My thoughts on Healing in FFXIV as a new player

[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.

[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.

[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.