Healers need an overhaul

[MiaShino]

From my little understanding, currently healers avoid having to use GCD heals and view it as bad, so a core part of the healer toolkits is being ostracized or something which is confounding.

Beyond gcd healing being deeps loss it is also rather umm.. miserable feeling. It worked perfectly within Swtor which had East Coast servers and stacking alacrity offering 1 second ish gcd. Rouletting into 50 content as White Mage is experience most feist inducing because of this. If someone requires healing now because they stood in the stoopid and Bene is gone you must slow cast cure 2. Hope you are not lagging or the server does not believe you are still moving causing your cast to interrupt. Yes this happens and it is infuriating. Standing completely still > go to cast heal > interrupted > cast again > interrupted > cast finally goes off on myself. ...

All of this made worse by the insistence that we must be facing targets if we wish to cast on them. Nothing like my character twirling around to look the person I am healing dead in the eyes as I clip into mechanics and go dead on the floor.

Unavoidable damage can interrupt casts (please kill this dumb mechanic). Timing a big phat cure 3 for that multi hit stack? Tough! Interrupted! Hope you have Surecast up and did not use it for the knock back.

If you are lagging and the server decides to not register the heal you are required to begin casting again. GCD heals must be planned in advance due to cast time and wiffing one usually results in death or near death. When ogcd heals fail to apply I can just mash into clipping if it means my target lives.

Mentioned before but shall mention again as disserves its own bullet. FF14 has much longer gcd then most other mmos. If we were forced to rely only on gcd healing our total healing output would drop substantially without reduced gcd or buffed gcd heal potency.

Whiiiiich brings a Mia to final point. GCD heals are not nearly strong enough for me to consider wishing to use them. Why touch 700 potency Benific 2/Cure 2 when ED is 900 potency and Tetra is 700 potency. Have not mentioned lilies because those are deeps neutral now and instant casts.

Would probably finally quit the role if they forced us to rely on gcd healing more frequently without serious overhaul to the gcd healing portion of our kits. Make them stronger and more reliable. Also allow them to interact with the deeps portion of our kit in some meaningful way, then we can talk. Swtor did this to great effect! One heal combos into another altering the effect of that gcd heal in similar way to how skill combos on other classes work. Just going from mashing Glare into mashing Cure 2 is only trading one problem for another.

[SieyaM]

The thing is, if you design classes that can both heal enough and deal damage, they will immediately outclass anything that only heals. If you then design encounters that have very high healing requirements that only that superspecialized healer can deal with then you make that class mandatory and that is not good either.

Also, again, healers are not asking to make healers themselves deal more damage, they just want more interesting downtime where there is nothing to heal or nothing to warrant immediate healing.

Everquest didn't have such a hyper focus on balance, and having a Cleric along provided numerous benefits that other classes didn't have. Cleric's were also the only class that had a resurrections spell that would restore nearly all of your lost EXP. That was a huge deal before guild halls and res NPCs.

[ty_taurus]

The thing is, if you design classes that can both heal enough and deal damage, they will immediately outclass anything that only heals. If you then design encounters that have very high healing requirements that only that superspecialized healer can deal with then you make that class mandatory and that is not good either.

Also, again, healers are not asking to make healers themselves deal more damage, they just want more interesting downtime where there is nothing to heal or nothing to warrant immediate healing.

Although if they continue making content deal so little damage that tanks can heal and thus healers are irrelevant for farming, perhaps healers should be doing more damage to justify existing in content. Prior to shadowbringers, I didn't have DPS or tanks leveled. It would be really crappy to not be able to join groups farming certain content because farm parties star barring healers from joining. I've already been told to switch to DPS or leave once in a treasure map party of all things.

[Gaido]

I should say it depends of job. As someone that play much of older FF titles from NES, SNES times, I expect that White Mage will have some really basic damage abilities until holy or specific circumstances (using cure on undeads). WHM in FF XIV is my main job, and I really like that in terms of damage dealing it's simple. I would much more appreciate to have something more to do in terms of healing, shielding, buffing and doing some new tricks (for example, puting reflect on some party member(-s) when enemy is using magic ability). For me it's much more about job fantasy not about button pressing.

But it's me. In D&D you have people that choose some class because it's fantasy, and players that like it's gameplay or power, and other that are just horny bards. Role of game is to make happy as much of these players as it can.

[ty_taurus]

I should say it depends of job. As someone that play much of older FF titles from NES, SNES times, I expect that White Mage will have some really basic damage abilities until holy or specific circumstances (using cure on undeads). WHM in FF XIV is my main job, and I really like that in terms of damage dealing it's simple. I would much more appreciate to have something more to do in terms of healing, shielding, buffing and doing some new tricks (for example, puting reflect on some party member(-s) when enemy is using magic ability). For me it's much more about job fantasy not about button pressing.

But it's me. In D&D you have people that choose some class because it's fantasy, and players that like it's gameplay or power, and other that are just horny bards. Role of game is to make happy as much of these players as it can.

The reality of how this game is designed on a fundamental level, though, is that DPS contribution is the most important metric you bring to the table regardless of your role. This includes healers. This cannot be changed with massively overhauling the entire game's combat design, which includes reworking every single dungeon and trial. The reason for this is because damage is way too infrequent to push you to needing a healing-focused playstyle. This is true of every RPG really, even the old Final Fantasies. If you've ever been under leveled for a tougher boss in an older Final Fantasy, and found yourself using all your turns to heal with magic or potions, you'll eventually get overwhelmed and fail. RPGs are defined by your need to push out as much damage as you can with every turn. Choosing to heal takes this into consideration. If you don't have someone heal, and a party member dies, that's a huge hit to your damage output.

Having said that, it is entirely possible to design a healer who contributes their DPS passively by applying buffs rather than by mashing an attack spell. It's not a fleshed out concept, but on another topic discussing the upcoming AST rework, one idea that came to mind was if you split draw into Astral and Umbral Draw, giving you offensive buffs and defensive buffs, and making both drawing and playing your cards GCD actions that additionally cause a star to orbit around you to a maximum of 6. When you cast an offensive spell, one star delivers an additional attack of the same potency as your DPS nuke (currently 250 on Fall Malefic). You can then use Astrodyne as an OGCD action to pass your stars over to someone else, and when they use spells or weaponskills, your stars will attack with them with the potency stemming from you.

This would give us a healer that has a more passive support playstyle while still contributing DPS.

[Semirhage]

It also goes to show just how...goofy? Disjointed? Ignorant of reality? WHM's supposed "identity" is. It's the passive healer. But it has the fewest tools to support that passivity. Astrologian's buffs better fit the idea of passivity. It's the healiest healer. But it has the fewest, weakest, longest cooldown tools to support free potency output. Astrologian's stronger, more highly available, more numerous cooldowns better support raw lossless HPS output. It's the selfish healer. But its tenuous relationship with free healing means that selfishness gets cut into faster than the other healers. Pick any of the other three healers, and their ability to weave oGCD heals without interrupting their damage is a better enabler of selfish GCD damage riding. Its entire kit runs counter to both the implied design philosophy -and- the community's perception of how it's "supposed" to play. The only thing the community gets consistently right about it is that it's the GCD healer. Yeah, with two, count them TWO lossless GCD heals on cooldowns. The rest don't bolster WHM's output at all; Scholar's former DoT mage archetype better fits the idea of dropping damage casts to heal, because loading your damage into DoTs makes you lose less damage from missed GCDs. WHM is a rat's nest of identities that either don't gel with FFXIV's combat system, or are better expressed by the design intentions of other healer jobs. It needs to be nuked from orbit and given a real distinct identity with spells that encourage, reward, and support it for once.

[Droxybrobotnik]

Not necessarily rotations. Keeping the role identities matters, but i'd be all for giving healers more procc options. The problem is that if you increase their dps without affecting their healing output then you essentially buff the role and have to adjust the rest of the endgame content around that, and if you make it a choice then you will see people posting about healers not doing their job. Overall, it's not worth the effort to appease the minority of people who feel that endgame is not keeping them busy enough with healing. Not to mention people who raids savages are already a minority..

[Recon1o6]

Not necessarily rotations. Keeping the role identities matters, but i'd be all for giving healers more procc options. The problem is that if you increase their dps without affecting their healing output then you essentially buff the role and have to adjust the rest of the endgame content around that, and if you make it a choice then you will see people posting about healers not doing their job. Overall, it's not worth the effort to appease the minority of people who feel that endgame is not keeping them busy enough with healing. Not to mention people who raids savages are already a minority..

Once again

We are not asking for more damage

We asking for more damage BUTTONS for the same level of damage total. Instead of glare x10 to get 3000 potency, have Aero 3 for 1200, stone x4 for 800, water x2 for 400 and glare for 600 to get a total of 3000 potency

[ty_taurus]

Once again

We are not asking for more damage

We asking for more damage BUTTONS for the same level of damage total. Instead of glare x10 to get 3000 potency, have Aero 3 for 1200, stone x4 for 800, water x2 for 400 and glare for 600 to get a total of 3000 potency

To follow up on this, it's also important to note that the frequency of DPS vs healing has literally nothing to do with how many DPS buttons healers have. WHM could have 101 DPS buttons and it would do nothing to change the frequency of healing needed.

There are two things that influence the frequency of needed healing: How much damage is done by the boss to the party, and how many free OGCD healing options the healer has to handle those. OGCD healing is inherently superior due to not having an opportunity cost, and thus the more of it we have, the less we need to stop and heal with our GCD and MP. Adding a simple-yet deep DPS rotation to each healer would have exactly 0 effect on this. It would just give healers a more engaging set of tools to play with while healing isn't needed.

[Banriikku]

I really wouldn’t even call our healing kits complex. They’re just bloated compared to the amount of damage we have to actively heal. There’s nothing complex at all when it comes to any aspect of the healers.

We avoid GCD heals because 1. GCDs are better spent on damage, and 2. the oGCD heals we have are pretty broken. For jobs like SCH and SGE, their GCD heals are pretty puny and it’s inefficient to use them at higher levels. Diagnosis is less potent than WHM’s Cure I.

Personally, I’d rather just see a closer balance of healing uptime and DPS uptime. I don’t particularly think making GCD heals mandatory would improve this—how different would it be doing Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure or Medica Medica Medica Medica Medica versus Glare Glare Glare Glare? Not much.

What i am to fail to understand: Do people not know how FF14 encounter are build ?
After all this discussion i still hear "let the bosses do more damage" - This is not how FF14 encounter are designed and if you are changing this in that way many encounter would break. FF14 Encounter are build as a dance, you remember the steps and do them correctly and beat the encounter.
There is not much rng goin on. WoW Encounter are more build as constant dps check and not much as a dance.

But even if they increased dps checks, it would not change the fact that the job design of healer in FF14 are build as resource needed by dps and tanks to beat the encounter and not a class that is played.

So healers need to be changed into "green dps" or all healer's need a major overhaul. I am game for both but i am not believing that SE is putting money back into FF14. My reason is simple "FF16" and many other "Projekts" and how they got handled.
SE dont even understand that "NFTS" are not wanted at moment and they still push.

With all that in mind:
1. NO, increasing damge dont solve the problem.
2. NO, healer should heal do not work at the moment.
3. NO, healer's dont want more damage but more to do.

Healer's are not just a resource needed by DPS and Tanks to beat an encounter but a class to be enjoyed, not only a spot to be filled.