Healers need an overhaul

[VentVanitas]

Frankly, my problem is not really about healing itself, but more about role indentity. Right now there are so much conflation between roles that it both make it a balancing nightmare and a messy ball of unclear purpose. The Green DPS issue is merely the poster child of the issue, but hardly the only issue. My solution, in full, is actually very radical:

- Take away all party wide buff from DPS. Make them all selfish DPS. They're in charge of their own optimization and no one else. Also, remove stuff like fient and addle.

- Tank should only be in charge of personal defensive cool down, and maybe debuff the boss. They should not be double up duty to party wide mitigation.

- Support classes (p.range) should have the exclusive job as buffing the party, they should be the only one with party wide buffs.

- Remove majority if not all but the most basic self healing (i.e second wind) from all classes.

- Healers should be exclusive in charge of healing and raid wide mitigation.


I feel this way you can amp up the complexity and difficulty for each "role" that is unique to them. Instead of this melting pots "everyone does everything just some better than the others with DPS the only true go to".

I see you did not at all mention that tanks are just fat DPS and your only change to them was removing party wide mitigation. So you're fine with the majority of a tank's kit being dedicated to DPS? Because you realise that it's stupid to have a tank with ~3-ish attacks and everything else being dedicated to aggro or mitigation, right? So why are healers so special that green DPS is considered problematic and conflates identity between roles when blue DPS isn't given the same treatment?

They're never going to change fight design to suddenly require healers to dedicated most of their time to healing. That's never been the way the game has worked at any point. DPS has always been everyone's responsibility. Suddenly amping up healing requirements would not change this.

[Raven2014]

I see you did not at all mention that tanks are just fat DPS and your only change to them was removing party wide mitigation. So you're fine with the majority of a tank's kit being dedicated to DPS?

I said green DPS is the poster child of the problem, not the only part of the problem, or did you miss that part? If you want to remove DPS ability from tank, I will support you with both hand and feet. In fact, if anything your inquiry just simply illutraste my point in that everything in this game is funneling into DPS as the one and single metric that matter. Just like Piety is ignored on healer, the fact that battledance is also a hot potato stat despite it's supposed to be a tank stat further show the disconnect between class design and fight design.

Because you realise that it's stupid to have a tank with ~3-ish attacks and everything else being dedicated to aggro or mitigation, right? So why are healers so special that green DPS is considered problematic and conflates identity between roles when blue DPS isn't given the same treatment?

Read above, the only thing I realize is the battle for tank having unique identity were also fought and lose after they remove stance and aggro management. When I talk to a tank these days, if they don't mention the class the thing they focus on would make them almost indistinguishable from a DPS.

That's exactly my issue with class design, every other role are stripped of its identity to eventually merge into the only one thing that matter, DPS. Blue DPS or Green DPS, same difference to me.

[Shurrikhan]

Frankly, my problem is not really about healing itself, but more about role indentity. Right now there are so much conflation between roles that it both make it a balancing nightmare and a messy ball of unclear purpose. The Green DPS issue is merely the poster child of the issue, but hardly the only issue. My solution, in full, is actually very radical:

- Take away all party wide buff from DPS. Make them all selfish DPS. They're in charge of their own optimization and no one else. Also, remove stuff like fient and addle.

- Tank should only be in charge of personal defensive cool down, and maybe debuff the boss. They should not be double up duty to party wide mitigation.

- Support classes (p.range) should have the exclusive job as buffing the party, they should be the only one with party wide buffs.

- Remove majority if not all but the most basic self healing (i.e second wind) from all classes.

- Healers should be exclusive in charge of healing and raid wide mitigation.


I feel this way you can amp up the complexity and difficulty for each "role" that is unique to them. Instead of this melting pots "everyone does everything just some better than the others with DPS the only true go to".

This I also don't get. Never has removing tools from most, in the long run, made the few who still get to hold onto their forms of those tools feel any more complex, nuanced, or fun due to their removal elsewhere.

Remove enmity management from all but tanks and you don't get tanks that do more with enmity management. You instead get a game that simply has no enmity management, where tanks act like DPS but have Enmity bundled atop it. Rather than tanking, you just end up with tanks, which are then narrowed down skillsets that stand in place of actually interacting with that gameplay.

Remove survival tools from DPS and you don't get greater healing intensity or value. You just get toned down healing mechanics, checks, and raid damage because when a two people get hit by the same AoE and only one can be sufficiently healed before the next raidwide, either the damage must be AoE healable and/or an oGCD able to be left on the backburner for mistakes, or one of those two die, completely outside of the healers' control, where the one not getting healed could previously have popped a defensive and then become the one prioritized next time (as their defensive would be on CD). Removing those defensives wouldn't just strip complexity from others, but also detract from the quality of life and/or complexity of healing.

Etc., etc.

[Nizzi]

30+ year old boomer MMO attrition healer ""gameplay"" is hot garbage and spamming Medica Medica Medica is as unengaging and boring as spamming Glare Glare Glare is. Doing the former is not what "traditional" or "real healers" do, and no amount of increasing healing is ever going to make spamming Glare fun or a "reward for doing a good healing job" as Yoshida thinks it is. Embrace what the game is and make healers engaging to play in all content, no matter the skill level. It isn't hard at understand.

The funniest part is that figuring out the puzzle of where to use what healing resources to get the best bang for your buck is what's fun about healers in Savage, but once you've figured that out, you're left with nothing to do in reclears and beyond. MAKE. THE. DOWNTIME. KITS. FUN.

[Raven2014]

No more or less so than now.

That's the point. I never said FF14 had "amazing" healing mechanic from the beginning. I simply said at least there were "some" consideration. Was they good? No. However 10 years ago from Midas when there were two paths to diverse, the dev choose the DPS path. Instead of improve the healing experience, instead of making resource managing more deliberate meaningful, they decided instead of simply strip those things a way. There have been a questions in the community for a while now: why do we still have MP when it's so much of an after thought? Because the complain about 6.0 WHM is why. The community's mentality has been spoiled to the point that any attempt to walk back will make fierce resistance.

You can say healers use to have 3-4 things going for them. Was those thign good or well thought out? No!. But instead of improving those thing to give Healer a unique identity, they simply strip away all that doesn't work so well to simplify healing to the barebone that we have these day. Like, strip away the healing give and replace them with a DPS rotation ... what healers gonna become? SMN light?

30+ year old boomer MMO attrition healer ""gameplay"" is hot garbage and spamming Medica Medica Medica is as unengaging and boring as spamming Glare Glare Glare is.

Well, first off I don't think 30 years old is the threshold for Boomer. Also I wish I were a boomer, 'cause that would mean I got to retired now and sit back sipping tea when you youngsters agonize about your daily life. Honestly I don't know what my generation are. Not old enough to be boomer, but still older than millennia. And you know what, I don't even care to find out. Boomer, Millenia, gen X, gen Z .etc. I have never see a single of those label used in possitive manner, often time they always used as a way to mock the people in question like you're using. Congratulation, you fall for the trap set by politician activist to create this "us vs them" mentality with all of these divisive label, I personally don't care much for them.

And even if someone is a boomer ... so what? They would be entitled to their prefer play style as much as you do. With the amount of vitriol threw around in the last couple page because someone just prefer a different play style ... The same people who always demand their preference is respect, that feel the developer offend them just because the wrong body language ... Sometime I do wonder, do people still have a mirror in their house any more?

I'm sorry I can't hear you over how fun and engaging the Sylphietron 6000 is. Spamming Medica and Cure are truly the pinnacle of healer gameplay. Real Healers love it so much.

I'm not sure if oyu can't hear, but I know for sure you can't read. If you gonna reply and mock someone on top of that, at least try to read what they wrote. Because right now you're just making stuff to mock. I'm not sure who is your target because it ain't me, 'cause I didn't say the thing you're mocking about.

[KageTokage]

A happy medium where GCD heals aren't almost completely ignorable while also making DPS kits less dull would be ideal to me.

[Semirhage]

I mean, there's a good example with WoW, both the retail and classic versions. Heck knows I actually enjoy healing in those games because it has that model. In retail it's still more or less expected that you do damage with downtime if mana permits but those occasions are few and far between. Of course it helps that the groups over there are more dynamic, and if you have too many healers for a fight you can have them swap to their DPS spec no problem. Parses are also generally ranked on amount of healing done, rather then damage, which is nice.

That's my point: WoW is an anomaly. Next time you pick up, say, Final Fantasy [fill in the blank], clock how much time you cast healing spells versus doing anything else. Pick up something with the RPG tag from Steam or GoG. It could be Divinity, or Pathfinder, or Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, any Bethesda RPG, Tales game, Witcher, Fable, Dragon Age, you name it. When people play these games, they tend to *get* it. Your characters defeat their enemies and save the day. Sometimes your healer spent a little more time than usual healing. Frequently, they were blasting demons instead. I've never heard of anyone shrieking "NO! Why does Wynne from Dragon Age have dirty attack spells!? She's a HEALer! She should be HEALing! What ever happened to Traditional Real Healing where HEALERS HEALED?" Nobody's said that because that's ridiculous. Everyone -knows- how healers generally work. Until they turn it upside down because they want FF14 to be WoW.

[Midareyukki]

That's my point: WoW is an anomaly. Next time you pick up, say, Final Fantasy [fill in the blank], clock how much time you cast healing spells versus doing anything else. Pick up something with the RPG tag from Steam or GoG. It could be Divinity, or Pathfinder, or Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, any Bethesda RPG, Tales game, Witcher, Fable, Dragon Age, you name it. When people play these games, they tend to *get* it. Your characters defeat their enemies and save the day. Sometimes your healer spent a little more time than usual healing. Frequently, they were blasting demons instead. I've never heard of anyone shrieking "NO! Why does Wynne from Dragon Age have dirty attack spells!? She's a HEALer! She should be HEALing! What ever happened to Traditional Real Healing where HEALERS HEALED?" Nobody's said that because that's ridiculous. Everyone -knows- how healers generally work. Until they turn it upside down because they want FF14 to be WoW.

"Your characters defeat their enemies and save the day."
Dragon Age: Uhhh.... kiiiind of? And then your wolf boyfriend cutely chops off your hand and says 'bye felicia, see you at the apocalypse' while everyone stares at you like you should have dated them instead if you wanted to be fine

The issue isn't just that in traditional games "healers heal". In FF14, White Mages are the quintessential "Healers heal". Yet if you check out White Magic...

The only other times I see full support healers in RPGs as far as I can remember, they've been borderline useless. The only exception is if their repertoire is that strong and brings in more than just an HP refill.

Dedicated healers are few and far between in FF, and when they exist, they exist as a consequence of the design of the game:
- FF3 White Mages and Devouts were dedicated healers with access to Aero and Holy.
- FF5 had White Mage as a dedicated healer with Time Mage able to cast regen. Tactics also had this system but with a few more classes.
The purpose of these two was to eventually replace them. Either with a more freeform mage (Sage/Onion Knight) or to apply their skills to Freelancer and meld them with another jobs' skills.
- Aerith is the quintessential WHM figure but she's got access to offensive magic due to the way Materia works.
- Garnet and Eiko were White Mages but had access to Summons. The same goes for Yuna in 10, though by endgame your Sphere Grid allowed you to do stuff other characters did.
- White Battlemage in the Zodiac Job System allowed for a more traditional path, but even that isn't enough. Halfway through you could take on a second job to add to WHM. Same with the Dressphere system in 10-2, where you could change jobs mid-battle.

The only pure healer that doesn't learn a single offensive skill and isn't "replaced" necessarily are Rosa and Porom from FF4, whose only offensive tool is Holy. They're otherwise just there to keep the party alive.

But it made sense for FF4 to have this. It's a very traditional turn-based RPG with a limited roster. You can't exactly change jobs in this game (DRK Cecil doesn't count), and your party members come and go often. So having a healer around is always valued. But even then, this system shows it doesn't require following such strict rules. FF6 then takes this approach, but gives the healers more variety, showing that pure healers aren't a requirement of these systems at all. And as I said before, even when there ARE dedicated healers, they still do more than refill your HP and revive you.

14 is an MMO even if it's an RPG. It doesn't need to be limited to the design philosophy of old-fashioned single-player games.

[Raven2014]

That's my point: WoW is an anomaly. Next time you pick up, say, Final Fantasy [fill in the blank], clock how much time you cast healing spells versus doing anything else. Pick up something with the RPG tag from Steam or GoG. It could be Divinity, or Pathfinder, or Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, any Bethesda RPG, Tales game, Witcher, Fable, Dragon Age, you name it. When people play these games, they tend to *get* it. Your characters defeat their enemies and save the day. Sometimes your healer spent a little more time than usual healing. Frequently, they were blasting demons instead. I've never heard of anyone shrieking "NO! Why does Wynne from Dragon Age have dirty attack spells!? She's a HEALer! She should be HEALing! What ever happened to Traditional Real Healing where HEALERS HEALED?" Nobody's said that because that's ridiculous. Everyone -knows- how healers generally work. Until they turn it upside down because they want FF14 to be WoW.

First, RPG and MMORPG are two distinct gene. You dismiss WoW (an actual MMO) as a anomoly, yet using a bunch of single player to make your case ... how does that even make sense?

Second, WoW is definitely not an anomaly. If anything, it is the NORM in that regard. Start War Old Republic use it. Tera is meme for it over-exposure armor but generally considered having the best combat system in MMO use it. The healing in Tera is a battle in itself, and that's not because they have to DPS. While I won't say FF14 is the exception when it comes to green DPS, its model is definitely on the minority side among all the relevant MMO.

Also the irony is in almost half of those games (the D&D style ones), healers main purpose is a buff bots, heal second, and DPS is a distant third only useful late game with a min/max build. I enjoy those games a lot. Path 1 + 2 together clocked in 1000h for me on steam. But no, keep those healers away from my MMO please.


On unrelated note: my observation on this forum about WoW is it seems to be like a certain ex-president. Both the people who hate it and love it seem can't help but let it live rent free in their head. It's always funny seeing two sides gaslighting each other over it.

[Sebazy]

Second, WoW is definitely not an anomaly. If anything, it is the NORM in that regard. Start War Old Republic use it. Tera is meme for it over-exposure armor but generally considered having the best combat system in MMO use it. The healing in Tera is a battle in itself, and that's not because they have to DPS. While I won't say FF14 is the exception when it comes to green DPS, its model is definitely on the minority side among all the relevant MMO.

Agreed that WoW has been the template for modern MMO design ever since it landed. It pretty much annihilated it's peers at release (EQ2 and to a lesser extent, FFXI) and moved the genre forwards into a play style that was more sustainable for players but ironically made things vastly more expensive and difficult for developers.

Whilst I commend Yoshida for consistently trying to find the next big thing in side content, I'm really starting to think that the lack of investment in the fundamentals of the core gameplay loop is starting to haunt them now. We're barely midway through the expansion and in my FC and social circle at least, things feel as dead as the tail end of Stormblood. It really does feel like the Pre Expansion blues at the moment.

IMHO it's either going to be because the Criterion dungeon hasn't been that popular (Which is a shame as I've really enjoyed tackling it blindly), or it's because things have gotten stale to the point where it's just not enjoyable for a lot of long termers. My best guess is that it's a combination of the two.

It's depressing that my 'SE needs a healer designer' post has only ever gotten more relevant as time has gone on. That's a significant failure on Yoshida's part IMO.