Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[StrykerGaming]

They cant change it because the "i dont wanna DPS as healer" crowd would go mad for STILL having to push non-healing buttons...

The answer is quite simple to have both DPS and Heals available. Make 3 of the DPS powers off-cool down too. That way, healers can contribute to the a burn phase when required or needed and not having to worry about casting DPS spells when heals are called for. When I heal, I don't like to DPS because it requires casting time. I believe my suggestion would be a QoL improvement for all healers and team mates too.

[Recon1o6]

The answer is quite simple to have both DPS and Heals available. Make 3 of the DPS powers off-cool down too. That way, healers can contribute to the a burn phase when required or needed and not having to worry about casting DPS spells when heals are called for. When I heal, I don't like to DPS because it requires casting time. I believe my suggestion would be a QoL improvement for all healers and team mates too.

ogcd damage is an idea but on WHM it would exacerbate the current problem of not enough weaving windows to play smoothly.

That said the general idea of having heals and dps buttons is completely correct.

Not one of the "healers should only heal" crowd own up to the fact they need to do damage in order to clear their job quests or msq if they didn't deal damage.

[Absurdity]

Turning healer's dps spells into oGCDs would be an idea, but not a good one considering how healing currently works. You're ideally not "casting" any heals but using your superior oGCD heals while simply spamming dps GCDs. If you were to add even more oGCDs in the form of dps spells or, god forbid, turn GCD dps spells into oGCD abilities it would be an absolute disaster for pretty much every healer.

WHM already doesn't have enough weave windows as it is, SCH has the "choice" between either clipping their GCD or losing 90 potency every time they need to weave a heal without energy drain or a Biolysis refresh and AST only has this many weave windows because of it's GCD dps spell.


You would essentially just create a clunky clipping nightmare.

[RyuDragnier]

The only way healer design can be changed is requiring encounters to change. Have more boss fights or rooms like in WP HM where there's a lot of party/raidwide damage going out that requires more than a simple regen/shield to cover. Imagine fights where your entire party has a permanent DoT attached to it. HoTs can cover around 75% of it, but because of that remaining 25% you're still taking chip damage and are requiring heals often. Add in party/raidwide attacks and the usual stupid from players, and it turns things into more of a healing job because there is no moment when you're not taking damage, you're CONSTANTLY taking damage. I'm basing this btw on some bosses and raid fights I've seen and personally experienced as a healer in other MMOs, where the healer has very little time to actually do damage due to how often the party is getting hit.

[Packetdancer]

At this point, I don't see healing ever being really "fixed". Things are the way they are and that's the way they are going to be. I have given up hoping to see things change and I do not believe we will really ever see healing getting fixed. All of the new games I have seen have roles that are mostly DPS with some nice heal gimmick.

FWIW, I choose to disagree. I want to believe the simplification of healers down to more easily-balanced templates in 5.0 is in preparation for building them out in more varied ways in 6.0. A sort of "you have to tear the house down to the foundations to rebuild it properly" scenario, where in this case that means tearing the healers down to the bare bones, balancing them out, and seeing how people use them before starting to diversify.

I may be wrong, of course. But I choose to be optimistic and hope that I'm not.

Why if SE actually wants healers to heal, they need to change their encounter design mentality. All they are doing now is ruining healers.

I suspect that they've heard this and are listening and starting to tinker, because this raid tier seems to hit harder than the previous when it comes to damage amounts. That DoT in E11S is fairly spicy...

As for giving healers utility, I definitely agree there's some things they could improve there.

*waves her "Make Fluid Aura an interrupt please." placard around again*

[Anhra]

I wonder if FFXIV could learn a thing or two from XI about job designs on pretty much any Job, i mean, i am aware that this Game plays completely different and i haven't experienced playing XI too, but from what i've seen from the wikis and some youtube guides about jobs such as scholar for example? They showed some incredible depth to my suprise. It clearly couldn't hurt exchanging some words with them.

[NealSnow]

I wonder if FFXIV could learn a thing or two from XI about job designs on pretty much any Job, i mean, i am aware that this Game plays completely different and i haven't experienced playing XI too, but from what i've seen from the wikis and some youtube guides about jobs such as scholar for example? They showed some incredible depth to my suprise. It clearly couldn't hurt exchanging some words with them.

It would be hard too do so because I recently played xi and its... literally take ff3 or ff5... but online. If you don't set up macro's in xi you will be seeing a looooot of menus just like an older ff game, but just online, literally that is xi no exaggeration. As where xiv is really its own thing so trying to copy anything from xi to xiv is trust me, far harder then you'd think cause you are essentially trying to fit ff1-5 gameplay/design into a modern game that doesn't really feature any of those old systems to support it.

Would it be impossible... probably not, but super time consuming to try and figure out how to best translate said designs into xiv? Oh yea.

as an example blue mage in xi is almost the same as it is, except the only difference is you still only need to see the mob use a skill, and kill it for a chance to acquire it and blue mage works so fantastically in xi because its mobs have the same type of skills as you would see in ff3/5 so theres some really useful ones like Cocoon which gives you some defense for a minute or so I think, and because its ff just online enemies have elemental weakneses so blu can really make good use of their spells as long as you know whats weaker to what.

In xiv however blue is... not great because most skills are just copy pastes for flavor rather then anything else because elemental weakness/resistances aren't a thing so it makes multiple different "elemental" spells useless and only good for window dressing as where xi's blue HAS the advantage of more useful abilites in the right situation. and xiv blue just rarely gets many cool abilites that are unique. I did 4 HW trials for 4 spells... out of them only 1 single skill to my shock actually was a kind I never saw before and its a hella fun skill! But it doesn't stop xiv blue from feeling largely pointless, an iconic job, demoted to just minigame material and that sucks :/

And no masked carnival for people who would bring it up does not justify making skills the same since sure elemental weaknesses exist in that... but masked carnival is pointless content which is probably why instead of really expanding on it they make HW blu need to do savages for a cool reward.

[Anhra]

It would be hard too do so because I recently played xi and its... literally take ff3 or ff5... but online. If you don't set up macro's in xi you will be seeing a looooot of menus just like an older ff game, but just online, literally that is xi no exaggeration. As where xiv is really its own thing so trying to copy anything from xi to xiv is trust me, far harder then you'd think cause you are essentially trying to fit ff1-5 gameplay/design into a modern game that doesn't really feature any of those old systems to support it.

Would it be impossible... probably not, but super time consuming to try and figure out how to best translate said designs into xiv? Oh yea.

as an example blue mage in xi is almost the same as it is, except the only difference is you still only need to see the mob use a skill, and kill it for a chance to acquire it and blue mage works so fantastically in xi because its mobs have the same type of skills as you would see in ff3/5 so theres some really useful ones like Cocoon which gives you some defense for a minute or so I think, and because its ff just online enemies have elemental weakneses so blu can really make good use of their spells as long as you know whats weaker to what.

In xiv however blue is... not great because most skills are just copy pastes for flavor rather then anything else because elemental weakness/resistances aren't a thing so it makes multiple different "elemental" spells useless and only good for window dressing as where xi's blue HAS the advantage of more useful abilites in the right situation. and xiv blue just rarely gets many cool abilites that are unique. I did 4 HW trials for 4 spells... out of them only 1 single skill to my shock actually was a kind I never saw before and its a hella fun skill! But it doesn't stop xiv blue from feeling largely pointless, an iconic job, demoted to just minigame material and that sucks :/

And no masked carnival for people who would bring it up does not justify making skills the same since sure elemental weaknesses exist in that... but masked carnival is pointless content which is probably why instead of really expanding on it they make HW blu need to do savages for a cool reward.

I am not suggesting to copypaste things from XI to XIV, but rather draw inspiration from it, since XI draws, as you said, its own inspiration from the first few Final Fantasy games. I think there is alot of potential that can be drawn that way that could make combat and the jobs alot of fun and unique from one another, instead of having 4 flavours of warriors, 3 flavours of white mage and that bag of skittles we call DPS here.

[Liam_Harper]

Something I don't think the healbots realize is that if Enix ever actually achieved the impossible goal of pure healing, where a healer couldn't dps because they needed to be healing for the entire fight regardless of gear or skill, they'd crumple and fall flat.

The typical healbot has maybe 60% uptime pressing their buttons and usually neglects key parts of their toolkit in favor of spamming Medica II, Regen, AspHelios or Succor endlessly. If fights started demanding 90%+ uptime and full efficient use of the healing toolkit, they simply wouldn't be able to do it. They tend to panic heal in high damage situations, rather than calmly combine oGCD's and burst heals and would empty on resources in the first minute or two. A playstyle where all healers always needed to be healing would be significantly more difficult than healing and doing decent dps under the current game design.

It's nice to say "I play healer to heal" as an excuse to avoid having to learn the full toolkit, but in reality optimal healing isn't the goal at all then.

[Anhra]

The funny thing about pure healers is that they can be one anytime. Just remove your damaging abilities from your hotbar and there you go, now they can heal each other with glitter magic until everyones bottom turns into solid gold (or attempt doing so before the servers go down for the next maintenance)

But jokes aside, i guess we will be waiting for quite a while (and if you're asking me, probably in vain too) before we get proper changes for healers (and tanks too) which aren't about making things even more simple as they already are.