Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Deceptus]

Say it louder for the people in the back.

It has been and is currently being shouted from every rooftop over in the healing forums.

[Absurdity]

It might be a smaller problem compared to others, but it still does it's contribution towards the big picture that is the current healer, and the excuse of "it has always been like that in dungeon's" doesn't mean it should stay this way just for convenience's sake. As Saefinn already said, most of the time, you'll be doing DPS inside a dungeon, and dungeons are something every single player does. Removing those self sustain Skills might not be able to fix the problem in one go, but it tilts towards the desired outcome by one step, which might turn that 70% DPS & 30% healing maybe into something like 50% DPS and 50% healing.

And i dont think that investing a few Gil's into Potions which any NPC could sell in low quality could be any issue. If you want something stronger, then you better be ready to invest into Alchemy.

Well, let me rephrase that then to make it more clear. It won't do a single thing to change the way you heal in dungeons. I have not even once considered someone's selfheal in dungeons, mainly because you never know if randoms even have it on their hotbar...yes, even random warriors. It will have 0 influence because it already does not matter.


The only way to make healers actually change the way they approach dungeons would be to significantly increase damage taken from mechanics and SE doesn't want to do that because it could alienate the people who already struggle in those faceroll dungeons for one reason or another.

[RyuDragnier]

I can only speak for myself but to be honest... the only way they could make healing engaging in this game, is to have a revamp of how damage works. For a game that exposes the player to so many fantastical settings and encounters, damage is painfully binary and boring. Your number is either low or high. That's it. Perhaps having different types of damage that require different actions? This would likely require a complete re-structuring from the ground up.

Idk... Complicate things a little bit. That's where my engagement comes from.

They could add more attacks to enemies that are a bit instant, like attacks that hit everybody without a cast time. Things that you have to heal through and watch out for simply because they happen so fast. Or more DoTs that you cannot remove with Esuna, so you're forced to heal through them.

[Loki]

They could add more attacks to enemies that are a bit instant, like attacks that hit everybody without a cast time. Things that you have to heal through and watch out for simply because they happen so fast. Or more DoTs that you cannot remove with Esuna, so you're forced to heal through them.

In each "solution" they will have to change healers gameplay cause ok i 'm not against the fact to use Esuna often or something else but give us the way to aoe it or spread it, i'm already bored to cast my single target DoT on 10 mobs during big pulls so if i have to cast Esuna on each party member regularly it won't fix the main trouble which is Healers gameplay is became too borring since 5.0 release

[SavishSalacious]

I'm going to be blunt and to the point, your healer design mentality for Shadowbringers is bonkers.

Why? Because your trying to design them into something they will never be because you focus on the wrong things to adjust.

Your reasoning for the recent Scholar changes is sound however your actions are backwards design to your intent.

For those that don't know they said the energy drain nerf is to encourage scholars to heal more with their stacks and as compensation they buffed their DoT and nuke spells.

Why is that so backwards to what they want? Because no scholar will change what they are doing currently with their stacks, scholars will still prioritise Energy Drain unless they feel the need to use an ogcd stack heal, the change was moot and does nothing to the mentality people already have.


Developers of healer jobs here are a few things that would make healers follow your vision more.

1. Nerf ogcd heals, literally all of them. We have an overabundance of them and they do so much healing that gcd heals are viewed incredibly negative, cure 1 and benefic 1 are considered button bloat because they don't do enough even with their proccs.

2. Increase incoming damage frequency by a lot more than currently. If you are giving us so much healing ogcds make us want to use them a lot more often so we need to use our gcds on heals more often.

3. Change fight design from scripted to chaotic. The better the healer the more likely that they have mapped out any given fight which means they will have planned to use the most gcd damage spells with the least amount of healing, your fights are that scripted.


But you won't change any of these because the playerbase at large wouldn't be able to handle it, you know this, just like we know this.

So I am imploring you please change your mentality on healers, you are designing things the wrong way to what you want, if healers only had Glare/Broil/Malefic and they had 1 potency, that would still be the most used ability in every single fight by a large margin. You want us to heal more as a community then YOU need to stop targeting the dps abilities as the reason we do so, they are not the cause of the issue IT IS THE HEALING ABILITIES that make us more dps focused than you would like us to be.

One of the things that confuses me is why are healers DPS'ing?

I thought your role was to keep me alive, not fight along side me. Aside from that:

Why do Palidins have heal skills? You are a tank, your role is to keep the big bad off me and on you, while I nuke it. and the healers job is to keep you, the tank, and me the dps alive. Not help us.

I dunno, maybe they want this game to evolve into GW2 with the zergs.....oh god the ptsd from the zergs.

[RyuDragnier]

One of the things that confuses me is why are healers DPS'ing?

I thought your role was to keep me alive, not fight along side me.

Because unfortunately 1 button heals you enough to where there's around 5-8s of healing downtime. Gotta do something during this time frame.

[Recon1o6]

One of the things that confuses me is why are healers DPS'ing?

I thought your role was to keep me alive, not fight along side me. Aside from that:

Incorrect and all 3 healer questlines state it too, even the hall of the novice says to throw some damage in if you're allies are fine. Healers do more than heal, we fight too

We are to support the party, that means doing our share of the damage (everyone's role) healing the unavoidable damage and raising the rdm and drg when they accidentlly backflip off the platform

Tanks likewise are meant to protect the party and keep them alive. For paladin that does include healing them and shielding them through clemency and divine veil


You don't kill the enemy by healing your allies. Its why we have damage buttons. You dps dont go up to a boss and auto it, tanks dont turn on their stance and call it a day. We all have a joint responsibility to do damage in addition to our other duties
if we didn't do damage, we would never be able to do the msq and we'd be stuck at level...6? 7?

[Saefinn]

One of the things that confuses me is why are healers DPS'ing?

I thought your role was to keep me alive, not fight along side me. Aside from that:

Why do Palidins have heal skills? You are a tank, your role is to keep the big bad off me and on you, while I nuke it. and the healers job is to keep you, the tank, and me the dps alive. Not help us.

I dunno, maybe they want this game to evolve into GW2 with the zergs.....oh god the ptsd from the zergs.

If that's your thought, then you might be in the wrong MMORPG. That is the curse and myth of the triad mentality. But FFXIV has never had it be as regimented as you state.

Healers will heal you AND fight alongside you. It's been like that in the FF franchise since forever, your healer characters have always fought alongside the damage focused ones.

Tanks will take damage, draw the damage away from you and fight alongside you. Some tanks and some DPS will contribute to healing. Healers and DPS can also contribute to damage reduction. It has been this way since the beginning.

Heck, I try to think how it is for other games? When I heal in WoW, I'll still contribute to DPS when I am free to. If I am playing a healer character in Overwatch, I still shoot the enemy. When I had a healer build for Roland in Borderlands, I'd still shoot enemies. Clerics in DnD heal and do damage, I play one in Baldur's Gate III.

The counter question is: what are healers supposed to do when everybody's health is topped off? Our options available are: contribute via DPS or twiddle our thumbs and leave the work to everybody else.

The mentality here is, "if I could be helping this run go more smoothly or more efficiently and have the tools to do it, then I should use them" rather than, "this is your corner, stay in it".

[Loki]

Fortunatly we dps as healers i don't count the number of EX fight i have done where DPS check wasn't achieved just by DPS themselves even in random dungeons sometimes it takes ages if you just count on DPS jobs.

[Crushnight]

One of the things that confuses me is why are healers DPS'ing?

I thought your role was to keep me alive, not fight along side me. Aside from that:

Why do Palidins have heal skills? You are a tank, your role is to keep the big bad off me and on you, while I nuke it. and the healers job is to keep you, the tank, and me the dps alive. Not help us.

I'm glad your someone who at least attempts to understand why healers do things even if your mentality on what they (and tanks for that matter)should be doing is outdated for FFXIV.

We dps because we would be bored otherwise, we dps because we want to contribute as much as possible just like tanks and dps players do, we dps because the game allows and even encourages us to, we dps because we are designed to.

Next duty you go into at a boss just stand there at the beginning until the 1st unavoidable raidwide and ask yourself would you want that amount of nothing time on your tank or dps jobs, no self respecting healer that wants to improve themselves would just accept standing still for so long if at all.

Paladins have always had heal skills in Final Fantasy so them having them in FFXIV is pretty much tradition just like White Mages have had Holy, a damage spell.

The mentality of stick to your lane has caused the current issues with healer design, the devs have even got it in their skulls this toxic mentality.

A bad healer in FFXIV only heals
A bad healer in FFXIV only dpses
A good healer balances both dps and heals
A great healer uses as little healing as possible to give out as much dps as possible while never letting anyone die.