The most fun job for healing: RDM

[-BlueGreen-]

I know RDM doesn't stand a chance healing end game content, but I've taken it on FC dungeon runs on plenty of occasions and it's a whole lot more fun than taking an official healing job along. I essentially started out maining SCH in 2.0 and continued that through 3.0, but when 4.0 started the transition to what we have today, I left it behind. I've given sage a shot, and if I had to go on an actual healing job for anything, it'd probably be the job I'd use, though I'll likely continue healing on PLD/RDM for now when FC members need a healer.

I've given it some thought and the basic healing problems in this game boil down to:

1. Healer kits are overly done and complicated
2. The damage most things do to players is a joke
3. Better gear across the team only makes healers less important

It might feel like #1 and the rest are at odds with each other, but the combination likely explains the long-standing healer shortage we had all last expansion and probably will see again once the hype dies down. Want to keep newbie/anxious players away from a role/job? Try this:

• Give the job a lot of "responsibility"
• Make the job have a complicated kit

There's not a whole lot of in-game visibility to when a specific DPS player isn't pulling their weight, and that's further complicated by the fact that a competent tank/healer combo can pull dead weight DPS through just about all story content with no/minimal contribution from the DPS. That makes it easy to see why newer/weaker players flock to DPS roles.

Tanking is only really problematic for these players most of the time because those players don't want to "lead" (thousand maws is probably the worst offender to planting the idea that dungeons are hard to navigate in general). Healing, on the other hand, not only has the clear responsibility of keeping the team on their feet, but they have a whole mess of similar abilities that just confuse them.

Not sure what I'm talking about? Let's take a look at WHM:

Want to heal a single target? Take your pick:

• Cure
• Cure II
• Regen
• Benediction
• Afflatus Solace
• Tetragrammaton

Want to heal multiple targets? Again, take your pick:

• Medica
• Cure III
• Medica II
• Asylum
• Assize
• Afflatus Rapture
• Liturgy of the Bell

Why on earth do we really need 6/7 similar effects? Sure, there's mechanical variations in the way most of these spells and abilities work, but at the end of the day, they heal you and your team. It's also easy to see why novice healers also tend to boil their toolkit down to the likes of cure (II)/medica (II)/raise, not even hotkey Cure III and shove the rest into a corner labeled "In case of emergency, mash" (if they bother to hotkey them at all).

And of course, due to the other two problems with the healing role in general, they can easily get away with such simplifications of their toolkits.

For healers to take the role to end game, I can't imagine it really gets any better, either (disclaimer: I've participated in savage content as DPS and read up/observed how healers fit in to it). From what I've seen, the non-emergency/emergency classifications that most novice healers apply to their skills get swapped at high end play because those "emergency" heals are generally more efficient with the tradeoff of being only usable at certain times. Those heals get mapped out to certain times of the fight "Boss does X, I heal with Y" and become part of the whole choreography of savage to the point where you can probably heal without even looking at health bars. If someone stands in bad, but not deadly, then maybe you'll need to target them for a heal. Since everything else is pretty much locked into some plan, that just leaves you with GCDs like cure II and medica to cover such "emergencies" (but, hey, isn't that why DPS have things like second wind?).

Going back to the title, in my mind, an ideal healer would probably look like the current RDM given a few new spells:

• Vermedica (room wide AoEs are the main thing RDM's are ill-equipped to heal through)
• Esuna (for the few mechanics that require it)
• Vercure II (5 second cooldown, stronger heal to be used as the second cast in a dual cast to heal up after tank busters)

That would give RDM just 5 healing spells (the 3 above plus vercure and verraise) to master with clear purposes. Novice healers can pick up on the basic healing side of it very easily. After that, RDMs would get to enjoy their current DPS rotation which has plenty of room for taking a pause in most places to toss out heals here and there.

Obviously RDM would likely have to give up some potency on the damage side (so "real" DPS jobs aren't totally obsolete), and a few skills to avoid button bloat as well as have the learn levels of skills rearranged to make healing spells available at much lower levels, but RDM could easily give up any of these (not saying all because only 3 new skills would be introduced):

• Displacement
• Fleche
• Acceleration
• Contre Sixte
• Embolden
• Manafication
• Magick Barrier (though as a healer, it'd probably make much more sense to keep this)

The point is it'd be much better to simplify the healing side of things to make that less intimidating to novices, and then give veterans a loose DPS rotation to play with the more they're comfortable with their job/role.

I know the dev team is pretty dead-set in keeping the healing role on the path it's on, but it's hard to see how anyone really, truly likes current healers other than because "they're the healer" or for their looks/roleplay. It's intimidating to novices and boring to veterans. Let's continue to not be silent on this issue.

[rewd]

So your solution to healers being dumbed down and boring is to make them even more accessibile and dumbed down so even a rock could master them?

[-BlueGreen-]

So your solution to healers being dumbed down and boring is to make them even more accessibile and dumbed down so even a rock could master them?

I don't suppose you've tried taking RDM to heal a dungeon run lately? Vercure is weak compared to most normal healer skills. Optimizing vercure casts to the limit, being mindful of aoe damage and mechanics is important to keeping the team alive so that you don't need verraise and sacrifice your MP for it. Even in light of that, though, there's still plenty of opportunities where vercure spam isn't required (if you optimized the healing well in context of whatever the current mechanics were) and you can DPS. The difference, and how this makes RDM much more fun to "heal" dungeons with, is that there's an actual DPS rotation to fill that time.

Basically, when I'm healing as RDM, I have fun with the basic challenge of keeping everyone alive with wimpy healing skills, and when I do that well, I'm rewarded with being able to DPS along with the rest of the team with more than 1 button damage spam.

I'm going to take a guess that your comment is driven by one of these:

• Only 5 healing skills and RDM's easy rotation? Easy + Easy = Easy (the RDM is a braindead job camp, nevermind that doing both at the same time is more taxing than one alone)
• Healers must have even more diverse healing spells to the point where it feels like they're doing brain surgery in the middle of battle. (the healers only heal camp)

Now, I could honestly see the 2nd one being more healer-like and interesting, but there's a fundamental flaw with it no matter how hard SE tries to push in that direction. If you've got some fancy heal combos and rotation and you're healing away, what do you do when there's nothing left to heal? Just keep healing anyway? Go back to throwing rocks? If you want to justify spend more time healing, we have to nerf the heals or buff the enemies*. What if novice healers can't keep up after rebalancing in that direction? I guess a lot of bodies will hit the floor in duty finder. That or "adventurer in need: healer" will just be a fact of life from that point on once we scare all but the most talented away from it.

* Rebalancing battle to create more need for healing is ultimately futile unless we also get rid of gear upgrades because upgraded gear will again reduce the need for healing. At the same time, if healing isn't balanced around minimum gear requirements (instead balancing to keep things interesting at max gear levels), then progression becomes impossible or at least nearly impossible since the team won't have max level gear at the start of any kind of progression.

[Silver-Strider]

If BLU wasn't handicapped into always being 10 levels below the current cap, it would be the best healer job by a mile.

[-BlueGreen-]

If BLU wasn't handicapped into always being 10 levels below the current cap, it would be the best healer job by a mile.

True, but BLU is just basically broken. Go in, freeze everything, mow them down with AoEs, heal up with white wind, and oh, tank buster? Swiftcast -> diamondback. Why not just ditch the team and go in with instinct?

Anyway, back to the discussion, the point isn't trying to make an OP healer, just make a fun healer. If you find being OP fun, then yeah, I can see the argument for wanting to promote BLU as an actual healer.

Along those lines, consider making SMN into a healer? Give it something like Kardia, but beefed up to essentially be your primary heal, then esuna for when you really need it. Of course, they'll need some sort of AoE heal and maybe a tank buster counter heal/shield, but make those long cooldown or high cost to put more emphasis on the Kardia-like healing while you keep up a DPS rotation. Even better, make the amount healed from the kardia like thing depend on the potency of the DPS skills used so that you couldn't just go ruin-ruin-ruin, ignoring the rest of the kit, and expect that to generate enough healing.

Honestly, that'd give us 3 flavors of DPS:
Blue DPS - you hit things... from the front
Green DPS - you hit things... while keeping the team alive
Red DPS - you hit things... harder

[-BlueGreen-]

I suppose giving it some thought and going back to experiences with older RPGs where I've played a healer that did nothing but cast spells on teammates (you wouldn't be caught dead wasting your MP doing laughable damage), the only other possibility would be to make healers into absurd buff mages. Granted, I'm talking about a game where /sit was just as much an MP management tool mid-battle ant not just an emote.

Essentially, make it to where even if your target is at full hp, you always have something you can cast on them that's better than aero/stone/holy/etc. Some sort of healing rotation where you just keep on casing and full-health allies get something other than healing out of it (probably a huge damage increase). That would make it to where healers are like DPS, except you're targeting allies to perform your rotation on. DPS/tanks are then encouraged more to dodge so that they can be buffed more often, not just to save the healer some grief. Basically, bringing a competent healer would then mean staying alive while bring a master healer along would transform the rest of the team into gods of war. That would probably go a long way to getting rid of the whole "Green DPS" meme since their actual DPS output would drop to zero in favor of boosting RDPS. The DPS skills that they do have would simply exist for solo content (and even then, they might be able to go into part of their heal/buff rotation to build up power before blasting the enemy with crazy powerful rocks).

[Jovakim]

The point is it'd be much better to simplify the healing side of things to make that less intimidating to novices, and then give veterans a loose DPS rotation to play with the more they're comfortable with their job/role.

Unfortunately, that is the sort of thing that healers here on the forums have been asking throughout ShB, and not only SE didn't care but they decided to double down and give us even more healing like Macrocosmos, Lilybell, and even tank-like mitigation.
Sorry if we're hopeless at this point that anything will ever be done about it.