More support and damage kits would be great if this is the tank direction

[GideonWilhelm]

https://youtu.be/fFcZCEny4x4

So... Warrior can solo P1N. I'm not gonna rag on it and say 'nerf tanks now', because honestly it's hilarious, it takes a lot of dedication, and I'm here for it.

If this is how tanks are gonna be, absolute chads with mountains of mitigation and self-heal, then healers need something else to do in between raidwides.

Don't get me wrong, the kits and utilities and capabilities healers have now makes them powerful and kinda satisfying... and their numbers are so big, too! But numbers aren't everything. Not everything needs mass healing. As I get better gear I spend less and less time casting heals and more time spamming the 1 key.

Bring back the healer design we had in Stormblood. I would kill for my very simple DoT-juggling multitask scholar to return, and its healing/damage balance across its kit would fit perfectly alongside the new tank sustain. That's all I really ask.

[eagledorf]

This. I feel like the biggest insult of the EX Trials and now normal mode raid not needing healers is that healers have nothing else to do except jam one button over and over again.

I get excited playing Sage because I need two buttons to apply my DoT. It's a sad state of affairs.

[GrimGale]

Our healing kits suffer from a lot of redundant skills where as our DPS/Non healing kits are extremely sparce, considering how much we use them.

We also suffer from a lot of non-interactivity in our kits. Our Nukes are just flat damage, no other effects or resource interaction with any of the other abilities. Its just DPS. And our healing is just equally non synergistic.

WHM does have a very slight synergy between the usage of lilies and the unlocking of a DPS ability (Which is counterintuitively a DPS loss.)

SCH sacrifices DPS to use their oGCDs (Yes, losing 300 potency every minute is significant enough. It feels like you're punished for used your AF heals or mitigating. You should be rewarded for properly mitigating and weaving oGCDs not punished.)

AST card system is needlessly frustrating with Redraw being an issue in how it works, and its DPS kit suffers a lot with movement intensive fights.
(Lightspeed is not a movement skill. Having 15s of instant cast every 90 seconds barely meets the movement demands of most bosses, plus you want to align those with your Astrodyne and Divination windows.)

SGE is the healer with the least problems, much because its the newest.

[Allegor]

Honestly....I kinda like this concept. See, I always liked the idea that tanks are, well, tanks. They are the meat shield role, the only ones who can actually take a blow from a boss and survive, but the way they are designed now - all 4 tanks, even arguably PLD - are literally DPS with ~5 defensives skills on top. If tanks are designed to be more self reliant that they can survive longer than 4 gcds without a healer, then healers can now focus more on the rest of the party/utility/dps.

Granted, a tank having so much self sustain that they effectively don't need a healer may be a problem, but that can always be rearranged with some balancing.

[Brixy]

We have different job roles, but the way FFXIV plays would suggest otherwise... we are honestly just red dps, blue dps, and green dps. You have the damage dealers that focus mainly on damage. The tanks, that also focus mainly on damage and occasionally press an extra button or 2 for mitigation, and finally the healers, where you have a whole toolkit of abilites that could be condensed and put on a charge system and instead of using those... you press 1 button for damage most of the time.

Give each healer a 1,2,3 rotation for damage and a 1,2 for AoE at the very least. Condense all their excess healing buttons into 1 or 2 with charges. Tetragrammation could be a 4th lily for WHM for example (tweak the lily charge time to be slightly faster like sage's charges as well). Bonus points if you can impliment a system where doing damage powers up your next heal or healing powers up your next attack to promote doing both. Sage has a good approach with this idea with their Toxikon access from their shields being broken. White mage has this as well with their blood lily system. The idea for both could definitely be expanded on though. I'd love nothing more than the "healer" role to be changed to "support" and open up the option to be party/raid buffers even. Where their whole role is dedicated to upping everyone elses damage and healing when needed. Think of Something like Geomancer, Corsair, and Bard from FFXI for those that are familiar. They all still deal damage, but their main role was powering up everyone else and their damage was just icing on the cake.

[Seraphor]

Honestly....I kinda like this concept. See, I always liked the idea that tanks are, well, tanks. They are the meat shield role, the only ones who can actually take a blow from a boss and survive, but the way they are designed now - all 4 tanks, even arguably PLD - are literally DPS with ~5 defensives skills on top. If tanks are designed to be more self reliant that they can survive longer than 4 gcds without a healer, then healers can now focus more on the rest of the party/utility/dps.

Granted, a tank having so much self sustain that they effectively don't need a healer may be a problem, but that can always be rearranged with some balancing.

The problem is all jobs need to be viable in a solo context for the MSQn so tanks and healers need to deal a non-insignificant amount of damage.

We used to get around this with seperate stances for dps and tanking/healing, but meta determined dps stance was always optimal anyway, because more damage.

[eagledorf]

The problem is all jobs need to be viable in a solo context for the MSQn so tanks and healers need to deal a non-insignificant amount of damage.

We used to get around this with seperate stances for dps and tanking/healing, but meta determined dps stance was always optimal anyway, because more damage.

Cleric Statice got removed because of fat fingers, it has nothing to do with DPS stance being meta since overhealing is always undesirable if for no other reason than it wastes MP. It was always excessive IMO that they got rid of it since stance dancing was honestly crazy fun and accidental double-clicking could have been easily fixed with a 1s cooldown.

If SE wanted to bring cleric stance back it should be easier now than ever before since Sage and SCH both have passive healing. The only real problem with it before was WHM had less healing that ignored cleric statice than SCH.

Tank DPS stances became meta because SE buffed hate generation to where you could hold hate from a WHM spamming AoE heals without tank stance and nerfed boss damage on the tanks into the ground in Heavenward. The latter was because they gave healers all these shiny new oGCD AoE heals so they made partywide damage a much bigger factor. They also bizarrely refused to balance PLD and DRK stances with WAR and gave all of WAR's new shinies in DPS stance so literally nobody wanted to use tank stance.

Anyway, I doubt DPS stances are ever coming back. Given that, SE should embrace the green DPS the same way they have blue DPS.

[Saefinn]

Seeing how tanks have been getting more self-sustainability, I do agree healers should get more. I'm not interested in taking it away from tanks either.

But the way I've generally viewed is:
- White Mage could DPS like Black Mage lite, maybe a similar DPS kit to level 50 BLM (not identical obviously). It's simple, straight forward, does good burst and you get dopamine hits from procs.
- Scholar could be a DoT mage like it and SMN used to be. They've managed to completely taken DoT mage away from SMN and it made most sense thematically for SCH anyway. And it was never complicated to do
- Astrologian is all about raid/party buff, which they are right now
- Sage I think would benefit from resource building with Addersting and taking a self-enhancing approach to DPS...which is does, but maybe embracing it more.


Sadly we know this won't happen. But seeing stuff tanks can do, I feel if anything it is more imperative that healers get more to do that isn't healing. I can't see any other way to solve the problem of healing becoming less engaging the better you get it and the better your party gets at content.

[RinaShinomiya]

I'd really like it if we had a open dialogue with the devs about healers rather than a dismissive answer every now and then in live letters.
Wishful thinking ofc but it would go a long way.

[Allegor]

The problem is all jobs need to be viable in a solo context for the MSQn so tanks and healers need to deal a non-insignificant amount of damage.

We used to get around this with seperate stances for dps and tanking/healing, but meta determined dps stance was always optimal anyway, because more damage.

I didn't mean that tanks should focus on defense the same way healers only focus on healing, quite the contrary actually. Tanks now play exactly like how a DPS would, and that doesn't feel "tanky" imo, but if they're designed to have more self reliance and stand their ground through active mitigations, then healers would have even less of a reason to have so many healing spells, and more dps/utility based ones.

I've been a WHM main since I started playing, my entire leveling experience has been Stone, Aero, Stone, Stone, Stone, Stone, Stone...probably because, as a healer, I'm not "expected/supposed" to be seen anywhere outside a dungeon/raid, and that's just disingenuous - I play WHM (and now SGE) because I like being a healer, even if there's nobody else to heal. I keep saying at the very least they should give us back our aoe dots