Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[GrimGale]

If there was a game mechanic that tied a percentage of your dps to your HP then keeping people topped off would mean everything. 100% HP means you do 100% DPS, and as you go down, you weaken.

Now there is no rush or reason to focus on healing as long as the group has enough health to withstand the next mechanic.

(But of course something like this would ultimately open up another avenue for abuse to healers.)

Then again, spamming GCD heals is as engaging as spamming Broil or Glare.
AST is often recognised as the most fun because it juggles with three simple systems at the same time, so you're always doing something different.

Heal, then support, then damage for filler.

[Saefinn]

People can and will still do the fights even if future fight design changes. ARR and HW have different fight design than StB and ShB so changing the fight design going forward doesn't mean redoing all previous fights.

It does if the chosen solution to fixing healers is to change encounter design.

Else it means healing remains dull as heck for existing content but not for new content.

Hence that's only a partial solution but IMO not adequate.

This would however, work in line with suggestion #1 I put, accept that downtime is a thing, give healers more to do and change future encounter design if need be.

Which is why my first solution IMO is the best one. Because they can keep existing content engaging enough, keep the skill floor low and increase the ceiling and if they want more heal focus moving forward they do it from encounter design and at the same time respects existing design. And arguably is the least laborious.

[Alpheus]

They should just make our responsibilities feel rewarding to achieve. Give healers damage scaling based on party health, allow their crits to build separate but identical stacks that restore MP (for dmg crits) or a in-combat only Direct Hit rate buff (for healing crits)or benefits that otherwise facilitate DPSing and healing and let them have diminishing returns so that you are motivated to keep both stacks high.

This can be extrapolated for other jobs, tanks get damage scaling with aggro with maybe a slight dmg buff that's separate for the off tank to make them utilize their off tank mitigations without being penalized on DPS for not being the MT. Melee DPS for positionals performed correctly, rez mages for rezzes granted, a personal DPS buff for DPS when they utilize their party buffs, give BLM and SAM some party or individual party member buffs so they can also have something similar. And make all these buffs short duration so that when a phase change happens it punctuates the fact that now the boss is serious and you have to do everything u just did but with everything exploding around you now.

If DPS is the only thing that truly matters then let it be the fulcrum that everything else revolves around and let it incentivize usage of the other parts of a job's kit, players remain engaged and take an interest in playing well with others because then they themselves perform better in a way that's highlighted with bigger numbers so that there's that immediate feedback.

TLDR: Give everyone a Greased Lightning kind of mechanic but one that is granted for playing well and utilizing everything your job has to bear. The point being to incentivize good play that isn't so binary ie: we did it!/Oh we died, cuz I dont think the Devs have it in them to change encounter design and make hard heal checks when throughout the lifetime of this game healers have been trying to get away with what's good enough (as healing is in all other games but its especially felt in this one as CC and other such busy work just isn't relevant at the higher levels of content)

[Payadopa]

I think there should be more random damage we have to heal through. Yesterday I did E11 and I had to AFK during the fight because of RL stuff that couldn't wait, sadly, and when I came back like a few minutes later the entire party was alive and none the worse for wear and the other healer didn't have any problems. I get that it's no savage content but c'mon... We're lvl 80 now. Some stuff feels like it's still on training wheels.

[Recon1o6]

damage boosts for full healed parties would merely open up more healer abuse by parsers who refuse to dodge out of aoes. It would also only swap glare/broil/malefic spam to heal spam which is just as boring, now with added salt

Restoring dps rotations and buffs and cutting down the number of redundant heals available would make everyone much happier. Curebots will still be spamming cure, actual healers who pull their weight and keep the party alive while putting out damage will be happy again.

Remember ARR, HW and SB? SE was praised for their combat medic approach to healers in these expansions by people in and out of ff14 to the point competitors copied it, and its why WHM was utterly reviled when they tried to force a pure healer mentality on it in SB. As of now, healers have far too many healing buttons that a lot of gcd ones are never used.

Give sch back shadowflare, bane, dots and a fairy thats actually a useful pet, give whm back aero 3, self buffs and give it some actual water magic, give ast back its cards, time manipulation and stun

Fun>balance always. Once the jobs are fun, then the devs can tweak the numbers till they are balanced.

[Semirhage]

Then again, spamming GCD heals is as engaging as spamming Broil or Glare.
AST is often recognised as the most fun because it juggles with three simple systems at the same time, so you're always doing something different.

Yes yes yes yes yes. This. Back in the days of Heavensward, this was much more the case than it is now. The healing GCD kits weren't any more complex than they are now. The damage GCD kits were somewhat more comprehensive than they are now, but they still didn't have anywhere near the features of a full DPS class's rotations. Without getting into the complaints I had about design back then (because I did have them, but not nearly as many as I do now), healing was more fun then because we were juggling multiple simple-ish systems at the same time.

When you're closer to 50/50, you aren't spending enough unbroken time on one basic system to get bored of it. 80/20 you see the cracks, and 80/20 where the 80 is dumbed down to its simplest possible iteration is even worse.

If you want us to play whack-a-mole, Square, don't give us a mallet that covers half the board at once, and stop popping one mole up at a time. Both of these things are a problem.

[Jirah]

Off topic but Why the hell is Sleeve draw still 180 CD?????

I do agree that any community not just FF14 are difficult to adapt to any change however beneficial. But the healer issue is one I wish they fix before adding on another it’s ridiculous Physick, Benefic, and Cure are seen as useless due to the overabundance of powerful OGCD heals even more so of how stubborn the devs are they listen to most complaints but the healer thing after 4 patches of constant rage from AST and SCH festering even more after Sleeve draw and ED changes they still seem resolute on not listening. Very unlike them

[Teno]

This game is simply not made for reactive design anymore (if it has ever been in arr). Because of the long gcd you have to know and anticipate the fights, unlike wow and its shorter gcd which makes healing fast-paced and reactive. Off gcd are good in that regard and are enough most of the times.
So the biggest issue lies in our uses of gcds, which amounts to the same spell 99% of the time. We need more things to do with our gcds, be that support or dps. Scholar, albeit based on arcanist (so, an old ff14 design), was almost perfect from the get go in terms of engagement with its dots and aoes. Ast has its card system, which needs expanding, and whm took a step in the right direction with the blood lily.

[Saefinn]

Remember ARR, HW and SB? SE was praised for their combat medic approach to healers in these expansions by people in and out of ff14 to the point competitors copied it, and its why WHM was utterly reviled when they tried to force a pure healer mentality on it in SB. As of now, healers have far too many healing buttons that a lot of gcd ones are never used.

Give sch back shadowflare, bane, dots and a fairy thats actually a useful pet, give whm back aero 3, self buffs and give it some actual water magic, give ast back its cards, time manipulation and stun

Fun>balance always. Once the jobs are fun, then the devs can tweak the numbers till they are balanced.

This is very much how I've felt. I praised them for this too. I think for non-healing set ups:
- HW was best for SCH
- SB best for AST
- Maybe HW for WHM but they were still in need of some love

Though at least from how I looked at them.

I would love for them to continue this design philosophy.

But if they MUST go for "healers heal more" at LEAST make the steps to achieve this because adding more heals and removing DPS ability doesn't achieve this and just makes it dull to play.

[tdb]

damage boosts for full healed parties would merely open up more healer abuse by parsers who refuse to dodge out of aoes.

Besides the vuln up lasting over a minute, make getting hit by an avoidable attack also give a 30% damage down for 10 seconds. You'd lose more than an entire GCD's worth of damage if you get hit. That should incentivize even the turret mages to get out of the way.