The Problem With Healers as a Role Withing FFXIV

[MiaShino]

Give me a deeps rotation and more healer skills that interact with each other and a happy Mia I will beia.

Right now I have eight win buttons and it is becoming a little much.

[Garten]

I have not still read all the posts yet, but coming from similar discussions i think that in this game there Is only a solution:

Give healer a "decent" dps rotation. Embrace the healer/dps.

Than make casual content so that It requires like a BIT of healer dps. The reward for dpsing more when you master the healing side/not making mistakes Is the faster clear of mobs/fights.

Then.. going towards harder and Savage fights you: increase healing or dps requirement or both.

[BungleBear]

From a raiding perspective, I'd say that avoidable damage doesn't have a huge impact on healing, because many mechanics will simply one-shot you if you fail them. Probably more significant is the use of damage mitigation. But the most significant impact on healing might be the level of your party's gear. Higher level gear has several relevant effects. It has higher defensive stats, which means less damage taken. It enables you to kill bosses faster, thereby skipping mechanics with high unavoidable damage. And it increases the amount healing done per healing action. So in general, the better your party's gear, the fewer healing actions you need to use.

Consequently, the amount of resources that healers need to devote to healing diminishes over the the course of a raid tier, as their party's gear (and performance) improves. This presents a problem for developers. If they tune jobs and encounters so that healing remains demanding, and therefore engaging, even when players are fully geared, then it may be too demanding for players with only entry-level gear (e.g. everyone at the start of raid tier).

Some possible solutions:

1. Other MMOs solve this problem by having larger raid parties and less rigid party composition requirements. Whereas a less well geared (or less competent) party may choose to take 4 healers, a better geared party may take only 3 or 2. But this may be too drastic a change for FFXIV.
   
2. Another solution is to make healers' non-healing functions more engaging. But SE might worry (perhaps with justification) that this would distract some healers from their primary function of healing. And anyway, some healers want to be healing, not doing other things.
   
3. FFXIV already implements a solution to this problem in ultimates. These have a fixed item level sync, so you can't "outgear" them. Perhaps the same model could be adopted for other kinds of content, like savage raids. But then the gear awarded for clearing this content would have less benefit. Having said that, people still do ultimates, even though the only rewards are prestige and a sense of personal achievement.

[Tulzscha]

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.

True, healing is and always has been the most inconsistent of all roles to play. Is it a problem that needs fixing? I don't think so, it kind of fixes itself as players get better. What's important is that healers have the tools to fix mistakes up to a point.

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.

Same idea as the first point. Your level of involvement doesn't really change you just switch from healing to dps and plan for the next mechanic.

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.

I've never known a healer to have a "rotation" unless they healed through dps, nor do they need one. They just need a toolkit to deal with a variety of situations. It's true that FFXIV healers don't have a great deal of variation and I think this is mostly due to the overly scripted nature of FFXIV encounters.

Things SE could do to improve the feel, making each healer unique and distinct, duty design so that playing healers if more fun, etc.

They can only make healers so unique before it becomes a balance problem. At the end of the day when they put a mechanic in a raid or trial every healer needs to be able to answer it, so anything one healer has that's unique to them doesn't really have a place in FFXIV's scripted encounters unless it's just a different way of doing the same thing (shield vs hot vs burst).

As for making healers more fun well that's subjective and largely dependent on player experience - the more you put in to make vets happy the more overwhelmed and unhappy newer players become.

I can think of a few ways to maybe make healing more interesting:

1. The most simple idea would be to add more to healer dps kits. Could lead to button bloat and more confusion for new players while not making gameplay that much better.

2. Increase health pools a lot and incoming damage a bit - more often and in smaller relative amounts - with maybe some random unavoidable damage, thus forcing healers to constantly be healing and reacting to damage regardless of player mistakes. Also change healer kits so we're not simply spamming the same two abilities. Random damage wouldn't translate well in higher difficulties though.

3. Make mana matter more with base abilities, replace Lucid Dreaming with something unique for each job, reduce cost of rez for healers (the rez debuff and cast time are limiting enough). Make cheap heals necessary, mix mana management into dps abilities as well as healing. Reward dot uptime with the ability to heal more, punish spamming the same dps ability with going oom but also offer alternatives, etc.

4. Add entirely new mechanics that healers (and possibly a few other jobs) can deal with. Adds that need to be crowd controlled (long and short term), enemy buffs that need to be purged, attacks that need to be dealt with by more than just heals, movement buffs, etc. Wouldn't help with older content.

5. More different damage patterns that each job deals with differently and more specialized abilities to accentuate what makes each job unique, like removing healing from certain shield abilities or having more hots that can be stacked or smart aoe heals that increase in potency when fewer targets need healing. Essentially results in having different ways to do the same things with different timing but it could be fun. Wouldn't help with older content either.

[Sebazy]

To this day it boggles my mind that SE have this glorious job system coupled with itemisation that is mostly role rather than job centric. Yet they don't embrace or abuse this in the slightest.

A badly handled balance patch in WoW could sideline thousands of hours of effort put into gear, reputation and even clout within the opposing faction.

In FFXIV, this simply means that you might want to give your favoured job a pass for a bit in Savage and Ultimate.

Now that they are at least claiming to be switching to a dynamic of 2 pure + 2 barrier healers, there has never been a better time to go full yolo with a healer from each side of the coin and try to experiment. Take some chances and see what sticks. The initial period when it's just dungeons, quests and a couple of EX primals is the most forgiving period of an expansion and they would have to truly scupper a job for it to be unviable in trivial content like this. We don't even need a DPS rotation in all honesty (although something as simple as an auto combo would help at least give the illusion of something more interesting, as well as rewarding consecutive GCD usage). Let us dump our GCDs into buffs. Give us back our debuffs. Give us anything to do that isn't smashing that single glare key endlessly at almost all stages of content.

Unfortunately this would require some effort to actually be put into healers so uh, NM =/

[Dearche]

Now that they are at least claiming to be switching to a dynamic of 2 pure + 2 barrier healers, there has never been a better time to go full yolo with a healer from each side of the coin and try to experiment. Take some chances and see what sticks. The initial period when it's just dungeons, quests and a couple of EX primals is the most forgiving period of an expansion and they would have to truly scupper a job for it to be unviable in trivial content like this. We don't even need a DPS rotation in all honesty (although something as simple as an auto combo would help at least give the illusion of something more interesting, as well as rewarding consecutive GCD usage). Let us dump our GCDs into buffs. Give us back our debuffs. Give us anything to do that isn't smashing that single glare key endlessly at almost all stages of content.

Unfortunately this would require some effort to actually be put into healers so uh, NM =/

To be honest, I don't see why SE doesn't gamble on the jobs more often.

Frankly speaking, while I'm a relatively hardcore SCH main, I wouldn't mind it so much if they made SCH and WHM easy to access jobs, while the went ham on AST and SGE, being that they are both jobs you can't get until reaching at least level 50.

Of course I'd head straight into one of those jobs if that happened, I wouldn't even mind if they were underperformers as long as they were sufficiently fun to play.

SE does have a problem with risking alienating existing players with their decisions, but pretty much every decision will alienate a portion of the player base. They currently are alienating most of the healer boards with their ShB healer decisions as it is.

But FFXIV is a game that it's easy to switch jobs or even roles, and while there's a lot of players who only play one job, I don't see the downside of alienating a portion of those players who liked a particular job for its style or feel if the changes served to help the greater game.

SE already made GNB the DPS style tank, and a large number of veteran tanks migrated that way. They should do the same with SGE, since it's the perfect opportunity.

[ElysiumDragon]

As someone who plays WHM on the side, the job being easy isn't really an issue for me. It's more that the vast majority of damage can be either shrugged off with heals, or instantly drops the affected player there and then, in which case the Res Mage'll usually have them up quicker than I will.

[Lyth]

If you want to differentiate between healers, and you want to make healing interesting, then it needs to be through resource management. If you have too many resources at your disposal relative to what the content requires, healing becomes trivial.

[Recon1o6]

If you want to differentiate between healers, and you want to make healing interesting, then it needs to be through resource management. If you have too many resources at your disposal relative to what the content requires, healing becomes trivial.

you also need to differentiate between what they do when they don't need to heal, which is hte majority of a healer's gameplay in ff14