Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Ultimatecalibur]

Not counting all death effects and some other BLU specific things, that's basically how BLU Healer mimic plays.
You have Pom Cure with short cast time, after which you can weave your Primals (OGCD damage abilities on various cooldowns) in. You have Gobskin which is ~20% hp party shield without any healing component, so it's a strict mitigation. There's Exuviation (Cure 3 + Esuna)/Stotram (off-brand Medica), Angel Snack which is your busted 2 minutes CD which is *just* super charged off-brand Medica 2. And then there's also White Wind, which in a lot of situations is AoE Benediction (Ahem). No OGCD heals whatsoever, and as someone who has cleared all BLU content, which includes Synced/NoEcho Coils, AlexSavage and OmegaSavage i'd say they are not needed.

A few things to note:

• Pom Cure is roughly the same potency as Cure 1
• Gobskin generates roughly the same strength shield as Succor without the healing component
• Exuviation is the same strength as Medica with Cure 3's AoE
• Stotram is identical to Medica
• Angel's Snack is double the strength of Medica II but can only be used once every 2 minutes
• White Wind is one of the single most expensive power heals in the game and it will drain your MP if you rely to heavily on it and gets weaker the lower your own hp is.
• Angel Whisper is limited to once every 5 minutes.

I wonder if the limits on Angel's Snack, White Wind and Angel Whisper a part of what allows for Healer BLU to be much more engaging.

And then you get the odd player who notes that BLU has a pretty fun system and gee whiz maybe it would be fun if more jobs worked this way. BLU might not be practical, but it definitely is fun. Maybe we should start by optimizing fun first?

Part of what allows BLU to be fun is that it is 10 levels behind and can not be used for progression and party finder content. Make it level 80 and allow it to participate in Savage and players will start optimizing the fun out of it.

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

Part of what allows BLU to be fun is that it is 10 levels behind and can not be used for progression and party finder content. Make it level 80 and allow it to participate in Savage and players will start optimizing the fun out of it.

Even then it's still more fun to play than some actual jobs because of the sheer amount of cooldown juggling it has. Even after blowing all the cooldowns in the 15 second opener it's shortest cooldown is just a measly 30 seconds long and you also have The Rose of Destruction to use that breaks up Sonic Boom spam briefly. Blue Mage is basically just Black Mage if Fire 4's cast time was 1 second instead of 2.8 and then had a trillion cooldowns to weave between casting 1 second cast time Fire 4s with the occasional Xenoglossy being The Rose of Destruction and Matra Magic.

[Liam_Harper]

Part of what allows BLU to be fun is that it is 10 levels behind and can not be used for progression and party finder content. Make it level 80 and allow it to participate in Savage and players will start optimizing the fun out of it.

What? One of the main things to do with BLU once you have it leveled is Savage progression, because the Morbol mount is locked behind it. There's the carnival and collecting spells, but since the only rewarding content BLU has is the Morbol mount, the only point in doing those is to prep for Savage. It's a job designed for Savage prog and while it's certainly optimized it remains extremely flexible and good fun.

[Allegor]

You know you screwed up when a DPS playing pretend as healer is more engaging than an actual healer lol

[Lyth]

You know you screwed up when a DPS playing pretend as healer is more engaging than an actual healer lol

In fairness, pretty much any time that someone suggests giving players choice over what actions they actually bring (i.e. skill tree systems, BLU's pick-and-choose system, etc.) a swarm of extremely self-assured players descends and insists that such systems involving player choice never work in any MMO in the known universe and that the optimal universal setup would be calculated in 12.77 seconds (repeating, of course) by the Excel spreadsheet wizards over at the Balance. And it's not like any other successful MMOs use such systems, either.

And then you get the odd player who notes that BLU has a pretty fun system and gee whiz maybe it would be fun if more jobs worked this way. BLU might not be practical, but it definitely is fun. Maybe we should start by optimizing fun first?

[Recon1o6]

In fairness, pretty much any time that someone suggests giving players choice over what actions they actually bring (i.e. skill tree systems, BLU's pick-and-choose system, etc.) a swarm of extremely self-assured players descends and insists that such systems involving player choice never work in any MMO in the known universe and that the optimal universal setup would be calculated in 12.77 seconds (repeating, of course) by the Excel spreadsheet wizards over at the Balance. And it's not like any other successful MMOs use such systems, either.

And then you get the odd player who notes that BLU has a pretty fun system and gee whiz maybe it would be fun if more jobs worked this way. BLU might not be practical, but it definitely is fun. Maybe we should start by optimizing fun first?

honestly this really is a problem. The players who want folks to stop having fun and play optimally. When that misses the point entirely. Fun is always more important than balance or parse numbers.

[GrimGale]

honestly this really is a problem. The players who want folks to stop having fun and play optimally. When that misses the point entirely. Fun is always more important than balance or parse numbers.

Fun is very subjective. Some people have fun when they feel like they support their party and help others succeed. Other people have fun when they bring down others, such as griefers. If I had to chose which one to team up with I'd say the first. Of course reality is not black or white but then again, if someone having "fun" gets in the way of actually overcoming the game challenge I'd probably be inclined to exclude them from my potential team mates in favor of someone that actually wants to win.

Then again the devil is in the details. Maybe "winning" is a chore. Maybe the price for winning is boredom in which case the issue lies in game design. It's more complex than that I suppose.

[NYCLouisGamer]

You know you screwed up when a DPS playing pretend as healer is more engaging than an actual healer lol

Very insightful. I have always found healing & rezzing on my Summoner during a Trial much more fun than being one of the actual healers. Thank you for explaining WHY I preferred it!

[Raikai]

Healing per se is not engaging in this game because of how encounters are designed.

in most of the content, in the scenario of your group managing to avoid all the applicable telegraphs, you can cover most of the healing with just free OGCDs, so that leaves healers without a lot to do. I think that to make the healer role interesting, they need at least one of these:

a) Revert back them having more dps tools;

b) Add a 'side-game' to every healer, just like AST has with the cards;

c) Change encounter design with a bit less telegraphed choreography and a little more random damage;

[FusionSamurai]

They would need to rework their spaghetti code if they were to add a rotation for healers as using a gcd heal would break that rotation. Or have it act like RDM's verstone/fire ready buff.

But not much of anything can be done because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that someone much earlier noted. Healing was made easy/boring thus a drop in playerbase which in turn means the devs need to make healing even easier to make up for less skilled players which causes another drop in healers which again causes the devs to make healing easier and it'll keep continuing because they'd rather not spend the money or work hours to fix the root of the problem: healer dps.

Which could be, hypothetically, solved by; reducing the amount of healing abilties, lowering the strength and the cooldowns of the healing abilities that stay, increasing the strength of gcd heals, lowering the cast time of gcd heals, adding at least 3 or 4 dps abilities (one is a single target ability with a 2 second cooldown, another is a DoT with a 30 second duration and 5 second cooldown, the third could be a single target ability with a 25 second cooldown, and the fourth could be an aoe with a 50 second cooldown) to replace the healing abilties that were removed and keeping Glare, Broil and Malefic for when healing isn't needed and lowering their cast times to 1.5 seconds.

With that you; heal primarily through casting healing gcds and dps through weaving dps cooldowns between casting heals. And if healing isnt needed you still have Glare, Malefic and Broil to use. Dpsing as a healer would at least be more engaging as you'd have more than just 1 DoT and single target spell. You'd be casting a heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil then weave that DoT ability, then after the next heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil you'd weave the next cooldown then go weaving the 2 second ability until the others come off cooldown.

The reason people hate having to spam gcd heals is there are no dps abilities to weave during them that do not have healing tacked on to them. Give dps abilties with very short cooldowns to healers with 0 healing tacked on and people would be content with spamming Cure 1 or Physick because they'd have those to use during the gcd.

An unintended side-effect of that is too much mobility, but who really cares about mobility anymore when nearly every job has heaps of mobility now.

A rotation doesn't imply combo actions. Also, some combos can be interrupted with no loss, so even that argument falls through.

Combos for healers would be stupid, but I'm just correcting you.

Give healers more things to juggle damage wise. It doesn't have to be a set rotation, just a broad priority system like scholar had in stormblood.