Healer dps is unfairly boring

[kujoestars]

Depends on the MMO or the RPG, but as this is FFXIV, if we look at the track record not just for XIV but the series. Healer down time is a thing and in their down time they do damage or support in non-healing ways. This game gave a variety of damage spells to WHM and SCH to weave and it flowed and worked well, with WHM doing more burst and SCH more sustained. Then AST with its party/self buffs. This game had a really good balance with its healing spells and what it does in its downtime and the game arguably was designed to take advantage of our downtime. It’s not so much how MUCH damage they do but in how that is dealt, because nowadays it feels like a single button spam.

Then looking at a track record into other FF games, the majority of the time you had a job or character with a healing focus they had some extra choices for support and damage, because you don’t have a big continuous push for healing (and is true for this MMO).



As an example when I felt SCH was at its peak for DPS variety:
Miasma
Miasma 2
Bio
Bio 2
Shadowflare
Bane
Energy Drain
Broil
Ruin II


SCH now:
Biolysis
Broil 3
Ruin II
Art of War
Energy Drain

Energy Drain was given back after complaints.
Your AOE rotation has been reduced to 1 button. Whereas it was 6 before (miasma, bio, bio 2, bane, shadowflare, miasma 2)
Your single target has been reduced to 2 buttons with the occasional 1 extra thrown in (broil 3 + ruin 2, with occasional biolysis or energy drain), whereas before, technically your entire arsenal (minus bane) could be useful to put on a single target, which I count 8

So it makes a massive difference to how it feels to play. and overall DPS wise, healers were still the lowest.

Fair points. And it finally occurred to me in at least one RPG-type game that the healer class still has a good damaging attack even if the majority of their kit consists of heals/buffs/etc. Of course it still isn't made for DPS, but having at least one good damaging move (especially if it's both an AoE and DoT) would help counteract a smaller DPS kit.

At the very least, it would make solo'ing content as a healer more bearable; still not over the fact it takes forever to Malefic and Combust anything, lol. So yeah, either we have more stuff in the kit or make what we have more powerful.

[purgatori]

From a 'class fantasy'/lore perspective, all the jobs the WoL takes on should be able to handle their own in a fight. Let's not forget that even the white mages of Amdapor were able to scrap with Mhachi black mages. From a gameplay perspective, it's a trivial thing to 'keep the party' alive for the majority of content at which you're capping out the maximum-allowable ilvl for your gear, leaving you with little to do other than 1 single target and 1 AoE spell over and over again, while chucking in the odd shield/regen/whatever (as a SCH).

[Crushnight]

I\\'m well aware of what the healers used to have. I am by no means the best healer out there, but I have been doing it and participating in these discussions for a long time. If you feel this needs to be explained to me, then you don\\'t know where I am coming from at all.

Their DPS, even 3.0 SCH, was never engaging for me. It was ALWAYS what I did when heals weren\\'t needed, which was most of the time. This should quickly add up to my boredom in general with the role due to having such a high DPS uptime. However, this boredom was really only present and exacerbated during encounters with a low threat level such as dungeons, unsynced runs, MSQ instances, FATES, etc.

I\\'ve always had the most fun healing when I am pushed, and the DPS uptime drops significantly. This is why I encourage tanks to pull the whole effin dungeon, and spend most of my time in random groups. However, I can admit that some skills such as Aero 3 and Shadow Flare were very satisfying to use. I definitely see nothing wrong with giving healers their AoE DoTs back, and I am confident they will return.

I don\\'t think that is the best solution currently in the future sure but not for the current problems.

The devs have proven multiple times they do not care for previous expansions content when designing new jobs or reworking old jobs. Any new healer rework and any encounter design that tailors to it would be for the newest expansion in mind only. Asking any new healer to wait until you hit 81 and do dungeons then you\\'ll start having a good time is asking for lot of effort or money just to see if true.

Asking for dps skills back can be added earlier and this adds a little more engagement during the downtime (that gets worse the more competent the group is + all previous dungeons get nerfed on top from when they were current) and can be done earlier in levels, any new healing tools would be redundant we just don\\'t need them anymore at earlier levels we were plenty sufficient before they added more in ShB.

Adding back dps skills earlier for healers would be better for healers to keep engagement for newer healers and make them want to stay and not hope for bad players for enjoyment in group content or something less mind numbing for solo content, than a healing fight design rework that would be exclusive to 6.0 content. The devs need to actually think for once about how do these changes affect the previous experience (they won\\'t but they should).

1 thing is clear no matter what the devs do to healers they do not care how it effects ARR, HW, SB, and come 6.0 ShB content.

[Deceptus]

Decent healers who had any independent thought were thinking this when they released the previews.

"Wait until it goes live and THEN make judgements" we were told.

So we did

"Maybe SE will finally make mobs hit harder so healer's will have to heal!"

Nope. Still casting just as many GCD's on damage spells as before. Just now the rotation is 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2

And again and again we were proved right. It's like the FFXIV development team has no idea that healers have to be able to complete the MSQ. They need damage to do that.

[Sloprano]

Decent healers who had any independent thought were thinking this when they released the previews.

"Wait until it goes live and THEN make judgements" we were told.

So we did

"Maybe SE will finally make mobs hit harder so healer's will have to heal!"

Nope. Still casting just as many GCD's on damage spells as before. Just now the rotation is 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2

And again and again we were proved right. It's like the FFXIV development team has no idea that healers have to be able to complete the MSQ. They need damage to do that.

It's one of those moment where seeing all premonitions come true doesn't feel good at all.

Saw another interview come and go with the most neutral of questions about Shadowbringers. What with FF14 being at the upcoming PAX convention, where are the journalists that played Shadowbringers for longer than to the credits, slapped goty on it and never looked at it again. Someone who can come within question-asking distance with the Director without the questions in question being vetted or handpicked. Not for particulary accusatory questions, but when asked about our green iconed jobs (and class) get the kind of behind-the-scenes excited exuberantion they show for pretty much everything else when asked about 1.0, the lore and when they spent twenty minutes talking about nin on Live Letter LV.

Given the track record, I can imagine Yoshida sitting, pretending to look ponderous for a moment, suddenly shoot out an arm with an outstretched finger pointing in the back of the room, shouting "Nani?" and while everyone's heads are turned he bolts from the room and to not be seen again for the rest of PAX. Succesfully avoiding talking about ast, sch and whm again.

Because despite the Director going on about playing MMO's of the past, SE seem quite happy lumping whm, ast and sch together all under "healer" as all their problems are the same and can be solved the same way. Would like to think someone playing that long ago that nuances and inconvenices to work around and eventuelly with is playstyle with draw when you have many to choose from.

Only other mention I came across was in an interview with Famitsu with the battle scenario, but also battle systems team. Thanks to U/CarrieRofLight for the translation. (link)

"Kawamoto: As a member of the battle system team, i wanted healers to be conscious. We actually held down/nerfed healers' healing capibilities across the board in shadowbringers, so having a percentage based attack that hit hard was on purpose."

Which just confirms what we knew: Healing spells effect havn't increased, actually went down. Really hope they can get Kawamoto up for a Q&A or interview, he might know more why we got the iteration we have now, why everything under and at 80 feels like an afterthought.

[ForteNightshade]

Gasp! It's like they want the healers to actually focus on healing!

I understand the complaint, but DPSing as a healer is a bonus for making sure everyone is okay. Healers have so much support especially between SCH and AST that even if they aren't casting their DPS skills their support skills more than make up for it.

Remember when this was the go to response for healer DPS being dumbed down? Meanwhile, we look at how Scholar and Astro actually play in 5.x, and what to do you know. They're still primarily spamming Broil and Malefic, respectively. In fact, I looked up a Scholar I know who cleared TEA. 250 DPS abilities compared to 103 healing abilities (both GCD and oGCD compared). So about that "we want healers to heal more" argument. Hardest content in the game and healers are still spending 60% of it dealing damage.

[Semirhage]

I don't think they have to increase outgoing damage to force healers to use more GCD heals. I agree that the philosophy here isn't very good. I think all they have to do is adjust ogcd and GCD heals. I think ogcd heals should support the healing requirement, not outright take it completely over. I know this would result in healers doing less overall damage. I know this would affect encounters and put more pressure on DPS and tanks to push phases. And I say good. Where do I sign up?

I think a healer being able to solo heal in any encounter to be quite telling, and it happens in just about all content.

It would take -way- more than a simple adjustment to GCD and oGCD heals to engage me. I don't think replacing Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare with Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure would be some refreshing groundbreaking shift. The way GCD healing kits are designed is as boring as the DPS kits.

[Corbeau]

Either you give healers a DPS kit with greater complexity or you ramp up the constant attrition damage in encounters. Either one could work by putting more buttons into consistent use.

[CrimsonGunner]

Either you give healers a DPS kit with greater complexity or you ramp up the constant attrition damage in encounters. Either one could work by putting more buttons into consistent use.

agreed, that is pretty much the two things we can think that might solve the healers boring gameplay.
either all the runs will have much more frequent damage intervals making healers spam their heals more frequent with less downtime ,or give healers additional skills to use during downtime.
this is pretty much the only 2 ways that could solve this.(if SE would do both ,it would be the best really)

healers should be designed with 2 parts in their kits, their heals and their non-heal skills. healers need to have a kit that allow fluid swap between those things.
u have skills u spam normally like dps,buffs and debuffs and when party is in danger u swap to your healing skills.
u cant make a class gameplay be 70% 1 button smash ,no matter what excuse SE gave ,that is simply wrong design plain and simple.
dps skills should be simple for healers but with the lack of actual skills to use such as applying buffs and applying debuffs ,combine with the fact that 70% of the time in all content is not healing there is not denying the fact that these are the 2 major issues in healer gameplay that must be changed for healers to be fun.

[Crushnight]

Another thing that goes against healer kits that also increases hlr downtime is the overabundance of self healing/survivability tools non healers have access to.

Plds can solo dungeon fights(and I am talking ShB dungeons here) if no dps check in place or keep dps alive too for far longer due to Clemency, great for plds but hurts healers. Gnb regen is good enough for decent health back and then brutal shell is baked into combo for ammo so constantly getting health back regularly just low. Not sure on NF on war but Equilibrium was always potent heal.Drk however lost a bit of its hp regeneration tools Abyssal drain no longer spammable also no more DA soul eater.

Melee have second wind and bloodbath for self healing, range have mitigation + second wind, brd gives healing up making our strong heals stronger, dnc has curing waltz aoe which when used right is free hlr aoe heal. Rdm with vercure can save lives (shouldn't need to but it is a very potent option), blm has manaward and smn has titan shield both good mitigation reducing heals, smn also getting phoenix regen which is good(ever have 3+ smns in your C.F. party if all on rotation massive health regen whenever phoenix is out).

Literally every job has ways to reduce healing needed, good for self survivability, lowers amount healers can contribute healing however, more so in higher end play but can happen in lower content, ik I get annoyed at plds using clemency in dungeons especially with excog on them.

I think for healers to have to heal more they would also need to look at all the healing tools non healer jobs have and cut down a little. I think 1 survivability tool(as in getting hp back) per non hlr job is enough no more no less would be fine.