The role name "Healer" should be changed.

[Gravagar]

"Healers should just heal."
How many times have we heard that by now? It's misleading. Nobody queues up for a fight just to heal. If they do, then other players doing mechanics correctly sabotages their objective- by not taking extra damage to heal, they're infringing on your playstyle as badly as a tank Shirking a deeps just before a tank buster. Dead deeps do no damage and a healer with all full HP bars does no healing. Rather, we focus on the survival of our teammates, rather than large amounts of heals-per-second.



"Healers" queue up for fights with the objective of "win the fight." Maybe they're after loot. Maybe they're after EXP. Maybe tomestones, mounts, minions, or achievements. But regardless, your motivation is likely to fall into one of those categories. Casting healing magic is but a means to an end- a tool. It is a hammer, but not every situation in FF14 is a nail. In fact, "nails" are kind of infrequent as of late. That's why I think the name of the role should be changed...


"Healers" don't just heal if they want to complete their objective of "win the fight" as smoothly and cleanly as possible. Supporting allies with damage buffs (like SCH and AST do) is one of their options, as is dealing damage. After all, dealing damage inflicts a -100% damage dealt debuff called "You Died" on enemies, which helps your teammates survive.


Combat Medic, Support, Party Survival Specialist, there're plenty of possible names that more accurately reflect the role's playstyle. We don't just heal, and leaving the name "Healer" intact reinforces the idea that "healers should just heal." But again, healing is just a hammer, and not every situation is a nail. I think it's highly unlikely that we're going to see "nails" appear more often, so I believe the title of the role should change to embrace our full kits instead.

[MirronTulaxia]

Just call it DPSH, for DPS with Heals. Can do the same with Tanks, would more accurately reflect things to be sure.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Healer, Support, honestly just an argument of semantics likely derrived from World of Warcraft's generally different approach to how Healers, damage intake and fight design works compared to Final Fantasy XIV, intentionally or not.

I'll call it Healer because thats the terminology what the devs gave it ingame and I stick with that.

[Saefinn]

"Support" I think would be fair, though probably a bit late and kinda arbitrary to do it now.

But "support" encompasses healers who DPS and healers who buff (like AST) and other useful things that could support the party. And is probably more descriptive of the core design of "healing" in this game.

And being honest? I've always liked it.

But I feel this game's approach until maybe the current iteration has respected the general approach of healer characters in the FF series, in that if there is no healing needed then your healer character is tasked with doing something else most of the time. It also respects the FF MMO universe where FFXI your healer jobs also were expected to do other things when healing wasn't necessary. I was a main healer for my FFXI as a Scholar, Scholar was arguably one of the most complicated jobs to play in the game, it was both great for healing and DPS and I'd have to juggle the two and it was great. That carried over to here and that worked great IMO. But now the DPS side feels really lackluster and the healing side is too efficient for most content for that to be interesting.

I can't think of a game in the FF series where you're needing to only heal or constantly have a heal focus, except for certain fights.

"Healers must only heal" seems to be mentality that comes from MMO's where this is more accurate, where there is a harder push for heals. And the game isn't really designed to favour how other MMO's handle healing, so I don't understand why there are people who keep trying to push it.

I'd say something like "I don't want this to be like WoW healing" but I hopped onto my Holy Paladin whilst FF was down for patch and was like, "huh, I have a more varied DPS than my SCH on FFXIV, not massively more, but still more".

[HeulGDarian]

We can call it SEs green boy

[Wilford111]

Gosh this is petty.

[Urthdigger]

People just need to realize that every party member is expected to do whatever is within their power to help the run succeed. This means tanks and healers contributing to damage, this means players performing mechanics to avoid unnecessary vuln stacks, this means using tools DPS have such as Feint, Addle, or Mantra to help reduce damage taken or recover it faster. A healer is simply the party member that can most effectively recover HP, a tank is the party member that takes the least damage from attacks, a DPS is the party member that deals the most damage. A role is what you excel at, not the sole thing you do with absolutely nothing else done whatsoever.

[Gravagar]

I'll call it Healer because thats the terminology what the devs gave it ingame and I stick with that.

I'm not making an argument that players should pick a different name amongst themselves- if I were, I'd pick the "Damage Dealer (DD) vs DPS" argument, since that's much more interesting. I'm making an argument that "just semantics" has a measurable impact. It's the packaging the job comes in- if packaging didn't matter, then packaging design wouldn't be a multimillion (or billion?) dollar industry until itself.

...
I can't think of a game in the FF series where you're needing to only heal or constantly have a heal focus, except for certain fights.

...

I remember FF4 in particular... Until Holy, there are no damaging white magic spells (exception for Curing undead aside), but your white magic casters DO have options for contributing to the party. Rosa had a varied selection of useful buffs and debuffs. Porom could Twincast with Palom. As for other games, most of your healers have some sort of subjob- whether it's Yuna or Garnet also being summoners, or FF5/T giving you access to one other job's ability set.


Funny enough, these encounters are designed to give us room to cast buff / debuff spells using GCDs, like how Rosa often has time to cast Blink on Cecil or some of the other frontliners. We just kinda don't have any of our old FF staples to cast. FF white magic casters have never "just" healed- would be nice to have some kinda figurative sticker on the package that says "Does more than just heal!"

[MirronTulaxia]

I mean, White Mages never just heal, but usually it's heal, buff, and debuff. Not heal and damage. There are exceptions but that's still the norm. Even the exceptions it's just that they get a lower level damage spell other than Holy.

[Limonia]

Well, whenever I didn't need to heal/buff/support with Rosa and Garnet before they got stronger attacks (Holy/summons), I just pressed Attack. Garnet did low damage (don't remember how much Rosa's arrows did), but that was better than doing nothing.

Anyway, I would be fine with renaming healers to something that reflects their actual role of Attacker with healing and support actions. Maybe that would silent the people who say "I queued as 'healer' and thus I only heal".