Healers need an overhaul

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

It annoyed me they're so stubborn about not adding more dps that they added rubbish filler like Krasis and Aquaveil instead. They didn't think players could handle one more damage button, even at nearly max level.

While the lv86 abilities do technically have uses, we really didn't need them. They just exist for the sake of adding something. Lv86 would have been a perfect slot for more dps without overwhelming players.

It felt even more insulting that they could’ve added those actions way lower in levels… say, ARR lv range to give healers at least something else to press & actually served something. I.e. teaching baby WHM/AST that Aquaveil/Exaltation can be used to help with mits, teaching baby SCH/SGEs that they can make thicker shields with their Protraction/Krasis. And yet for whatever reason it’s shoved up there at lv86—people have to go through 85 worth of levels just for that single button. Buttons should feel more impactful when learned at higher level. Not these 4—they’re just fluffs.

[BRVV]

I play on controller and have easy access to 3 Cross hotbars without using the "switch to another hotbar". You can set them up. If all controler players would just take 30 minutes aside to look at the options...

But how many buttons are 3 cross hotbars. One is 16, so 48. Yep. 48 WITHOUT switching. My limit button isn't even on there ^^. Easy space. If you want to know how many are displayed without pressing a button (for info on recast) the answer is 2 bars, so 32.

[Lazariah]

There's lots of issues with changing how healers work, as others have pointed out. The fight philosophy cannot change without changing every single other class and every fight in the game so that wont happen. We're stuck with very predictable damage that requires healing. I say embrace heals that do DPS. Assize is fun as heck and ALWAYS feels good to use. Earthly Star? Always feels good when it goes off. Kardia? Every hit is a heal and that is awesome.

I'm not saying EVERYTHING should heal and do damage, but making certain things also do damage would end up creating a rotation for high end and just be a fun bonus at low end. You will still have the raw heals for big damage bursts and tank busters, just more option to press if you are casual and feel like it and more to do if you are not and trying to min max DPS.

Because lets face it, high end raiding is ALL about DPS. No healer main in Savage content or higher I've known cares about how well they heal. People are alive? Cool. We didn't down the boss because of low DPS? F. That is not going to change, ever. Because the fight philosophy in this game wont change. It actively encourages healers to care more about their DPS.

But we also don't want to alienate more casual players and new players. And I think YoshP worries about that too much. I think he went overboard. I just hope he realizes there are ways to keep raiders happy while not making non raiders unhappy.

[Lunalepsy]

I have a great respect for FFXIV and the devs that create it but I feel like the design of healers in this game is kind of ridiculous. Why is it that healers are the only role that get an extremely lackluster DPS rotation yet are still required to contribute significant amounts of DPS to clear difficult content? Like, in what world is a 1-button spammed DPS rotation okay for ANY JOB in PVE content? Well, after playing this game for 8 years now and weathering all the various changes to the jobs I honestly think we've hit the point where healers seriously need to be redesigned.

I believe that by redesigning healers to have simple DPS rotations not unlike tanks that more people will be attracted to the role which will boost the overall health of the game. This can be done in two steps: consolidate useless healing actions and add simple rotations that easily tie back into healing. Consolidating actions is very simple to begin with: there's no need for a cure 1/2 or a medica 1/2 when these abilities should simply evolve into higher forms. All the healers have redundancy in their healing kits that could be streamlined to make room for a few DPS buttons which could even add some of these abilities back in some way, shape, or form.

After this, each healer could have a simple DPS rotation that ties back into their healing in some way like increasing their healing potency or granting them a free heal, etc, in the reverse way to how using lilies grants a bloody lily at the end to restore lost DPS. And in the spirit of EW, they could even make it so that using your healing abilities don't break these combos so there's no reason NOT to heal when you really need it but also a reason to optimize your DPS to increase healing. But most importantly, it doesn't have to be overly complicated; just more than the one attack and one dot we've had for a while now. My mind is exploding with countless ideas about how this could be done inside of the current game's framework but I'd love the opinions of others on the matter.

The game needs to go back to its roots. Abandon WoW, embrace FFXI!

[Recon1o6]

I saw a healer kicked for not doing dps once or to be more precise, attitude leading to not dpsing. It was called A1s and we wiped to faust. One quick look at the stream the dark knight was running and upon being questioned the healer responded "I cba to do damage. The dps shud git gud"

kicked out of the pug group so fast I didn't get chance to type out my wtf response on my ps3.

[GoatOfWar]

I saw a healer kicked for not doing dps once or to be more precise, attitude leading to not dpsing. It was called A1s and we wiped to faust. One quick look at the stream the dark knight was running and upon being questioned the healer responded "I cba to do damage. The dps shud git gud"

kicked out of the pug group so fast I didn't get chance to type out my wtf response on my ps3.

I mean if the healers don't do damage then you're going to struggle with the enrage timer. Kicking the healer who openly refused to deal damage was the right call.

[Floortank]

If regular content becomes impassable because casual healers can't clear it, everyone will quit the game.

[Recon1o6]

If regular content becomes impassable because casual healers can't clear it, everyone will quit the game.

This is bait but there is something of merit here.


A minimum amount of effort and skill is important for everything that's not a tutorial. Currently the minimum effort is literally zero for the majority of the casual content.

raising that so all these "I oNlY hEaL" folks either quit the role or contribute, or it forces yoshida to actually overhaul healers would not be a bad thing in the slightest

[Maltothoris]

Well here was some stuff from, the liveletter when they were taking questions.

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

[ty_taurus]

Well here was some stuff from, the liveletter when they were taking questions.

Q2: For this Savage, there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question here to you is: Are you aware of the reason and is there something you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by a long "hmmm") Things to reflect on......things to reflect on? Well for one I did read something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that... But we also experience situations where there is a serious lack of tank participation and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....well, this is hard to answer...I mean there's also the request we got from players that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, and among other things that is asked of us...(another long pause) So in this case, due to certain circumstances and certain "wall" which caused deviations (biases?) to occur, and this is definitely a thing after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely......I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything on this matter what I am able to say at this point is "please give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you are allowed to handle multiple roles, and when you try playing a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting through that experience....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason). Ok, we are told that (healers) are free, which is why healers tend to focus on firepower instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens....so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here. Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder), Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us......I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best and this is what we can do here.

It essentially boils down to this:

A significant chunk of strong, dedicated healer players who would have the skills and willingness to keep up with the higher healer requirements have abandoned the healer role at some point between the release of ShB and now. The new healing requirements are pushing away less experienced and/or flex healers who might only have P1-P4 Savage raiding experience. This leaves a much thinner selection of healers remaining.