What's your preferred change?

[BooPoo]

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
2. More consistent and bigger raid damage so healers spend most of the time healing.
3. Both?
4. Anything that makes the job busier.

[Videra]

All of the above.

[BooPoo]

Well I did think of option 3. lol

[Gemina]

5. None of the above. Make them fun to play.

This is done by rewarding the healer by playing the job as intended, and that is done through interactive gameplay in order to acquire the resources to use rewarding skills.

This is why simply giving me more DPS skills to press, or the game pumping out more raid damage won't do a whole lot to change the state of healing. I want those DPS skills to be given to me as a reward so it feels better to press them, and makes it more evident to me when I am doing things wrong because they are not available. I also shouldn't have to wait until I'm near max level for me to enjoy that gameplay so I can still have fun playing my job in synced content.

While we can't look at anything as set in stone right now, from the abilities trailer it really looks like AST is the healer that fulfills this the most. I saw the AST using their card mechanic to gain the seals in order to cast a really cool meteorain. If that is the case, then that is exactly what I'm talking about.

Passive Lilies; a useless Fey Gauge. Changes to these tools and resources is what I want changed. It's the key to creating a solid roster of healers for FFXIV, and that is what I feel this team really needs to focus on.

[ItMe]

6. Give healers more versatile and expressive glamour options (especially with body pieces).

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think options [1] or [2] would be nearly sufficient. Nor would [3] necessarily be any better. [4] seems like it'd have less that could go wrong, per se, short of intentionally malicious compliance (adding bloat or convolution just for the sake of added apm).

I think the larger part is that a far, far larger of our actions as healers need to feel eventful in the context of a given fight. A small part of that could be from CDs saved or resources prepared for a certain mechanic that'd otherwise be lethal if that actually amounts to you feeling like your extra GCDs used for healing in order to save those CDs or ready those later spenders are rewarding a real and deliberate decision, rather than merely following procedures to keep safe margins.

Offense, too, should have costs and reward. We saw this somewhat when casters had more DoTs. Since there were particular moments you wanted to keep free for their refreshes in order to optimize their average potency-per-minute, the relative costs of a heal in any particular moment would wax and wane not only with future events or chances of danger, but also with your own rotation. Being able to track and meet the ends of both internal and external circumstances, then, offered a higher skill-ceiling and greater rewards, all without actually forcing less skilled healers out of a role.

Synergies, too, can spice things up. Sometimes these are the obvious synergies of an unique mode of X and a unique capacity Y that inadvertantly suits it, such as in that a SCH needed more time to ready a Bane but Galvanize would allow them that time. Other times, such as in early ARR, it could be more compositional, such as WHM being capable of a hard CC and SCH capable of a mass-Heavy and BLM, around whom the dungeon party-wide strategies of stacked AoE or focused burns most shifted (at least until Flare, later gear creep, and speedrun comp dominance). There, too, though, your kit and your actions had connective impact. You didn't merely fill bars via oGCD heals; they allowed for something more, and that something more had its own implications in turn.

That, I feel, is what we need to go back to and beyond. Obviously, we've still relatively few good examples of contextually stellar healer design even when going back to the "good old days" of GCD heals, CC, cross-role versatility, or the like having an integral place, but we've at least gotten hints enough to mark a direction. I hope we don't wait until it's too late to take up that tack and go for it.

[AikenDrum]

How option 2 is supposed to work? They redesign and test every group encounter in the game, which for an 8 year old game is A LOT; or encounter design gonna change starting from some patch and you're still gonna have no healing in all old content?

[Truen]

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
2. More consistent and bigger raid damage so healers spend most of the time healing.
3. Both?
4. Anything that makes the job busier.

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With 5.0 the SCH lost it's identity. It was a dot-tossing healer...and that was way better than the trash they stuck us with now. I'm so sick of spamming BROIL!

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
4. Anything that makes the job busier.[/QUOTE]

[BooPoo]

How option 2 is supposed to work? They redesign and test every group encounter in the game, which for an 8 year old game is A LOT; or encounter design gonna change starting from some patch and you're still gonna have no healing in all old content?

Tbh I don't really know and I hope they don't go with that approach at all. Being a hybrid healer/DPS makes healing in this game infinitely more fun for me compared to other MMOs. I only put it down because I did see a few players wanting healers in FFXIV to be "pure pure healers".

Do you think there is a chance SE removes healer DPS and change healers to align with e.g. WoW instead in the future?

[Urthdigger]

For starters, I want the design to reflect how the game is actually played. To make a long story short there will ALWAYS be significant downtime where you're DPSing unless they fundamentally redesign combat in this game from the ground up. Straight up, with the ways encounter, gearing, and stats are designed there is no way around this. So embrace it, realize that DPS is as much a part of our play as it is for tanks and make combat more interesting.

Now, beyond that I'd also say give us more ways to contribute, and ideally I'd wrap the two together. Sage is actually a step in the right direction with DPS spells providing passive healing, but ideally I'd go with something similar: Allow our DPS during downtime to contribute meaningfully to our support role. It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

Recognize that we'll spend a fair amount of our time DPSing especially as player skill and gear rises, but wrap that into the core support mentality.