters of their profession and their mistakes causes a wipes a lot of times. Bigger damage means more strain on tanks and healers at the same time, and it could ruin duties for pugs.
Healer had a lot of downtime with a skilled and geared teams, there is really nothing much they could do about it, the differences between someone with gear and skill and someone who has none of it is like 2-3 times on the DPS so its obvious that a healer at one point will have less work to do.

I would be so much happier if this was the case and everyone was expected to play thier role in a more concrete way. Even in alliance raids where several people are dying at once that just makes healing more engaging and gives DPS who have raise in their toolkit an opportunity to support the party. Non-healers would have more expectation to dodge mechanics, especially DPS with the "healer adjust" mentality. They would also be 100% responsible for DPS like they should be and would need to worry about movement and damage rather than just nuking while standing in aoes and expecting to be revived constantly. The whole we need healers to DPS to pass DPS checks would no longer be a thing.

[ADVSS]

just nuking while standing in aoes and expecting to be revived constantly. The whole we need healers to DPS to pass DPS checks would no longer be a thing.

Either this means we wouldnt need healers period, or that you dont want to be responsible for healing the dps so they can - pass the dps checks -
This is super confusing to me. You cant have one side, without the other. What they are going to do, to make you happy, is bump the incoming amount of unavoidable damage, now you really will be forced to be responsible when a dps check fails because you'll be expected to heal them from damage- damage they are unable to avoid-that is all. Itll be no more enganging than when you can literally see a drg eat an avoidable aoe, and have already known, probably chuckling(at least that would amuse me but everyones different), that theyre going down. So what you want is for more avoidable damage and more downtime to dps as a healer, or do you want avoidable aoes to disappear so you have to heal more frequently anyway?

Spoiler Alert: You most likely will have to raise more often, because it will be unavoidable.

[Nedkel]

I would be so much happier if this was the case and everyone was expected to play thier role in a more concrete way. Even in alliance raids where several people are dying at once that just makes healing more engaging and gives DPS who have raise in their toolkit an opportunity to support the party. Non-healers would have more expectation to dodge mechanics, especially DPS with the "healer adjust" mentality. They would also be 100% responsible for DPS like they should be and would need to worry about movement and damage rather than just nuking while standing in aoes and expecting to be revived constantly. The whole we need healers to DPS to pass DPS checks would no longer be a thing.

Of course healers with already high ilvls will be happy to be able to heal a lot more than they do DPS, but what with the healers that are not geared?
Its really hard to balance healers so that all healers could heal all the time, their gameplay depends on so many factors that is impossible to balance dungeon/raid for healers with all ilvls brackets and make them heal for the most of the time. Your gameplay as a healer is based mostly on the performance of your team, if your team is weak, weak geared, weak skilled and soaks up all the damage you will have an opportunity to heal non stop thats how it often looks like in alliance raids, but if your team is going to be really good and they know their stuff, then you will be left with pretty much dpsing most of the times.
SE could give more unavoidable AOE damage in duties, but if it will become any harder than it is now, it could hurt pugs and people playing casually. They also could increase the difficulty of high end content on savage raids to give a healers an option to play harder content where they could heal more. However it will still ruin pugs that are running it, because you really cant balance healers having to heal non stop and dps having to meet a dps check, it will multiply the difficulty levels if it will be easier to die in them and still include dps checks for a team.
You could give encounter a source of constant damage that is being delivered to a tank, but what if a tank does not meet the expectations and its dying faster than you could heal? Then its another ruined encounter.
The only way to solve it is to nerf healing abilities to the ground, take away scaling, give more base healing and rework encounters into the boring and stale WoW style ones, which will ultimately kill this game all together.

Its far better to allow good healers in good teams to deal significant amount of damage, instead of trying to figure it out how to make them healing non stop, thats all.

[Bahati]

Of course healers with already high ilvls will be happy to be able to heal a lot more than they do DPS, but what with the healers that are not geared?
Its really hard to balance healers so that all healers could heal all the time, their gameplay depends on so many factors that is impossible to balance dungeon/raid for healers with all ilvls brackets and make them heal for the most of the time. Your gameplay as a healer is based mostly on the performance of your team, if your team is weak, weak geared, weak skilled and soaks up all the damage you will have an opportunity to heal non stop thats how it often looks like in alliance raids, but if your team is going to be really good and they know their stuff, then you will be left with pretty much dpsing most of the times.
SE could give more unavoidable AOE damage in duties, but if it will become any harder than it is now, it could hurt pugs and people playing casually. They also could increase the difficulty of high end content on savage raids to give a healers an option to play harder content where they could heal more. However it will still ruin pugs that are running it, because you really cant balance healers having to heal non stop and dps having to meet a dps check, it will multiply the difficulty levels if it will be easier to die in them and still include dps checks for a team.
You could give encounter a source of constant damage that is being delivered to a tank, but what if a tank does not meet the expectations and its dying faster than you could heal? Then its another ruined encounter.
The only way to solve it is to nerf healing abilities to the ground, take away scaling, give more base healing and rework encounters into the boring and stale WoW style ones, which will ultimately kill this game all together.

Its far better to allow good healers in good teams to deal significant amount of damage, instead of trying to figure it out how to make them healing non stop, thats all.

Regarding newer or ungeared Healers having a rough time due to higher damage output I don't believe that would be a major issue. It always will be a factor just like it is now and has always been until skills are learned and gear is obtained. I would rather new healers have the opportunity to stand "idly" and learn mechanics in down time so they can improve rather than have the expectation from other players they need to be DPSing or they are lazy.

Healers need to learn mechanics just like everyone else but they also need to divide their attention between enemies and their party. That being the case I'd rather healers not have to worry about DPS just to meet checks at the same time. Higher enemy damage and needing to focus on the job of healing and support is much preferred to bring some off record hybrid class with no clear direction but a ton of pressure from the player base.

[Sylve]

Of course healers with already high ilvls will be happy to be able to heal a lot more than they do DPS, but what with the healers that are not geared?

Welcome to the fundamental problem with Healers in how MMOs currently function.

Because we all want to 'feel powerful' with ilvl upgrades. For DDs, that means doing more damage. For Tanks, incoming damage goes down while outgoing damage goes up. And Healers … Well, as our own healing power rises, the Tanks damage intake is going down... So we get stronger and heal less often.

Only Healers have this problem.
Thing is, the solution is to boost the amount of Healing a Healer is required to perform. Problem is, Tanks wont like increasing their ilvl and NOT seeing a reduction in damage intake.
WoW went the wrong way and turned healing into an endless session of whack-a-mole. Watch any raid footage and you can see the entire raids HP fluctuating madly for the whole fight.

Bosses don't need to hit harder, they need to hit the party frequently and unpredictably.

Also removing the second Healer from full parties in such a scenario would give Healers more room to actually utilize the full suite of tools we have for keeping the party off the floor.

[Kalise]

Welcome to the fundamental problem with Healers in how MMOs currently function.

Because we all want to 'feel powerful' with ilvl upgrades. For DDs, that means doing more damage. For Tanks, incoming damage goes down while outgoing damage goes up. And Healers … Well, as our own healing power rises, the Tanks damage intake is going down... So we get stronger and heal less often.

Only Healers have this problem.

Actually, Tanks often also fall into having a problem.

They gear up and take less damage... But face tougher enemies that hit harder and thus they are at a net neutral. Outside making previous encounters less interesting.

Also, there's that thing where devs just give Tanks more HP. No defences, just more HP. New gear? Only stat on it, Stamina. GG. This I assume is to make Healers feel more powerful, because their new bigger heals are doing more because the Tank is taking more damage because HP isn't defense, it's only buffer >.>

The other thing that happens is that when Tanks gear up... They gear AWAY from defence and into offense. This puts more onus onto healers needing to heal more (But also can actually increase personal mitigation in certain circumstances)

It's all a bit of a mess that no MMO has actually figured out the solution to, they all just copy the same faulty design that has persisted through the years...

* DPS get more damage as they gear up - This is fine and dandy. This is what the role is for and it is universally useful and will always have a feel good impact when you hit EVERYTHING harder.

* Tanks get... More tankiness? Which often is negated by increasing difficulty of fights as you progress... Or by Healers healing more anyway... Otherwise it's just more damage because damage is universally useful (Especially for holding aggro over the increasingly strong DPS)

* Healers get... More healing? But this can often just simply turn into overhealing. Especially if fights include massive HP swings (I.e. When a WHM uses Benediction on a 1HP Warrior that just soaked a TB with Holmgang... Having more healing doesn't do anything here, because it's already a 100% max HP heal on a literally 1HP target)

Tanks and Healers are less straightforward in their progression... Heck, even if Tanks didn't get tankier then healers are stuck in an odd situation, because if they can heal through encounters at lower gear levels... Then higher gear levels would still end up being a lot of overhealing wouldn't it?

Which is usually why in most MMO's when healers get more gear, it simply translates into them doing more DPS because of spending less time actually healing...

Ideally, a company needs to figure out a system where Tanks and Healers have their own, dedicated, infinitely scaling way of gearing. That doesn't run into the issues of Tank defence vs Healer healing vs Encounter damage all working to make things really convoluted and often causing Tank and/or Healer item level increases to not have the same feel good impact that DPS get with their straightforward damage dealing capacity.