The Problem With Healers as a Role Withing FFXIV

[Dearche]

I've been bouncing ideas around quite a bit lately in regards to the state of SCH, and healers as a whole. Things SE could do to improve the feel, making each healer unique and distinct, duty design so that playing healers if more fun, etc.

The one conclusion I had come to in the end, is that healers are on a fundamental level, at least with how FFXIV treats them, nearly impossible to fix.

The reasons are thus:

First of all, it's impossible to scale healing between differing combination of skill levels of healers and the rest of the party. The purpose of healing is twofold. The first is to undo unavoidable damage caused by the enemy. Heal the tank after a tank buster. Heal the raid after a raid-wide AOE. The second is to undo mistakes. Someone stepped in the bad? Heal them.

The problem about these is that they are fundamentally different issues that are covered by a single mechanic. Of course, it's next to impossible to separate these two.

Either way, designing for these two factors is extremely difficult, as they both burden the healer equally, but the factors which decide that are completely separate. Unavoidables are easily planned and the healer's expected skill can be accounted for it based on the content's difficulty. But the latter? The difficulty can be adjusted to a certain degree, but the difficulty the healer faces is more than 75% dictated by the skill level of the party members.

This is a variable amount which cannot be predicted by the neither the developers nor other players. And it's very difficult to actually observe in the duty itself by anyone but the healer and the one making the mistake. Even then, unless if the healer is especially experienced, understanding how much mistake damage should be considered permissible is quite difficult to establish.

The second reason is that no matter how much forced healing an encounter has, the skill of the player directly works against the healer's level of involvement of the encounter. As damage comes both in unavoidables and avoidables, there is a limit to how much unavoidable damage can be sent to the party even if the healer has infinite MP to spend on healing. The reason is that if the healer has 100% uptime for doing its described job just to keep the raid going, there is no leeway to fix avoidable damage if it happens.

But if the healer doesn't have 100% uptime doing its described job, then its left having to do a different job during its downtime. This comes in the form of DPSing, as healers have no other use for their time. Raid design also accounts for this fact, despite class design not doing so.

[Dearche]

Third is the fact that without predictable and constant damage, there's no opportunity to create healing rotations to keep the act of healing interesting. As things stand, healers all just have a jumble of skills that generally just do the same thing. There are slight differences between potency and restrictions, but overall they're the same.

Every healer has big single target healing, weaker AOE healing, and everything else is just a variation of the two, with the bulk of abilities veering towards the latter. There's no synergistic effects between the abilities to promote using them in a particular order, or to use certain combinations together to improve the effect. They're all more or less the same abilities with differing effects put on them.

You can argue that the management of all these abilities is the skill of the healer, but frankly, there's not much difference between what we have right now and just consolidating all these skills into four abilities. A single target and AOE heal that uses MP, and a single target and AOE heal that is on a 15s or so CD with 2-3 charges.

This change would make learning healer infinitely easier, but it would also expose just how little there is when it comes to healer design.

It's really unfortunate, since most other healing related abilities either fall into abilities that manages MP, allows movement while casting, or increases the potency of the heals by a insignificant amount. Frankly, the first is pointless since MP is only important when it comes to rapid firing rezzes or coming off of a rez, the second can be done by just using oGCD healing weaved between instant cast attack spells, and the last is a waste of a hotbar slot.


These are the biggest reasons why healing as a role is broken, not just when it comes to class and duty design, but from the fundamental philosophy of the entire thing.

It is possible that making avoidable AOEs give a stacking debuff that instantly kills the target when it reaches a certain number, but otherwise those AOEs do very little damage. This way scripted damage can come much more often to minimize downtime. You can even make healing combos or other synergistic rotations for healers to do so that they aren't just replacing the single button DPS spam with healing single button spam.

People constantly make the same mistake when it comes to the healer role within the holy trinity. The healer's job isn't to fix other people's mistakes. Anyone can do that, so everyone should be responsible for that, not just one part of the trinity. That's why the DPS all have self-healing skills. The role of the healer ties directly to the tank instead. The tank's job is to prevent the party from wiping in 5 seconds. The healer's job is the continuously push back that 5 second margin for as long as possible. The DPS's job is to end the encounter before the tank and healer give out from the strain.

[BungleBear]

Every healer has big single target healing, weaker AOE healing, and everything else is just a variation of the two, with the bulk of abilities veering towards the latter. There's no synergistic effects between the abilities to promote using them in a particular order, or to use certain combinations together to improve the effect. They're all more or less the same abilities with differing effects put on them.

You can argue that the management of all these abilities is the skill of the healer, but frankly, there's not much difference between what we have right now and just consolidating all these skills into four abilities. A single target and AOE heal that uses MP, and a single target and AOE heal that is on a 15s or so CD with 2-3 charges.

This change would make learning healer infinitely easier, but it would also expose just how little there is when it comes to healer design.

I think you're underestimating the diversity in our healing toolkit. It seems like you're saying "every healing ability is either single-target or AOE, so there are only two kinds of healing ability". But surely there are other relevant differences between healing abilities besides the number of targets they heal.

Take SCH, for example. Sure, Indom and Whispering Dawn are both AOE heals. But Indom has lower potency and heals instantly, whereas WD has higher potency and heals over time. So Indom is preferable when raidwide damage is imminent, but WD is preferable otherwise. WD and Sacred Soil are both HOTs with roughly the same potency. But SS has the added benefit of damage reduction, whereas WD doesn't require your party to remain in a tightly circumscribed location. So SS is preferable in situations where your party stacks for multiple raidwide hits. It's not rocket science, but working out which healing ability to use in which situation still requires some thought and planning.

I don't understand why you say that reducing the healing abilities to only four would be "not much difference" but also that it would be "infinitely easier". That seems like a big difference.

[Dearche]

I think you're underestimating the diversity in our healing toolkit. It seems like you're saying "every healing ability is either single-target or AOE, so there are only two kinds of healing ability". But surely there are other relevant differences between healing abilities besides the number of targets they heal.

Take SCH, for example. Sure, Indom and Whispering Dawn are both AOE heals. But Indom has lower potency and heals instantly, whereas WD has higher potency and heals over time. So Indom is preferable when raidwide damage is imminent, but WD is preferable otherwise. WD and Sacred Soil are both HOTs with roughly the same potency. But SS has the added benefit of damage reduction, whereas WD doesn't require your party to remain in a tightly circumscribed location. So SS is preferable in situations where your party stacks for multiple raidwide hits. It's not rocket science, but working out which healing ability to use in which situation still requires some thought and planning.

I don't understand why you say that reducing the healing abilities to only four would be "not much difference" but also that it would be "infinitely easier". That seems like a big difference.

I mean, I admit that I was exaggerating, with SS being the most glaring example. But in reality, HOTs don't last long enough to really be much of an issue when it comes to AOE healing. The raid-wides often don't come quick enough in significant enough damage that the AOE HOTs don't just end up doing the same work as normal AOE heals.

In the context of FF, most of the time the more deciding factor is the potency of the heal and whether it's a GCD or oGCD heal. And due to what all our DPS actions are, we always pick the oGCD when possible. Even the potency isn't that big of a deal a lot of the time since aside from a few specific examples, they don't vary that significantly.

[Dearche]

Seen this way, rather than the walking band-aid which healers tend to be viewed as, makes it more obvious how the healer archetype just won't work in FFXIV no matter how much SE tries to rebuild them. At the very least, it clashes too hard with how older duties are designed, and there's no way SE has the resources to rebuild older content to this degree.

So we have to settle with an alternative. If SE doesn't want healers to do lots of damage nor spend a lot of time hitting DPS buttons, then there's only one solution: make healers into supports instead.

By replacing much of the redundant healing kit and simplifying that side to at most 8 buttons, there'll be plenty of space for buffs. AST already has a working buff system, it just needs the buffs to feel impactful rather than be slight bonuses that can be accounted for by normal damage variance. Make AST cards push the realm of 20%+ damage bonus for single targets with capstone abilities doing that much for the entire party, then the number of complaints for the cards will plummet. Though having only two effective cards is still a problem.

For WHM and SCH, if the buffs were set up like a DPS rotation, but done on an ally instead of an enemy, then SE'd have some quite happy healers I think. Players will be happy doing interesting and impactful stuff during downtime, all the while healing when necessary.

For example, WHM could have Cure, Cure 2, and Medica be their mainstay healing spells. Cure is weak but instant, but the other two have cast times but are powerful. Each one give one of three random resources. All three together can be used to give a big party wide buff, while each resource somehow interacts with the buff if used by a corresponding skill that consumes it. One could extend the buff, another could empower it, and the third could add a secondary buff. Of course, there'll have to be some management abilities to avoid being swamped with too many of one resource.

SCH could have only oGCD heals, and a GCD scan ability. Scan a target, and it produces an analysis resource. Get a certain number of analysis resources and you can convert them into a stratagem buff for the party. With the stratagem buff up, the SCH could use a tactical evaluation GCD on the buffed party members to gain tactical resources depending on the role that the ability was used on, which could be used to further improve the party buff like the WHM's buff.

This was only something I came up with in under an hour, yet would satisfy both SE and the players' desires to a reasonable degree I think without SE having to expend resources fixing old content.

Fundamentally though, healers need to change from a philosophical level. Healers only healing doesn't work with how FFXIV is designed, and as a result, healers spend most of their time pressing DPS buttons even in the hardest raid content, which gets worse as we improve our gear and people get better.

[Raikai]

SCH could have only oGCD heals, and a GCD scan ability. Scan a target, and it produces an analysis resource. Get a certain number of analysis resources and you can convert them into a stratagem buff for the party. With the stratagem buff up, the SCH could use a tactical evaluation GCD on the buffed party members to gain tactical resources depending on the role that the ability was used on, which could be used to further improve the party buff like the WHM's buff.

Oh, this is actually a pretty nifty idea for a mechanic!

Honestly, it was a good OP read. I'm pretty curious on what is coming to EW, since healers appears to be the most delicate role to balance, by a huge margin compared to the others, and the fourth healer can really shake things up if not handled across the board.

I feel that a part of the healing problem right now is caused by the abundance of oGCD or insta-cast MP free actions. Healers right now have very little need to use GCD heals, unless the party is really messed up, and that makes the act of healing quite braindead, and on top of that, it nulls rotational MP management. Lucid Dream is only pressed when you're chain-cast rezzes, you don't even need it when you get a rez yourself, because most likely you'll have a bunch of oGCDs to play with. It's glaring how MP intensive a WHM is when you go through a roulette to ARR content.

[BungleBear]

Lucid Dream is only pressed when you're chain-cast rezzes, you don't even need it when you get a rez yourself, because most likely you'll have a bunch of oGCDs to play with.

Sounds like you've got too much piety.

[Liam_Harper]

Sounds like you've got too much piety.

Probably a lack of uptime too. Healers who spend half the fight twiddling their thumbs tend to spend far less mana than one filling every moment of downtime with dps casts.

[AnotherPerson]

Tip: use Edit to go over the 3000 word count limit on your first post.

People constantly make the same mistake when it comes to the healer role within the holy trinity. The healer's job isn't to fix other people's mistakes. Anyone can do that, so everyone should be responsible for that, not just one part of the trinity. That's why the DPS all have self-healing skills. The role of the healer ties directly to the tank instead. The tank's job is to prevent the party from wiping in 5 seconds. The healer's job is the continuously push back that 5 second margin for as long as possible. The DPS's job is to end the encounter before the tank and healer give out from the strain.

This is what happens in EX/Savage Raid difficulty with experienced players. E8S is a notable mention where players have to alternate using mitigations - Even the DPS - to survive raidwide damage. It's just most content isn't made to be difficult to the point where mitigation is a group effort, and less experienced players will never think of mitigating because they expect healers to adjust to damage.

Everyone in the healing community can figure that out quite easily. Support skills are great, but healers are also combat medics in this game just because the MSQ exists. Some people do progress the MSQ as a healer. If healers could only give buffs and not do as much damage, the solo instances will have to be dialed down to be extremely easy to be clearable for not just DPS, but healers as well who can only spam their now weakened attack potency skill. Killing things would be take forever or be straight up impossible since all their damage is from buffs - which are scaled to DPS doing damage rather than healers's DPS. Giving support utility is fine, but killing DPS options is really a bad idea in the long scheme of things since healers would only be able to level up in a party setting, and that's not what the MSQ's storytelling through various instances is designed for when they call you a Warrior of Light.

[Semirhage]

No role in this game is expected to improve. You can drag yourself bewildered through all story and alliance content failing mechanics left and right, barely doing a quarter of your job's potential and you'll squeeze through in the end.

The difference is, this doesn't make the designers stare down the red job icons and go, "heavens me, black mage is so very very scary. Better make Fire 4 instant and refresh the timer. RedSylphies need an easy job too!"