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.

[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

[BlueMageQuina]

This question is a little complicated.. The truth is that it’s this way now for many reasons; it has been a reaction to player complaints, a result of unpopular design choices, a change from mechanics reworks, and a reduction to button bloat.

For player complaints, for example, for a long while (ARR, HW, SB) healers kept complaining about the skill gap especially since it justifies leaving players out of content they wanted to try. When healers had more DPS spells, good healers very obviously outclassed bad ones and bringing a good SCH was like bringing a 5th DPS. (Yes, the did DPS like a DPS.) Even so, reducing our damage output to 1 button has not extinguished the skill gap, which is still often very evident.

For unpopular design choices, SE had had the notion for a while that “healers should only heal,” which only exacerbated the previous issue. Slowly our DPS and utility toolkits were nerfed and hallowed out into oblivion while the healers themselves have been homogenized. There was a time where only SCH had a bubble (Sacred Soil), but then WHM was given one (Asylum) and AST was given 2 (Collective, Star). But that still wasn’t enough. ShB made it so that now SCH’s bubble also regens like the other two healers. Sacred Soil is now the most overpowered healing cooldown for the sake of homogeneity. Likewise, WHM was often stripped of its own utility to be spread to other healers and roles: Cleric Stance was given away then deleted, Shroud of Saints became Lucid Dreaming, Esuna replaced AST and SCH’s unique status heals, etc. WHM even had a cooldown to increase its healing potency that was first given to other healers and renamed Largesse, and then split and renamed again for a second time to be unique to WHM and AST in the forms of Temperance and Neutral Sect.

The utility we do/did have is continuously reworked; it is continuously removed, rebranded or repurposed onto other roles. To be fair, sometimes the rework is required. Old NIN is a good example. Tanking used to be a whole lot more difficult and unlike now, you couldn’t just turn on tank stance to hold the aggro. DPS and healers both used to pull aggro off the a tank who didn’t have a good aggro rotation. NIN solved this somewhat by being able to directly mitigate and empty party members’ aggro. NIN actually had a mechanic that was neat and unique to it. Then—of course—it’s utility was reduced by giving other DPS Diversion (aggro dump for DPS role) and tanks Ultimatum (AOE Provoke). Then, reworked again so that tank stance is enough so all aggro related abilities have been deleted from all jobs but tanks.

Unlike NIN, for healers a rework of utility wasn’t comparatively required though it happened anyway. Old AST utility was that it buffed 6 unique aspects—every card wasn’t a damage up the way it is now—and AST could extend the duration of its own buffs, shields and regens through card buffs, Time Dilation, and Celestial Opposition (which incidentally used to have an AOE stun). This was taken away because of player complaints about the RNG aspect of fishing for the right card, and for the balance aspect that the other healers would never buff that way, especially WHM which was planned to never offer true comparable utility. But more to the point, AST and SCH both had mitigation tools that have been repurposed into other roles. AST’s Disable and SCH’s Eye for an Eye have both been deleted in place of giving DPS more responsibility: Troubadour, Shield Samba, Tactician, Feint and Addle.

The little remaining utility was slowly weeded out too. WHM had a Heavy+40% with Stone 1, which became healer role Break, which became gone. Fluid Aura had a knockback and a damage potency, gone. Aero III, gone. Cleric Stance is gone so badly that people say “healers should only heal,” forgetting that the original design for one of the healers had a DPS stance that raised damage output and lowered healing output. SCH had a Shadowflare, Bane, Miasma II, Energy Drain, Rouse, an AOE haste, an AOE Esuna, and an AOE silence (interrupt). All gone, though Energy Drain returned because of MP issues. And we already spoke on AST.

Lastly, the final reason we have nothing less to do as a healer, and don’t let this reason be overlooked: button bloat. We have too many buttons and the “less useful” utility and DPS buttons have been the first to go.

All these things gone. All for balance. All for rework. All for button bloat. All because we complained.

[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.

[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..

[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.

[elioaiko]

They don't want to give healers more utility outside of increased healing and damage reduction because it'll "stress" out players who have to heal so much (and waste their healing as a result). They think that healers can't handle the workload while we're begging to be more support-oriented.

But also SE does not want meta comps to form like it did in previous expansions so they removed debuffs like slashing, blunt, piercing (this one was especially bad since DRG was the only one who can do it). The consequences of this have stripped support oriented jobs into simply a dps battery booster. AST's cards were all turned into balance cards with different art on them, NIN no longer having an aggro management niche, PLD's cover being changed (though justified as it was very OP), Phys. Ranged as a whole got their MP refresh removed along with Palisade.

I mean just look at the SCH, they took away Selene because she was "niche" even though Fey Wind felt good to use and on top of that, the fairy is flying regen who's so weak now that her heal does nothing.

SE will likely never return to debuffs and actual skills (even though Phys. Ranged is severely lacking). The only thing that we could hope for is a more interesting DPS rotations for healers as that's the only thing SE can properly manage.

I'm 99% sure that the dev consist of dps mains who took don't even know how FFXIV are being played. They keep pushing that healers need to heal when there's nothing to heal and the fact that the combat design prevents GCD healing from being optimal.

I fully expect SE to destroy what little support AST has left for a one button Divination (no seals required). I don't expect WHM to have anything significant added. SCH will either be reworked into an OP healer again or remain as disjointed and boring as it is now. Sage is a toss up but I feel like it'll be pretty busted.