Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[Larius]

WHM:
1) Nothing to do but spam Glare all day long. Healing is reactive, the whole role is designed about being reactive. It's horrible, we need something proactive to do other than spamming one button. There are many ways that reactive healing could be more engaging, like simply having heals way weaker so that it's actually a struggle to keep the tank alive, but ultimately as both tank and healer gear up the need for healing will always go down. That's when we need something proactive to do, no more one button 'dps rotations'.

2) People telling me WHM is fine because it has the best numbers out of all healers. Couldn't care less about numbers, those can be hotfixed in a small patch. What WHM, and actually all healers, is lacking is fun gameplay.

3) Healing sets that look good on male characters. Can we have some?

[Punslinger]

Thinking on it some more, most of what's wrong with healers ultimately comes back to the oGCDs. Healers have gotten more of them with each expansion, yet fights have not increased their damage output (relative to player HP) to compensate. As a result, healing has gotten easier and easier with each expansion.

Using WHM as an example, back in ARR, it had one oGCD direct heal: Benediction. Its other oGCDs were Divine Seal, which was a precursor to Largesse, and Presence of Mind. Both of which interacted with GCD heals to make them better. Shroud of Saints was a proto-Lucid for MP recovery. And that's it. That's the sum total of WHM's 2.0 oGCD toolkit.

Now, in 5.0, WHM has the following direct heals in its oGCD toolkit:

- Benediction
- Asylum
- Assize
- Tetragrammaton
- Divine Benison

That's five oGCD tools ready and available to deal with scripted tankbusters and raidwides. That's not even counting further healing-boosting oGCDs like Temperance or Plenary Indulgence or Largesse.

If you stop and think about it, actually, almost all of the new healing abilities added since 2.0 have been oGCDs. The Afflatus spells are on the GCD, but that's it. SCH and AST didn't get any new healing GCDs to play with. It shouldn't have been hard to add a couple extra healing GCD spells that interact with the existing kit in some way, yet it never happened.

[rachcouture]

From the perspective of a longtime omnihealer main...

White Mage:

• Lilies are more pointless than ever. Afflatus Solace and Afflatus Rapture–exact clones of Cure II and Medica tied to a slow charging meter and thus negating their lack of a cast time–have no reason to exist outside of stacking to use Afflatus Misery, a pretty offensive spell that would have been better off as a trait-based upgrade to Holy. Special meters aren't needed for every class, and this is one of the best examples as to why.
• Bring back Aero III. Give it a trait that turns it into Dia II.
• Get rid of Fluid Aura already. Why is it still a thing?

Everything else is honestly fine, especially Temperance; all future WHM skills should aspire to it.

Astrologian:

• Revert the cards to the original system, just with the necessary change/removal of The Spire. I can't stress this enough. There is no salvaging the rework when it contradicts the development team's desire to streamline all existing jobs. Not only has the identity of the class been entirely gutted in the process by turning every card into a single target damage boost, but it's extremely unintuitive and unwieldy, especially on controller. I spend more time fishing for seals/arcana conversion than I ever did trying to build the buffs I wanted pre-ShB.
• An AoE DoT spell would be really, really nice.

I have no other issues with this job. It's healing and shielding abilities were never a problem, and that still remains true.

Scholar:

• Let each fairy have its own unique skills. Pet micromanagement was a major component of this class. Not only that, but Selene's speed buff and AoE cleanse were far more useful than anything Eos has to offer nine times out of ten; I don't even have a use for her outside of the occasional mega pull as a safety net. Anything 70 and under is an absolute bore right now.
• Art of War is a nice gesture after the loss of Blizzard II as a cross-class years ago, but please, bring back Miasma II.
• I really don't understand why so many useless skills like Ruin II were left in, but essential abilities like the above were gutted.

Still, it's probably my favorite this expansion; more interactive than WHM, but without being convoluted like AST is now.

General:

• Every healer should have four basic offensive spells: a single target attack, an AoE attack, a single target DoT, and a DoT AoE. This covers all the essentials without taking away from the role's intended priority.
• Reinstate Protect as a cross-class skill, but in its PvP iteration: a 20% damage reduction for 10 seconds.
• ... what happened to bringing back Stoneskin?

[Reiryuu]

Everything else is honestly fine, especially Temperance; all future WHM skills should aspire to it.

No. No. No. No. and Hell no. Taking away 2 skills (protect- yes, it came back as the PVP version, but it's still protect and divine seal) and combining them into the level 80 skill an expansion pack later should not be tolerated let alone applauded as a skill that should be mimicked in any way shape or form. Especially when it uses rehashed graphical assets for its spell effect.

[Deceptus]

No. No. No. No. and Hell no. Taking away 2 skills (protect- yes, it came back as the PVP version, but it's still protect and divine seal) and combining them into the level 80 skill an expansion pack later should not be tolerated let alone applauded as a skill that should be mimicked in any way shape or form. Especially when it uses rehashed graphical assets for its spell effect.

SE did the same thing with Stoneskin > Divine Benison and then nerfed it AGAIN.

[Acidblood]

For me the three biggest issues with the current healer design are:

Lack of reward for good gameplay
Examples of 'reward' are DRG's Raiden Thrust, BLM's Polyglot gauge, or 4.X SCH's Quickened Aetherflow... just something that needs to be thought about / paid attention to and gives you something nice in return. WHM lilies are not an example of this as they require neither interaction nor attention.

Lack of interaction within the kit
Good examples of 'interaction' are 5.X WHM Plenary Indulgence and Temperance (which really should be an upgrade from Divine Seal) ... however perhaps the worst example is WHM lilies; they are essentially instant Cure II and instant Medica, so why do we need two extra buttons? It would feel better if lilies just made Cure / Cure II and Medica / Medica II instant cast, which would not only introduce some choice but free up buttons for something more interesting, like Aero 3? PvP Protect? Stoneskin? Cleric Stance? Divine Seal? an oGCD damage spell?.

Lack of general thought required
Due to the first two issues it feels like Healer gameplay has become very stale, just spam (your now limited) DPS until you need to use a healing cooldown (of which there is now an overabundance)... no thought, not much choice, no real ability to optimise, just play like you are a bot (and hope someone gets hit by something they shouldn't to break up the monotony) :/
And of course the new AST cards are the worst example of this, say what you will about the old cards but at least they required some thought.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

For me the three biggest issues with the current healer design are:

Lack of reward for good gameplay
Examples of 'reward' are DRG's Raiden Thrust, BLM's Polyglot gauge, or 4.X SCH's Quickened Aetherflow... just something that needs to be thought about / paid attention to and gives you something nice in return. WHM lilies are not an example of this as they require neither interaction nor attention.

They aren't now, but they COULD be. With some development, the lilies could be the springboard for a spread out "rotation" of sorts that eventually leads to misery, has exciting spells to use in between, and rewards good play. Given that SE probably isn't going to let a job go without a gauge mechanic at this point, this scenario is the best I can see for lilies. And I really hope that's where it goes rather Afflatus Cure 3 or nowhere.

Lack of interaction within the kit
Good examples of 'interaction' are 5.X WHM Plenary Indulgence and Temperance (which really should be an upgrade from Divine Seal) ... however perhaps the worst example is WHM lilies; they are essentially instant Cure II and instant Medica, so why do we need two extra buttons? It would feel better if lilies just made Cure / Cure II and Medica / Medica II instant cast, which would not only introduce some choice but free up buttons for something more interesting, like Aero 3? PvP Protect? Stoneskin? Cleric Stance? Divine Seal? an oGCD damage spell?.

Technically, keeping Afflatus skills as their own button is likely meant to be a choice enabler. The choice is "do I want to save this Afflatus skill for when I need to move or weave, or use it now for healing?" Leaving Cure 2 and Medica open lets you save the afflatus while still getting the specified type of heal out.

The issue with this is that there's not enough damage dealt to the party in this game to make this a valid choice within most fights. Many times you'll use a different ability entirely, or not heal at all, if you want to hang onto an afflatus skill. As such, unless encounter design changes, I don't think much would be lost by folding the buttons together as you propose. This kind of design strike-out reflects how poor the dev team's grasp of how healers actually play is.

That said, I have never understood the button bloat fears. 3 X-hotbars for controller on a W-bar setup or flipping between 2 main ones with a third for niche or long cd skills has worked perfectly for me. Trying to require every job to have fewer than 32 skills is unnecessarily restraining kit diversity imo. Definitely a fan of OG Fluid, PvP Protect, or a sub-50 Divine Seal returning.

Lack of general thought required
Due to the first two issues it feels like Healer gameplay has become very stale, just spam (your now limited) DPS until you need to use a healing cooldown (of which there is now an overabundance)... no thought, not much choice, no real ability to optimise, just play like you are a bot (and hope someone gets hit by something they shouldn't to break up the monotony) :/
And of course the new AST cards are the worst example of this, say what you will about the old cards but at least they required some thought.

In anything sub-Savage, this is 100% true. MSQ especially is dreadful on healer, because the damage output can't be anything that would kill the most fragile of DPS.

[Lola_bunny]

From my own experiences my problems with astro pretty much breaks down to, Noct sect is too mana expensive for what it has. Once I realized that blue is melee and red is ranged the cards lost all meaning. As someone who genuinely enjoyed the lore it saddens me to see that it's been made effectively meaningless. Also doesn't help that I often find the seals not applying even if the person has gotten a hit in or two.

White mage for me is lacking a proactive way to build blood lily, I regularly over heal with the afflatus just to not have 3 up, maybe a shield or a damaging ability. It'd be nice to have a damaging aoe again like aero 3, perhaps kill 2 birds with one stone and have an afflatus ability that spreads dia. Whm feels the least affected for me at least but I think that's mostly from already having lost so much in Stormblood (still a tad salty that 7 of the 10 role abilities were once WHM) but whatever in the past.

I wish I could bring something to the table for SCH but it's the healer I have the least experience with, almost zero time spent (the pet stuff always seemed so daunting).

Mostly though my biggest problem so far has been the seeming lack of response from the dev team. I don't know the scale of feedback but I did see with the last live letter how many questions were posed and no response, not even some much as a "we're aware" or some boiler plate "Listening to feedback and making adjustments". The sound of silence is deafening, I'd appreciate any level of awareness even if it's just them dismissing us, anything but silence.

[kartana]

It comes down to 1. content (especially 4-man) get easier every expansion 2. there is less and less to heal even in harder content and 3. the dps healer dps rotation is mind-numbing boring since you basically press the same 2 buttons. I would be ok with the two buttons if we need to use our healing kit more often. Even at the hardest content the difficult comes mostly from remembering what to do when and where to move, meaning you need to remember where to stand etc. rather than improving your skill usage. There isn't even healing needed when people are new and mess up since most of the failed mechanics these days mean insta-death.

In general, everything (content and classes) in FFXIV feels more and more like it was designed with whiteboards and spreadsheets. And while there is no way around that, it never should FEEL like it was designed that way. It's probably because the same design people (for classes and content) do the same stuff for too long.

[nalol]

I'd also go with lack of interactions in the healer's kit.

I play mainly SCH so i'll talk more about it. but more interaction between fey heals and SCH heals. the only procs left are cure to cure 2 and benediction to benediction 2.

and the WHM lilies .. in a way. other than that .. the lack of interaction on our kit makes it boring compared to some of the dps's kits.

also the boring dps of the healers. I totally understand .. as tanks, we have another role so we can't have a complex rotation like a dps class, but come on, now it's really boring.


I want to be able to make good plays as healer, and that the kit has more depth to allow us that.