Healers need an overhaul

[Darthgummibear]

i think you misunderstand the argument. there us not enough damage to justify such a barebones downtime kit, even all the way to the hardest content. it affects pretty much everyone but the absolutely new to the role.

I wasn't clear, I agree with you. I just don't think they will do it.

[ValkyriaCrystalis]

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. …

Exactly this.
I play dps most of the time and I’m currently levelling sage. And your post clearly states why I’m anxious playing as healer.

Last night I healed the Copied Factory for the 1st time in my life, trying to cast my anxiety over.
My co healer, an AST, was undergeared and died a couple of times on avoidable damages. On the first boss my tank died because I was busy rising the AST, and as you pointed, it’s not a bliss to target a teammate on controller. For the boss starget, it’s easy, you just have to push R3 to “help the ennemy’s target”. But for an ally, you have to scroll down the entire player list.

I struggled a lot with panic healing because there was a very good amount of newbies on my team.

Otherwise, the party damages were incredibly easy to heal ! I would clearly prefer the opposite.

[IDontPetLalas]

Exactly this.
I play dps most of the time and I’m currently levelling sage. And your post clearly states why I’m anxious playing as healer.

Last night I healed the Copied Factory for the 1st time in my life, trying to cast my anxiety over.
My co healer, an AST, was undergeared and died a couple of times on avoidable damages. On the first boss my tank died because I was busy rising the AST, and as you pointed, it’s not a bliss to target a teammate on controller. For the boss starget, it’s easy, you just have to push R3 to “help the ennemy’s target”. But for an ally, you have to scroll down the entire player list.

I struggled a lot with panic healing because there was a very good amount of newbies on my team.

Otherwise, the party damages were incredibly easy to heal ! I would clearly prefer the opposite.

If I take the raid that you were doing, for example, that's a level 80 raid- by that level someone is expected to know their kit.

Now, one point that I absolutely Do agree with is Leonerdo"s point regarding self-resses, this is the only game where I did not have access to that as a healer, although we do have other jobs that can rez, that isn't a guarantee. I would give up a heal in order to have that skill.

i disagree however with the concept of healers needing to learn to 'panic healer' that is something that you do not want to learn, that is something that will get you into a very bad place. You're also not there is fix everyone's mistakes all of the time., you're there time get them through alive, there's a difference.

[Teno]

I fervently hope that they will take inspiration and data from PvP and bring back things like contagion (baked into deployment tactics), oGCD Toxikon, Mesotes, Seraph Strike, the better cards and a few other things that I might be forgetting.

[Ravor]

In other mmorpg (world of warcraft), being a healer truly meant almost only heal, you need to save up your mp mostly for healing, a tank buster required 3 to 4 spell to maximize the tank hp back to at least 50%, very punishing if you stop healing for several second? The tank died and a new mentality will appear, "TANK DYING IS HEALER's FAULT" because tank is so weak that they need healer to even last more than 10 sec, the tank have little self mitigation or self heal, they are useless alone but aside from the tank, any other dps or healer will die in 1 hit by the boss or mobs in dungeon or raid, you know how to know a healer is good or not? The tank will pull the first mob in dungeon/raid and if the healer cant heal the tank to survive that, ussually the party will disband, that makes a new mentality where, we should inspect everyone's equipment lvl, their achivement, etc, it took 1 hour just to make 1 raid of 10/25 player, it was fun at that time, when i was still a college student with lot of time, now? Fully working..... i have no time for that, this is my state of mentality on playing games, i become casual and ff14 is the perfect place for that, but when i was in serious mode, i can get my cerberus mount from delibrium savage which took me 5 weeks of progression

[IDontPetLalas]

In other mmorpg (world of warcraft), being a healer truly meant almost only heal, you need to save up your mp mostly for healing, a tank buster required 3 to 4 spell to maximize the tank hp back to at least 50%, very punishing if you stop healing for several second? The tank died and a new mentality will appear, "TANK DYING IS HEALER's FAULT" because tank is so weak that they need healer to even last more than 10 sec, the tank have little self mitigation or self heal, they are useless alone but aside from the tank, any other dps or healer will die in 1 hit by the boss or mobs in dungeon or raid, you know how to know a healer is good or not? The tank will pull the first mob in dungeon/raid and if the healer cant heal the tank to survive that, ussually the party will disband, that makes a new mentality where, we should inspect everyone's equipment lvl, their achivement, etc, it took 1 hour just to make 1 raid of 10/25 player, it was fun at that time, when i was still a college student with lot of time, now? Fully working..... i have no time for that, this is my state of mentality on playing games, i become casual and ff14 is the perfect place for that, but when i was in serious mode, i can get my cerberus mount from delibrium savage which took me 5 weeks of progression

i don't understand your point- are you being nostalgic? Are you asking for a game redesign?

[Ravor]

Sorry, i didnt elaborate more detail concerning my post, i simply share my experience with some gameplay that actually make healer do heal and it concern either the mobs or bosses are stupidly strong that tank cant even survive more than 3 hit without healer OR nerf all self mitigation or self heal by all class even tank to the point that without healer you cant survive anything at all, this kind of environment will make the game significantly stressful altogether....... in my opinion, it is very hard to find middle ground here, either keep the gameplay like what it is now or make the game more stressful altogether, in my opinion, the middle ground would be harder encounter on extreme and savage difficulty, but even now i think less than 40% player actually do savage? Or even extreme? I think the dev made healing easier is also part of their intention to encourage player to do savage and extreme, this is just simply my personal opinion

[MiaShino]

Sorry, i didnt elaborate more detail concerning my post, i simply share my experience with some gameplay that actually make healer do heal and it concern either the mobs or bosses are stupidly strong that tank cant even survive more than 3 hit without healer OR nerf all self mitigation or self heal by all class even tank to the point that without healer you cant survive anything at all, this kind of environment will make the game significantly stressful altogether....... in my opinion, it is very hard to find middle ground here, either keep the gameplay like what it is now or make the game more stressful altogether, in my opinion, the middle ground would be harder encounter on extreme and savage difficulty, but even now i think less than 40% player actually do savage? Or even extreme? I think the dev made healing easier is also part of their intention to encourage player to do savage and extreme, this is just simply my personal opinion

Support has always had lower engagement then other roles because of perception of it being high stress. You can see this from Overwatch to FF14. Even now with all these many changes deeps queue times are still ridiculously long on Primal (watching friends riiiiight now in sixteen minute queue).

What developers should understand is that type of person willing to play role vital to the parties survival then main that role does not think like most other players. Most of us experience the happy chemicals when we succeed despite adversity. For those moments when you recover from near tpk, at the least I do. That one clutch heal, that clever utilization of party buffs to circumvent what should have been one shot mechanic. We enjoy the "high stress" that oft comes with playing healer.

When you strip all of this away you are left with a role that veteran healers no longer wish to play and casual healers never wished to play in first place. Eventually the role dies and the lesson developers take from this is; "Welp! No one is playing healer thus no one wishes too so yeeeet boy!". It is why true support is fading from most major cooperative games. One of the reasons I am here playing FF14 is because it has support classes and proper holy trinity...

Dev team makes content do able without healers so that should you roulette with bad healer you can still clear. This is.. awful design. Can understand their fear of players failing to complete content as those players tend to be particularly loud but still.. please.. by the twelve stop. Healer - Support is not for everyone and this is okay! There are many many other jobs for those types of players.

[Chopstix]

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?

U know what, i was on the fence about 2 button healers being a problem due to the existence of optimisation around slidecasts and prepositioning. But the above is a pretty strong point. No it is not cool. +1

[Momo_Kozuki]

Healers in this game seem to be designed to contribute DPS-wise, but still need to pay attention on healing. So instead of balacing healing and DPS, the dev just utterly simplify the DPS aspect and focus on healing. It will be fine if one or two healers have simple rotation, but when all four healers share the same main DPS button + DoT button + AoE button + something DPS-ish, it becomes super boring, especially for casual players, which are FF14's main focus, who will barely touch any of the healing kit. Without utilizing every button of the healing kit in casual contents (cuz Dev doesn't want healer have it hard), casual players will eventually feel burn out cuz their classes have stopped growing DPS-wise.


I think the dev should divide a healer class into two part: DPS and healing, and develop both aspects equally instead of just focusing on the healing aspect. Make that the four healers have their own way of DPS instead of a reskin of each other.