Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Aravell]

I love being told to 'just play DPS' when for the umpteenth times since time immemorial, SE have specifically refused to increase HPS requirement. Despite that it's been an on-going wish alongside the 'more dps'-wishes. But I guess people just gloss over the 'more healing' and just want to laser focus on 'more dps' comments. "Read your tooltip" certainly didn't extend well enough to "Read the room/thread", just another day in the forum.

I mean I get it---it'll take a while to read 300+ pages plus every other existing healer thread. Still.. /smh

It's the monthly rerun of "Person who wants more healing and completely denies any damage buttons vs people who want more damage buttons and happily support more healing required", I think this is the 17th time this episode rerun aired, it's getting rather boring.

[Saraide]

I don’t see anyone asking for more DPS. Healers are already DPSing for >70% of the time - we’re just asking for more to do than spamming 1, ie, a rotation that’s not boring.

I also don’t need to compare FFXIV to any other game to hold the opinion that 14 is scripted, and I need more to do when heal plans have been figured out. Every other game has a lot more differences - a big one is that in most other games you can easily replace a healer with a DPS if the fight doesn’t need that much healing.

You got some good responses to your previous message, so to me, this particular comment seems to be in bad faith.

It feels like the "just play dps" comments are always in bad faith.

[rawker]

Can we also include the "play another job if you don't like the rework" to the list?

[Aravell]

It feels like the "just play dps" comments are always in bad faith.

Anyone who makes that kind of argument tends to be the one trying to turn FFXIV healers into something they're not. Healers in this game have always contributed to dps and used to have a decently complex damage kit to juggle while actually using GCD heals, most people are just asking for that design that they loved to come back.

If someone wants to mash heals instead, there are other MMOs that offer that kind of experience. FFXIV is not built for the attrition healing model.

[Deceptus]

It feels like the "just play dps" comments are always in bad faith.

Especially when you realize that it only affects healers. Tanks aren't told to "just go play DPS" if they want a decent damage rotation. They're simply given it. Even after the aggro simplification. There's zero functional reason for them to have all the damage tools they do, other than it's fun.

And isn't that supposed to be the point?

Apparently not for healers, the b@stard children of FFXIV.

[ASkellington]

Can we also include to the "play another job if you don't like the rework" to the list?

FAQ FYC - Healer ED

• You keep asking for more dps instead of more healing; you should play a dps job.

We are asking for our current dps options which amount to 1 direct attack (Malefic/Glare-Stone/Dosis/Broil) and a DoT (Combust/Dia-Aero/E. Dosis/Biolysis) for the most part (see Energy Drain on SCH, Misery on WHM, Phlegma/Toxicon on SGE) to be more varied. More options like ED/Phlegma, separate attacks on their own with a short cool down, to break up the monotony when we have nothing to heal. NOT for higher dps numbers.

SCH and WHM prior to Shadowbringers HAD these, and SGE being the supposed dps healer should have more to interact with Kardia.

No other role suffers from this. Not even tanks. There's no reason why we also can't have another 2-3 dps buttons that aren't tied to a healing gauge. "Its not your job" is a cop out excuse. Its not a tank's job to have Fell Cleave, Gnashing Fang-Continuation, or Delirium either. But they can get those on top of mitigations and a 1-2-3 combo while still doing their job.

• You should be asking for more healing then so you have less down time.

1. It is impossible to increase healing enough for two healers to spend over 70% of their time healing with our current toolkit. And it isn't fair for newer healers to have to keep up with the pace of a midcore-veteran healer.
2. We are STILL going to have down time. There are plenty of other pieces of content such as Deep Dungeons, FATEs, solo MSQ instances, Hunts, and normal dungeons where the devs aren't going to increase healing much if at all. And good healers are going to be attacking more anyways. No reason to keep it boring.
3. We HAVE asked for higher healing. Yoshi-P's tone death response has been the infamous "Go Play Ultimate".

• Go play another job/game.

We want to play this game with a role that in other games we've played (wild isn't that?) we enjoy. We want to see the healer role be something that is fun to play and not a chore so 3-6 other people can do content.

We see that our role is being phased out by tanks (hi WAR) and DPS (RDM/DNC) due to the low healing requirements. We see that a lot of the changes made to our role are not ones WE want. And much like every other role/job we ask for changes to make it better.

Telling us to go play another job/game, no matter how well meaning, does nothing. Unless the rest of the world is going to go on a healer strike to cause such an uproar. And I don't see that happening.

What healer mains what in short is both higher healing requirements so we aren't replaced in even high end duties and something engaging be that dps and/or frequent applying of buffs/debuffs (both really) to the pary/enemy so it feels like we're contributing.

For class specific details read here.

In fact, read the above link before commenting in general to save us all a headache.

Good enough?

[rawker]

I am asking specifically for SCH because our healing kit is already super good. I can't think of anything to make it better, other than getting charges on Recitation. Also, the dps I wish for SCH is to move some of it to the pet. You should stalk my other posts even more so you have a better grasp of where I am coming from.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

It's the monthly rerun of "Person who wants more healing and completely denies any damage buttons vs people who want more damage buttons and happily support more healing required", I think this is the 17th time this episode rerun aired, it's getting rather boring.

It does certainly feels like something that I've been doing over and over and over and over again in-game... Why, oh why that sounded familiar lmao.

[ForsakenRoe]

If I had another damage button in my healer rotation for every time I've read someone say 'go play a DPS then', the rotation for WHM would look more terrifying than that one picture of the 2min loop of the TK MNK rotation from SB

Also, shoutout to 'play another game' if I want more involved damage rotations on healers (note: NOT MORE DAMAGE PER SECOND, just more 'damage buttons to interact with'). How about 'Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood'? Or 'Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward'? We HAD this stuff before, and many believe that its removal in SHB was a step too far in simplification. Just adding 1-2 buttons to each healer, with a 10-15s CD and do 'a little bit more damage than the filler spell' would alleviate the issues quite a lot. Then, it gives SE room to give new things in later expansions. We heard how they gave us Expedient because 'we didn't really know what to do for SCH'. Well, I have to ask: Would they have had something in mind for SCH, if they hadn't removed its DOTs? If they had still kept it as having 2 or 3 DOTs to maintain (depending if we're on about HW ShadowFlare or SB), they could have added... I dunno, how about '60s CD skill whose CD is reduced by 1s each time your DOTs tick'? If they close off a whole room of design space (damage related buttons), then it only makes sense that they'd hit a wall in 'what can we add to the class that is new', which is why we constantly get 'more healing tool' for WHM, for that job they've locked off so many design spaces in pursuit of making it 'the healer that heals really hard', and it doesn't even work, because AST has to be able to do the same healchecks as WHM can. So all that extra healing power is just that: Extra. Unrequired. Not needed.

It's a few pages back now, so I'll relink what I'd do to the healers to start fixing the dreadful downtime. And just to prove that you can make big differences in how the rotation feels with very small changes, here is a video demonstrating only the GCD loop for my 'WHM suggested rotation', where the only differences from 'current gameplay' are that there's a new 15s CD we can use instead of a Glare, and Dia's duration is lowered to 12s (potency would be adjusted to compensate). Or worded slightly differently, 'Banish every 6th GCD, Dia every 5th GCD, otherwise use Glare as filler'. It takes us from 18 Glares a minute (with 2 Dia, 3 Lilies, 1 Misery), to 11 Glares (with 5 Dia, 4 Banish, 3 Lilies, 1 Misery). An 'over 33%' decrease in how often we hit that one Glare button.

If anyone wants to say the solution is that 'we should heal more', I have questions:

- How do you expect us to heal more in harder content, where we're already having to spam Succor and Cure3 to handle healing at certain times for week 1 prog (Harrowing Hell Savage, the 11-hit Styx in Savage)? If the solution is 'heal more often' (eg by having raidwides happen more often), has the potency of skills been considered? EG, we can pump out 4000 potency a minute as WHM by just maintaining 100% uptime on Medica 2. How hard and how fast do we need to be hit to actually challenge our total accessible healing potency?

- If we are forced to heal more, has the increased MP cost per minute of our healing been factored in? If we have to use Medica and Cure2 more often (due to having not-enough Lilies to heal everything without damage loss), has their MP cost been factored in, or are we looking at going OOM without a massive amount of Piety added to our gear, or MP cost adjustments across the board?

- Would the 'increase in healing required' affect casual content like EX roulette? If so, has it been considered how it would affect lower-skilled players, and how many would no longer be able to keep up?

- If the 'increase in healing required' does NOT affect casual content, what is there to make that content more 'engaging' for a higher-skilled player? Or is the 'increase in healing required' solution only a solution to a certain difficulty of content? In which case, how does it 'solve' the problem, when it wouldn't be doing anything to the content that arguably needs 'a solution' the most?

- If people become more practiced at the new healing requirements, what stops them from reaching the current plateau, of 'I have X% of my time spare to DPS, so I'll just DPS during it'? If we go from 70% of our GCDs being damage related to... say, 50%, does that 'solve' the issue? If we are always going to have 'some time to deal damage', what ratio of 'GCDs spent on not-damage' to 'GCDs spent on damage' is the 'fix'? And is this 'fix' still forgiving enough to give time for recovery from mistakes, and forgiving enough to allow for less-skilled players to have breathing room (amount of breathing room dependent on content difficulty level)?

- Going forward, if we cannot have 'more damage buttons in rotation' because that is not our role (just ignore that tanks get new ones every expansion, despite it not being 'their role', I guess? Love double standards), what suggestions of 'new additions to the job' are there for later expansions? Is there any new 'thematic' ways to add new non-damage buttons to the healers that feel unique and novel? If a button adds a 'utility' (eg Expedient), how does said utility's effect balance 'feels good to use' with 'is not so strong that it makes the job mandatory for certain content'?

- Finally, would this 'increase to healing required' be going forward, or retroactively applied to all content? If the former, how will people adjust to a sudden increase of healing required when it has never been asked of them (compared to previous content of the same difficulty level)? If the latter, how much extra dev work has to be done to make sure that the jobs can clear old content, with the new adjusted kits, and the new healing required?

Of the two proposed solutions, of 'add more healing required', or 'add more buttons to damage rotation (keeping damage output roughly the same)', which brings less 'questions to answer' with it?

We have a sort of 'butterfly effect' when it comes to changes like these, so I believe it best to focus on a solution that has less 'butterfly effect', less knock-on issues that arise from solving the base issue. And in that regard, I fully believe that 'add more buttons to damage rotation (keeping damage output roughly the same)' has WAY less 'butterfly effect' attached. You don't have to recheck older content to make sure it's still clearable, you don't have to worry about rebalancing MP costs, you don't have to worry that casual players won't be able to keep up on the sudden new damage intake. The sentiment of 'healers should have to heal more, that's the solution to their boredom' is well meaning, but has not been thought through. It's a 'this feels like the solution', and one that falls apart when faced with numbers, logic, and frankly, common sense

[Supersnow845]

Why are people so quick to want 14 healers to play like other games healers despite 14 always having maintained the idea that healers are damage casters in their own right (I mean we have an entire alliance raid questline that explores this exact point) but are also totally fine with the tanks playing like tanky DPS when there is zero games out there that both have healers healslut while the tanks basically just play a melee DPS

I shouldn’t be mad at tank mains because it’s not really their fault but the level of sheer favouritism the design team has towards tanks over healers is honestly shocking, tanks play how tank players want them to play, healers play how melee DPS imagine a healer should play to ensure they continue to be the main character