Healers need an overhaul

[currentlemon]

At this point why? We damn near no longer need healers. I'm actually waiting for no healer EX clears and I'm sure there'll be some mad lads who attempt Savage and Ult no healers.

Actually, that would be a great wake up call for Yoshi and Co. to clear their hardest content with no healers and then turn to them saying "What was that about healers needing to play harder content for more engagement?"

Savage Pandaemonium all WARs.

Uh, the first two Extreme Trails can be completed with no healers. And I believe the first two Savage Raid tiers can be cleared by an all Warrior Team. Back when Eden Titan Savage released in 5.08, it was also clearable without healers. Heck, I've been hearing that Japanese players have been doing dungeon runs with no healers as of late.

As for the first two Extreme Trails, the Healer forum made a thread about it.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ithout-Healers

[BrokentoothMarch]

I'd like more involved DPS. Or more involved healing. Or more involved buffs. Or move involved SOMETHING. Jesus Christ, anything that doesn't feel like every fight is a QTE.

[Leonerdo]

I feel like they've made healers easier in the wrong ways. Like for a mid-tier player getting into EX, the ShB changes were good in theory: Make healer DPS more consistent (to hit those incredibly tough DPS checks \s), and provide tons of healing tools so you can't run out no matter how inefficient you are. But that reasoning doesn't make sense unless you're looking at incredibly specific scenarios. Meanwhile, for veteran players it's just more boring, and for complete newbs it doesn't help at all.

If the goal was to make healing more approachable for novices, then they should have made it less punishing. For example, currently, the worst experience for a new player is going into a dungeon, dying to a mechanic they've never seen before, and causing a wipe because they were the healer and nobody could raise them. Why is the healer role the only one that causes wipes by dying in normal content? One thing I loved about TERA (R.I.P.) was that you got 5 free self-resses when you were new to a dungeon, so you had a chance to learn the bosses' attack patterns without wiping. FFXIV could do something similar, or just allow DPS to use Phoenix downs on the healer (slow, annoying, and potentially limited, but it keeps the run going).

Also, because -avoidable- damage is so high (and it gets worse as people take more vuln stacks), healers are heavily taxed by other people's mistakes, and that becomes the central role of a healer: be ready for other people to fuck up. Which is not only stressful for newbie healers, but it's incredibly boring for veteran healers when mistakes don't happen. What if healing were more consistent? Less punishing for other people's mistakes, and a bit higher or more frequent at a base level. Like why are wall-to-wall pulls the only time when single-target heals are needed in a good party? Healers basically have to learn 3 different modes of gameplay: DPS, scripted healing, and panic healing. It's pretty obvious which one is going to be most problematic for newbies, and conversely the least interesting for veterans. Cut that one down a bit (just a small bit), so the others can be increased.

Lastly, I don't know if anything can be done about this, but the simple act of switching targets to heal can be difficult for newbie healers (especially on controller?). Maybe if you cast a single-target heal while targeting an enemy it should go to the tank by default instead of yourself? Idk. (Not sarcastic, I just haven't though about this one as much, so I'm not sure something like that that would be doable or helpful.)

These are just a few systemic things that I think SQEX should be looking at if they actually want to lower the barrier-to-entry for healers. Streamlining the DPS kits just made it easier for mediocre players to beat enrage checks, which I guess is good for EX/Savage PF, but less fun for veterans.

There are other important perspectives, and I'm not at all a newbie healer myself, but those are the things I would look at to fulfill SQEX's goal of making the healer role more accessible. And since that would make healers less punishing for newbies even when they use only the most basic abilities, SQEX can then make the rest of the kit more complex and interesting for the rest of us without fear, right?

I know some people would prefer for there to be less focus on scripted healing, and instead have some built-in random-ish heal checks. Something that requires quick thinking or contingencies, but doesn't rely on people making mistakes. But SQEX would have to be incredibly careful with that, to avoid the possibility of random damage combining with mistake damage to instantly kill someone. That's just doesn't feel fair, as most one-shot mechanics have extra obvious telegraphs. It's still a worthwhile possibility though.

[Silver-Strider]

I feel like they've made healers easier in the wrong ways.

Tell me about it.

Removed skills that actually made Healing easier (Divine Seal, Eye for an Eye, Virus, Disable, etc)
Level locked the majority of your important healing skills until higher levels (Temperance, Rapture, Seraph, Neutral Sect, Celestial Intersection, etc.)
Removal of DPS tools that made dungeons easier by virtue of killing things quicker (AoE DoTs like Aero 3, Shadowflare and Bane).

They didn't make healing easier at all. They made it tedious and boring. Leveling a WHM from 1-50 in ARR and 1-50 now is an entirely different beast in the worst kind of way. You no longer have skills like Stoneskin and Divine Seal that actually made healing a LOT easier since you could prebuff the party with Stoneskin and Divine Seal made your heals powerful enough to actually matter. Nowadays though, the level 1-50 grind is so easy, you don't even HAVE to heal at all. The potency of your attacks, the lackluster damage enemies deal, etc. have made it so that people going into the role are so horribly unprepared that when shit hits the fan, they don't know what to do because their level experience was easy until that point and they never had to learn their job. While the reworking of ARR content has added back some of the old difficulty curve (at least from what I've seen with the reworks of MSQ dungeons actually having mechanics now), the jobs themselves are still horribly lacking for moments that require some level of effort to get thru.

If they want to make Healing more accessible, fine but at least do it properly and not just make low level content so easy that people never get a good feel for the job.

[QooEr]

Here I present you the new healer tutorial in FFXIV :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlc-...4M_18NhpPR3ojs

woah man, not everyone is an elite healer. think of the sprouts

[rewd]

Why? May as well play however you want since it ultimately doesn't matter. Why tell people how to better make a boring task more boring? Let em heal how they want.

At the very least I hope this applies to every role.

[Grann-Goro]

A quick little fix would be to simply make the auto-attacks of the ennemies hit harder.

[rewd]

You see there are different players, i like it more the easy way as well as i see the healer most in the healing part. Maybe a solution is to make savage/ultimate dungeon runs for the healer a full time heal job, so no time to do dmg. And if you don't like the 2111 dmg part from the healer in easier dungeons, maybe better do dps in this dungeon.

We are not monkeys that are happy if they are given something - anything - to do. CureCureCureCureCure is as boring as GlareGlareGlareGlareGlare.

We want and deserve interesting gameplay that doesn't depend on whether you play with competent players or comatose monkeys. We don't want to be told we need to play the hardest content (that was solo healed or cleared with no healers) in the game to feel engaged.

Healer players have the same rights as tank and DPS players to enjoy the game they pay for without feeling like second class customers. How about people drop their condescending attitude and instead of telling others what they should or should not play, we push the developers to make jobs enjoyable for players of different levels of skill?

[Seraphor]

I'd be happy if healing was more 50/50 dps and actual healing, with more support style skills in there too.
Sage is almost there as far as I'm concerned, it has a couple more dps skills than the others, but really... that's just back where healers were 2 expansions ago.
Reimplementing AoE DoTs and one additional proc or combo based dps skill would probably be enough to make all the healers more interesting.

[WaxSw]

I'd be happy if healing was more 50/50 dps and actual healing, with more support style skills in there too.
Sage is almost there as far as I'm concerned, it has a couple more dps skills than the others, but really... that's just back where healers were 2 expansions ago.

Sadly, no. Sage is the exact same 1 button crap as the rest, look Sage in savage:


vs 6.0 Whm


If that's the dev idea of a difference between a pure healer and the new dps healer they need to learn what "difference" means.