Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[tikiwiki]

all healers having the same damage spells when we have so much downtime is an issue its incredibly boring and makes me not care what healer i play since 90% of the time ill be playing the same class and spamming broil/glare/malefic

[Exiled_Tonberry]

WHM
The thing is, healer DPS is boring, but this is especially true for WHM. Unlike SCH with Energy Drain and managing fairy or AST and the card system, WHM has nothing extra to them. It's so unbearably simple.
When they take this awful dps rotation with nothing extra and force all our utility into it... despite being very strong, it's just awful to play and the glare spam really gets to you after a while.

If WHM is going to focus on damage over utility, they should at least work towards making it interesting to use.

[Saefinn]

I'll talk about SCH as it was my main.
Positives: Seraph looks cool, more mitigation is the direction I'd like to see of SCH, so it is good they got more in the way of shields. The storylines are always good.
Negatives: Too much downtime in general, I'd probably favour weakening some heals in favour of mitigation. And there's little to do in the down time. Ergo I get bored playing it. Healing is too easy, DPS too monotonous. I don't have to put much thought into what I'm doing.

Suggestions for improvement:
Rely more on mitigation. weaker pure heals versus AST or WHM, but good mitigation tools make up for it. Kind of like an evolution of 2.0 SCH, but more suited to today's mode of play. I figure SE may have their reasons for removing our DPS toolkit and I'm not sore in the sense I wanna go big deeps! Because that's still a thing people can do, it's just less interesting to. I am willing to compromise and say maybe if we want to move away from a deeps focus, I'd like to see healer roles, in general, gravitate to more of a support mentality. AST is already on its way there. Specifically for SCH, I think replacing their DPS toolkit with debuffs would work for the job and could include mitigation as a part of it. The 2.0 DPS rotation included debuffs, I'd be okay if they were brought back but without being a part of a DPS rotation.

I'd also like to see even experienced healers to be more engaged with healing outside of EX and Savage content, because we have to level, we do roulettes and so on. One proposal I have is to have a trait learned for when you hit current content, for example, in ShB it could be learned at level 71. When healers get balance for new content it seems that lower content has felt less engaging. Let's say hypothetically we could do a 20% flat nerf to heals and regain that potency at level 71. Healing would need to be more engaged at lower levels. I'm not saying this would be the "ideal" solution, but I think one way it could be approached without necessarily rethinking how they've designed the job for new content. I am sure better ideas could be made.


In talking about making healing more challenging, there is a trap here to simply make stuff hit harder without as much thought behind the process.
The great thing I feel about the dev team is that they increase difficulty in content through mechanics and add penalties for failure greater. An example of what I felt to be good healer mechanic design was the Titan Ex fight, a SCH/WHM set up was great, because the SCH would focus the tankbusters, and mitigate the flurry of damage coming in from Titan whilst the WHM could keep everybody's health topped up. And at times the tank's health would be lower before Mountain Buster hits, so a SCH and WHM could work together. I think how healsets respect mechanics or how mechanics respect healsets can help them feel engaging.

[Connor]

Well, I think the main issue is that they won’t give healers anything to do during downtime other than DPS, which, is never really going to be ‘fun’ because healers can’t have full DPS rotations because of balance. And with healing oGCDs being ridiculously overpowered, you have basically no uptime required on gcd healing spells. Which means more downtime, and SE is just like ‘lol just DPS harder’.

I love healing, but it feels like chasing dragons. You get that one party where everyone is like asleep or something. You’re having to cast Raises, keep the party healed, use both GCD and oGCDs and be strategic with positioning, how you use your spells, what you’re weaving and what you’re weaving with, maximising uptime on DoTs, look for opportunities to use filler attack spells. But then you try the fight again and everyone has better gear this time. They don’t die anymore, and their shiney new gear makes their HP and defense much higher, so they can survive attacks with less healing/mitigation that before. You’re no longer using any GCDs on healing, and it becomes gradually replaced by DPS spells.

If you ask me, but I don’t think there’s any point in the healing role existing if they just make us DPS in a green skin, which isn’t far off what we are now, just with extremely simplistic rotations. I’d much rather see healers get support options to use during downtime. Best provisional idea i have as an example would be adding the spells into the role skills like ‘Bravery’, ‘Haste’, ‘Protect (PvP version)’. Give them standard gcd cast time, 400 MP cost and like 30 second duration. And I’m not saying that having a ‘DPS healer’ job would be wrong somehow, because they should cater to every playstyle, but right now there’s only one that’s acceptable because of the game’s design, and it’s the DPS healer playstyle. I don’t think that kind of playstyle should be a baseline for healers; they should have the healing kits as the baseline then split off into DPS / support / mitigation / etc, rather than having the one kind for all of them.

I guess what I mean is, the DPS kits for healers are just basic direct damage and damage over time, and I think it’d make healers much more fun if there was some sort of interaction with the healing kits. I mean, if they want the DPS healer playstyle as the baseline surely we should have more interesting attack spells that have some interaction with our healing kits, like if Malefic IV inflicted Slow or Glare inflicted Blind (not very worthwhile status effects but just examples to try and make what I mean make sense lol)

Basically my issue is that we have nothing to do during the huge amounts of healer downtime we get but SE just tries to cover it up by slapping DPS spells on healers, reducing and then homogenising the spells instead of making the healing mechanics fun and engaging or allowing healers to contribute in a meaningful way outside of DPS spam. Or maybe a better way to say it would be, my issue with healers is that the whole DPS thing is just a cover up developers are using for how easy and weirdly uninvolved healing. And it’s compounded by the fact that if you’d prefer a different healer playstyle, you don’t have any real options without becoming a huge detriment to your party

Tl;dr: my issue with healers is that they aren’t giving us enough interesting abilities beyond ‘small heal, big heal, filler attack, DoT, etc’

[Dynia]

I played all 3 healers and I can post healer main problems in ff 14:

- dungeons is way too easy even for casuals rly, if you want easy dungeons for story ok, but give us harder version of dungeons with 2x exp, 2x loot etc, or just M+ from wow ...
- healers are not healers actually they are hybrids dps/healer, how to solove this ? give us old cleric stance that can't be change in combat like astro stances but in exchange give us some cool buffs/debbufs/ccs

- in exchange of new cleric stance give us combo system same as dps have: for example you can't cast cure II 1st, for casting cure II you need cast cure I to proc cure II etc is just examples don't need to look exacly same ...

another mechanic would be combo cure I > cure II or cure I would be buffed like 50% mana cut or give 5-10% power attack to healed targed or armor or any buff (this is only example how healing combo would work)
combo would be cure I > cure 1 with buff > cure I with buff for healer like 10% healing power ETC

aoe combos would be medica > medica 2 with small party buff > medica again big party buff 80% mana cut etc (you could combo medica with medica II too etc,) or regen from whm 1st regen is normal one, 2nd regen heal faster more ticks , another regen would give some buff like barrier some kind etc is just random ideas not need to do same ...

we could use same system for buff combo too, there is shitload of possibilites

I would see that system on harder dungeon content similar to m+ from wow ...

another thing, don't make all 3 healers the same balance them but ... make 3 healers with diffrent skill cap: whm for begginers with small skill cap , sch for mid skill cap players , astro for veterans with big skill cap make more advanted healing combo for example and for whm make simple one ... but with same power

in this scenerio we would have healer for begginers and for veterans who would need more challenge and more fun and SE would be happy that could get new players and some old veterans would be happy too with harder class ...

before any of you tell hohoho but you don't do savage is harder version of trials ... yeah I don't do but I would like to make some m+ in ff 14 version, in wow I made +15-20 m+ in legion and it was rly fun as prot/holy paladin ...
and before you tell why we need debuffs or ccs they don't work for bosses !! - sure they won't but they would be rly fun in m+ environment for bigger pulls that would help party alive on some rly high levels !

I don't wanna talk on balance overall in this thread rly and im totally against on so big dps numbers on ANY heal

[tesni_g]

I would love some GCD spells like that but I can see immediately why they are hard to implement. Either the buff will be a waste of a GCD, and no one will use it (Break, wasn't it?), or the buff will be strong enough to justify its use, and then it becomes part of the rotation (with the MNK complaining about either getting the haste or not getting bravery). It becomes necessary instead of bonus. I think maintaining 4 GCD buffs on different players, refreshed every thirty seconds, sounds like a nightmare.

So that leaves us, again and always, with the Green DPS icon. So long as there are enrage timers, there will be healers trying to beat it. So long as fights progressively get harder/mechanic intense the longer they go on, there will be healers trying to prevent mechanics with optimized nuking. This game is designed so that spamming Broil will almost always be in mine and my groups' best interest.

Since I can't imagine the game being redesigned (again) from the ground up, the only solutions I can think of to deal with the fights we have is more complex DPS for healers. I understand that a lot of healers want to heal more than they do, I am disappointed too at how little healing is required (despite the million different ways to heal that we have been given, talk about false expectation).

I'm not calling for a full rotation, by any means. Just one mechanic. Something to watch for. A reason to cast Ruin II and Fluid Aura. Like, casting Broil has a chance to proc a special Ruin II (which would crazy help with weaving). Or casting Glare gives a stackable buff (up to 3, say) that can be consumed with a special Fluid Aura. Something to work toward that would be easy enough to manage when things are going well but also set aside when things don't--if those stacks and procs had a long enough duration that they would be available after a burst of healing. Healers who don't want to deal damage aren't punished by these additions, and healers who want to optimize have something to build/fish in the thirty seconds between fight mechanics.

There's too much healing downtime. And this is not a problem they can fix into design of the next Savage tier--that ignores the fundamental problem for the first 79 levels.

There's too much healing downtime. Nerfing our skills and heals to the point that spamming is required won't fix the problem, either, because that's too unfriendly to DF content. We already have people complaining about healers that "let" someone drop below 60%--I can imagine the storm of cries because the healer couldn't heal a player with 3 vuln stacks back up to full in two GCDs. We can't fix mistakes if we have to spam the tank just to keep up, and I believe that this paradigm (godlike healing power for maximum forgivability in leveling content) is here to stay.

With that in mind, give me something meaningful to do between bursts of divinity.

[Miziliti]

I play all three. Aside from job specific problems. Healers in general have a few common problems that is on-going. I will make them into categories.

DPS wise: Healers lost their already short and limited amounts of damage spell. WHM lost aero III and SCH lost dots and the ability to bane though AST is still the usual 1 damage spell + 1 dot. Some would say old ways were already boring, but right now everyone can say it's boring because it really is. I am especially salty about SCH's 1 dot gameplay.

Healing wise: Those new healing tools in 5.0 is something I would not call lame, but they are certainly too much as an not-really-necessary stuff since healing gameplay didn't change all that much. All of the healing tools we've had until Stormblood (before them getting nerf in 5.0!), I would say it's pretty sufficient. Many were expecting healers to heal more, but what we got is an artificial way of asking to heal more because there is overall nerf across the board in our existing skills, which to me, is pretty much uncalled for.

Finally, It's still DPS or Heal: This is the cage we are in right now. You can say AST's card gameplay added a Buff-Supporter type into the healer role's formula, but in 5.0 the buffing gameplay got gutted heavily. Many people including me, play/prefer AST because we can actually do something outside of dps and heal. Cards gameplay was my relieve from being bored with playing healer too much. I wanted a buff and debuff-supporter healer that can actually provide equal party contribution as WHM's pdps potential.

[ReiMakoto]

The only time I can truly say i enjoyed healing thoroughly in this game was in heavensward, where on scholar I had.

Aero
Bio 2
Bio
Misma
Shadowflare

Just for single target. I dont care how much more effort it was than other healers, it was just fun

[Deceptus]

Lodi summed it up pretty well.

Too much scripted damage output, which leads to:
Not enough to heal. And a
Simple damage rotation which doesn't make up for it.

Pretty much this.

SE wants us to heal more but won't increase incoming damage enough to do it because the casual playerbase can't handle anything remotely difficult. See: Steps of Faith, Shinryu normal.

[Vitreus]

Astrologian card rework didn't achieve the goals the devs set out with. They should have tweaked the numerical values of the cards instead of reworking the entire thing if it was just going to obliterate the lore of the job and make every card a mini-balance. If balance was better than spear and arrow than they should have increased their values or decreased its. With TP gone spire could have easily been given something such as direct hit. The last two cards would be easy consumable choices for the double duration or AoE .

But most importantly redraw should have been designed in a way that didn't give you clearly a disadvantaged card. If you just consumed Ewer/Bole it is incredibly simple to program it so that you receive an offensive card on a redraw. Or just rename it and make it always return an offensive card.

Personally I think Divination needs to go. 15 seconds of 6% extra dps is an abysmal mechanic for what it requires to set up. It's a less than an 1% average total group damage increase.

Even if the devs do not undo the rework they must reprogram redraw to not give a card with the same seal we already have. It's trivially easy to do from a logical/programming standpoint and means we won't get times when are screwed over by the RNG. Then you could remove the charges associated with it as well. The very existence of three charges on redraw is a testament to it being a inherently flawed mechanic now.


As for healing in general really the only thing I can give input on is the dps changes. They wanted us to dps less and focus more on healing and to that end simplified our kit. But the problem is that how we dps doesn't determine how often we dps, our healing does. The stronger our heals compared to the current content, the more downtime we have. You could simplify each job to a single attack and we would still spam that one ability in our downtime.

If the devs want us to do something else other than dps during our downtime they need to give us something else to do. As it stands now all they achieved was making it less enjoyable via simplification. I miss Aero III, I miss Miasma, I miss Bane