My thoughts on Healing in FFXIV as a new player

[tazrenoth]

Hi everyone,

I recently started playing FFXIV. I levelled up the conjurer to white mage, and now I am working on finishing the msq. In the short time I've been playing up to lvl 53, I feel perhaps I made a mistake in choosing to heal. I played healer in WoW for a long time, but FFXIV feels different for healing.

1. I feel the mechanics of healing in this game creates a community that doesn't value healing whatsoever.

2. I asked about healing in raids, the first question they asked me was how my DPS was. (my dps? I thought. I'm a healer, not DPS)

3. I feel that healing is a side gig in this game, which makes me feel useless. I feel as though I should be doing DPS first, and healing is just a side thing I should do every now and then casually. I hate this.

4. This makes me frustrated but also sad, because I want to feel valued in the role that I play. I don't want to feel forced to DPS when that is not the class I want to play.

5. I've posted some stuff on Reddit and was just downvoted because the whole community there just said in this game you dps first, heal second. That's just the way it is otherwise you are compleletely useless and lazy. That's the mentality the FFXIV has about healers? But I can understand this because the game mechanics don't seem very good for healers to have fun and play, so far.... IMO


I know I haven't finished the msq, but does healing get better after or is this pretty much the mentality of the game forever?

[Mesarthim]

Unfortunately the game gives you so many oGCD heals to the point it gets silly, you will spend most of your time healing through oGCDs. GCDs will be spent doing dps because with a combination of oGCD abundance and game design you will most likely be spending the majority of your time dpsing in your downtime when you get familiar with content.

Just ask people who do ultimate. Savage and ultimate are heavily scripted so you'll generally always know what attacks are coming and when. Dungeons are no exception either. Dungeon bosses only have like.. 1-2 mechanics and they always happen in the same order. The most variance I usually see is... say breath of the creator savage. Opens up with one of two mechanics but the other mechanic will happen immediately after. So even if they switch up the order it happens in the same spot in the fight.

Edit: And this is usually a starting point on why people are reaching boredom. We have so much downtime to dps but they stripped healers of dps skills for Shadowbringers. There's a good 20-22 pages of threads to sift through on that. I personally have been tanking or playing a red mage more than healing these days.

[GrimGale]

Hence why we're seeing a shortage of healers.

We are valued for our dps. We are expected to dps.

That in itself is not a bad thing, but if you found dpsing as a healer dull from 1-50 I have bad news for you. It doesn't get better. You will spam the same singlentarget spell while keeping up the same single target DoT even in high level content.

For a game that expect healers to dps, damaging as a healer is incredibly dull and boring.

[tazrenoth]

I just registered in the forums today to talk about this point, but now that I am looking through all the pages, I can see I am definitely not the first person who has mentioned these things Yikes.

Do you think SE is listening to the healing community and may do something to fix these issues, or nah?

[Mesarthim]

I just registered in the forums today to talk about this point, but now that I am looking through all the pages, I can see I am definitely not the first person who has mentioned these things Yikes.

Do you think SE is listening to the healing community and may do something to fix these issues, or nah?

Who knows. We've been given the same excuse for Stormblood and Shadowbringers of them "needing to balance healers" so there will be quite the riot if they do that for a third. Aside from the AST buffs and them giving SCHs their Energy Drain back for the second time there has been nothing but radio silence from the devs. As far as I am aware even the Japanese side of the game hates the situation too.

The devs probably know but they're just too scared to say anything. Or they intend to do something by 6.0 but won't say anything for over a year when that time comes. They haven't been giving healers the attention they deserve and it's starting to show.

[elioaiko]

I've played since SB and pretty much an omni healer and raid on them so my opinion will range from the spectrum of casual to hardcore. I'll respond to each of your points with my thoughts and my experience.

1. It doesn't, you're right. The combat philosophy is very scripted therefore making a fight/content pass its first clear much easier as you can plan out all your heals, specifically oGCD heals. SE has had a trouble history with balancing healers to the content they make. They want us to heal more but the incoming damage is so low and spaced out, it makes healing with oGCD heals more optimal and rewarding. It's a problem that lies with how content is designed, not the job itself or the community that optimizes it.

2. Unfortunately, this is a game where DPS is very important as the hardest parts of Savage and Ultimates are the dps checks. Helping dps during times where heals are not needed (everyone's topped off and the next mechanic doesn't require a GCD heal) goes a long way. It's this way for tanks too, everyone's a DPS in this game. This isn't to say that healers and tanks shouldn't perform their primary function, there's just a more you can do than that focus. In short, tanks focus on surviving and healers focus on keeping the party alive, but with a layer of dps in between downtime.

3. It truly does suck that we have to hit 2 buttons throughout the encounter for the most part while only half our healing kits is useless aside from oGCD ones. The devs have a massive disconnect from what they want healers to be (GCD focused healing) rather than how they're played (oGCD healing and dps heavy). This is just the devs not being able to find a middle man to all this, thus the never-ending list of healer complaints.

4. SE has made it clear that healers are not required to dps but this is a social game where people tend to respect each other's time. And in Savage raiding, you are expected to dps and heal optimal past progging. I understand the desire to not want to do dps as that's not what healers some are used to, but again, if the dps checks aren't being made, tank and healer dps matters a bit. DPS cannot be expected to have 100% uptime and perfectly either as tanks and healers aren't expected to be perfect.

Healing does get better at the max level but that's a personal opinion, you may not like it since it's still heavily dependent on your party performing well.

If you do wanna play a job that's a bit more support-like (buffing the party and assisting with damage mitigation) then I'd suggest Bard or Dancer as they are more party-focused. But they again are DPS who's main focus will be DPS.

I think that seperating other games' healers from this one would help. The content design is very different than say WoW or GW2.

I am sorry that you can't enjoy healers in this game. If you want to keep going with it, I'd suggest to play with different groups of people to gauge how they view it and if it works for you.

[Irenia]

Honestly, in order to fix healing, one of two things need to happen.

1) Embrace the Green DPS meme and make the time you don't have to heal engaging. Since things really only get hectic due to inexperience or lack of skill, this should ideally make getting better feel really rewarding. The problem here is that the casual culture of this game night take a big hit, can and everything I've seen suggests that SE values this culture a lot.

2) Change the design going forward so that the harder encounters cannot be planned out to the letter. The healer fantasy is a reactive one, generally, knowing the tricks makes you a DPS that presses a skill at certain points in order to not wipe. If you don't know when that big raidwide AoE is coming out, then you are incentivised to keep people's health up, rather than let people lay at low health, because you know that they will regen enough before the next big hit. Unfortunately, changing the old content too for this paradigm is a waste of time in my opinion, and I'm not sure how the other roles would feel about not being able to line up buff windows because the boss randomly decided to do a mechanic that forces melee to disengage this run.

[tazrenoth]

Thank you very much for this detailed reply. It was very insightful.

[whiskeybravo]

Elioaiko summed it up pretty well, it's just a potential thing. Healers have the potential to both sustain parties and deal respectable damage in all content. Full-time healing isn't really required, most players know this, and if they see you just standing around waiting to cast the next cure or medica it's going to trigger someone eventually, because you, as a healer, have the potential to both heal and contribute damage. It'd be the same for a DPS that doesn't AoE in dungeons, or tanks that deal less damage than they're capable of, which causes the instances to take longer than necessary.

That being said, I can't get into the weeds on this since I'm not a healer by any means. But I would suggest to give it some time (if you really want to main healer) and see how it plays out with the knowledge that "pure healer" isn't really a thing in this game. You certainly can play that way if you want, just be prepared for some people to get triggered here and there.

[Kalise]

Do you think SE is listening to the healing community and may do something to fix these issues, or nah?

It's hard to say.

Given that the state of healing in the game has been pretty much the same way forever.

With them regarding the rebalancing of Healers in ShB being things like "People find WHM too hard, so we're making it easier" when at the time, WHM was not only the easiest healer to play (Due to it having even more oGCD than the other 2 healers) but was also considered the weakest because it didn't bring as much damage as the other 2 healers (Due to AST having cards that buffed damage and SCH having Chain Stratagem as a party DPS CD)

The fact that they added more oGCD healing to healers kits in ShB is not a good sign when even before it there was the meme of healers being "Green DPS"

Though, one of the major issues isn't just how they've designed healers (With a plethora of oGCD healing skills that are equal if not stronger than their best GCD heals on top of infinite MP made worse by oGCD's literally having no cost)

But it's the way that they've designed encounters at their core. So, even if you literally deleted all oGCD heals from healers, their gameplay wouldn't really differ. You'd just see people use Cure II instead of Tetragrammaton after the Tank gets hit by the big scary Tankbuster once per minute and would use Medica II instead of Assize when the raid gets hit by the unavoidable AoE damage, once a minute.

They would need to completely rework how they design encounters from the very base in order to create a situation where healing was needed more than once per Raid/Tank"Buster" that happens at set intervals during a fight. Which would also necessitate them having to address how Tanks would then play because they're currently also balanced as mostly "Blue DPS" and simply press a defensive CD once per minute as a Tankbuster comes in.