Healers need an overhaul

[Semirhage]

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?

Because MMOs grew from single-player RPGs. Hence MMORPG. If you want MMO examples, how about Aion? I remember healing in SWTOR. I spent a ton of time debuffing + dealing damage and miraculously, my parties stayed alive through it. The entire RPG genre family looks askance at "pure healers". "Pure healer" classes are the ones you tend to replace in most games. They're just not that useful as you get more skilled. It's just how the zeitgeist of the game style works. Killing things has a functionally infinite ceiling on usefulness. Health bars do not. Eventually you get good enough at filling the health bars that your utility ends. And then you do other things. Constantly spamming healing spells is boring. Healers are fun because you weigh options and multitask with them. If you want to spam spam spam one task, go play a DPS and stop trying to ruin the healing role. Hyperfocusing on one(ish) task are what DPS are good at: they have a theoretically infinite ceiling on refining their one task and getting better at it.

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.

D&D style games see healers as buffbots first, DPS second, healers third if you're actually good at them. Casting healing spells in combat is something you want to actively avoid. You want to patch people up after everything is dead.

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.

Funny, I don't often bring up WoW until other people do. I have no interest in that game, but good lord do its disciples love to invade other MMOs and wail and screech and gnash their teeth demanding that the entire design paradigm be upended to make it more like WoW. It's happened in every. Single. MMO. I have ever played.


MP and aggro management is interesting insofar as it enables/adds flavor to choices. In a better system, I'd love to see 'em. In the current one? Good riddance. There's no point to punishing players for just playing the game. And GOD no, I wouldn't want old Everquest-style "MP management" anywhere near me. Sitting on your butt in the middle of combat for 8-10 seconds at a time is somehow even more boring than spamming Glare.

just do what I do. Leave them be and let them keep on agreeing with each other in circle

Well yeah, it's because Sylphies don't have compelling arguments. Just rewordings of "HeALeRS sHOuLd HeAL OnLY", then they pitch fits when people dare to disagree with that simplistic stance. Make healers interesting to play. Not boring spammy snorefests. What a novel opinion, how dare we agree that healers should be improved. NO! Keep them as they are! They're in the best state ever! Spamming one button over and over and over again is a good start, but we need to make them even more boring to finish perfecting them.

[Sebazy]

And GOD no, I wouldn't want old Everquest-style "MP management" anywhere near me. Sitting on your butt in the middle of combat for 8-10 seconds at a time is somehow even more boring than spamming Glare.

Off topic, but as a Shaman main and hardcore raider, I ended up on a model M keyboard and even then, I still polished my 8 key (cannibalise) smooth over all those years

Everquest's style of combat had it's place, but that was in a time where we were on average much younger and could merrily afford to waste entire days on a raid or camp. A modern day raid is done and dusted in the time many EQ raids took to simply prep and setup.

Back on topic:

Constantly spamming healing spells is boring.

If you can count dual purpose abilities as healing, it can be done in a way that's enjoyable. It just requires inventive approaches. SWTOR did this well, Warhammer did it to perfection.

Abilities like current Lilies, Earthy Star and Macrocosmos show that they understand the theory, but haven't got to grips with it yet for whatever reason.

[Midareyukki]

Back on topic:

If you can count dual purpose abilities as healing, it can be done in a way that's enjoyable. It just requires inventive approaches. SWTOR did this well, Warhammer did it to perfection.

Abilities like current Lilies, Earthy Star and Macrocosmos show that they understand the theory, but haven't got to grips with it yet for whatever reason.

Yes, please. Especially on White Mage.

It's jarring when most of your spells are just some variation of Cure but special™
- Cure 2? Stronger cure
- Afflatus? Instant cure
- Tetra? OGCD cure
- Cure 3? Cure 2 but AoE
- Medica? AoE cure
- Medica 2? AoE cure but with regen tacked onto it
- Benediction? Full Cure
- Plenary? Putting cures on your cures

Other jobs are just as simple, but at least they have special effects that don't make the similarities as jarring!
Astro has delayed cures, cures that scale, cure after mitigation... and Scholar and Sage have mitigation, shields, safety nets and heals as well.

I get that WHM is meant to be straightforward in design, which is why it works. But without any further effects, you're really better off choosing the better spells until they're on cooldown rather than have to choose your approach.

[Raven2014]

If you can count dual purpose abilities as healing, it can be done in a way that's enjoyable. It just requires inventive approaches. SWTOR did this well, Warhammer did it to perfection.

Same thing in Tera, as a healer you can help party member dodge damage (by give them an ifram teleport), provide buff, cleansing, MP recovery, not to mention healing come in many different forms. Healing is so simple that if you think about it, would it make any difference for a healer to heal a group of 4, of 8, of 12 or even 20? I think the answer will be no because the majority of the kit is basically a one size fit-all, fire and forget abilities. In other games, the complexity of healing scale with party size.

Buff in FF14 is also extremely simple comparing to many of its peer. Like it always come at specific time, and you basically just press one button. In other games often there are both on demand buff and full up time buff that the healers have to manage and maintain, adding cleansing duty (which notarious lacking in FF14 so whenever it shows up once a blue moon it feels like a gimmick), actually have to manage your MP and the healer basically would have a full pallate. Can they still DPS? Sure, but that would be like the last item on the list, instead of something on the fore-front like FF14.


People only say "more healing is boring" simply because they don't envision the healer role as anything else but just casting a spell to top people off. Someone had mentioned it before, the healing model in FF14 is boring isn't because they have one DPS button, but because it's too one dimensional. Hell, the fact that "oh I don't have cleanse on my hotbar" is a meme should tell you something. While I agree the healing in FF14 can use more "engagement" and should be more "interesting", I simply don't believe DPS focus in the way to go. In fact if I can be so bold, I certainly will claim FF14 is the one MMO where I see healer does the most DPS while also have the most simple healing model.

I wouldn't have a problem if the dev drop their pants and just scrap the trinity system and adapt a model like Guild War, then I would change my expectation accordingly. But for a game that bill itself as using the trinity, having essentially a Red DPS, a blue DPS, and a green DPS just feel ... wrong.

[Zebraoracle]

Man this just makes me miss healing in Guild Wars 1...

Generally, outside of some weird creative build, healers didn't do much damage other than auto attacking. However, healing was WILD in that game, there were so many creative tools to do it. Shoot, monks in particular, with their protection skill set, didn't even focus on healing so much as they focused on buffing allies with damage prevention stuff. Pure healing monks had to come up with builds to let them keep blasting their heals (so if your skills didn't work together, you were gonna be fairly useless). Ritualists had interesting healing tools, especially summoning spirits that healed or prevented damage. And then you had wonky builds where an elementalist would take a bunch of monk protection spells and do extremely well because of a specific elementalist skill, or necromancer support builds that healed both health and energy (mp/mana/etc). GOSH that was a fun time, that game was truly ahead of its time.

[EaMett]

I don't understand how FFXIV went from having some of the most fun healing gameplay a couple of expansions ago, to the absolute worst. I feel like a proper post-mortem would need to be done within SE to figure out what led them down this odd path.
I'm also going to add that the constant mashing of the single DPS button also takes its toll on input devices. It's less of an issue on controllers since these behaviors are tested for, but keyboards take a real beating. 1 gets hit 99% more than any other key. I've already had to replace keys/switches multiple times (at least I'm fortunate enough that it's an option on my laptop). Others might not be so lucky.

[Reinha]

I remember healing as a resto Druid and planning with my cohealer when I was going to use Tranquility and when he was going to use his big cool down ability. It was required because regular heals were not enough and would drain far too much mana. I was spot healing people the whole time because AoEs were expensive, had a cool down and didn't heal the whole party.

In FFXIV tanks, melee, casters and ranged coordinate with each other when to use the damage reduction abilities that allow the party to survive. Those abilities were taken into account in raid design. Was anything designed with healers in mind? Healers can coordinate heals but it's not needed for survival or MP. It just allows them do more damage with a boring rotation.

[Zebraoracle]

I think what people are forgetting to mention regarding WoW is that WoW actually offered multiple styles of healing - there was something for everyone.

You want to be a pure healer? Holy priest and holy paladin (and even then these two are focused on AoE/raid heals and tank heals respectively)
You want to put a ton of HoTs on everyone and giggle as damage can't keep up? Resto druid
You want to be a jack of all trades and still very effective? Resto shaman
You want to heal by DPSing and damage prevention? Disc priest and kind of (not as much anymore from what I've heard) monk
You want to heal by... doing whatever the heck mistweaver monk does? I still don't know how to categorize this one and I've played it and it's fun and it still baffles me.
Who knows what the evoker healing style is going to be like.

Meanwhile you have sage as a supposed "heal by dps" job, which is kind of very misleading, and a worse scholar but with less jank.
You have white mage and astro with very similar play styles, only thing really separating them is astro cards.

That's it. The healers feel so incredibly homogenized compared to other games that offer actual variety.

[Yeastyloins]

I think what people are forgetting to mention regarding WoW is that WoW actually offered multiple styles of healing - there was something for everyone.

You want to be a pure healer? Holy priest and holy paladin (and even then these two are focused on AoE/raid heals and tank heals respectively)
You want to put a ton of HoTs on everyone and giggle as damage can't keep up? Resto druid
You want to be a jack of all trades and still very effective? Resto shaman
You want to heal by DPSing and damage prevention? Disc priest and kind of (not as much anymore from what I've heard) monk
You want to heal by... doing whatever the heck mistweaver monk does? I still don't know how to categorize this one and I've played it and it's fun and it still baffles me.
Who knows what the evoker healing style is going to be like.

Meanwhile you have sage as a supposed "heal by dps" job, which is kind of very misleading, and a worse scholar but with less jank.
You have white mage and astro with very similar play styles, only thing really separating them is astro cards.

That's it. The healers feel so incredibly homogenized compared to other games that offer actual variety.

On top of having agency what healing style you want to engage in, each of those healers have damage options, some of which can be incredibly powerful and vary between classes. Holy paladin and Disc is almost like adding an additional DPS to your raid or your M+ group depending on the patch, with a Holy paladin build doing DPS levels of burst on the opener with bloodlust at the beginning of Shadowlands. Holy priest have a stun built into their kit which is powerful for fights requiring such. Resto Shaman has a surprising amount of mobility and can burst with good lava burst procs and they have the best interrupt of the healers (longest range and shortest CD). Resto Druid has the option if they are able to do heavy burst damage via Convoke by shifting into moonkin or feral if they do not need to save it for a mechanic.

[Kacho_Nacho]

I think what people are forgetting to mention regarding WoW is that WoW actually offered multiple styles of healing - there was something for everyone.

You want to be a pure healer? Holy priest and holy paladin (and even then these two are focused on AoE/raid heals and tank heals respectively)
You want to put a ton of HoTs on everyone and giggle as damage can't keep up? Resto druid
You want to be a jack of all trades and still very effective? Resto shaman
You want to heal by DPSing and damage prevention? Disc priest and kind of (not as much anymore from what I've heard) monk
You want to heal by... doing whatever the heck mistweaver monk does? I still don't know how to categorize this one and I've played it and it's fun and it still baffles me.
Who knows what the evoker healing style is going to be like.

Meanwhile you have sage as a supposed "heal by dps" job, which is kind of very misleading, and a worse scholar but with less jank.
You have white mage and astro with very similar play styles, only thing really separating them is astro cards.

That's it. The healers feel so incredibly homogenized compared to other games that offer actual variety.

Oh, I didn't forget it. I just wanted to touch on the crux of the issue with FFXIV healing, which is the lack of meaningful choices. This causes it to be unfulfilling. You're just pushing the same buttons over and over without thinking about it.

I agree the healers in FFXIV are more homogenized than in other MMOs. They definitely need a complete overhaul to regain their identities.