Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[QooEr]

Bear in mind that me saying I liked CS doesn't imply I think it was good or that it should come back.

I honestly think old cd could come back but ONLY as a tool for high end optimization. If all cs did was increase damage by 5-10% and reduced all healing by 50-60% or something like that, it would only raise the skill ceiling considerably. casual players would absolutely not touch it and still dps normally, but someone trying to optimize and squeeze as much damage as possible would try to get as much damage under cleric as possible. The reduced healing is also not so much that accidentally helaing with it on makes the heal completely useless


i dont think it would ever happen though

[shao32]

Sorry, what? Tanks are over simplified? Try being reduced to 1 single attack, a dot, an AoE attack and 20 buttons just like rampart, then we'll talk about tanks being oversimplified.

My apologize for the late reply, to answer your question yes they are, as Recon say we don't have it as bad as healer situation but we can't and shouln't deny that tanks has been hit pretty hard this expansion too.
Tanks gameplay has been reduced to execute a very simple dps rotation and use a mitigation every 10 years, mitigation management has been totally absent in SHB and all tanks suffer from heavy homogeinity, even on the JP forum haved a lenght discusion about tanks being boring now.
The dps deartment is aceptable for PLD and GNB but DRK and WAR are in shame, remember the lily gauge in SB? well i present you the Darkside gauge in SHB with extra useleness and the whole DRK and WAR being virtually the same job with a esential minor question, what do you want? a WAR with buffed fell cleaves or a WAR with a coulpe of oGCD more?

So yeah i wasn't trying to say we have it as bad as healer, my apologize if i make you undertand that but tanks have the same problem, not as bad like the stuff you mention but they have been oversimplified in so many fields the situation is pretty absurd overthere too, at the end of the day both roles need help since both roles and on the same boat.

[Roeshel]

Thoughts?

I'm starting to get the feeling, even going to tanks, that the other two roles besides DPS exist to solely and completely facilitate their fun.

Ours and tanks, starting in ShB, is second thought.

No, they don't. The DPS exists to fill queues. You can always let them die when they are eating aoe, you are actually not required to heal them. You can do that if you want their comms.

Healer jobs are the ones with the greatest amount of impact on a run. You can literally dictate the pace of the run whereas the dps players have absolutely no say in how much should be pulled. And those who are overstepping should be put in their place.

I have no clue how healing in FFXIV felt like but right now if the skill ceiling for healers is increased either the skilled players are going to become omnipotent DPS or all of the cure bots are going to start feeling the weight of their laziness. The latter is something SE definitely wants to avoid.

I actually want healers to be able to achieve the same dps out-put as dps players in terms of ST. We are already dealing approximately the same DPS when it comes to AoE. Make raids a little bit more difficult and include more healer-targeted stack markers so that a party of 6 healers and 2 tanks can't clear it. Everything is a dps in this game with a gimmick so I am certain it would happen eventually.

[Aluja89]

No, they don't. The DPS exists to fill queues. You can always let them die when they are eating aoe, you are actually not required to heal them. You can do that if you want their comms.

Healer jobs are the ones with the greatest amount of impact on a run. You can literally dictate the pace of the run whereas the dps players have absolutely no say in how much should be pulled. And those who are overstepping should be put in their place.

I have no clue how healing in FFXIV felt like but right now if the skill ceiling for healers is increased either the skilled players are going to become omnipotent DPS or all of the cure bots are going to start feeling the weight of their laziness. The latter is something SE definitely wants to avoid.

I actually want healers to be able to achieve the same dps out-put as dps players in terms of ST. We are already dealing approximately the same DPS when it comes to AoE. Make raids a little bit more difficult and include more healer-targeted stack markers so that a party of 6 healers and 2 tanks can't clear it. Everything is a dps in this game with a gimmick so I am certain it would happen eventually.

People who don't DPS already exist so it doesn't really matter, all this design does is hold back good players and push them eventually away from the role.

[Lexis]

I don't know if my perspective will change as I level, but I'm currently loving my lvl 59 WHM and much prefer to heal than DPS in group content. I enjoy figuring out which heal to use when during encounters while accounting for mistakes and weaving in as much DPS as I can during downtime. I don't feel like healers need complex healing/dps rotations to feel valued of challenged. Unless your group is playing to perfection, which I've yet to see in Duty Roulette, you can make the difference between a wipe and a kill by throwing out a timely heal, turn the tables with a raise or get that last add down in time by squeezing in that extra dps.

[Roeshel]

I don't know if my perspective will change as I level, but I'm currently loving my lvl 59 WHM and much prefer to heal than DPS in group content. I enjoy figuring out which heal to use when during encounters while accounting for mistakes and weaving in as much DPS as I can during downtime. I don't feel like healers need complex healing/dps rotations to feel valued of challenged. Unless your group is playing to perfection, which I've yet to see in Duty Roulette, you can make the difference between a wipe and a kill by throwing out a timely heal, turn the tables with a raise or get that last add down in time by squeezing in that extra dps.

Nobody talks about feeling valued. Healers are by default the most valuable role in any MMORPG that has it, regardless of their actual gameplay.

Healers do need complex dps rotation to keep us entertained. Unless the content is hard, which in FFXIV it rarely is, saving the party from a wipe becomes meaningless. Figuring out what type of heal to use is learning the basics of healing. Once you've learned it, all you are left with is one nuke spell and dot.

People who don't DPS already exist so it doesn't really matter, all this design does is hold back good players and push them eventually away from the role.

Yes, it does. The healer's design is a work in progress for more than half a decade. It's 2021 and we still have absolutely useless and detrimental synergies present. 15% chance of acquiring a Free Cure II proc or Crit Benefic II by spamming your baby heal. There is no doubt that the GMs have no clue what to do with the class. This is why I am eager to see how they designed Sage. I want to check if they figured out how to clean the mess or if they made a bigger mess with that new Healer job. I am honestly expecting a more engaging type of gameplay, maybe not for all healer classes but at least for sage. The Endwalker benchmark was like meh, but we will see how things really are soon.

[Lyth]

...

This entire discussion is about feeling valued.

Value comes from scarcity. It happens when you are able to offer something beneficial that many other players cannot. That, unfortunately, requires a skill differential.

There is no intrinsic value in healing something that everyone expects you to be able to heal. Sure, if you don't press the heal button sometime over the course of the next three raidwide casts, everyone dies. But you are expected to be able to heal that. If you fail to do a basic task like that consistently, there are more than enough players who are up to the task and are able to replace you after the team silently disbands. You will not get applause and accolades from your teammates for just doing your job.

There is a gameplay mode where healers are intrinsically the most valuable players on the field, and that's PvP. That's because damage is not scripted, and players know that when you pull off a clutch save on a teammate who is being focused down, you've done something that another healer may not have been able to pull off. You're also everyone's priority target, so you've probably also pulled off said clutch save while kiting circles around their melee.

Healers are also valuable in entry level content. Your team doesn't know what they are doing and everyone dies to a mechanic. But wait! You LB3 and everyone is back up again. Or perhaps you keep the tank alive and the two of you take the boss down from 80% to the clear. Everyone showers accolades on you. It feels great.

This stops working the instant you go near anything with a non-trivial dps check. Which is as it should be. Everyone should carry their weight. But the only things that matter at that stage are pass-fail mechanics which you are expected to perform correctly, and dps.

Historically, the reason why tanks and healers have been okay with this design in harder content is because if you were good, you could become a 'fifth dps' while performing your primary role. So even after you've learnt the pass-fail mechanics, there was still something of value to optimize. There were no clutch saves, but at the end of the day, everyone was blown away by the fact that you put out more damage than the BRD.

It was fun, but the dev team doesn't want this.

So sure, you can be the best player that you can be and put out as much damage as you can while doing the mechanics. But does it really matter? The real heroes are the DPS, because that's where the majority of the raid damage always comes from irrespective of how grossly inept they are. The only thing left for you to do on one of these other 'support' roles is to do your job on pass-fail mechanics. Nobody will value you for when you succeed, but they certainly will chew you out if you fail.

I think that even if you try and reverse this by giving healers more complex dps rotations and giving them a bigger portion of the raid damage pie, you're still at a disadvantage. Every job has an action budget of around 25-30 actions. DPS jobs are always going to have more elaborate rotations than you do because they don't need to budget for nearly the amount of support actions that you do.

The most impactful change that could be made is to re-evaluate how fights are designed in this game. The current standard of completely scripted, choreographed rail-shooter fights has to stop. Damage patterns need to be more complex and less predictable. Fights should deliberately force attrition of your defensive resources and require smart resource management to survive. You need a skill differential that impacts the end outcome.

The problem right now is that healers have nothing of value to contribute. You can only do your job, and that's it. You don't need to be good, most of your team can't tell the difference either way. You just need to exist.

[Saefinn]

Thoughts?

I'm starting to get the feeling, even going to tanks, that the other two roles besides DPS exist to solely and completely facilitate their fun.

Ours and tanks, starting in ShB, is second thought.

It's unlikely they purposefully with the desire to facilitate the enjoyment of DPS and make healing and tanking boring, but certainly their design choices have resulted in it. I feel like it's more likely 1 of 2 things (or possibly both), 1) to make the roles more accessible 2) people complain about healers and tanks, whether it's for wipes or something to do with balance for raiding.

Point 1, I'd say fair enough but let's not lower the skill ceiling. It's why most of my suggestions have taken in mind a low skill floor but takes an interest in raising the skill ceiling. DPS, sadly, I feel is the best way to do that. But they can also try to match your healing requirement with the difficulty of content. I think one thing we've learned is that the complexity of a DPS rotation isn't the reason why healers cause wipes. I'd argue that oversimplifying things makes it worse because it makes it more likely you're tunnel visioning, there's been multiple times in ShB where even I've said "whoops, I forgot I was the healer", which I didn't tend to do before ShB. This approach I feel keeps current content from being too monotonous, avoids the need for a massive overhaul and means future content can be better balanced to feel better for the healing aspect.

Point 2, The reason I think point 2 is probable is because we only need look at the types of changes we've seen over the years. . And again I think we've found that dumbing/watering things down is not the answer. We still go into dungeons and complain about the healers and tanks. This is not something they're going to resolve for a few reasons: some people are new, some people are affected by a handicap, these roles have a responsibility that affect the life and death of a party, rDPS is how performance is measure in this game so that means everybody's gonna end up focusing on their DPS at some stage. With DPS checks, enrage timers, DPS affecting the pace etc. it's going to be inevitable there's gonna be a culture of encouraging healers to DPS.

With balance, it shouldn't come at the cost of enjoyment. But with one of the new changes coming I at least see potential for this to be addressed, because if they do it well then every healing job will only have 1 other healing job to balance against. Whereas currently each have 3 (if we count Di and Noct AST as separate things to balance).

But I accept with the stat crunch there is some possibility that the healing requirement goes up. But as it stands I feel like for the majority of the game's content I'm not really utilitsing my healing kit and am left as a spam bot.

With tanks, my biggest gripe is Dark Knight, yet, it flows well now but it's...dull. I liked that it used to be more technical, to me that was the part that felt rewarding, not them being an edgy equivalent to Warrior. And Warrior I think lost some of its charm, but I've not played much Warrior since ARR because Dark Knight became my favoured tank.

[Roeshel]

...

The discussion is about GMs not paying enough attention to healers and tanks. The fact of the matter is, no matter how poor the gameplay is for those two roles, they are always going to be more valuable than a dps job in-game. The value comes from the role itself and its place in the game.

Healers in this game have been given the opportunity to correct stupid and blatant mistakes. It is more or less a consequence of a bad player base in general. In any case, I went through FFlogs to check historically how much dps were the healers doing. The top SCH was not out-dpsing the top bard even in Heavensward. They had like 5 different DoTs, healed almost nothing, and still couldn't deal more than a dps that's playing properly. Back then they didn't have rDPS so we can't really check the real raid-contributing dps of a player. As far as I know, bards have raid-wide buffs so the DPS value that is seen is not really the correct one.

Right now in terms of rDPS, healers can achieve around 60-70% of a dps' max rDPS output. For the Oracle of Darkness, the strongest healer (AST) has dealt 64% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS job (Black Mage) and 73% of the rDPS of the weakest DPS job (Machinist).

Healers' dps is not negligible at all. We are achieving that amount of DPS with a 2-button rotation. Obviously, we are a little bit more complex than that. And I think we should be even more complex and allowed to reach 100% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS when we play perfectly well which should be next to impossible but still possible. The skill ceiling needs to be raised.

[Lyth]

...

Sure. You need tanks and healers to queue in, and their population numbers are smaller than DPS. That makes them a "valuable commodity". But most people want to be more than just a warm body. I'm talking about being valuable in the sense that people respect your skill as a player on the job. That only happens when there's a skill differential, which is what you're asking for here.

You can really only correct mistakes to a point. For a lot of mistakes, the penalty is either less damage, or player death, which also translates into a damage loss. And in the latter case, raises are so ubiquitous and you don't even need to be a healer to perform one. And I suppose that's where part of the problem exists. Because raises are trivial, it's an expected outcome. It's not precious: this is not a 'once every ten minutes' battle raise. There's nothing to celebrate; everyone knows that you've lost raid damage because of the death and the damage is done. The raise is merely the inevitable follow-up event that nobody bats an eyelid at unless you somehow mess it up.

While you won't surpass a the very best DPS players in terms of damage output while on a support role (as should be the case, or else we'd run only tanks and healers), there definitely was a lot more overlap in earlier expansions than there is now, even when comparing at relatively skilled players. Actually, if you want to look at a time before raid buffs were so prevalent, in late ARR some of the best players at the time got together and scribed in their abacus totals on a mottled excel spreadsheet that's still floating around the internet, if you know where to look. And there definitely was a lot more overlap then than there is now. Which is hardly difficult, given that there is none.

I think for long term satisfaction, you need to see some degree of personal growth as a player. That in turn requires a meaningful skill differential that impacts your team's performance. A novice player should see someone more skilled and want to put in the hours of practice to become that player. That could involve having more dps complexity for tanks and healers which translates into a significant raid impact. The dev team is not at all interested in this, and the STR accessory fiasco in Stormblood should have clued people into this if they weren't already aware. Tanks are there to take damage. Healers are there to heal damage. Yay.

Working under this constraint, you have to suggest something that allows you to be challenged and allows for a skill differential in the role. For tanks, I think that could come out of allowing more control over boss positioning and movement. For healers, I think that could come out of having greater variability in fight damage patterns, unpredictable damage spikes, and more challenging resource management, but I don't see any simple solutions here. Well, aside from the obvious, which is swapping to DPS. Hey, did you know that they'll be doing a media tour/live letter on Reaper, the new healer job? Looking forward to it!