Why is FFXIV Tuned to Discourage Healing?

[HappyHubris]

So, I've healed in a lot of MMOs, and it can be both a fun and rewarding role. When your party or raid is in a tough spot and you deftly weave together lifegiving abilities to get them across the finish line you get an amazing rush! This kind of healing is prevalent when first learning content: you're undergeared, everyone is standing in fire, and the healer is a wall between defeat and victory.

The flip side of this is that healing can often be downright tedious when there's not enough incoming damage to go around. This happens a lot during trash pulls, when your party knows an encounter expertly, and/or when you massively outgear the content. Then you're either sniping healing from each other or spamming an under-developed damage toolbox to contribute a bit.

What's odd is that FFXIV seems to like to tune content so that healers barely get to heal. I healed at level 70 and found that the only time that I felt like a full-time healer was when I was doing extreme primals with pick up groups where everyone just barely met the ilvl requirements (I never got into Savage raiding). 4-man content and non-extreme bosses was mostly spamming stone/holy with a healing spell or DoT spell thrown in every once in a while.

This is bad design, as you take a class with a ton of interesting tools and make them slaves to a filler nuke button for most of the time. Instead of hitting all my buttons and overcoming a challenge I'm spamming stone stone stone stone stone aero stone stone oGCD heal stone stone oGCD heal stone etc.

People will say that balancing healing and damage is difficult in its own right. I would agree if we were healing 85% of the time and figuring out where to weave in damage oGCDs to maximize party progress, but the nuke nuke nuke nuke heal nuke meta is simplifying these healing classes until they're trivial.

Coming back for ShadowBringers, it looks like nothing has changed. I talk to friends at endgame and the only "heal-heavy" content is savage raids, but even those are innovating to squeeze out healing casts for DPS casts. Despite really enjoying the WHM class design I don't know if I can take another expansion of spamming one nuke spell and am leaning more on SMN as I go through the new content.

Why does FFXIV hate healing? Not having enough to do is really stressful.

Edit: To make this more constructive, one of the things that Square could do to reduce traditional healing in FFXIV while keeping healers engaged is to introduce the idea of damage->healing healers.

In some MMO classes you heal by doing damage, and a portion of that damage is translated into healing. E.g. 50% of your damage heals the primary healing target and 25% of your damage value is applied as an AoE party heal.

I've also seen games where doing damage fills up a resource that can be spent on healing. So instead of hitting a button to get Aetherflow or waiting around for Lillies you could say get a Lilly for every XX damage done or X damage spells cast. One class that comes to mind is the Warrior Priest from Warhammer Online. So healers still get to heal and have dedicated supplemental buttons to keep people alive, but most of their time is spent maintaining a more normal damage rotation.

[MPNZ]

*snip*.

TBH, most of this can be easily fixed with crowd control, allowing stackable abilities/spells/effects, breaking the regen/shield HLR segregation, and adding gameplay hooks et cetera, but the dev team literally does not have confidence in the playerbases's skill level or ability to adapt, which is a major problem in and of itself

[ReiMakoto]

They basically backed themselves into a corner that would require a massive overhaul of both tanking, healing and encounter design to get out of, which would have to retroactively change old content as well. The game was balanced about spikey damage charts, of periodic damage, the only way to generate more healing in that environment is to pull the spikes closer together, but given the resources healers have, without massive reworks healers and tanks would run out of rescourses within those spikes. Smoothing out the damage would require changes to both tanks and healers kit to support it, which would simultaenous break content which wasn't designed around it. This was exacerbated by the dumbing down of healers damage rotations from SB onwards, giving even more spikey healing tools, but less to do inbetween using them

[Chansey]

Most unpleasant healing experience in any mmo I've played so far tbh and hearing that it doesn't change much at end game is not good.

[Elladie]

It isn't tuned to discourage healing. It's tuned so that average players - who form the majority of the player base and have no intention of stepping into extremes, savage or ultimates (at least while they are current content) - can play as healers and be relatively competent at it. They can keep up with speed runs - because those don't seem to be going away - and manage to throw out a few nukes as well, even when healing a party made up of average DPS and an average tank.

I enjoy healing in this game and have enjoyed it since 1.0. It has changed over time, but it is still engaging. Keeping the majority of the player base happy - most of whom don't use the forums - makes economic sense. I'm happy for them to increase healing requirements in Savage etc of course because that doesn't affect me, and I have no issue with you having your healing challenges in that content

[ForteNightshade]

It isn't tuned to discourage healing. It's tuned so that average players - who form the majority of the player base and have no intention of stepping into extremes, savage or ultimates (at least while they are current content) - can play as healers and be relatively competent at it. They can keep up with speed runs - because those don't seem to be going away - and manage to throw out a few nukes as well, even when healing a party made up of average DPS and an average tank.

I enjoy healing in this game and have enjoyed it since 1.0. It has changed over time, but it is still engaging. Keeping the majority of the player base happy - most of whom don't use the forums - makes economic sense. I'm happy for them to increase healing requirements in Savage etc of course because that doesn't affect me, and I have no issue with you having your healing challenges in that content

Except healing isn't scaled towards the average player but the lowest common denominator. Hence why even more casual healer mains have been quite vocal over how boring the role has become. An average healer can straight up solo heal any Normal mode content without batting an eyelash. It's downright comical how minimal the healing requirements are in 8 man non-EX/Savage content.

One of the main reasons speed running became so prevalent for dungeons is due to the sheer ease. Small pulls deal such trivial damage, the tank could be 100 ilvls below the requirement and it mean absolutely nothing. Most tanks, myself included, pull big to feel like actual tanks not gimped DPS. Healers largely encourage it for the same reason. Put simply, the design philosophy is to assure that healer who spams Medica II for every little thing and thinks Cure III is better than Cure II because three is a bigger number can still clear. And that's why four years later they are still struggling with what to do when it comes to healers. The dev team thinks we heal when we don't. We're gimped DPS with some responsibility.

[HappyHubris]

They can keep up with speed runs - because those don't seem to be going away - and manage to throw out a few nukes as well, even when healing a party made up of average DPS and an average tank.

Damage is like 80+% of casts in dungeons, not "a few nukes." Unless someone is dozing off and does 2 or 3 casts a minute.

[ForteNightshade]

Damage is like 80+% of casts in dungeons, not "a few nukes." Unless someone is dozing off and does 2 or 3 casts a minute.

To further emphasise this point. My TEA healers, together, spent 41% of their casts on healing abilities; GCD and oGCD combined. And that was a bad run for them where we had deaths and some missed mitigation. TEA is currently the hardest content in the game and it still couldn't press them to spend even half their abilities on healing. That's how predictable outgoing damage is in this game. And why there are an increasing number of complaints regarding how boring the jobs have become—from players at every skill level.

[Shurrikhan]

All MMOs are "tuned" to avoid overcapping any short-term, cappable throughput. Healing is also always a short-term, cappable throughput in any game, single-player or multi-player.

The difference is solely that most games have more raid damage dealt and/or deal that damage in less predictable waves than does XIV.

[Risvertasashi]

This is bad design, as you take a class with a ton of interesting tools and make them slaves to a filler nuke button for most of the time. Instead of hitting all my buttons and overcoming a challenge I'm spamming stone stone stone stone stone aero stone stone oGCD heal stone stone oGCD heal stone etc.

I just wanted to quote this for emphasis. I agree completely. A lot of people say "healers are boring" and "we need more complex rotations.". Because of the filler nuke.

On the healing side there's a lot of interesting stuff. But the way the game is designed, we could get by with a 1 single target heal and 1 aoe heal for most content. The only time the kits' depth comes into play is in savage and beyond, but even then, we spend so much time hitting that filler nuke.