Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[Lyth]

It shouldn't be too difficult to give healers a more complex rotation. There are plenty of ideas that you can steal from BLU on how to make spells interact with and combo off each other. You would need to trim out a few defensive actions to stay within the action budget, but it's definitely doable. But that's not where the contention lies.

What if the devs give you what you want, but keep your raid dps contribution unchanged from your present state? Healer dps on average will decrease, simply because there will be players who used to be able to do the old rotation in content without trouble, but aren't able to keep up with the new one. The overall distribution will become more spread out because there's a skill differential, and only the very top results will stay unchanged. Are you fine with that, or would you expect healer dps to be adjusted upwards so that the average stays unchanged?

And if you adjust healer damage output accordingly to fix the average, what do you do when the best healers starts chasing down someone like that poor DNC main who posted earlier? Have you considered the unreasonable amount of pressure that you'd be placing on DPS mains, now that they have to do more than an auto-attack only rotation to stay ahead of you? And then if all the straggler DPS quit, their eyes lined with tears, who will buy the dev team's hand painted mogstation glamours to fund SE's next IP flop? They were going to finally make Spirits Within 2. How cruel. Did you consider that?

But seriously, the elephant in the room is your raid contribution. If you wanted to make the game more challenging with no reward, there are plenty of ways to do that already. Turn your HUD off. Play in first person view. People want to see reward for their efforts, but they're either too nice or too polite to ask. "Are you saying that you want more dps?!" "N-no. I-I just want more interesting gameplay. I wouldn't dare ask for more dps. I'll work even harder for less reward. Please don't hurt me."

[Kraniel]

It shouldn't be too difficult to give healers a more complex rotation. There are plenty of ideas that you can steal from BLU on how to make spells interact with and combo off each other. You would need to trim out a few defensive actions to stay within the action budget, but it's definitely doable. But that's not where the contention lies.

What if the devs give you what you want, but keep your raid dps contribution unchanged from your present state? Healer dps on average will decrease, simply because there will be players who used to be able to do the old rotation in content without trouble, but aren't able to keep up with the new one. The overall distribution will become more spread out because there's a skill differential, and only the very top results will stay unchanged. Are you fine with that, or would you expect healer dps to be adjusted upwards so that the average stays unchanged?

And if you adjust healer damage output accordingly to fix the average, what do you do when the best healers starts chasing down someone like that poor DNC main who posted earlier? Have you considered the unreasonable amount of pressure that you'd be placing on DPS mains, now that they have to do more than an auto-attack only rotation to stay ahead of you? And then if all the straggler DPS quit, their eyes lined with tears, who will buy the dev team's hand painted mogstation glamours to fund SE's next IP flop? They were going to finally make Spirits Within 2. How cruel. Did you consider that?

But seriously, the elephant in the room is your raid contribution. If you wanted to make the game more challenging with no reward, there are plenty of ways to do that already. Turn your HUD off. Play in first person view. People want to see reward for their efforts, but they're either too nice or too polite to ask. "Are you saying that you want more dps?!" "N-no. I-I just want more interesting gameplay. I wouldn't dare ask for more dps. I'll work even harder for less reward. Please don't hurt me."

Nonono.
I'm not here to DPS.
I'm here to save some ass.

I genuinely wouldn't care about healers DPS spells if healing wasn't as basic and dumb in FFXIV, and i'm sure the majority of healers feel the same.

I want to feel drops of sweat running down my buttcheeks when i heal. I want to have to click left and right and actually have a hard time keeping people alive, and when i do i want them to go "How in hell did you manage to do this ? You're an AMAZING healer". I don't care about the sad commends that i get at the end of a dungeon because no one died when there is nothing to worry about and i can DPS through every wall-to-wall pull as long as i put a regen + barrier on the tank. I didn't sign up for healer kindergarten when i bought the game.

If i want to DPS, i'll play a DPS.
I play a healer, so i want to heal. Simple as that. Damn it give me some work SE!

[Lyth]

...

I think that this is also a reasonable direction to take things. Again, the problem comes down to being valued as a healer. You need a skill differential.

A lot of this comes down to fight design. Tightly scripted fights with unforgiving mechanics will never really be challenging for a healer in the long run. You actually need the opposite: highly variable mechanics where there is some room for recovery (and by variable, I mean variations in mechanic order, not just being randomly assigned to being Healer 1 or Healer 2 on a Gavel mechanic. You need variable damage patterns where the tank is at risk of being burst down to nothing if you blink. You need to have limited resources. It should be possible to bottom out on healing resources, such that you have no choice but to watch your team die in front of your eyes.

There is a downside to this, of course. Some healers just won't be able to clear tougher fights. And they will need to be okay with that fact.

I personally wouldn't mind trying this out. Differentiating healers on the basis of damage output is actually really safe. We know that was done well in ARR and HW, and people liked it. Differentiating healers based on their ability to carry your team through difficult mechanics hasn't really been done here, but it has been done in other games. It's just a question of whether this community would be happy with seeing their clears gated based on healer gear and skill.

I suppose there is a middle ground that I haven't really gone into, and that's if your excess resources from healing more effectively could be turned into extra dps. You'd need fights to force resource attrition, and dps would be a luxury if you healed effectively. But you'd have to be able to wipe your team if you bottom out.

Either way, things can't stay as they are now. The common theme here is that tanking and healing need to be more valuable as roles than they are now, otherwise people will swap off them to DPS. And in the absence of some major changes both to job design and fight design philosophy, I predict that's going to be a big issue in the next expansion.

[Kraniel]

I think that this is also a reasonable direction to take things. Again, the problem comes down to being valued as a healer. You need a skill differential.

A lot of this comes down to fight design. Tightly scripted fights with unforgiving mechanics will never really be challenging for a healer in the long run. You actually need the opposite: highly variable mechanics where there is some room for recovery (and by variable, I mean variations in mechanic order, not just being randomly assigned to being Healer 1 or Healer 2 on a Gavel mechanic. You need variable damage patterns where the tank is at risk of being burst down to nothing if you blink. You need to have limited resources. It should be possible to bottom out on healing resources, such that you have no choice but to watch your team die in front of your eyes.

There is a downside to this, of course. Some healers just won't be able to clear tougher fights. And they will need to be okay with that fact.

I personally wouldn't mind trying this out. Differentiating healers on the basis of damage output is actually really safe. We know that was done well in ARR and HW, and people liked it. Differentiating healers based on their ability to carry your team through difficult mechanics hasn't really been done here, but it has been done in other games. It's just a question of whether this community would be happy with seeing their clears gated based on healer gear and skill.

I suppose there is a middle ground that I haven't really gone into, and that's if your excess resources from healing more effectively could be turned into extra dps. You'd need fights to force resource attrition, and dps would be a luxury if you healed effectively. But you'd have to be able to wipe your team if you bottom out.

Either way, things can't stay as they are now. The common theme here is that tanking and healing need to be more valuable as roles than they are now, otherwise people will swap off them to DPS. And in the absence of some major changes both to job design and fight design philosophy, I predict that's going to be a big issue in the next expansion.

100% with you on this.
To be completely honest as a healer (not sure about DPS or tank here), i had more fun with extreme fights during the ARR era than with anything after SB.
I admit that the current extreme fights are very well designed/refined in their mechanics, with a nice dramatic aspect to them (a bit like an interactive movie), but as you said it just doesn't "scratch that itch" for healers and tanks.
I honestly feel more thrill grinding the current Leviathan Unreal fight with randos, than i did during any of the extreme trials/Eden savage so far. I know there isn't an obvious solution to this, as it's directly related to the vision SE have for their game, but i'm just hoping it will change someday. I want to feel like healers and tanks are more than just "filler roles" that are only required to take aggro at the beginning of the fight and heal through the occasional AoE damage.

I just want to feel alive, Lyth. I just want to feel alive ...

[Saefinn]

Nonono.
I'm not here to DPS.
I'm here to save some ass.

I genuinely wouldn't care about healers DPS spells if healing wasn't as basic and dumb in FFXIV, and i'm sure the majority of healers feel the same.

I want to feel drops of sweat running down my buttcheeks when i heal. I want to have to click left and right and actually have a hard time keeping people alive, and when i do i want them to go "How in hell did you manage to do this ? You're an AMAZING healer". I don't care about the sad commends that i get at the end of a dungeon because no one died when there is nothing to worry about and i can DPS through every wall-to-wall pull as long as i put a regen + barrier on the tank. I didn't sign up for healer kindergarten when i bought the game.

If i want to DPS, i'll play a DPS.
I play a healer, so i want to heal. Simple as that. Damn it give me some work SE!

I mean, I like the healer/DPS hybrid when it's done well and it WAS done well. Typically in Final Fantasy titles your healer characters don't JUST heal, even in their other MMO title. So to me it's appropriate to have a hybrid ESPECIALLY in a game where performance is measured by your party's average DPS. If I wanted to play a game where I only heal, I'd pick a different MMO.

With that said, for the majority of content you don't /have/ to DPS, it's really only an issue with DPS checks, enrage timers and optimisation. This game is designed to value DPS regardless of your role.

Then we have this other problem of wanting to make all roles accessible to new and casual players. So ramping up the heal requirement would make it less accessible. Then in addition to that, high iLevels reduces healing requirements too, but content needs to be balanced for people who are still within the iLevel requirement.

It's why I say the best solution is twofold. First is to embrace the healer/DPS hybrid aspect, it works and it solves the monotony on content that doesn't push you enough (particularly those with a higher skill level).
Second is to design future content with an increase in healing requirements.

I just don't see them rebalancing the entire game to give a healing requirement that makes healers work and avoid any compulsion to DPS. And there are a lot of factors they would have to rebalance. It'd not be as simply as nerfing healing abilities or making stuff hit harder, but actual fight mechanics, and how gear affects stats. Because what's a challenge at iLevel 480 will be easier at 520, because your healing spells are more effective, people's HP pool is higher, people kill stuff quicker (and may even skip mechanics), people have better defense and so on and it all adds up. Some fights have mechanics that don't give healers much to do at all because damage isn't frequent enough. So I think a LOT would have to be done to fix this. Now it's possible they're attempting this in the stat crunch on some level...and maybe we will get an improvement there but they've yet to imply as much.

However, they can still make future content more healer intensive. But they will still need to solve the problem for all existing content. DPS is the most sensible way of doing it with the game's current design whilst also respecting a low skill floor.

[Kraniel]

snippity snip

Oh sure, don't get me wrong, i'm totally fine with DPSing during downtime. What i wanted to emphasize with my previous post was just the idea that we're healers first, not DPS.
So of course, contributing to DPS is a thing and i agree with it, however since FFXIV uses the tank/heal/DPS trinity concept they should make it so that each role has a distinctive way to contribute not only to the group's DPS, but to the fight as a whole.
As i said on a different thread, in their current state you could pretty much remove healers from the game, and slap one or two healing skills on each other class like GW2 did, and everything would be just fine. Healers should not be "expendable", just like any other role. If they're in the game, they have to be put to proper contribution, as healers first, and then and only then, as DPS. Or else we might as well just all start playing RDM.

[Recon1o6]

snip

The problem is really a two pronged issue
1. We don't have anywhere near enough buttons during downtime
2. We barely heal.

In terms of skill level
1. Players are not incentivised to get better
2. Those that do get better as a healer get massive increases in output because its very easy to get better with 1 button dps
3. Devs won't raise the difficulty despite shb being the easiest expansion so far with pitiful dps checks outside of delubrum savage.
4. Gear is too strong now yet it feels flat as ever and so what little challenge there has been got smacked down quickly.

These problems only get more noticable as you get better with the role. I seen a lot of new healers asking in game when it gets harder to heal and a few when do they get aero 3. (they are ones who would have seen old guides)

The so called problem of healers doing more damage isn't a bad thing. A healer or tank doing about 70-80% of the damage output of a dps if both are of equal skill level is a good balance. That way in raid settings dps would still have the majority of the legwork collectively, but the healers/tanks could keep up. And we wouldn't get boring situations in the overworld where it takes nearly a dozen more gcds to kill a mob than a dps at the start of the expansion.

Nobody should be babied, we are in our 4th expansion soon. If the dps are going to cry because their freestyling samurai or cryo mages are getting beaten by healers who put some effort in, then let them cry. Players should be incentivised to get better and get rewarded for it with ebtter gameplay

[Reiryuu]

The problem is really a two pronged issue
1. We don't have anywhere near enough buttons during downtime
2. We barely heal.

3. Healers cannot actually do anything besides DPS to help a party clear. Healing more than what is absolutely necessary means you're not doing damage and nothing you can do will increase the amount of time the group gets to down the boss. Which... kind of means the whole concept of healers just healing is contrary to the whole boss encounter design. So even if SE gives us 10 extra buttons to press, if they don't increase our party's DPS, our own dps, or do something to help the DPS increase their uptime-- I dunno a buff to increase melee dps hit range or something? then, more than likely, we won't be pressing those much either during fights.

Edit: I'm tired so I hope my meaning comes through. I mean, dead dps do no dps... that's true and all, but the more dps a healer does the less burden the DPS have. I mean if DPS die to mechanics and there's nothing we can do about it since it's instant kill or such, the damage loss from the time the DPS is dead alone could be enough to not make the group clear... I hope I'm making some sense. ><;

[Roeshel]

3. Healers cannot actually do anything besides DPS to help a party clear. Healing more than what is absolutely necessary means you're not doing damage and nothing you can do will increase the amount of time the group gets to down the boss. Which... kind of means the whole concept of healers just healing is contrary to the whole boss encounter design. So even if SE gives us 10 extra buttons to press, if they don't increase our party's DPS, our own dps, or do something to help the DPS increase their uptime-- I dunno a buff to increase melee dps hit range or something? then, more than likely, we won't be pressing those much either during fights.

Edit: I'm tired so I hope my meaning comes through. I mean, dead dps do no dps... that's true and all, but the more dps a healer does the less burden the DPS have. I mean if DPS die to mechanics and there's nothing we can do about it since it's instant kill or such, the damage loss from the time the DPS is dead alone could be enough to not make the group clear... I hope I'm making some sense. ><;

The concept of healers only healing is contrary to absolutely everything in this game and anyone who has said "healers only heal" must have been joking.

[Truen]

The concept of healers only healing is contrary to absolutely everything in this game and anyone who has said "healers only heal" must have been joking.

That was Yoshi P's entire premise for the 5.0 healer changes. I think the term he coined was "pure healer."
Rubbish.