Dear Square Enix, do something with GCD healing please.

[RinaShinomiya]

This has more to do with healer design in general but i feel like if Square isn't gonna listen to anything we say regarding getting more DPS abilities then maybe this might.

Why do healers have so many dedicated buttons to GCD healing & buffs dedicated to GCD healing yet we have no reason to use them since we get overpowered oGCD heals on very short cooldowns that cost 0 mana (which is a stat affected by our role exclusive Materia!!!) every expansion.
Instead of giving each healer a unique mechanic that rewards GCD healing with DPS, y'know rewarding us for doing our job, the devs would rather we spam the same 1 button over and over again while pressing oGCD heals whenever they come up. Why can't we have that 1 button spam and when we need to heal we GCD heal and then go into a combo that rewards us with DPS? I know, a outlandish idea.
I feel like this issue is being swept under the rug by many due to oGCD healing being the meta but it creates so many issues like hotbar bloat, homogenization etc.
Because GCD heals are a DPS negative of 250/295/310/330 potency depending on the healer of choice, most people end up ignoring those buttons unless they find themselves in situations where GCD healing is the only solution.

(1/3)

[RinaShinomiya]

Let's go by release order.
WHM currently has 10 buttons dedicated to GCD healing (11 if you count Misery) and 5 buttons dedicated to interacting with the GCD.
The full list is:
Cure, Cure II, Cure III, Medica, Medica II, Afflatus Solace, Afflatus Rapture, Regen, Esuna, Raise, Pressence of Mind, Thin Air, Plenary Indulgence, Temperance & Swiftcast.
That's between 15 or 16 Abilities which is literally half our toolkit and from the abilities I mentioned in optimized play you'd prefer to only use 3 of them, maybe 4 if you see Temperance more as a mitigation rather than GCD boost. Even in unoptimized play you'd probably use maybe 7 or 8. And you know what? If Misery wasn't a DPS loss those 4 unoptimized play buttons would be optimized. Crazy right?

SCH currently has 5 buttons dedicated to GCD healing (I don't count summoning the fairy even though those are GCD buttons) and 6 buttons dedicated to interacting with the GCD.
The full list is:
Physick, Resurrection, Adloquim, Succor, Esuna, Fey Illumination, Deployment Tactics, Emergency Tactics, Dissipation, Recitation and Swiftcast.
That is 11 buttons dedicated to something that's most optimally used during downtime or else it's a DPS loss. Not as bad as White Mage but that's still a third of the toolkit dedicated to something that isn't really used in optimized play and if used it's for different reasons, like Dissipation being a tiny DPS boost. But the more damning issue is that SCH is a barrier healer that's being punished for barrier healing.

AST currently has 8 buttons dedicated to GCD healing and 6 buttons dedicated to interacting with the GCD.
The full list is: Benefic, Benefic II, Aspected Benefic, Helios, Aspected Helios, Ascend, Macrocosmos, Esuna, Lightspeed, Synastry, Astrodyne, Horoscope, Neutral Sect & Swiftcast.
Similarly to WHM that's nearly half of AST's kit which wouldn't be as jarring if AST didn't need so much space dedicated to it's card mechanics. But unlike WHM there is no Lily mechanic trying to return 75% of DPS for GCD healing, in fact AST might have the most OP oGCD heals of them all. Synastry felt out of place in AST's toolkit forever and while Horoscope can still be used without a Helios cast, Neutral Sect does not. It can't even be used for mitigation only, you have to GCD heal with it.

SGE currently has 5 buttons dedicated to GCD healing and 4 buttons dedicated to interacting with the GCD, 5 if we include Toxicon.
The full list is: Dosis, Prognosis, Egeiro, Pneuma, Esuna, Eukrasia, Zoe, Pepsis & Swiftcast.
That's 9 or 10 Buttons and similarly to SCH a third of out toolkit of which we don't really use much during the fight.
(2/3)

[RinaShinomiya]

The point i'm trying to make here is that between half or third of each healers toolkit isn't used in current content because of being a DPS penalty, costing mana & simply not being needed to heal through most content in this game thanks to our OP oGCD taking care of the current healing requirements.
This is exactly why I personally found WHM to be the most fun healer in SHB, because it rewarded healing with DPS. Even if it was a DPS loss, that didn't matter to me, it felt satisfying. If it wasn't a DPS loss i'd feel even better about it. Meanwhile the overly focus on oGCD healing is what forced the Healer design into a corner and caused our button bloat in the first place. Many oGCD heals are just GCD heals on a cooldown. Does WHM really need a oGCD Cure II when they already have Afflatus Solace? Why can't Tetra just be a button that generates 1 lily. Why does Afflatus Solace & Cure II, Afflatus Rapture & Medica need to be separate buttons when they could just upgrade whenever a lily is available or not. Why does Thin Air exist at this point when most of our Heals are free anyway, it ends up being a "free Glare" button. WHM would play so much better if SE designed it around the lily system from the ground up.
Why does SCH have so many GCD healing buffs when it only has 3 GCD heals, well only 2 really since Physick is... Tataru's favorite button i guess. And again a system that rewards DPS for healing would go so far here. SCH has 2 Job gauges but only really uses 1. Why can't GCD healing reward Aetherflow (in combat) and Aetherflow abilities be all Damage dedicated. Using them then feeds into Fey gauge which unlocks powerful oGCD heals which you could use for pure healing, this way the player and the fairy have distinct roles. Barriers on the player and Pure heals on fairy.
As for AST, why is the class with the strongest oGCD heals also the busiest class from a oGCD standpoint? Wouldn't it make more sense to make its GCD healing kit more desirable so Card gameplay and healing don't clash?
SGE is arguably the most mobile healer even without Toxicon so I'd argue it should be changed to a DPS mechanic rather than mobility mechanic.

Then there are class-wide issues like Repose being useless outside 1 Role quest in SHB. Esuna being a rarely used button, Cure I, Benefic I, Physick & Diagnosis existing, Swiftcast only really being used in conjunction with Rez. Which is also something that's more punishing to the healer rather than rewarding, we lose a quarter of our mana for other people screwing up. Lucid dreaming being a boring way of restoring our Mana when a gameplay orientated version would be far more beneficial. For example why cant lilies apply a MP regen buff for 12s that restores MP like Lucid? I feel like Healer would have much more room to grow if our GCD healing kits wouldn't be so punishing to use. And if square wants us to only oGCD heal and press one button for the rest of our life then reduce the GCD bloat already.
(3/3)

[Navnav]

Agreed. Make oGCDs for utilities and buffs and give more gcds. That would help the issue of not healing enough, now it would force healers to actually use their gcd to heal, meaning less time to dps and more focus on healing.

I don't agree with seeing things as a dps penalty, rather it is better to just do dps where you can and that is it. Square should FULLY shift the focus to healing. A change like removing healing oGCDs would help a lot. Even if they left all healers dps buttons as normal but maybe gave them a few more short cd ogcd damage abilities so it instead doesn't hurt your healing.

Time to really change the perspective on healers, because you are meant to HEAL.

[Semirhage]

Lemme know when you can heal an enemy to death. Until then, damage output is always going to be massively important.

[RinaShinomiya]

Lemme know when you can heal an enemy to death. Until then, damage output is always going to be massively important.

That's what the thread is about. GCD healing shouldn't be a DPS penalty, we need mechanics that reward us for GCD healing even if its as boring as "Malefic cast after benefic deals 500 potency damage".
Obv. the ideal solution would be something more exciting than that. The current uselessness of GCD healing is a serious issue tho. No other role in this game has a third of their toolkit virtually unusable due to DPS being the most important stat.

[Navnav]

Lemme know when you can heal an enemy to death. Until then, damage output is always going to be massively important.

Lemme know when you try another game and realise that healing is not like this in anything else you play, and for good reason. You guys play this game in a bubble, like it is genuinely mind blowng. Even the developers don't agree with you, but here you all are...

[ThorneDynasty]

Lemme know when you try another game and realise that healing is not like this in anything else you play, and for good reason. You guys play this game in a bubble, like it is genuinely mind blowng. Even the developers don't agree with you, but here you all are...

Right. The healing is designed to work different in this game from other games. And the kits should follow the overall logic of the game's encounter design, instead of pretending to be healing classes from an entirely different game.

[ASkellington]

I'd also like to point out that AST and SGE have extremely similar GCDs to WHM and SCH effectively making them the same healing style. Both SGE and SCH have Aldo. Both AST and WHM have Cure. They're just named differently. If we're going to push for GCD healing I'd also like to push AST and SGE having stronger GCD identities. On the oGCD AST is a strong regen healer for example, might as well reflect that in their GCDs too.

And no, it does not when A.Helios and A.Benefic are cheaper copies of Regen and Medica 2.

[Nizzi]

Agreed. Make oGCDs for utilities and buffs and give more gcds. That would help the issue of not healing enough, now it would force healers to actually use their gcd to heal, meaning less time to dps and more focus on healing.

I don't agree with seeing things as a dps penalty, rather it is better to just do dps where you can and that is it. Square should FULLY shift the focus to healing. A change like removing healing oGCDs would help a lot. Even if they left all healers dps buttons as normal but maybe gave them a few more short cd ogcd damage abilities so it instead doesn't hurt your healing.

Time to really change the perspective on healers, because you are meant to HEAL.

This is just completely wrong though and not at all how healers in FFXIV work. No matter how much Yoshida says this, the fights say otherwise - the game is not tuned for "just do some DPS where you can!" but instead for healers contributing as much DPS as possible. These fights are tuned around healer DPS. To see that this is the case, all we need to look at is the top E8S speedkill.

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/qCnHW...pe=damage-done
This is the E8S Rank 1 Speedkill. The rDPS requirement for enrage is 90725 and this group logged 104357 rDPS. If you subtract the healers, 104357 - 20662, you end up with 83695 which is 7000 rDPS behind the enrage requirement for the fight. And these are the TOP players for the fight.

If the content was tuned around not requiring healer DPS or just having healers "DPS where they can", it wouldn't be impossible, if not close to impossible to clear even if you had 4 of the best DPS players and 2 of the best tank DPS on the planet. This is the core problem, healers are in fact not "meant to heal." The design encounters that they're sticking with demand that we DPS, and using our GCD healing is always a DPS penalty not just to ourselves, but to our entire party's potential clear.