If they made healers into pure healers, would you still play it?

[MorganG]

I would instantly leave if healers became pure healers. Besides the obvious design problems of pure healing, it also creates a role in which unnecessary pressure is put on 1 or 2 characters. I already have problems explaining to my Static that if the AoE heal kept everyone BUT them alive, they probably died to an avoidable mechanic. In pure healing roles that means nearly every wipe is the healers fault, since they only have one job anyway, right? Additionally, the stress of pure healing fight designs is just a major turn off for me. Finally, I like that groups in FFXIV have the same basic function: hurt the bad guys until they fall down. It means in organized groups even selfish dps are trying to maximize tank and healer dps, since quicker clears can sometimes bypass whole mechanics.

Anyway, yeah. Pure healer becomes a thing and I'll probably just leave. I can play a support DPS in DnD or GW2 to scratch that itch.

[Maltothoris]

Ya the problem with the statement with what Deceptus posted what that it didn't happen but it was with timing. The main healer/ off healer dynamic was something was very prevalent during the early days of Heavensward. Look at some clear videos of Gordias and early Midas and you can see this the whm doing the healing and the sch doing the dps. Thing is, it was near the end of Midas and towards the beginning of Creator that people realized that if both healers shared the burden, they were able to do better dps together than if it was just one healer. That and the astro buffs in 3.4, whm basically suffered until now when they decided that all healers should suffer.

[HyoMinPark]

I don't just mean how they are now. I mean their healing potencies nerfed into the dirt, to the point where even the best gear would still require you to spam heals on at least the tank. Something more akin to the typical healer archetype mmo's have had.

They nerfed healing output in ShB and it did nothing to change the Green DPS meta that exists. I'd only play a "pure healer" if this game did actual damage. As it is now, there's not enough outgoing damage to warrant spam healing - and nerfing healing potency is just the lazy way of trying to enforce a "pure healer" playstyle. It wouldn't increase engagement for me, anyways. I want more frequent raidwides (that actually hurt and not just tickle) and reasons to want to save my bigger healing cooldowns. Not puny healing potency.

[Urthdigger]

I'd probably still play healer if they did that, but the problem is they'd need to overhaul a LOT of things to make that work. The problem with simply nerfing healing potency into the ground so you have to spam heals even on casual content, is how do they then scale it up for higher level content? If you're already spending all your GCDs healing to get by on easier content, anything that puts out more damage is going to be literally impossible. Then we have the issue of gearing up: Currently, as both the tank and the healers get better gear over the course of a patch, healing becomes easier because the tanks are taking less damage and the heals are healing for more. There's basically no way of fixing this without making gearing up the healer essentially useless. This is essentially how a lot of older MMOs work, with a fairly hard limit on how much a heal can heal for regardless of stats, and gearing up a healer in those games usually revolves around max MP and MP regen, but that requires a game environment that accepts resting between fights as something one does, which modern MMOs like FFXIV do not do.

[Videra]

No. /Tenchars

[Shalan]

I would probably stop. Shifting one spam (DPS) to another (healing) would just tell me the devs are either out of ideas or couldn't find a way to balance things. Neither of which inspires confidence in a role I'm already on shaky grounds with after the constant cuts over the years.

I'd rather see them bring back more support oriented abilities. Not healing, but abilities like Eye for an Eye, Disable, Stella, Stoneskin II, Fey Covenant, etc. and work new fights to require a proper understanding of when to utilize these abilities. It would be significantly more interesting than simply spamming a single button like we are now or likely would be in your suggestion.


I understand Yoshi wanted to remove a lot of these support type abilities to prevent meta-chasers from only running certain classes, but it honestly feels like we've lost more over the years than we've gained as a result.

[Valic]

I appreciate the mentioning of Aion. I remember that yank (and how good it felt to use).

And I see your point. Dealing damage is more intrinsic to the tank role in that they deal damage to establish and hold hate, while the healer role doesn't need to deal damage in order to heal, strictly speaking. That is a fair distinction to make. I think what I wanted to focus on was more the direction tanks and healers are being taken in, and where they came from. Both tanks and healers have always had a versatile dps toolkit in ffxiv, yet it is only the healer that is experiencing a neutering of its dps toolkit while the tank is experiencing a steady metamorphosis into a "designated dps that also holds aggro." Now, if tanks are allowed to embrace their dps half, why can't healers? Would expanding on the dps toolkit for healers, to the same degree as tanks, be so terrible for healer accessibility?

Additionally, I have no doubts that a "pure" job could work, but that presupposes that the game is designed to accomodate that kind of play -- which ffxiv currently does not. The problem there is the clashing philosophy of what the devs would have you do versus how it really works. But that is an issue for another day. It's late and this old man needs his tea.

God I wish we could have those yanks for pve, those one "cannot be moved, ranged mob" you always find in dungeons and have to line of sight to get together.... I'll live without it but dang it was a nice ability to have as a tank, especially marked for your party who needs to die first. Then again, tanks at the time could choose what they aggro rather than everything being so automatic like how FFXIV is.

[Sylve]

Big Snip

Sadly, As much as i would enjoy a world where the game was made for fun over balance concerns, The slightest glance in the direction of MMO history indicates impossibility thanks to players Thanos level obsession with absolute balance .

The SCH/WHM pairing in ARR worked wonderfully, because the SCH's role was to blunt the incoming damage while the WHM patched up the team. Nowadays? If any job is perceived to be 'weak' comparatively, it'll be ditched and shunned.
Stormblood WHM says hello again. The many threads you can find on Jobs being 'barred' from PF groups due to meta obsession also share greetings.

One would argue that there is a difficulty scale to our current Healing jobs. WHM is super easy to pick up and play. It's kit is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. SCH needs planning and preparation to do well while AST can be pretty technical at times due to its rather varied kit.
I'd love for the 6.0 Healer to be a difficult but rewarding job to play well.

And it'll affect people who have the mentality "I must pick meta over not meta" despite their group not being near the percentile where it really matters and end up turning away a non-meta player with a high DPS for a meta player with mediocre one...which annoyingly is something I've seen happen and it's stupid IMO.

Sadly, the masses like to look at data, like FFlogs and parses in general, and then make an assumption about the worthiness of jobs for their party. Like when SAM was ostracised for it being perceived as weak and a liability compared to other DPS.
Individual player skill be damned, if the parses and the speedrunners claim a job is weak it simply must be true!

On the GC and Shiva I corrected myself because I misunderstood what you were trying to say. But putting all that aside, I think there are wires crossed, because I think we are in agreement right up until the point I believe we need more to do in our downtime, especially for easier content.

I actually do understand what you're after here, we just disagree on downtime as a concept.
You believe that downtime is our "time to dps", while i believe that downtime shouldn't exist at all. We should be mingling healing and DPS consistently through the entire fight.

Our DPS 'kits' wouldn't feel quite so mind numbing if Glare usage was woven amongst healing GCDs. I don't support a dps like rotation for healing OR damage.
We should be dynamically responding to the condition of the party from start to finish. That can't happen for as long as the big damage is heavily scripted to line up with recasts for every tool we have.
There is no dynamism to the fights.
We learn "Mechanic Name = X Damage = Y Tool to fix", and then that tool is ready to fix that mechanics damage every time it's ready.

Given this difference and there being a problem with playing a healer being boring for a most of the game's existing content, I am curious how you'd deal with the following:

Assuming for a moment that you mean this in a hypothetical scenario in which encounter design changed for new content, then the reply is simple. I'd deal with that exactly as i dealt with ARR content during Heavensward and Stormblood content currently.
In that the content isn't fun to heal right now, and that wouldn't change with a hypothetical design change in new current content.

Once Heavensward got under way, ARR content felt like an absolute joke where it used to provide fun. Likewise with Heavensward content come Stormblood. Vault had a high rate of failure in HW, particularly the final boss.
Now? That dungeon is obliterated every time.

The encounter mechanics have steadily gotten more complex over time up to current. ShB stuff is more entertaining to heal than Stormblood stuff, despite Stormblood stuff being fun at the time of its relevance.
It will ALWAYS feel worse to play old content because the new content is better made. That's been true from ARR up till now.

They don't have the manpower or budget to rebuild every fight from ARR to ShB, nor would it be realistic to ever expect that.
Since Jobs wouldn't change, they'd play in old content exactly as they do right now no matter what they do with encounter design philosophy in 6.0 and onwards. But we'd end up with a more rewarding endgame play experience from that point onward, and i believe that to be worth trying to achieve.

[Niervel]

I think the idea of leveling the field is always the wrong approach - if the worry is that the top 1% of players will minmax a given job out of the spotlight and then the petulant copycats will parrot the idea - the solution to that is to make the copycats look like complete morons. If WHM was to become the only logical choice at the top 1% of play, I fail to see this as an issue if the AST and SCH offer up something more for the other 99% of play.

To make an analogy - if the absolute top-tier character in a fighting game requires constant strings of one-frame links to play, it may be that the absolute best players in the world will flock to that character. Yet if everyone else tried to play this character, many would perform awfully and stick to sub-par strings that avoid the one-frame links. Meanwhile if those players had gone to a mechnically easier character, they would see better results - and those characters might offer something else, like mindgames or frametraps, which could be used to beat out the top-tier. Even if the top-tier were mechanically simple and easily accessible, it can be the case that niche characters win out - Gen has topped for Street Fighter 4, Panda has topped for Tekken 7.

The goal of design should be that even if 2xWHM was the absolute bee's knees for the top 1%, any given mixture of healers can offer upsides for everyone else.

I don't think it would be impossible to make the idea of 'pure healing' fun, but it would require a complete overhaul of the classes to a more extreme degree -- or dumbing them down to the point where they're completely unengaging. Healing was fun in WoW's earlier days (I am ignorant of its later days) largely because it was a matter of managing resources, cooldowns, and limitations. Different healers were good at different things, had different tools, and managed their weaknesses very differently. If you ripped out offensive / support options for most of the healers in this game, I don't think you have terribly interesting resource management left for any of them. You could remake them from the ground up to make them distinct and viable yet primarily focused on healing... but why?

Just give them back more tools and tricks and goodies. Let one healer be generally better at healing, one generally better at damage, one generally better at utility - and let different groups figure out which combinations they prefer. Let the min-maxers find their preferences, the sheepish copycats attempt and fail to mimic it, and everyone else find something that works and is fun to play. Let some reward more skilled players and some be a little more forgiving.

[Saefinn]

snip.

I think we should have less downtime than we do, but I like being able to juggle my healing with other things and is a design choice I praised the game for, over some I guess more traditional approaches to the healer role. So I'd be saddened by a complete heal focus. But this is of course a difference of opinion I don't think either one of us can convince each other on because these are personal preferences, although I would argue my preferences are in line with how the game was designed, though yours more in the direction they're heading. IMO the compromise would be less down time and more DPS skills. So we can still weave and in content where downtime is high and will remain high, we have more to break up the monotony. But that's a compromise I've already come to, and hope more would feel okay meeting half way on.

Though I can understand that you might get something different out if the experience, which is fair. And if things went in your direction, I'd find it more enjoyable than what we have, but my concern about older content remains, as a tank or DPS I have stuff to break up the monotony, but not so much with a healer. Hence I'd not mind a disconnect between normal content and raid content with balance, like they did with PvP, but not to the extreme of PvP, it could be that some DPS spells are inaccessible in raid content, as an example. Not fool proof, but a better way than the split is now.

And it sounds like then we're expecting job design to adjust because people are idiots when it comes to how they understand balance? Whilst I am aware this mentality exists, back in HW my MCH friend was turned down in the PF a few times despite him doing really good DPS and his Wildfires were massive and he'd likely out DPS anybody who they probably picked over him, because he was an exceptional MCH.

A MNK friend found the same in ARR for speed run parties, when people laughed at her, she'd link them her parse and compare it to BLM's and SMN's she out DPS'd. I always used to take her in my speed run groups and stuff would melt.

But I don't really recall seeing much beyond that since.

But I feel accommodating it only validates this mentality, which I feel we should combat instead. To a semi-casual player like me this feels like "we'll sacrifice what you find enjoyable to accommodate people with an e-peen who don't actually know what they're talking about."

Because speaking to some of the more hardcore endgame healers here, they seem to mostly be on the same page as me too and are pro-DPS rotation. I tend to find people who are serious raiders tend to recruit on merit and not job choice.

So if what you say is right, I feel like we're accommodating for the wrong people for the wrong reasons.