A summary of healer issues

[Naychan]

Much like housing I feel its time to just give up on interesting healers & toolkits.

[Desna]

While I want more tools in the useful side of my kit? I disagree that DPS should be something SE bothers with on a Healer with the exception of Sage because Sage is billed and promoted as a DPS based healer even though SE has done a really poor job of making that work. Too much focus on tuning to Savage level raiding instead of doing the tuning in general party finder content is, to me, the issue. In Savage levels you have the cream of the crop players, which does NOT represent the majority of players that play the game. In Duty finder groups, tanks often don't use their mitigations, or, spam them and go for stretches without any available, they pull bigger than intended (and intent is shown in the Duty help when you're running the NPCs, you try a double pull in there and you're wiping, period) so clearly the content was never meant to be run that way. So...by design they don't expect healers to be facing things like tanks that over pull and under mitigate if they mitigate at all and while Allisaie in the duty help will stand in fire and take damage sometimes, the NPC DPS are far more likely to do mechanics than real players will. The amount of damage being taken by tanks in duty finder so grossly exceeds what a Sage's DPS generated throughput is it's laughable and not even worth bothering with in a duty finder general que. I see Sage healers try to use their DPS to keep tanks up...I've never, not since sage came out, seen it work among normal players in the general duty finder. Maybe in Savage? But in normal content where MOST of the players are? No. So Sage really doesn't deliver on the dps based healing...at all. That works like band aids, not heals. I would rather see more utility in crowd control, more stun abilities to break up the output of damage, more interesting approaches to delivery of both healing and mitigation with a Tank and DPS having LESS of those things available to them and thus MORE dependent on their healers who SHOULD be providing those things if the game designers were valuing the role for what it's supposed to be. No healer should ever have their DPS needed in any encounter, in my opinion, in groups a healers DPS should be nerfed to discourage groups from trying to force that on a role that it was not meant for. Leave it alone for solo content, but group up? 20% drop in DPS so no healer ever sees their class overlooked because another healing class does more damage (Again, except for the Sage since they want their DPS to contribute to their healing.) But over all? I thing the Devs really need to get and KEEP some people who run healers as their mains in their team, because current content should NEVER be something any group should be able to clear without a Healer. If it happens...the Devs are failing to do a good job with the roles place among the other classes.

[AlliciaCapulet]

All this is sadly still true in 7.2.

Seriously, doesn't the dev read... ? Over 1k comments on this issues and nothing moved... for 5... years.. 5... f*cking years of boring healing...

[Rozeee]

Much like BLM mains, I feel its time to give up on the game

[Qyoon]

All this is sadly still true in 7.2.

Seriously, doesn't the dev read... ? Over 1k comments on this issues and nothing moved... for 5... years.. 5... f*cking years of boring healing...

They don't read and don't care.
It's all about monitoring graph and stats.
In their opinion healers are fine as they are because stats said so.
This what happend when devs don't play their own games and and trust tools.
You end up with changes like +5 potency on dots in a patchnote that feels like a middlefinger to the players.
Been like that for years and i bet 8.0 will turn most healers into more dps than anything else.
Because this is the way that is the most cost and time effective to then design high level encounters.

Remember to SQE, FF XIV is just a product in their catalog, thats why FF XIV mobile is even a thing.
Acting like they care about the community is a PR thing, it's not real, this is just about making money.

[Taranok]

Much like housing I feel its time to just give up on interesting healers & toolkits.

It's more the playerbase needs to recognize what the issue actually is. The problem is class-encounter design interaction. If a party buster is coming every 20-40 seconds, healers are forced to have overpowered spells like medica. If all heals are overpowered spells, then any individual decision slowly becomes meaningless. If there's no real MP management, that's one less bit of complexity. And if the devs want to keep adding new things to healers, but constantly just continue the status quo of giving overpowered heals like medica 1, the situation gets pushed more and more into the extreme.


The problem is that encounter design is nothing but tank busters and party busters. There's very little random damage on 1 person, very little true sustained damage. There is no reason to choose between cure 1 and cure 2, you just tetragrammaton.

To fix this problem, the playerbase as a whole needs to clearly and concisely say that the way to fix healer kits is to nerf healer toolkits into the ground, prune abilities, remove literally every single free heal in the game (except things like freecure,) and pair it with a radical redesign of encounters. Because there will never be such a thing as fun healer design so long as every single mechanic can be solved by your choice of afflatus rapture, assize, indomitability, fey blessing, earthly star, macrocosmos, ixichole, holos.

Throw in barriers and mits to taste and you have a recipe of the singularly most boring healer design possible. The frustrating thing is, this nonsense started in Heavensward. But I'm not really a healer main so I never really detailed what the problem is or why it's a problem.

[Sylvain]

It's more the playerbase needs to recognize what the issue actually is. The problem is class-encounter design interaction. If a party buster is coming every 20-40 seconds, healers are forced to have overpowered spells like medica. If all heals are overpowered spells, then any individual decision slowly becomes meaningless. If there's no real MP management, that's one less bit of complexity. And if the devs want to keep adding new things to healers, but constantly just continue the status quo of giving overpowered heals like medica 1, the situation gets pushed more and more into the extreme.


The problem is that encounter design is nothing but tank busters and party busters. There's very little random damage on 1 person, very little true sustained damage. There is no reason to choose between cure 1 and cure 2, you just tetragrammaton.

To fix this problem, the playerbase as a whole needs to clearly and concisely say that the way to fix healer kits is to nerf healer toolkits into the ground, prune abilities, remove literally every single free heal in the game (except things like freecure,) and pair it with a radical redesign of encounters. Because there will never be such a thing as fun healer design so long as every single mechanic can be solved by your choice of afflatus rapture, assize, indomitability, fey blessing, earthly star, macrocosmos, ixichole, holos.

Throw in barriers and mits to taste and you have a recipe of the singularly most boring healer design possible. The frustrating thing is, this nonsense started in Heavensward. But I'm not really a healer main so I never really detailed what the problem is or why it's a problem.

But then you have the issue of having to have "old encounter" be clearable with the new design.
For DPS it's no problem, in the end, as long as "damage follows", you don't really care how it's distributed.
For healing it's different, while you could say "who cares about old content", it's still something A LOT of people do (and especially people leveling up)

If you redesign healing but it results in most EX/Savages/Ult of older xpac to be unclearable... Sure the design in the newest expansion is better, and it is important (more so than how it interacts with old content) but people would still be utterly mad and again, how do people leveling up manage if suddenly every lv 30-100 content becomes much harder to heal due to the new design? Let's not forget that a significant portion of the player base is **very** casual and can't even tackle EX trials.

[Carighan]

It's why all healing changes are going to be a massive undertaking, as it has to also be re-worked for all older content, and in particular the lack of incoming damage vs our overloaded healer kits is an issue you have to start fixing at lvl50 at the very latest, possibly much earlier.

That is:

* Massively increase damage frequency on the group, and in particular unreliable output. Initially keep damage lower, of course, but make it clear that there's always "something" to heal.
* Massively curb ability and in particular oGCD proliferation in healer kits. Cut the kits down heavily. There's no reason to have 2-4 oGCDs that ultimately all cause AoE healing, one is more than enough, make it stronger and more unique to compensate.
* Ideally compensate for the previous point by establishing some interaction between damage tools and healing tools that encourage interweaving both abilities.

But of course, again, that requires going back through all previous fights and re-doing much of them entirely.

[Qyoon]

They won't do it because it's fine as it is for them.
It works right now, they won't waste time and ressources on something that works.
The only answer we ll get is "play another job"
If many people stop playing healers, it would be easier to reduce the damage since everybody has self sustain.
Then make the mecanic more dangerous across the board and all the content will be doable without a healer anyway.
Most of the game normal content is doable without healer already.