Hello, I am a fan of many of the things PvP in FFXIV offers, but even I must admit that being a healer feels really bad in this game. I still play it a lot because PvP healing fills that niche I love, but there's some serious issues with it that prevent me from recommending it to anyone else.

The biggest issue is that the game allows you to use defensive abilities and heals on recently K.O.'d players. This means if you are fervently trying to keep someone alive, there is a good chance your last few heals will be wasted because they were already dead, but the game allowed you to keep spending your resources on them. The same goes for if you use Hallowed Ground or another tank invulnerability. The game allows you to use it even after you have been K.O.'d and the spell will go on cooldown with no effect. I believe this is caused by the lag compensation in the game, because on your end, you are still alive and can input the ability, but from the server's perspective, you are dead and it takes time for the server to inform the client that the player is dead. I've heard people attribute it to the "casting animation" of the ability, and this could also be contributing to it. In either case, I feel that skills in PvP should go on cooldown only after their effect has been confirmed to have activated successfully, and the same goes for resources spent using them. The only exception to this would be limit breaks, whose long animations and potential failure an important part of how they function. Fixing this alone would make healing and tanking much more satisfying to do.

The other issue with healers is that they are very unbalanced compared to other jobs, most especially in the Feast. There is a large amount of responsibility on the healers to be competent in the Feast, as having a bad healer makes winning effectively impossible. You can win with a mediocre tank or dps, but a mediocre healer will almost definitely lead to a loss. In other words, your skill as a tank or dps only feels like it matters when the healers are evenly matched. In a subjective sense, I feel that the team's overall power is 60% in the healers hands, and the other 40% is divided among the remaining 3 players. Even though I love playing healer, I would prefer if if healer players were balanced so that less of the team's overall power is in the healers hands, ideally with each player being 25% of the team's overall effectiveness. I know that Feast will be going away in 6.1, but this unbalance extends to other PvP modes and will carry over to the Feast's replacement, Crystal Conflict. For example, in Wolves' Den duels, healers cannot kill each other unless they willingly stop healing themselves. In frontlines, players cannot 1v1 a healer, and even a 2v1 can be challenging because healers are good at escaping unfavorable conflicts with repose and purify. Healing allows for easier escapes, too, since it extends chases, baiting enemy players into overextending, leading to them getting mobbed by the rest of your team. Healers that get attacked also have the extra resource of medical kits to heal themselves, so attacking a healer will not drain their mana or cooldowns. Because of this, it feels like it's not even worth it to attack healers unless you are sure you can K.O. them.

Because of these strengths, the most common and effective way to deal with healers is to target a single DPS and deal so much damage to them in such a short period of time that their healer cannot heal them in time. This is unsatisfying for everyone involved. The attackers are unsatisfied because they do not get to use their full combos, and it feels like your contribution is just one of 20 other people attacking a single target. The healers are unsatisfied because they cannot heal the target in time, and if they try, then the server will make their ability go on cooldown even if it did not heal the target. The target dps is also unsatisfied because they were killed before their medical kit could go off and it feels like there was nothing they could do in that situation. The design of PvP should move away from nuking single players by making AoE damage more effective than single target burst. Since players are much more hard to predict than dungeon mobs, and they tend to spread out more, spells like Flare and Gravity should have much larger AoE ranges to compensate, and all AoE spells should be buffed for use on "2 or more" players rather than "3 or more". There are many effects that increase damage dealt to a single target (such as Inner Chaos, ranged and caster LB's, and Phantom Dart) and they contribute to this problem of having one player at a time being killed all at once. These could be replaced with DoT damage, which can lead to greater overall benefit, just not provided all at once.

The last major issue is that healers can only cast AoE heals on players in their parties. This is not as big of an issue in Feast or in the future Crystal Conflict, but in Frontlines and especially Rival Wings (where there are 6 parties of 4 players per team) this is a major issue. Even if multiple party members are near you, it can be hard to position yourself to be in range to heal all of them with an AoE heal when players are frantically running about. This is one of the few buffs I think healers desperately need, to have AoE heals effect all players, not just party members. It would be a huge quality of life improvement to simply see a mob of friendly players, stand in the mob, use an AoE heal, and actually have everyone be healed. This would go hand in hand with my earlier suggestion to improve sustained AoE damage and nerf single target burst, as healers will need better AoE heals to compensate.

The last suggestion I would make is to improve the UI to highlight players that are within healing range, and add an indicator that points towards who you have targeted even if they are offscreen. This is because the UI currently lights up players that are nearby, which is a handy feature for knowing who you should focus on healing. The problem is, the UI lights up even if they are out of range, and offscreen. This means you can see a highlighted HP bar at 30%, click it to try to heal them, only to learn they are too far away, and you need to spin your camera around to try to find them, then run towards them. This minigame where you try to play Where's Waldo as fast as possible should be streamlined by having better UI indications of where your selected target is, and either increase the range of single target healing spells to reach anyone lit up in the UI, or reduce the range at which the UI will light up to indicate the player is nearby.

In the new PvP game mode Crystal Conflict, I hope that healers do not play as major a role in the teams success, allowing other jobs to contribute just as much. Since Crystal Conflict will not have role restrictions, I hope a team of 5 healers vs 5 healers wont lead to both teams being absolutely unkillable. And I hope that peoples best defense against healers will no longer be killing players quickly enough to exploit the game's unresponsive servers.



This part is just a rampant tangent
Also let medical kits activate their heal immediately like all other instant heals please for the love of God. Healing is unresponsive enough without adding a potion-drinking animation added to it. (Though personally I think it would be best to dramatically increase everyone's base HP and make medical kits a 12 second regen that you can also use on other players, to help mitigate the effectiveness of one-shot bursts and distribute the responsibility of healing onto other jobs.)