Healers need an overhaul

[Recon1o6]

My static bypassed that with a lootmaster rule. Everybody gets 1 drop, then it rotates. We /random, and if you win a piece, congratulations, you can't roll on another one (upgrade items have a different count) until everybody else gets a piece (from any floor). So we have ended up in a situation where the healers one time were the first ones BiS, with the ranged/caster DPS and tanks right behind them and the last two to get BiS were the melee. Note that if we find ourselves far too close to the enrage with a clear despite a near perfect run (as what happened just this week with P7S), we'll modify that rule for the one time and only DPS can roll on the loot for that fight.

unfortunately your static is in the minority here, most gear up dps, then if its not bis then tanks to the point its an unspoken rule

I've been in and out a number of statics over the years and despite asking, each time its me and the other healer who gets left behind.

[angienessyo]

My group does gear dps then tanks then healers. But we also make sure the healers get the first mounts and dps will get the mounts last so that the healers are at least getting something cool. The past few tiers our regen healer has always lucked out and gotten the first non coffer weapon drop as we've gotten an AST or WHM weapon every first clear. (another friend actually had 3 SCH books drop across their first 3 clears)

[Kewitt]

Healers need mounts and bam there would be more healers.

[MintnHoney]

Healers need mounts and bam there would be more healers.

Not really, no. While it would be nice to get special mounts, the population would just be filled with those who play the role for an easy role-in-need hand out, but who, otherwise, "mysteriously" disappear for most other content.
You know, like it is now.

[BaconBits]

Healers need mounts and bam there would be more healers.

Healers need actual changes, not shiny baubles to attract the unwashed masses.

[Floortank]

Healers need mounts and bam there would be more healers.

There's no shortage of healers though.

[Maltothoris]

There's no shortage of healers though.

Depends on where you are looking. The shortage mainly stems from Savage PF needing healers and while there are those who can, there are factors that prevent others from doing mainly learning a whole new set for the savage fights and parties setting their ilevels above 610 which would prevent a crafted set from coming in.

[Kaliesto]

I think its weird that these classic Healer jobs are limited in their attacks, and its time we went back in time for a sec regarding that -

White Mages had the following abilities -
Dia/Diara/Diaga

Light Magic traditionally used against the undead, and it was pretty devastating as it lvled

I say White Mages are the least stripped of the healer roles currently in terms of attack spells, but they could use more Debuff and Buff spells that White Mages in other games had like the Invis spell that raised evasion (in this case it would be the parry stat).

Astrologian, first made their appearance in FFT and very thematically similar to Time Mages.

What needs to happen with them that its time Astrologians were given a new upgrade by adding in a new job the Time Mage itself, Time Mages have more in their arsenal with attack spells historically so going by this route would make the most sense. Besides Yoshi P. hasn't done a Job Stone Upgrade in quite awhile now and finally having a proper Time Mage would be pretty cool.

Also have their LB2 be upgraded to Stop all Monsters in the vicinity for 10 seconds or more (inspired by FFT's Celestial Stasis), Healer LBs need a bit more love here instead of being copy-paste.

Alternatively just incorporate classic Time Spells into the Astrologian.

Scholars, I'm not sure where to go with this one

I think the only real solution is import what worked for Scholars in FFXI into FFXIV, they would become a lite-version of Red Mages but at least they will have more variety of attack spells. Scholars also had a lot of buff and debuff spells traditionally, something they could use too.

Sage

Gonna be honest Sage is a complete and confusing mess, and I have not heard good stories about it. I think what needs to happen here is let Sage be the first dual-role job because traditionally Sages could cast both high level black and white magic. I think this was a missed opportunity to introduce such a concept if a Sage wanted to either fill in the role as a Magical Ranged DPS or Healer.

[WaxSw]

Depends on where you are looking. The shortage mainly stems from Savage PF needing healers and while there are those who can, there are factors that prevent others from doing mainly learning a whole new set for the savage fights and parties setting their ilevels above 610 which would prevent a crafted set from coming in.

Also lets not forget the different luchybancho census that show healers are the least played role at all level ranges and that is in an expansion that gave a "new" healer job

[Fendred]

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 thing is, while it is pretty normal to be spamming glare to the point of actually wearing down your mana pool from it in normal content, it is a totally different story in savage content. Astrologian's opener shows what would happen if healers had DPS abilities: The healer strains to adjust to incoming raid-wides by comparison to sage, whm and scholar. Normal mode content doesn't require the full use of the healer's toolkit, whereas savage content does. What I do find problematic with healers has specifically to do with scholar and astrologian. Scholar still has leftover heavensward design elements-- that is, they require the player to know when something is coming up to fully utilize an ability. In this case deployment tactics with a guaranteed critted adloq and ground targeting on their primary defensive buff. Sage by contrast is snappy and responsive. Astro's issue is really just ability bloat.