I hate to, but I think I put down healing for now. Please make it engaging again, SE.

[Saefinn]

You are the correct that the current design is much more engaging when you are actually under pressure. That said, you are vastly overstating the differences between each of the different buttons. When it comes down to it, Emergency Tactics > Succor, Indom, Seraph, Fey Blessing all exist for one express purpose: To be backup buttons for each other. Is one on cooldown? You use another. Is one lacking resources? You still good, you have a backup. Their differences begin to matter less when I need to throw them out in response to the same stimuli, for the same reasons.

They had healer design working at one point; It was in ARR. Scholar was an extremely tight design where every skill served a purpose and there were limitations that demanded I respond to mechanics differently than White Mage. It mattered that I was limited to Aetherflow stacks because if I mismanaged them I didn't have four different oGCD heals as backup. Likewise, Adlo and Succor were prohibitively expensive so I wanted to use them smartly and sparingly (and mostly predictively), rather than as my main GCD heals. And then when I needed to dps, I had a pretty neat DoT-based rotation to play with (and later, Shadowflare).

Currently, there's a fundamental misunderstand that simply having a lot of heals means healing will be more engaging. I'm of the opinion that limitations breeds creativity-- when every situation is a puzzle of how to use your limited moveset to approach a problem, healing becomes engaging. As it is, I have few limitations.

I think this is fair comment. 2.0 healer design was my favourite and for the reasons you've listed. And I never felt the 2.0 healing was inaccessible to new players, after all I started out as a SCH (it's one argument I keep on seeing for more simplicity is being accessible for new players) and I also coached some new SCH's too, and if anything I praised the game for how it eases you in. Rather than the job being accessible through simplicity, but more about how the game teaches you.

That's why stuff like Sastasha, TamTara and friends are good dungeons for the start of the game (heck guildhests were like dungeon training, but I suspect nobody does them anymore). They game eases you in, there's lots of room to make mistakes on any role and the difficulty gets gradual with the odd dungeon or fight acted as a check for your abilities. By the time you get to endgame, you've learned to play the job and role. And to add, if you wanted something more straight forward, you had WHM and if you wanted something where you're planning more, you had SCH.


I think healer design now (and maybe after potency tweaks) still has the potential to fulfill that niche, but it'd require designing encounters around it. But that'd be a considerable amount of work, arguably. This was my argument back in the media tour, the changes to healers would make healing boring unless they change encounter design...and they haven't.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

I mentioned this in another post but I have all healers at 80 and the problem I have with it now is that it's boring. Not because it's 'easy' but because even though the healer kit has been expanded or changed, there's literally 3 dps spells per healer. A DoT, an AoE and a single-target damage spell and theres very little variation between them. No way to spread/layer DoT. And there's no more general healing buff (Largesse) that lets you layer a buffed HoT while you go to town. All the things that used to make the healers stand apart, to identify them now are just clunky or useless window dressing.

When I can heal high level casual content with a fourth of my SCH kit (using the pets for auto healing only--because I don't remember what all of the new actions are or do) why pick one over the other? Its literally easier to just take WHM for everything and not bother with the extraneous things that once defined the other jobs but now are just more things to divide your focus on.

Healer is just for fast que nowadays. I used to kind of enjoy it.

[vtndll]

It is kind of interesting that you two bring this up. Currently, on the tank forums, there is a very heated discussion where a lot of tanks are rather angry that healers have comparable DPS to them. That their DPS rotations are 9~12 buttons is sometimes cited as a reason why tank DPS should be significantly higher than healers'.

Not gonna lie I'm a little concerned that square will end up radically reducing healers dps output now. Main reason is it is a role other than healer that is complaining.

Edit- I don't mean that as a dig at tanks. I'm saying all other roles opinions matter more to square enix than healer.-End edit.

I believe a big contributing factor for Astros being reduced to walking balances was because of certain dpses all to "happy" to say thats all ast. did anyway.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Healing in FF has gone downhill since HW.
It went from a great synergy of both healers having to cover for each other and work together to heal, to now where every healer heals the same and the only difference is the way it's done.

Honestly imo, if they want to fix healing in FFXIV they need to nerf all the healers down by a lot. Not specifically potencies, but the amount of instant healing nukes we all have available. There's no reason to focus on healing when you can tap one button or put out one regen and everyone is fine.

Now they're at this stage where all the healing kits function the same and their utility is different, and it's even worse. Because at least HW and SB tried to make their healing unique. Now all that sets us apart is how much dps we can pump out.

[Lodi]

Healing in FF has gone downhill since HW.
It went from a great synergy of both healers having to cover for each other and work together to heal, to now where every healer heals the same and the only difference is the way it's done.

Honestly imo, if they want to fix healing in FFXIV they need to nerf all the healers down by a lot. Not specifically potencies, but the amount of instant healing nukes we all have available. There's no reason to focus on healing when you can tap one button or put out one regen and everyone is fine.

Now they're at this stage where all the healing kits function the same and their utility is different, and it's even worse. Because at least HW and SB tried to make their healing unique. Now all that sets us apart is how much dps we can pump out.

I have to agree with that. If you look at healer abilities in the levels 51 to 80, there's filler and dot upgrades (= zero gameplay changes) , and nothing but healing and support CDs. WHM is the only exception with the addition of Afflatus spells.
Heavensward actually gave us more dps abilities post 50 (Earthly star, Aero III, Assize), and then SB and ShB took everything away and gave us more and more unnecessary healing CDs.

And while I can think of a ton of dps abilities that were removed over time (all of our dots tiers, Shadowflare, Miasma II, Aero III, Lord of Crowns, Fluid Aura...) , I can't think of a single healing spell or CD that suffered the same fate. Every single healing source we ever got still lives to this day, and we even have other abilities getting converted into more healing buttons (Celestial Opposition).

At this point I'm wondering if we will ever get any new damage buttons, or if 6.0 will just give us 4 more healing CDs per class that will permanently make our spells obsolete.


I already know I won't preorder 6.0 and, if we just get a repeat of 5.0, I'll probably just not bother purchasing the expansion.

[BerryCharlotte]

Healing in FF has gone downhill since HW.
It went from a great synergy of both healers having to cover for each other and work together to heal, to now where every healer heals the same and the only difference is the way it's done.

Honestly imo, if they want to fix healing in FFXIV they need to nerf all the healers down by a lot. Not specifically potencies, but the amount of instant healing nukes we all have available. There's no reason to focus on healing when you can tap one button or put out one regen and everyone is fine.

Now they're at this stage where all the healing kits function the same and their utility is different, and it's even worse. Because at least HW and SB tried to make their healing unique. Now all that sets us apart is how much dps we can pump out.

Absolutely agreed.

I mean I can heal anyone from sub 20% health to full in a couple GCDs, maybe less. I know I'm a WHM and it's pure healing but that's ludicrous. I never have to worry about MP - back in ARR I had that as a constant on my shoulder 'Do I Holy? No, MP, big hit coming.' Sort of thing.

I also feel like the whole 'Class Fantasy' thing SE likes to go on about is absolutely lacking now as well.

[Risvertasashi]

Not gonna lie I'm a little concerned that square will end up radically reducing healers dps output now. Main reason is it is a role other than healer that is complaining.

Edit- I don't mean that as a dig at tanks. I'm saying all other roles opinions matter more to square enix than healer.-End edit.

I believe a big contributing factor for Astros being reduced to walking balances was because of certain dpses all to "happy" to say thats all ast. did anyway.

There will be a riot if SE does.

Doesn't necessarily mean they won't, though.

[Rilifane]

Just like many other MMOs, there is a lack of healers in FFXIV which is only natural. People are not as drawn to that role.
And I understand that devs want to eliminate the problems this causes with the logical conclusion being making healing in general more accessible. But by making it so monotonous they only succeeded in driving many dedicated healers away while barely reeling in new healers.
I know so many people, myself included, who quit healing sometime during ShB because improving just so you can be more bored hardly feels rewarding. However I only know one person who got somewhat into healing but he never touched them again after bringing them to 80.
Right now, FFXIV is the game where I enjoy healing the least.

I enjoyed it for many years. I enjoyed the clunky cleric stance dance, having to be really careful with holy because of it's insane MP costs, keeping up several dots, watching my aggro because dpsing while healing could easily tempt mobs to make a beeline for you, falling back to Cure I - freecure - Cure II healing if fights took long and MP became an issue, falling back to Break spam if I was close to drained but still wanted to dps and just generally having to manage my resources better because they were more scarce.
Basic healing was accessible enough. New healers could always fall back on relying on their basic hardcast toolkit and would've been fine.
Cleric Stance, managing dots, managing dpsing vs healing etc was a bonus you started utilizing after you got comfortable and not something you needed to get right frmo the start.

We have so many healing buttons and all we use them for is to free up more time to press one button.

[Alynn]

Go heal TEA you'll be engaged again

[Billythepancake]

Go heal TEA you'll be engaged again

True, but you should be able to have anything to do fr leveling dungeons to Ultimate. You should not have only a sparse amount of content where your only action is broil/malefic/glare. You should be able to be engaged no matter the content, and that's where this expansion has failed.