A summary of healer issues

[Cled-cat]

Healing went from being my favourite role to my least favourite with the Shadowbringers (and to a lesser extent, Stormblood) changes. Healers need more love and attention badly. They’re so boring and uninspired to play it’s actually painful playing as a healer now. Comparing Healers to DPS/Tanks is like comparing a £1 burger in a can to a gourmet restaurant burger, not only does it look and feel crap in comparison but it also leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

[Corbeau]

Points 1-6 matter more than the rest, but the OP has a solid list of what's wrong.

[Lethros]

Although as they are now I find healer jobs quite boring, all other jobs I actually like even less. I hope something is done, but I also don't have faith in how it might be handled. I used to really like playing dark knight too but that's gone. Ninja I would enjoy if Hide didn't reset ninjutsu charges, because I really liked playing the job before I realized it was a traitless addition beyond rogue (when I already reached 80), so I really liked the extra cooldown management that goes with that in dungeons. However the level 80 action also threw me off a lot with what felt like a more linear tight rope jenga rotation. I think I generally like healers a lot more because of room to adapt and make choices in various situations, be conscious, answer and move according to environments and party members, and are not really about self-conflict like how DPS feel

[Mimilu]

As someone who is a Green-DPS through-and-through, I feel like they treat healing like its a required utility and not actual gameplay.
With DPSing, you have things like positionals, combos (or forms for MNK), weaving-oGCDs, maintaining/gaining gauges/stacks/resources, high-burst phases, and, in the case of NIN and DNC, a mini-game.
Healing is just: Use Shield before big damage, Use Burst/Regen after damage (most of which is done via oGCD while weaving your DPS spells), and some resource management (for WHM and SCH). (Having said that, healing harder content does require more skill-coordination and planning but still boils down to these fundamentals.)

I'm not saying they need to make healing more challenging and/or in-coming damage needs to go up but if the dev team is going to continue emphasizing Healer's healing kits without adding much else, they need to make the kits at least fun/interesting to play.

[ty_taurus]

As someone who is a Green-DPS through-and-through, I feel like they treat healing like its a required utility and not actual gameplay.
With DPSing, you have things like positionals, combos (or forms for MNK), weaving-oGCDs, maintaining/gaining gauges/stacks/resources, high-burst phases, and, in the case of NIN and DNC, a mini-game.
Healing is just: Use Shield before big damage, Use Burst/Regen after damage (most of which is done via oGCD while weaving your DPS spells), and some resource management (for WHM and SCH). (Having said that, healing harder content does require more skill-coordination and planning but still boils down to these fundamentals.)

I'm not saying they need to make healing more challenging and/or in-coming damage needs to go up but if the dev team is going to continue emphasizing Healer's healing kits without adding much else, they need to make the kits at least fun/interesting to play.

Something I've been talking about a lot is returning job identity by making each healer contribute to rDPS differently.

Scholar should be the healer for the "Green DPS" players, getting all of their rDPS contribution from direct, more complex DPS rotations and more oGCD healing tools to maximize their DPS up time.

Astrologian should get GCD support tools that outweigh Malefic spam for the players who want to be pure healers with little-to-no direct DPS usage, keeping your Combust up at most. Meanwhile you contribute to rDPS by adding to other players' total DPS instead.

WHM would be the happy medium, focusing more on GCD healing in an attempt to bloom the Blood Lily as frequently as possible to Throw out blasts of high personal DPS at intervals rather than trying to maximize Glare uptime.

[OvernightSiren]

Agree with all points.

I remember before ShB they said that they were making ShB fights require more healing, so that the loss of our DPS abilities wouldn't be noticed since we'd be healing so much but like....that's not the case. I still spend a lot of the fight DPSing (and rightfully being expected to do so) but the difference is now my DPSing is SO boring. Biolysis...Broil III....Broil III...Broil III. In dungeons it's even worse. As a SCH, having multiple DoTs and Bane really made the job feel very unique to the other healers.

I also agree that the healers are far too homogenized, but while that's true I still think SCH has the least distinct identity of the three. AST still has unique damage buffs with some element of thought to them and WHM continues to have the identity of having the strongest raw heals. What does SCH have that make it unique? Our fairies are watered down to the point that their best use is just waiting for the aoe regen to come off cooldown. Aetherpact is mostly useless and there's no strategy to it--you will ALWAYS use it on the tank. Aside from that the only other "unique" part of SCH's kit is chain stratagem which requires zero thought--you're always going to use it on the boss unless you're in a pinch during a DPS check. I felt like Fey Wind and giving SCH multiple DoTs with bane as well as two distinct fairies really made them feel so much more unique than they are now. And we lost all that with our only new DPS tool being "Art of War" which has a really underwhelming visual compared to Holy and Gravity.

[Payadopa]

Something I've been talking about a lot is returning job identity by making each healer contribute to rDPS differently.

That sounds like a cool idea. So ppl can DPS or heal more depending on preference.

Cheers to OP for the great summary.

[Deceptus]

Points 1-6 matter more than the rest, but the OP has a solid list of what's wrong.

Agreed. It is a good, solid, write-up of current issues.

9. Healer glamour compared to other roles is double standards
Other roles have various amounts of cloth and armour options of multiple amounts from full tunics and plate to cloth, to hardly anything at all
Healers are continuously stuck with robes, shawls or a couple of wraps. Ignoring the fact that male healers are a thing, why can't we have some proper armour sets instead of cloth for once? Imagine a scholar in plate alongside his warrior allies like the lore, or a white mage in a gambison and chain mail wandering the land to bring succor.
Many options that other roles get but we healers are constantly getting the short stick from

Healer plate CAN be done, but there's only 1 or 2 ways to do it.

[AnotherPerson]

Something I've been talking about a lot is returning job identity by making each healer contribute to rDPS differently.

Astrologian should get GCD support tools that outweigh Malefic spam for the players who want to be pure healers with little-to-no direct DPS usage, keeping your Combust up at most. Meanwhile you contribute to rDPS by adding to other players' total DPS instead.

There seems to be a lot of issues if AST becomes a little-to-no direct DPS usage job. The problem is what kind of GCD support tool can outweigh a Malefic spam? The nature of the game makes DPS > most general support toolkits unless support skill is a DPS buff. Having it tied to the GCD means it has to be fairly spammable, and too strong of an effect will break game balance and make malefic not worth casting. It sounds good in theory but not feasible to implement. oGCD support tools have an innate advantage in that they can be weaved into a combo so even if a support tool doesn't give a DPS buff, it's still a beneficial utility. GCDs on the other hand aren't.

The real reason healers DPS is to maximize and optimize the efficiency of their toolkit and contribution to its max. This is especially the case for savage level raids. However... pure healers who don't want to DPS means they do not have the mindset of optimizing their toolkit for max contribution, which also means they won't be doing difficult content that requires mandatory DPS. If anything they'll be doing normal content and 4-man content, which would be counter productive to what rDPS is aimed for.

The second issue is gameplay progression. The effect of rDPS varys greatly depending on the number of players in a party - If the AST (with little-to-no DPS Usage but has rDPS skills) doing 4-man content, they are essentially only able to achieve less than half as much potential from their toolkit than the other healers's toolkits (as their main source of damage is composed of 3 people and not 7). For MSQ storyline content and solo instances / with just a Chocobo, they'll be down to 2 (and technically less than 2 because rDPS is boosting only a small portion of your Chocobo's DPS). This effectively locks them into a raid-healer-only job category. At that point, their actual DPS skills in the open world is their Malefic + Combust spam, which ultimately just changes nothing for variety. That's a big reason why I preferred Lord of Crowns minor arcana to keep the flat attack potency rather than exchange it for an 4 - 8% boost.

The third issue is balance with other healers. rDPS scaling from 3 players to 7 players will inevitably break balance.

There's no way to truly a good way to make a healer not "DPS" but still contribute to DPS fairly without ruining some form of gameplay somewhere else. SE already tried to delete DPS to make it easier for healers... but you know how bad that went. The real solution is really to just encourage DPSing for a healer.

[Allegor]

Healer plate CAN be done, but there's only 1 or 2 ways to do it.

I think their point was that, aside from Mog Station/universal glamour sets, which anyone can use, there are literally only 4 sets one would call plate/chain mail armor for healers - the Deepshadow set, the Daystar set (and its recolor), the Deltascape set, and the Gordian healing set, with everything else being some variation of white robe and only occasionally some form of [...white] jacket, vest, coat, etc. Also they aesthetically tend to favor female characters (looking at you Eden) because let's admit it, the healing role has always been female coded.