healers need a serious overhaul

[HyoMinPark]

The current game design (whether its intentional or not) has people judging healers based on their DPS output.

That’s because:

1. This game doesn’t provide enough damage output to warrant 100% healing uptime. Even the hardest content in the game requires less than 50% healing uptime between both healers if they are moderately skilled.

2. Healers do way too much damage for them to not be DPSing when healing is not required. Aside from the fact that no other role gets to stand around for more than half a fight not pressing buttons, the damage a single healer outputs is not anything to scoff at.

This came to my attention very early on in my PF "carreer" in E5s~E8s.
I was basically solo healing because the other healers are always trying to put out as much damage as possible.
(Little did I know.. those healers where actually trying to get a good parse in damage so they could apply to static raid groups)

Most Savage fights can be solo healed with a healer that knows what they’re doing—usually Noct AST is chosen for this. If you felt as if your co-healer wasn’t pulling their weight in healing, then perhaps say something.

No surprise, when I applied to static groups a few months later... everyone said i was a crap healer and needed to work on my damage rotation!?!? (Those other players had uploaded their parses which had me at 90%+ on healing, and only in the 30%~50% window on damage)
This was my first introduction to what parsing was. I had never heard of this before untill people started shoving logs from other players in face.

Unless you were solo healing, then you should still have above average DPS in most Savage content (and even good solo healers have above average damage despite being the only one healing). The damage output from the boss/raid wides is usually not enough to warrant high healing unless people are doing a lot of dying/getting hit by stuff they shouldn’t (though that usually just kills people in Savage—but not always). HPS parses are irrelevant in a game that focuses so heavily on damage—and this is the developer’s own fault for designing encounters to not require more healing (as well as making healers deal as much damage as they do).

Over the last few months I have become increasingly anxious to throw out a single heal because I need the GCD and the weaves between to dish out Damaging spells like Glare, assize(which "the balance"clearly states never save assize for healing) and Blood lily cuz if I dont, I know people will see me as a bad player.
In PF's, its becoming an environment where healers are playing chicking with one another to see who will break and throw out the first heal.
Whoever does throw out the first heal... usually ends up solo healing the entire fight

Assize is used on CD because of its short CD of 45s and the fact that it has a 400 potency hit to it. In Patch 4.4, Assize’s cooldown was reduced from 60s to 45s, and this is what prompted theorycrafters to state that it is better to use it on cooldown instead of holding it for damage. Simply because you run such a high risk of losing that 400 potency hit—and, again, this game does not focus heavily on healing requirements due to the developers’ reluctance to make things “too hard” or “too inaccessible” for inexperienced or bad healers.

As for Misery, well, again: that’s the developers’ fault for attaching such a high potency to it. No job—tank, DPS, or healer—would just sit on a 900 potency attack. So when it procs through your lily usage, you should use it.

This is rediculous... A healer should be judged on his abillity to heal both pro-actively and reactively (depending on class and encounter). They should not be confronted by recruiters about their damage output (unless their applying for the very very top/profesional FC's or MLG companies(maybe a little!)... And the fact that you now have an environment where every single savage raider is prioritizing DIRECT HIT over Mana regen is a clear indicator that the healer design in this game needs to change...

Contrary to what people like to quote, healer DPS is required for early Savage progression and for Ultimate progression. I know a lot of players like to quote an outdated source where Yoshida states that they do not take healer DPS into account when designing fights, but it would be impossible to clear Savage Week 1/Week 2 when everyone is in minimum item level crafted gear if healers were not DPSing. And, in Ultimate, there is literally no excuse for a healer to not be dealing damage (and you will not clear if they are not). Especially when, again, it doesn’t require a high healing uptime. When I healed UCoB, even with playing it safe, my healing casts were still not 50% compared to my damage casts on AST.

Healers deal way too much damage currently to really defend the mindset of not DPSing as one. And there’s no one to blame but the developers for that. I would rather them give me more stuff to heal (most healer mains would, actually...even top-tier ones)—especially since they keep adding in more and more healing tools that are just overkill in 95% of content because said content doesn’t require a high amount of healing (AST’s Horoscope, Neutral Sect—neither are really required for most content outside of Savage and Ultimate). But they likely will not do that because they do not want to scare off new or inexperienced healers that are not prepared to heal heavy incoming damage.

Also, Piety is useless with the mana management that healers have now. The only time it has ever been useful is for safe progression in early Savage/Ultimate (the healer theorycrafters do make High Piety builds if someone wants to play it super safe during prog). AST saw some use out of it during early ShB—but that was due to them literally being MP negative if they had to do more than two raises, or if they died. Which is poor design of the job at that point. Now, I think they went a little overboard with the MP adjustments they made to it recently as I literally never run out of mana (just like HW AST haha), but AST did need something more to help out its MP issues. Because it was pretty bad.

[Cirque-it]

Also, Piety is useless with the mana management that healers have now. The only time it has ever been useful is for safe progression in early Savage/Ultimate (the healer theorycrafters do make High Piety builds if someone wants to play it super safe during prog). AST saw some use out of it during early ShB—but that was due to them literally being MP negative if they had to do more than two raises, or if they died. Which is poor design of the job at that point. Now, I think they went a little overboard with the MP adjustments they made to it recently as I literally never run out of mana (just like HW AST haha), but AST did need something more to help out its MP issues. Because it was pretty bad.

yeah I socketed a lot of Piety for week 1 then swapped out after week 2 once we cleared E9s and E10s.... I needed the piety in that week though.. With the amount of deaths.

Cirque-it, if you're reading this please don't take it as an attack

I'm not (really)

I appreciate al the help your attempting to provide but in all honesty... I have seen al that information before on xivanalysis.. But I do have an issue with a lot of the info on that site.
First of all. Every single piece of data on that site is directed at one thing only... damage... its all theory crafting around getting the absolute most out of your damage in every single way possible....
For someone whom has always played healers in games, its unpleasent to say the least...
Slide casting, uptime, never using heal GCD's but doing everyone you can to only use oGCD's when you heal
The frowning upon overhealing, or to ever not be casting. (moving is doing something too...)
+ the general rule that applies to EVERY static I have seen when it comes to loot priority.... DPS -> tank -> heals

I remember in other games (i wont name em) where it was the other way around in some raids, other raids had tanks prioritized, etc... but EVERYTHING in this game is about Damage damage damage...
There are a lot of players that dont actually enjoy "meter-whoring" as we used to call it in ((other game))

Your very Helpful post(I do admit it IS helpfull) actually only proves my point... every tip you gave was directed at improving my damage... it makes me sad...

[Risvertasashi]

The logs basically tell you every minute detail of the fight, from dps to the exact second at which the party took damage, which healer covered said damage and what abilities they used to do so.
If for example you check the logs and see that the SCH only used Recitation twice in the entire 8-10 minute fight then you know there's something seriously wrong. But if all you do is look at dps and call it a day then you might as well not look at logs at all.

Yeah but let's be real here. Most people by far only look at the player's summary page which shows percentile of DPS with no details.

And when people on the savage/ultimate recruiter discord set their requirements, it's a minimum of X percentile. Circumstances aren't really taken into account. But, to be fair, if you've cleared a fight enough times, you should have had at least one good clear...

You can say "oh it's just bad groups that do this", but it's not really, even decent or good ones will do this. Probably with the expectation that you'll have done a parse run at some point.

[MPK]

I mean looking at your logs there's lot of ways to improve like ensure you're always casting. Your active % is very low compared to like a healer that's in my static

[HyoMinPark]

I appreciate al the help your attempting to provide but in all honesty... I have seen al that information before on xivanalysis.. But I do have an issue with a lot of the info on that site.
First of all. Every single piece of data on that site is directed at one thing only... damage... its all theory crafting around getting the absolute most out of your damage in every single way possible....
For someone whom has always played healers in games, its unpleasent to say the least...
Slide casting, uptime, never using heal GCD's but doing everyone you can to only use oGCD's when you heal
The frowning upon overhealing, or to ever not be casting. (moving is doing something too...)

If I may try to shed some light on this—

It all boils down to what I said prior: healers simply do too much damage to not be “green DPS” most of a fight (not the entire fight—they are still responsible for healing). There also isn’t enough damage to warrant healing all the time—and all damage is scripted. So it’s very easy to develop the muscle memory to just know where your heals should fall; when your oGCDs are used; when you may have to GCD heal. There’s no such thing as unexpected or unscripted damage, which makes healing even more simplified. SB actually had crit auto-attacks from raid bosses to try and prompt healers to be ready to heal a tank—and I actually miss them because they meant you needed to keep an eye on the tank and not just slap a regen on them 9 times out of 10–because outside of busters, regens is more than enough to keep them up, with very limited spot healing being actually necessary.

Regarding prioritizing your oGCDs over GCDS—it’s simply because they’re free heals. And several of them are extremely powerful compared to GCD heals (e.g., Indomitability versus Succor/ET+Succor; Earthly Star or Celestial Opposition versus Helios/(Diurnal) Aspected Helios; Afflatus Rapture versus Medica II). GCDs are better spent on damage because, again, healers are very powerful in this game. Plus, with regards to WHM, using Rapture over Medica/Medica II allows for them to weave and avoiding clipping their GCD. For all jobs clipping is considered bad, as you end up delaying your next global—and then every global after that is off, barring downtime in a fight that allows for you to realign them to fit your rotation better. It’s actually considered a design flaw that clipping is so commonplace in WHM, and that they have very few weave options for things like Assize, Asylum, and Divine Benison compared to AST and SCH..

Regarding overhealing—once you have topped everyone off, all other healing is irrelevant. It does nothing. It’s a waste of the resources you have put out. Some overhealing is inevitable (especially on regen healers, since you can’t avoid HoTs ticking beyond maximum HP all the time, or things like Indom and Star criting and healing a person beyond their HP cap), but aiming for a low overheal is ideal because it means you are making the most out of your resources (meaning mana, oGCDS, and GCDs) and not wasting them. You can’t heal beyond 100% HP, so why spend resources on things that will go beyond what your party members need?

+ the general rule that applies to EVERY static I have seen when it comes to loot priority.... DPS -> tank -> heals

For gear priority, in most midcore/hardcore statics, gear is distributed that way because of how damage is in this game. DPS are at the top, with tanks after, and then healers last. That isn’t to say that healers aren’t wonderful assets for damage: it’s just that damage is so important in this game that it’s more worth it to prioritize higher damage dealers first. Even within DPS, some groups assign priority based on where a DPS job stands in terms of their personal damage. For example, I play DNC in my static. I am the lowest in terms of damage among the DPS, so I am fourth place for getting upgrades. Our MNK/SAM and RDM are number one and two respectfully because they deal more damage than me. Our NIN is third.

More healing power isn’t necessary because healers are already extremely overpowered in this game (particularly with all of their oGCD tools they have). Even at minimum item level during Week 1/Week 2, there is nothing in a fight that is impossible to heal and that requires gear upgrades. The only thing more gear would provide is more HP cushioning, more potent heals (which, again, isn’t necessary because healers are already overpowered), and eventual removal/shifting of raidwide mitigative tools such as Soil, Reprisal, tank AOE mitigation (Shake It Off, Dark Missionary, Divine Veil, Passage of Arms), and ranged AOE mitigation (Shield Samba, Troubadour, Tactician).

I remember in other games (i wont name em) where it was the other way around in some raids, other raids had tanks prioritized, etc... but EVERYTHING in this game is about Damage damage damage...

And that is the fault of the developers and how they designed encounters. They didn’t bother to make things hit harder—things are actually steadily getting easier to heal, alongside healers gaining more and more tools to through at raid damage. They didn’t bother to make use of things like crowd-control, debuffs, or even use Esuna (it’s virtually useless in all level-cap content, as most Savage/Ultimate debuffs are not cleansable). They haven’t given healers the support utility that DPS jobs have—AST and SCH do have some raidwide buffs/utility (cards/Divination and Chain Strat), but DPS maintain the majority of these support tools, so the healers don’t have much to do with that kind of raid utility.

There are a lot of players that dont actually enjoy "meter-whoring" as we used to call it in ((other game))

Which is fine. Join groups that are casual and do not care about parsing—there are plenty out there. But for others, parsing and chasing leaderboards are what they find enjoyable. It’s also the only purpose BiS gear really has outside of new Ultimates. It’s overpowered for everything else, as all content but Ultimate can be done in the new crafted gear that comes out every raid tier. With better gear comes better leaderboard chasing.

It sounds like to me that you attempted to join statics that were not on the same page as yourself with regards to static goals. There are plenty out there that don’t care about The Website That Shall Not Be Named or parsing in general. I would recommend looking for the more softcore/casual groups, or casual midcore that don’t care too much about damage and just raid to raid. Do be warned that the mentality of healing only-no DPS on a healer will not fly in content with randoms because it is the majority mindset in this game that healers should DPS when they aren’t having to heal.

[Jaelommiss]

I appreciate al the help your attempting to provide but in all honesty... I have seen al that information before on xivanalysis.. But I do have an issue with a lot of the info on that site.
First of all. Every single piece of data on that site is directed at one thing only... damage... its all theory crafting around getting the absolute most out of your damage in every single way possible....
For someone whom has always played healers in games, its unpleasent to say the least...
Slide casting, uptime, never using heal GCD's but doing everyone you can to only use oGCD's when you heal
The frowning upon overhealing, or to ever not be casting. (moving is doing something too...)
+ the general rule that applies to EVERY static I have seen when it comes to loot priority.... DPS -> tank -> heals

I remember in other games (i wont name em) where it was the other way around in some raids, other raids had tanks prioritized, etc... but EVERYTHING in this game is about Damage damage damage...
There are a lot of players that dont actually enjoy "meter-whoring" as we used to call it in ((other game))

Your very Helpful post(I do admit it IS helpfull) actually only proves my point... every tip you gave was directed at improving my damage... it makes me sad...

I agree that the damage-first design of this game has caused pervasive harm to gameplay in XIV. I'd prefer that healers have a more robust and interconnected healing toolkit and spend >75% of the time keeping people alive. This tier I was managing upwards of 95% Malefic+Combust uptime during week one prog while still healing more than my cohealer and preventing deaths. It's dull and uninteresting because there's so little healing to do that almost all my time is spent pushing one button over and over again.

That said, I think you might be missing why we look at healer dps. The focus is less on the damage itself than what it represents. Don't get me wrong, high healer dps can make up for deaths and turn an enrage pull into a clear, but that's not the primary focus. I use it primarily as a shorthand for healing efficiency and uptime because those are what determines how early in the tier a healer can overcome a healing check.


Consider a theoretical boss in a traditional MMO that lasts 300 seconds. That's 120 GCDs. Let's say that mechanics and forced downtime reduce that to a maximum of 100 GCDs with perfect play. The fight's healing check requires 60 GCDs' worth of healing to prevent deaths.

A highly optimized healer acts for 95 of those GCDs. Their efficient healing produces only 10% overhealing, leading to 66 GCDs being used for healing and 29 not-healing (usually damage even in other MMOs).

Another healer has connection issues and can only hit 80 GCDs. They're less optimized, but still only have 20% overhealing. Thus, they spend 72 GCDs healing and 8 not-healing.

A third healer has phenomenal uptime and achieves 99 GCDs, but has an atrocious overhealing of 50%. They heal for 90 GCDs and have 9 left over for not-healing.

A fourth is struggling with the mechanics and gets 81 GCDs. They're still learning the fight and overheal 35% just to be safe. All 81 of their GCDs are spent on healing and there are none left for anything else.

All four of these players are able to keep their party alive during the fight. They clear the tier with their respective groups and six months later they all apply to another group that will be tackling the next difficulty in content. This group's leader looks at their logs and sees that all four kept their parties alive. The next thing they notices is that the four applicants have 29/8/9/0 GCDs remaining for not-healing (this is dps in XIV). The leader does not know what to expect in the next set of fights, but suspects that the healing requirements will be higher. Meeting that healing check will require more healing actions, which will come directly out of the non-healing actions. The applicant with 29 not-healing actions has the largest buffer that can be dipped into before being unable to meet the requirements.

Healing in XIV works differently, but the concept is the same. Powerful healing actions, abundant oGCDs, and infrequent damage means that the number of required healing actions is far lower than other games. The difference is that XIV will often include phases with immense damage bursts. Rather than maintaining 60% healing uptime over a five minute fight, XIV healers may be required to maintain 100% healing uptime (including efficient oGCD use) for 30-60 secs. J Waves in TEA, Wyrm's Lament 2 in E8S, and Terminal Relativity in E12S P2 are examples of this. Both healers need to heal continuously and ration oGCDs in order to prevent a wipe. While it doesn't correlate perfectly, a healer with high dps (ie. high downtime after performing the necessary healing) will generally be more capable of healing efficiently and maintaining high uptime during those bursts. This is absolutely vital for a group aiming to clear early in the tier.

If healing is entirely redesigned in 6.0 to resemble other MMOs, then the overall measure of assessment will remain more or less the same. The only difference is that the number of "filler" heals will be counted instead of the number of Glares.



I feel that I should mention that the tips I gave you would apply equally well for a traditional healing paradigm. They maximize actions taken and minimize overhealing. Tweaking "mash your Glare hotkey as your default action" to "mash your Cure hotkey as your default action" would be the only change necessary.

[tdb]

For gear priority, in most midcore/hardcore statics, gear is distributed that way because of how damage is in this game. DPS are at the top, with tanks after, and then healers last. That isn’t to say that healers aren’t wonderful assets for damage: it’s just that damage is so important in this game that it’s more worth it to prioritize higher damage dealers first. Even within DPS, some groups assign priority based on where a DPS job stands in terms of their personal damage. For example, I play DNC in my static. I am the lowest in terms of damage among the DPS, so I am fourth place for getting upgrades. Our MNK/SAM and RDM are number one and two respectfully because they deal more damage than me. Our NIN is third.

Is that one upgrade each in that order and then another round, or do you aim to fully gear one person before giving upgrades to the next? The former makes sense, but the latter would feel unfair to me. It's your static of course, but if I joined a static and found out I have to wait months before being allowed to get any loot I probably wouldn't stay with them. I know there's also the book drops everyone gets, but it takes a while to get any gear with those.

[Rilifane]

That said, I think you might be missing why we look at healer dps. The focus is less on the damage itself than what it represents. Don't get me wrong, high healer dps can make up for deaths and turn an enrage pull into a clear, but that's not the primary focus. I use it primarily as a shorthand for healing efficiency and uptime because those are what determines how early in the tier a healer can overcome a healing check.

This is spot on.
It's not about a raw number, it's about what is neccessary in terms of knowledge and gameplay to achieve said number without getting heal chadded.
If someone has to "focus on healing" for regular, scripted damage it means they are already quite busy keeping up with the minimum required - now add mistakes and uptime strats (like uptime soccer) to that as additional damage or even some deaths and you know why so many healer mains dread "healbots", be it in PF or in their static... and to some extend even in DF.

Healbot gameplay represents a lack of understanding for your own toolkit, your co heals toolkit, the fight in general and how to properly keep uptime with slidecasting and correctly gauging when a mechanic snapshots. It means that this person is very likely to become the weakest link of the chain quickly because they have very little wiggle room in case something beyond scripted damage happens and only react on a hunch instead of planning, preparing and coordinating.
WL2 on e8s was a good example for a mechanic where a lot of PF healers who tended to healbot were out of their depths because they panicked, used too many tools early on and were starved for tools and MP for the last hits.

Even in PF, where party mitigation is usually atrocious and you have very little, if any, communication between the two healers, a good healer can guess fairly accurately how much damage is about to come in and what the co healer is doing by watching the HP bars and paying attention to the source of healing. Even in chaotic groups, a good healer can still deal signifcant amounts of damage while staying on top of healing and recovering from mistakes.

I'll not deny that there are statics who blindly check one number and judge people based on that. But if someone didn't manage to get at least one decent run for themself in a tier, it means they clearly still have a lot of things to work on. Everyone starts somewhere and has to work their way up but nothing is gained from demanding for the mentality to change when it is merely caused by the way the game, the fights and healers are designed.
There are statics who don't look too closely at healer dps and are content with being kept alive. But most midcore and pretty much every hardcore static will refuse a healer like that for good reason. It's not their job to train people and they'll naturally prefer people who already play at a similiar level.

[Derio]

Its a very difficult spot for devs. If you increase the amount of raidwide damage you increase the stress on the average healer. However if you make the dps rotation of healer more complex you also put more stress on the average healer due to the current way content is made.

The golden question is how do you increase the role responsibility for all roles without drastically increasing the challenge of content and not making it where one role is significantly harder than another one?

I know in other games they give out more raid wide damage but most classes have self/party mitigation. Then you have the question is square willing to make a drastic change to healing in where it changes the normal of content?

[Kewitt]

When it finally came time for me to upgrade gear in 5.4 I did my healer 1st. My main focus in 1.x was WHM, in 2-4 was WAR and in 5 it's been DNC. But I felt I will put my Eden gear on my WHM 1st as it was a little behind.
I have found, in the Eden normal raids I can slack as a healer, There is so worry at all.
I don't have to worry about keeping DPS up.
I don't have to worry about keeping cooldowns up.
I know this wouldn't be the case if I was doing savage, But it's such a change in pace.

avoid dmg, medica 2, regen, the random cure and cure 2 other AOE heals, spam DPS, Repeat.
Of the four raids release, 1 should have a DPS check, 1 should have a tank check, 2 should have DPS checks. That way all jobs get to feel really important.


It's not that healers need an overhaul the content needs to be changed to make us feel important.