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

[Gula]

I remember playing Aion, a PVP game, and getting shrekt on the field by clerics. Healers can be fun to play, if they're allowed to play the game. Someone compared XIV's combat to an ATB system and with that outlook I think healer could be really fun if allowed to do more than press a button when anyone's HP dips below 70%. Have healing phases such as that part against High Seraph Ultima where the entire alliance's HP is plummeting but also DPS checks where little healing is required and it's all about slapping that HP bar.

[Roeshel]

I remember playing Aion, a PVP game, and getting shrekt on the field by clerics. Healers can be fun to play, if they're allowed to play the game. Someone compared XIV's combat to an ATB system and with that outlook I think healer could be really fun if allowed to do more than press a button when anyone's HP dips below 70%. Have healing phases such as that part against High Seraph Ultima where the entire alliance's HP is plummeting but also DPS checks where little healing is required and it's all about slapping that HP bar.

AION is one of the few MMOs I have played before. The clerics had dps chain skills which were pretty fun for solo leveling. The game was ruined by p2w tho so I left soon after hitting max level. The low rng for upgrading your items was intentional so that you buy those stones from the cash shop.

[IDontPetLalas]

I remember playing Aion, a PVP game, and getting shrekt on the field by clerics. Healers can be fun to play, if they're allowed to play the game. Someone compared XIV's combat to an ATB system and with that outlook I think healer could be really fun if allowed to do more than press a button when anyone's HP dips below 70%. Have healing phases such as that part against High Seraph Ultima where the entire alliance's HP is plummeting but also DPS checks where little healing is required and it's all about slapping that HP bar.

That takes me back- I wish healers some of the love from the devs that cleric had in that game. I played from closed beta until 2020- so 11 years - clerics actually had 2 skills trees, and could even run a hybrid spec. In healing spec, they couldn't kill a fly- this is what AST and the SCH feel like, and solo questing feels pretty miserable, I find WHM is more tolerable. In that spec, cleric have tons of heals to support a team in PVP or the hardest PVE content.

However, in their DPS or even hybrid content, clerics could solo in PVP and easily solo in PVE- depending upon the release, they were one of the few classes (jobs) that could solo bosses. They were decent backup healers and very decent as PVE DPS.

[Acece]

I think they wanted to mimic WoW, healers in wow mostly heal with some utility. The problem is even in Wow, healing classes still have a pretty decent (holy priest) to robust dps (disc priest) rotation even when in WoW they heal way more. Healers also in ffxiv has no utility/uniqueness that makes them worth while from each other so you can take any of them.
Honestly I think they miss the forest for the trees, while they get the general idea of pure healers/shield healers they don't get why they work so they just dump a bunch of none interacting healing with little to no healing requirements while also not giving healers a satisfying dps rotation to make up for it.

[Dzian]

If this is the mentality how are they supposed to finish the MSQ on healers?

Can't kill mobs with healing.

That's literally the only reason they have dps spells at all. You can go back and read basically any super early stuff about it.

It's why in the devs eyes healers were never expected to contribute dps in endgame content or anything such.The only reason they had dps spells at all was to solo.

Which again comes down the huge disconnect between the people making the jobs and the people making the content...

The devs really need to get on the same page

[Lyth]

'Utility' in this game historically translated into one of three things:
1) Resource generation
2) Reduce incoming damage
3) Increase outgoing damage

Players always prefer things that directly boost their dps. AST and cards are the obvious example. That doesn't mean that these are the only forms of utility that exist.

But here are the problems. This game is built on potato framework. The fact that the solution to the 'spin to win' bug was to animation lock all boss movements shows you how little control over fights that they can allow you before things start falling apart. And the instant that you give the playerbase anything with niche, situational ability, people start complaining that it can't be used under all conditions to min-max dps.

You want impact? Play dps.

[Corbeau]

I started in ShB, so I didn't get to see first-hand what was lost. I came from WoW, and healers in ShB were profoundly disappointing compared to Legion... or hell, even BfA, where the appalling pruning of depth (one reason I quit) still left healers in a better state than they are in ShB.

"Utility" in XIV seems to mean one thing: party damage buffs. It's alien coming from a class that had, in Legion:

- Spirit Link Totem, a persistent ground-targeted ability that temporarily made a stack of players have (effectively) one collective health pool, capable of pre-emptively preventing individual deaths and/or making AoE healing more efficient.
- Wind Rush Totem, a persistent ground-targeted ability that granted a large movement speed boost to any player coming nearby.
- Ancestral Protection Totem, a persistent ground-targeted ability that would grant an immediate free rez to the first player to die nearby within the totem's duration (in XIV terms, imagine a rez that had to be cast and targeted before the death but didn't add damage down).
- Earthbind Totem, like Wind Rush but a debuff to enemy speed instead of buffing ally speed.
- Capacitor Totem, a ground-targeted ability that would deploy an AoE stun after a few seconds of charging.
- Dispel, like Esuna except oGCD and regularly written into encounters.
- A ranged interrupt that was constantly relevant.
- Purge, allowing you to dispel buffs on enemies - not quite as commonly relevant but still saw regular use.

I honestly started playing SCH expecting Eos or Selene to act a lot like totems, acting as the placement point for various utility buffs, and it turned out that there was nothing. Nothing at all. I think Esuna and Rescue are the only abilities that SCH has that'd even qualify as utility to me. The game engine and encounter design are just so, so limited with no room for abilities that break rules. PLD's Cover is the closest I've gotten to the game-changing abilities I learned to love back in Legion. And hell, both the healer damage and healer healing kits were deeper too, even post-BfA prune. There's a reason why I don't play healer in this game despite loving the support role in every game genre.

e: To elaborate on the DPS kit, Restoration Shaman's laughably bare-bones kit consisted of:

- A generic but mana-intensive damage spell.
- A worse damage spell that cost no mana (relevant in the resource-based healing model).
- A DoT whose ticks could proc free instant-cast uses of your generic damage spell (max. 2 stacks of free casting).
- An AoE damage spell.

Simple, yet you were rewarded for upkeeping your DoT with procs to change your rhythm or save for movement. There was some thought in whether it was best to burn stacks asap or if you needed to save them for use during mechanics, and even if you were just burning 'em as they came in it was more interesting than pressing your core DPS spell over and over again during downtime (which was itself much less common due to higher and less predictable healing requirements). And this was still much shallower than the Monk healer I switched to in early BfA; fistweaving, building/playing to maximize DPS in order to generate healing through kit synergy, was an absolute joy and I probably wouldn't have quit so soon if it had been the meta build for more progression.

[Dzian]

'Utility' in this game historically translated into one of three things:
1) Resource generation
2) Reduce incoming damage
3) Increase outgoing damage

Players always prefer things that directly boost their dps. AST and cards are the obvious example. That doesn't mean that these are the only forms of utility that exist.
.

Not necessarily players tend to prefer depth and complexity over simple and shallow.

If utility is interesting or changes encounters in some way thats fun its usually something players like.

1.2 paladin for example had a cooldown called aegis boon. Super fun and interesting to use. Blocked 100% of the damage from the next attack you took and converted that damage into HP.. a successful block of the right attack could literally take you from single digit hp to well over 50%.

If you compare that to Shelltron guaranteed block but only like 20% damage reduction... well that's just nowhere near as fun or interesting to use.

Old school cover was much cooler as well as it carried your buffs onto the covered target. So if you popped tempered will and covered someone. They couldn't be knocked back either. If you popped hallowed and covered someone they were invincible. Made these things so much more fun and interesting to use. Where now there all just shallow and boring..

[Lyth]

...

The more clever that you become with ability effects, the more opportunities there are to break fights. Rather than try to predict these or patch them out, they make your ability set just a little more narrow and a little more tightly constrained the next time. Hallowed and Cover as you mentioned being used to reset stacks are good examples of these. Another interesting example is Holmgang being used to interrupt otherwise uninterruptable abilities. That's one major reason we don't have draw in/knock back abilities in PvE anymore.

Utility doesn't need to be clever to not fall into one of those three categories. Movement is a major one. An in-combat movement speed buff could be used to help you respond more quickly to a mechanic, or it could be used to improve your uptime. Similar thinking could be applied to your casters if you gave them a warp point between two parts of the arena.

What else could you do? Reduce recast on next cooldown. Prevent/cleanse a vulnerability stack. Increase resource generation. Haste buff. Reflect damage.

The more complex you make it, the bigger a dev team you need to balance it. They're just cashing in for cheap.

[currentlemon]

I started playing this game when Stormblood was released. WHM was the first job I levelled to max level. Was it weak, yes. But I still had more fun playing 4.0 WHM than 5.0 WHM. In StB, you had more options such as Cleric Stance and Aero III. When they removed that in ShB, it took away a lot of the fun factor of the job. There were times when I played in dungeons that I'd like to cast Aero III on a mob, but the spell was sadly missing from my hotbar.

God I miss that spell. The only good decision SE did when it came to 5.0 WHM was the lily system. But other than that, I pretty much quit playing the job.