What proportion of casts should be heals?

[Hatstand]

I think there are a lot of healers not happy with how many times they cast glare/broil/malefic in a fight, but I see some disagreement about whether this problem should be fixed by padding out the dps kit or by increasing the healing requirement. Personally, I’d like to see both, but I would be curious to know what proportion of casts you think should be heals in any given fight. How many on a first attempt when everyone is undergeared? How many when you’ve got something on farm? Getting an idea of how much people actually want to be healing could give us a better idea of what the proportion of healing to dps skills should be.

[Semirhage]

There's a huge sliding scale there, for a number of reasons. The skill difference between the ceiling and floor is not small, and Square seems to believe the skill floor that the game should support should stay quite low in most content. A highly skilled healer might spend a dungeon without casting a single GCD heal. An unskilled one might cast 50 or more. For just that one reason, we already have a clear variation between the amount of time spent healing between players. When the content and kits "need" to support taking dozens and dozens of casts in easier content, as a side-effect they end up supporting 80+% damage uptime for someone who doesn't need to do that.

I'd be okay with 40ish% of my casts being heals in hard content once I've mastered it, but I'd also like the healing kits to be interesting for that. I think the skill gap makes conversations about how much healing uptime is "enough" hard to reach a definitive answer. Making the healing and damage kits interactive and interesting to play on their own would make the wiggle room in that uptime percentage much more bearable, no matter where it lands. I wouldn't have fun spending 80% of my time healing if I'm just casting Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure like I would Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare.

[NobleWinter]

I don't care if Im spamming healing or spamming dps as long as I have fun doing it. I want decision making to be invovled and be rewarded for skill. Dps is not a decision currently. You deal damage or do nothing for long periods of time. In some dungeons healing isnt an option either. The tanks health plummets the entire run and while that is far more fun to me it still doesn't give me a lot of fun decisions to make. Just more than dps does.

[Acece]

I'm squarely in the green dps camp, but I still think we need to cast way more hard cast heals. I would say in a perfect world a 40%-30% of total actions (both gcd and ogcd) would be healing actions.
The problem is there's only a couple fun healing spells (especially Gcd heals are extremely boring), I think star, excog(recitation), and lilly heals are the only healing spells that feel fun to me. The rest of the actions are just disconnected heals that I blurt out when damage comes out. With how many healing spells we have, having so few of them actually be interesting is kind of funny.

[Aarchie]

it would all depend on how interesting our kit is
as they said "cure cure cure cure cure" vs "glare glare glare glare" are both boring.
I would like a healing rotation (including buffs, debuffs) and etc, in an ideal scenario. Around 60% healing/doing support stuff (the game engine and fights would not support this at the current state tho). But again, our kit almost insta heal the entire party HP. I wouldn't mind keeping the DPS in higher proportion, but it needs to be fun and engaging.

[Liam_Harper]

You can't put a number on hardcast heals because the number varies wildly between groups. A minimum ilv group progging a new fight with some players still somewhat inexperienced is worlds apart from an experienced, geared group where mitigation is perfectly planned and both healers have a well coordinated heal map. This is true more in FF14 than other MMO's, especially when we're limited to a strict 2 healers per 8 players while a game like WoW has larger groups and can reduce the healers they bring as they gear and learn a fight.

This is why, despite the fact that I'd like more to heal, I'm still in the "make dps engaging" camp. Dps just works as filler in ff14, but you naturally get too much downtime the better your group is, so make that downtime engaging and fun. Trying to make us use a set percentage of hardcast heals per fight is an exercise in futility.

[Hatstand]

Trying to make us use a set percentage of hardcast heals per fight is an exercise in futility.

I completely agree, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in taking how much healing people would like to be doing into account.

[Averax]

If you're just healing up unavoidable damage because people are doing well, then not a very high percentage. If you're fixing people's mistakes a lot then that percentage is going to go up. It's literally impossible to know in advance unless you have a group you always run with that you have intimate experience with how they play.

As a healer your job is largely reactive.

And in the case of scholar, current nocturnal ast, and future sage, it's a bit proactive as well, but that boils down to knowing when the tank buster and the unavoidable aoes are coming.

[Recon1o6]

ideally you want it to be roughly 50/50

that is, min ilvl and new folks, you heal about 60% of your buttons and dps 40% as you get more experienced, ilvl boosts, mechanics learnt etc, it would graduate more to 40:60

whats important is that it is fun and you have a variable and significant enough portion of your kit be not healing, ie dps, support, buffing etc

[AnotherPerson]

ideally you want it to be roughly 50/50

that is, min ilvl and new folks, you heal about 60% of your buttons and dps 40% as you get more experienced, ilvl boosts, mechanics learnt etc, it would graduate more to 40:60

whats important is that it is fun and you have a variable and significant enough portion of your kit be not healing, ie dps, support, buffing etc

Is that supposed to be the ideal? With no deaths, 100% proper rotation, and 100% full understanding of the mechanics?
Because things vary greatly when people do stuff for the first time.

I don't think this is viable because a player's skill level affects that healing % a lot more than up to 20% currently. For the change to be 20%, the outgoing damage must happen frequently enough to reduce DPS time, but it also means dying will skew that bar a lot more on healers. It's more like a 80-90% heal / 10-20 % DPS if you were forced to continuously heal that much to keep 60% healing uptime due to the way deaths work. The 25% stat penalty is no joke, especially on healers, doubly so if they die twice.