Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[QooEr]

So it’s like, they acknowledge it’s necessary, but also see it as a last resort… It’s like they don’t understand their own design process.

Healer dps was necessary to clear below the intended minimum item level. its not contradictory.

That said though, their dps balancing has changed. E8s, e12s and i think even e11s is mathematically impossible to clear without healer dps even slightly above minimum item level, so theyre clearly acknowledging it and putting it in calculations now. With that in mind though it makes it even more nonsensical to make healer dps as boring as it is now.

[Allegor]

Largely trivial but still valid opinion: .... healers also exist outside raiding. People absolutely level up, do the MSQ, and/or do dailies as healers, and it's super fun being lv 70+ pressing a single button as if being a lv 5 still in Gridania. I know, I know, "you can just switch to a DPS" but...you wouldn't tell that to someone playing a tank, would you?

If anything, a "reverse RDM" would be a fun approach. Let healers still be mainly healers, but have a little burst dps phase - maybe that's why Sage's self damage boost was used as a selling point for the job /shrug

[ForteNightshade]

Healer dps was necessary to clear below the intended minimum item level. its not contradictory.

That said though, their dps balancing has changed. E8s, e12s and i think even e11s is mathematically impossible to clear without healer dps even slightly above minimum item level, so theyre clearly acknowledging it and putting it in calculations now. With that in mind though it makes it even more nonsensical to make healer dps as boring as it is now.

You would be correct. I believe E8S and E12S are still impossible to clear week two without healer DPS. Both their DPS checks, especially E8S, is surprisingly tight. Sadly, in their recent interview on Ahk Morning, they kept emphasising how E11s and E12S were the absolute highest they could stretch the difficulty for those respective floors. Which is... disconcerting to say the least. E11S' heal check is only at the very end, which you inevitably start skipping in a decent static and while Promise can be intense at times, Gaia is pretty free until the end.

[QooEr]

You would be correct. I believe E8S and E12S are still impossible to clear week two without healer DPS. Both their DPS checks, especially E8S, is surprisingly tight. Sadly, in their recent interview on Ahk Morning, they kept emphasising how E11s and E12S were the absolute highest they could stretch the difficulty for those respective floors. Which is... disconcerting to say the least. E11S' heal check is only at the very end, which you inevitably start skipping in a decent static and while Promise can be intense at times, Gaia is pretty free until the end.

id very much prefer if theyd put heal checks and harder mechanics in the middle of fights than at the very end so you cant skip them as the tier gets older

[KizuyaKatogami]

Healer dps was necessary to clear below the intended minimum item level. its not contradictory.

That said though, their dps balancing has changed. E8s, e12s and i think even e11s is mathematically impossible to clear without healer dps even slightly above minimum item level, so theyre clearly acknowledging it and putting it in calculations now. With that in mind though it makes it even more nonsensical to make healer dps as boring as it is now.

Below the intended minimum item level, but why isn’t that something they had preplanned for and adjusted the item level accordingly? Regardless though this is kind of derailing. Like you said though yeah, it’s basically impossible now to clear without healer dps yet, they’re approach this expansion was to dumb down the healer dps kits and take away their tools… once again SE is horrible at balancing and designing jobs lmao.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Largely trivial but still valid opinion: .... healers also exist outside raiding. People absolutely level up/do dailies as healers, and it's super fun being lv 70+ pressing a single button as if being a lv 5 still in Gridania. I know, I know, "you can just switch to a DPS" but...you wouldn't tell that to someone playing a tank, would you?

If anything, a "reverse RDM" would be a fun approach. Let healers still be mainly healers, but have a little burst dps phase - maybe that's why Sage's self damage boost was used as a selling point for the job /shrug

This is essentially what i had in mind for the healers. I don’t think anyone is really asking for a dps tiered rotation or anything, but something that has them pressing more than 1 button to deal damage. I’m a bit skeptical on sage because based on the vids we’ve been shown of it, it seems to still have the same amount of dps skills as the other healers unless they’re holding out on some other spells…

[Grimoire-M]

You would be correct. I believe E8S and E12S are still impossible to clear week two without healer DPS. Both their DPS checks, especially E8S, is surprisingly tight. Sadly, in their recent interview on Ahk Morning, they kept emphasising how E11s and E12S were the absolute highest they could stretch the difficulty for those respective floors. Which is... disconcerting to say the least. E11S' heal check is only at the very end, which you inevitably start skipping in a decent static and while Promise can be intense at times, Gaia is pretty free until the end.

Limiting the style of fights they do is the primary issue behind that. Easing up on the tempo while adding more sustained damage sources and things to manage is really something they should try to go back to. Dance fights aren’t the only thing you can do in an MMO. Attrition healing might suck, but there’s a point between that and XIV’s current fights where you can allow that slow burn to happen.

[Kraniel]

Largely trivial but still valid opinion: .... healers also exist outside raiding. People absolutely level up/do dailies as healers, and it's super fun being lv 70+ pressing a single button as if being a lv 5 still in Gridania. I know, I know, "you can just switch to a DPS" but...you wouldn't tell that to someone playing a tank, would you?

If anything, a "reverse RDM" would be a fun approach. Let healers still be mainly healers, but have a little burst dps phase - maybe that's why Sage's self damage boost was used as a selling point for the job /shrug

Honestly if they just slap 2 more DPS spells on AST to make a rotation and call it a day, i'll seriously consider stop maining healers. I hope there's going to be some level of complexity to whatever changes they make to each job, if there's any.
Not saying that it wouldn't be a small QoL improvement for us, but the main issue of healers not healing will remain.
As Grimoire just said, there's a middle ground between full attrition healing and the current fight design in FFXIV. I'm hoping SE will be able to find that balance.

[Lyth]

id very much prefer if theyd put heal checks and harder mechanics in the middle of fights than at the very end so you cant skip them as the tier gets older

This is a very sensible idea, but most fights make a point of introducing the basic mechanics individually early so that you have a rough understanding of what each action does before they start introducing variations on a theme. That's one of the reasons why you tend to get your first raidwide and tankbuster relatively early, just so you learn to recognize the action names before proceeding to the more interesting stuff. Many of the harder mechanics challenges in fights tend to happen when several simpler mechanics end up resolving at the same time, so that's why you tend to see them later on in a fight when the basic 'vocabulary' has been established. The exception to this is when they introduce a puzzle mechanic or intermission, but those often do show up mid fight.

One thing that they have changed around this is removing percentage-based phase transitions, because those did have a big impact on your ability to bypass mechanics based on your damage output (skip Soar or disband) (in addition to being quite messy in some cases).

I think you'll always run into the issue of your raid dps output truncating and simplifying fights. This is fine, because often if you're first progressing through a fight at a gear level that's appropriately challenging for your group, you'll probably have a few people dead and run up into enrage at least once. I think if you want a progressive healer check that ramps up over the fight and on mechanical errors, the ideal way to do that is to give the boss a stacking damage buff over time as a sort of soft enrage. Granted, they tried this with A7S at one point (every player death gave the boss a stack), and it was really quite painful to progress on because of how quickly things snowball.

[ForteNightshade]

id very much prefer if theyd put heal checks and harder mechanics in the middle of fights than at the very end so you cant skip them as the tier gets older

Same. Take Voidgate, which is easily the most interesting mechanic of E10S. Any good group will skip it entirely by week four at the latest. Although, it's skipable as early as week two, I believe. Without Voidgate, Shadowkeeper only has one noteworthy mechanic, which just happens to be the worst one—that being the orbs. Cloud doesn't quite suffer from this as her last phase is essentially a repeat but all the others do.