Increasing Optionality for the Party Frame (HUD) - A Healer's Perspective

[jus7ang]

A bit of background on myself...I've "mained" healers in WoW, in nearly all content, starting with Classic. My initial foray into FF14 was a few years back, as I was really drawn in by the concept of being able to heal and actually deal active damage, something that WoW didn't really do (and do well) at the time. Unfortunately, FF14 never really stuck for me back then, due to informational "clunkiness" creating unnecessary complexities in the healer role - which I believe continues to be the case today.

My Proposal
This game allows for some fantastic customization, and I think all the devs would need to do is apply some of the already existing customization features to the Party Frame.

In particular:
1) Allow the Party Frame to be broken down into the following discrete parts (this is already done for modules like Target Frame, Target Progress Bar, Target Buffs/Debuffs):

a) Health Bars w/ Name and Class Icons

b) Mana Bars w/ Name and Class Icons

c) Progress Bars w/ Name and Class Icons

d) Buffs/Debuffs w/ Name and Class Icons

2) Upon breaking the frame into it's discrete parts (checking an option), this would allow each discrete part to be altered in terms of display format (similar to how hotbars are):

a) have an option for the current 1x8

b) have an option for 2x4

c) have an option for 4x2

d) have an option for 8x1

Extra Detail

Informational "clunkiness"...How I define these issues may differ from your point of view, but net-net more optionality is generally a good thing. I think the main issue plaguing healing in this game is how clunky and cumbersome the traditional party frame is. In my view, from a healing perspective, there is so much irrelevant and unused information (mana bars, cast bars, etc.) that it creates this bulky HUD element, which eats massively into your important visual real estate. Additionally, the inflexibility of the HUD element, which can only span vertically, further exacerbates the issue.

There are certainly corner cases for why one may want to see all this information, and I respect those choices. But for those that want more optionality, which is a good thing, we should be able to filter the core of what we're looking for without excess fluff.

[Angry_Alisaie]

One thing that always drove me nuts when I played healer, was that I wasn't always familiar with all the debuffs out there, so it was extremely difficult to know when to Esuna someone for things. Unless you play all other jobs and have learned the icons that way, many of them aren't known to you. So having something show up clearly as a debuff would've been tremendously helpful.