Healers need an overhaul

[Reinha]

Re: The phrase, "try to play a healer" - Why don't YOU try to play an expansion as a healer Mr. Lead Designer? That way you can see what we go through, how utterly boring it is. Walk a mile in our shoes.

This. And imo they should go play WoW healers for a tier and then design healers for us that are actually fun to play and engaging at all levels. They took notes from WoW before and it's clearly time to do it again.

[Maltothoris]

That plea is being amusing to say the least. "Why don't you give healers a try?" Well he should practice what he says then. Also you have fights with such fluctuating damage outputs from them. The same expansion with stiorm crown ex was also the one with Zodiark ex which was an absolutely pathetic fight in terms of out going damage. They really need to figure out the difficulty curve.

[Hyperia]

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".

Can most healers handle the healing checks in the raids? Most likely, without many issues, sure. What is causing the problem for the healers is that we are being asked to do complex mechanics, heal a lot more due to the healing checks, AND... maintain high DPS as if we were not having to heal. What they need to do is, somehow, explain to everybody that if they increase the healing requirements, DPS performed by the healers will go down and to accept that. Since everything in this game is DPS DPS DPS and more DPS, the only way I can see them fixing the DPS issue is to give healers more DPS boosting / support abilities to offset the lower DPS.

I love healing, I want to heal more but... I CANT... I have to do huge DPS numbers so that the DPS checks are met and the boss dies. If I'm not 96% uptime on DPS, there is a good chance that checks will be missed.

Without totally rebuilding the role of healers so that they only heal / buff DPS, I don't see how this situation can really be fixed. When I periodically went back to WoW to look around, I tried to play my healer in WoW like my FFXIV healer... god... what an experience that was. In WoW, you HEAL... I mean... you - H E A L - as you don't have time to DPS as there is so much damage and healing spells have long cool downs. Healing in WoW is more like slowing the death of the players just long enough that they kill the monsters before they die.

The way healing is in this game right now and the age of the game, I don't see very many options for the Devs to fix this. There kind of stuck in the situation they are in and there are very few ways to fix this short of deleting healers or rebuilding them from the ground up. Yoshi knows this and this is why his answers are so full of pain and misery.

[WaxSw]

I mean all of this is not surprising at all. My two cents are as follows:

The devs designed healers focusing on easiness to pick up and accesibility disregarding the long term engagement and what the playerbase that actually played the role on a regular basis wanted, this of course makes that existing playerbase gradually leave the role to be replaced by new healers, but since the role is known for its accesibility and is not fun in the long term (or basically as soon as you become mildly competent) there is not a big number of said new players that play it enough to the point of reaching savage/ex level and out of those there is another group that only does because its a "chill" experience, experience that this tier with its hard hitting content does not give and as such those people do not play the role/play it that often, leaving us with the shrinking playerbase of veteran healers + the small group of new healers that sticks to the role enough to be able and willing to clear.

Add some external factors like how the previous tier was so easy and boring that drove a lot of players out of the role, how Sage is no longer the "new toy" and people are realizing its a Sch clone, how the biggest check for this tier is the mitigation and healers have not that much agency over it yet have to pay the price if its not done properly leading a lot of them to just play with statics or not play at all, how people tend to blame healers for any death despite not being at fault... And you have a really good combination to get a declining playerbase, no one wants to do an underpaid, boring job that gets blamed for things out of its control after all.

[Maltothoris]

There actually is some clarification about the green skin part.

A meme referring to "Healer slots being so open and available in PF due to so little healers willing to join recruitment". There's also a DPS equivalent of such meme, called "Red River", where the excessive amount of DPS slots open for Ranged role. The "Red River" meme usually applies to PFs with practice parties as their objective.

[WaxSw]

Without totally rebuilding the role of healers so that they only heal / buff DPS, I don't see how this situation can really be fixed. When I periodically went back to WoW to look around, I tried to play my healer in WoW like my FFXIV healer... god... what an experience that was. In WoW, you HEAL... I mean... you - H E A L - as you don't have time to DPS as there is so much damage and healing spells have long cool downs. Healing in WoW is more like slowing the death of the players just long enough that they kill the monsters before they die.

This works in wow because its party comp is open, meaning that healers can be replaced by dps and as such healing in wow, battle and job design aside, is more about granting enough hps so that the healer count can be minimized in favor of more useful roles, its the same as ffxiv but instead of changing one gcd heal for a dps spell you switch an unnecesary healer for a dps, also the notion that wow healers don't dps is only true at low levels of skill, healers in wow deal significantly less damage than healers in ffxiv but even there dpsing is prefered over unnecesary healing and even with that low focus on damage there the dps tools wow healers have are more varied and interesting than the ones available to xiv's healers

[Deceptus]

Can most healers handle the healing checks in the raids? Most likely, without many issues, sure. What is causing the problem for the healers is that we are being asked to do complex mechanics, heal a lot more due to the healing checks, AND... maintain high DPS as if we were not having to heal.

Which wouldn't be a problem if they'd just be consistent about it. Consistency is key. Do you want hard healing checks? Then significant Healer DPS needs to not be included in fight balance (like they used to claim, but were mathematically proven wrong). No other job has that much going on for them, that much responsibility.

The way healing is in this game right now and the age of the game, I don't see very many options for the Devs to fix this. There kind of stuck in the situation they are in and there are very few ways to fix this short of deleting healers or rebuilding them from the ground up. Yoshi knows this and this is why his answers are so full of pain and misery.

The issue with this is the Devs already DID attempt to start them from Square One in Shadowbringers and it was a colossal failure.. Which is the exact reason healers don't trust them to touch it again.

[Liam_Harper]

Can most healers handle the healing checks in the raids? Most likely, without many issues, sure. What is causing the problem for the healers is that we are being asked to do complex mechanics, heal a lot more due to the healing checks, AND... maintain high DPS as if we were not having to heal.

You realize you're talking about Savage and Ultimate raids, the hard mode content that's meant to be the most difficult in the game? Yes, it's meant to be challenging. Dps are also expected to maintain a rotation, often with higher apm than ours, while navigating the same complex mechanics. That's just how endgame goes, you need to bring your best.

If thousands of other healers can dps while healing a lot just fine, enjoy it, but you can't and it's stressful, then Savage is probably not for you. Why run something you find stressful? In other content, healers doing less dps is fine.

Wanting more to heal is nice, but that has nothing to do with dps. There's only a limited amount of damage to heal, even in heal intensive fights, then every heal after that is completely useless. So we fill in the blanks with dps. It sounds more like your issue is that you don't like having to do something useful with every GCD because full uptime is too much stress. Mythic raids in WoW would be similarly stressful even if it was mostly healing.

Also your dps uptime isn't 96%, I notice your static uses logs, so to see uptime you need to plug those into https://xivanalysis.com/

[Maltothoris]

Something that they should honestly do at this point is just get rid of mits from melee and casters and just give them to healers. Man those were the days when sch still had virus and astro disable. They couldn’t think of anything to give whm so they just got rid of both.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

This tier I finally ditched being a healer main ^^ much more content on dps. That said this tier looks like it's more engaging as a healer but it's too little too late for me and I guess a few other former healers. I have no plans to return to healing esp not since they pushed back the astro mini rework I was waiting for.