Healers need an overhaul

[Raven2014]

Jesus wept the Sylphie HeALeRS shOuLd HeAL oNLy camp never has anything new, compelling, or interesting to say. It's the same smug, self-satisfied "I'm a REAL healer because I HEaL!" horse manure over and over again.

And people like you accuse other of gaslighting.

[Maltothoris]

- Have to spam heal to keep the raid alive.
- Have to make judgement call between fast or slow heal or else someone end up death.
- Have to manage my MP or I may OOM before the fight is over.
- Have to prep party in advance for incoming damage.
- Have to precast heal in advance to get enough raw out out in time.

.

Well that isn’t happening in this game. The issue with the first point is that this games gcd system is really slow at 2.5 seconds, you can’t have damage coming out that fast. With the second point, there is hardly any real chip damage in this game. It’s all burst. With point 3 all healers have so many tools with getting mp back, be it Lucid, exclusive moves or ogcds. Point well that’s really not in the realm of the pure healers outside of temperance, collective and neutral sect. Point 5 hardly any need to precast when we know when the damage is coming and how much it does.

[Shurrikhan]

If you want to simplified it down to the core ... sure. But in 2.0 DPS and Healing was still a choice.

No more or less so than now. You healed as was necessary and avoided overhealing unless there was an upcoming AoE that'd kill anyone not topped off (in which case it was better to go a little over than under). That's... exactly the same as today. The changes are solely:

• A slight reduction in the minimum skill required (as relative healing requirements are far less now than then), but you have more (frequently redundant to point of bloat) healing buttons to manage, and
• A more significant reduction to skill ceiling, as there's less to manage outside of healing / less to optimize in throughput towards long-term requirements).

You have cleric, which makes DPS very in-efficient outside of it.

If you start a cast, you have (if not wasting time and thereby throughput) essentially committed to a GCD of either healing or offense. Cleric Stance merely increased that commitment by a single further GCD.

It was not deep. It did not increase "choice" in healing vs. dps. It was simply a bloated and mostly nonsensical shift lever, as if you had to double-clutch before each time you wanted to turn in the other direction.

You had MP management, meaning going all in on DPS would leave you short of MP for actual healing.

Not really. You simply brought a Bard. Outside of an undergeared and/or underperforming run, there was still virtually no reason to ever use a more MP-efficient option like Cure I / Physick, especially if running a SMN.

And they have tripped away even what little there were since.

...Which had solely to do with relative healing requirement nerfs to placate anxious healers, reductions to the non-healing-related parts of healer kits, and removal of dependencies on other jobs (Ballad, Promoted Bishop, and Manashift). There was no point at which you were more incentivized to GCD heal wastefully. It's never been anything but a bad idea.

Remember at the beginning of 6.0 where Lily were a DPS loss? God, heaven forbid you to heal with Lily - which is your supposed free heal - which is the reason why your MP regen is lower than other healers ... community cried about this "bad MP economy" because of a self-created MP crisis over some small potency loss.

There are three factors for something to actually be "free":

• It must cost no MP/TP.
• It must cost no offensive potency over time to use.
• It must cost no curative potency over time to use.

See an MP cost attached to any of the other healers' sources of "free" healing? As oGCDs, neither do they cost offensive potency, given sufficient weave space (which all have now). And as oGCDs, casting them does not prevent them from being stacked with a GCD heal in the same global's space if necessary (i.e., no curative opportunity cost / not redundant with normal outputs).

Previously, Lily met only one of those 3 factors. Now it meets two. It still falls short in terms of stackable burst healing. The only reason that isn't being likewise pointed out is because there's virtually no use for that anyways because the burst healing requirements were trimmed so short and tuning made up for what combined throughput would have otherwise been lost to Lily casts being GCDs instead of oGCDs.

It's always DPS DPS DPS, if healing means loss DPS than people refuse to heal.

Except a lack of heals that result in a death results in a far greater DPS loss. If not healing at a given moment would not result in a death or more personal dps loss being required later due to having to heal more at that point, then... yeah, you shouldn't be wasting your time healing.

But your entire purpose, including via not letting people die outside of specific exceptions (i.e., when it would cost more resources in MP, time, and CD value, to fight through a debuff than to just rez after), is to speed up the run. Healing is your uniquely fleshed out means to do so, but your purpose in attending the run remains the same as everyone else's: to do the thing (clear the instance, etc.) as quickly and enjoyably as possible (balancing speed against risk as per the time, goals, experience, and patience your team has).

Uh ... how about making fight where you actually need to utilize the entire kit and even more? How about oGCD is the extras you need for extra oohm and MP economy instead of your bread and butter.

Those advocating for more to do during downtime aren't the people you need to convince to allow additions like that. They clearly have more than enough downtime (enough to get bored of how little depth and variety are available within it). They're merely advocating for at least increased skill ceiling.

You'd need to convince the "don't increase the skill floor" crowd, which, yes, predominantly tend to be those asking for (still) little to do regardless and some of the staunchest opponents against adding (back) any sort of non-healing depth despite still seeming to struggle with the skill floor (such that the space between there and the ceiling is pretty irrelevant to them).

How about tank buster coming harder and more frequent that are beyond the healer oGCD's capacity?

It's not either-or, unless you are asking for harder than Ultimate levels of healing requirements in all content. You can both have more than 2 ST buttons for use in downtime and have less downtime.

So long as there is room for less capable players, there is going to be room (yes, optimizable downtime) between floor and ceiling -- which will only expand as gear increases. The downtime, then, is still going to be a significant component of healer gameplay worth addressing even if it were a fifth its present size.

Ok, you wrote that and you still don't see why I said what I said? Like ... you're suggesting remove HEALING ABILITIES and replace them with "interesting DPS options" on Healers ... and me saying people just want to play green DPS considered gaslighting?

You do realize that healing abilities are literally the oGCDs, the bloated count of which make the skill floor higher than it otherwise would be relative to the meager healing requirements in this game (thus expanding the downtime required to placate/allow for less skilled/coachable players)?

If you want less downtime, especially without increasing the skill floor to the point of excluding a portion of players currently accounted for, the most direct solution would be to trade excessive healing oGCDs for additional actions useful for downtime. That's not mutually exclusive with other changes to healing kits, tuning, or context. It's simply a very easy and reasonable first step that could be taken.

[Nizzi]

30+ year old boomer MMO attrition healer ""gameplay"" is hot garbage and spamming Medica Medica Medica is as unengaging and boring as spamming Glare Glare Glare is. Doing the former is not what "traditional" or "real healers" do, and no amount of increasing healing is ever going to make spamming Glare fun or a "reward for doing a good healing job" as Yoshida thinks it is. Embrace what the game is and make healers engaging to play in all content, no matter the skill level. It isn't hard at understand.

The funniest part is that figuring out the puzzle of where to use what healing resources to get the best bang for your buck is what's fun about healers in Savage, but once you've figured that out, you're left with nothing to do in reclears and beyond. MAKE. THE. DOWNTIME. KITS. FUN.

[Zebraoracle]

To answer both of these posts:

The new savage is pretty engaging, for healers. Lots of heal, lots of mit, lots of mechanic to solve. But Healer pop take a deep.

Face it: "we want it to be more engaging", "we want it to be more cool" are nothing but window dressing excuses for people who want nothing more but to play a green DPS with big fat numbers. In short, the majority of healers complain stem from the group of people who subconsciously don't want to play traditional healers to begin with, period. I enjoy the healing of this tier, but I can tell I'm in the minority. You said Yoshi's comment is so disingenuous it's unreal ... well, I have the same impression on the comments made by community.

But, you are correct in saying Ultimate is more engaging but it's not due to healing. Comparing to this tier savage, healing DSR was a disappointment.


This is by large SE's fault, since 3.0 in the last 6-7 years they have ingrain the players with the mentality of DPS is king and nothing else matter with their raid design. I applaud their attempt to walk back on it now and I think that's the right direction. But I also admit they're trying to move mountain, and wish them luck.

I mean... P5S and P6S were only "engaging" for like, the first few weeks until healers and tanks outscaled the DoTs through gear. Those two raids are no longer remotely threatening and the "scary DoTs", which people were so excited for, can easily be waved away with OGCDs. I took a break from savage for a bit and resumed with my static on P7S, and uh... the party wide and tank DoTs there aren't very threatening either. My co-healer and I both take turns solving the party-wide DoT with a single OGCD each and that's it. That's not really what I call engaging.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those "healers should only heal" healers by any means (hell, when I healed in WoW I was also contributing to damage), I just... want the role I love to be fun, and I take offense at YoshiP implying Ultimates are the supposed solution to that when it's not even remotely the case.

[Semirhage]

And people like you accuse other of gaslighting.

I'm sorry I can't hear you over how fun and engaging the Sylphietron 6000 is. Spamming Medica and Cure are truly the pinnacle of healer gameplay. Real Healers love it so much.

[ForteNightshade]

Remember at the beginning of 6.0 where Lily were a DPS loss? God, heaven forbid you to heal with Lily - which is your supposed free heal - which is the reason why your MP regen is lower than other healers ... community cried about this "bad MP economy" because of a self-created MP crisis over some small potency loss. It's always DPS DPS DPS, if healing means loss DPS than people refuse to heal.

Welcome to Final Fantasy XIV, where DPS is the only metric which matters. This isn't the dev team catering to community demands but the community itself adapting to the lackluster healing requirements content has in this game. On numerous occasions now Yoshida has made no secret he and the dev team as a whole believe, ignorantly, believe healers predominantly GCD heal or they simply don't want to "pressure" the baby raiders who want to spam Medica II and can't understand why that's not good enough. Content is simply too scripted and the outgoing damage is laughable up to and including Ultimate. You mention "traditional healers." Explain to me how I'm supposed to be a "traditional healer" in Algaia where I've literally pressed Dosis 500 times? If there's a magical way I can make content deal more damage, please, do tell.

"Just go to Savage then!"

I have. I healed every single fight last tier on Sage, in Party Finder without pressing a single GCD shield. I cleared phase two with a combined 97%. That means my White Mage co-healer and I were among the top end of players. Yes, by that point gear out-scaled the content but it was also a pug. Not to mention, what exactly are healers supposed to do when they inevitably out scale the content? I can't make the fight hurt more.

This tier is no different save for P8S. There's an adjustment period to be certain but once you work out the mitigation sheet, you're casting maybe 1-2 GCDs at most in P7S. That isn't to say this tier is bad. Frankly, it's the best tier we've had since Creator from a healer perspective. Unfortunately, it's left a good chunk of the "traditional healers" screaming because they suddenly can't get away with just shielding every AoE with Prognosis and thinking that makes them a good healer. Good players don't just value "DPS, DPS, DPS". They value a healer who can DPS efficiently while still keeping the party alive. Why would I want a 2% DPSing Sage who may be great at overhealing everything when I can have a 85% DPSing Sage who heals just enough to keep everything else but will also help kill the boss? Both Sages will clear but only one is actively contributing to the group's intended goal: deplete the boss' HP.

The irony is almost every poster on this forum and on the discussion reddit have asked for increased healing, be it in the form of unpredictable damage, more tank busters or just higher damage overall. We've been told no because it's too hard for the casual players. We're asking for DPS buttons now because there's literally nothing else we can ask for. They won't add debuffs, they won't increase healing, they won't add buff or resource management. DPS is all that's left. In fact, here's a quote from Yoshida himself:

Yoshida: So I totally understand that those healers that have a very high player skill level and they’ve really mastered their jobs go into these different raids or battles and when they do have some downtime between their heals they do cast more offensive spells. Some of them desire to have more technical aspects of it so they are more active and I totally understand that sentiment. But of course the basis of a healer is to heal so I think the development team and I have this thinking of getting that sense of exhilaration from doing really good heal work.

That being said I don’t think we would do any sort of dramatic addition of offensive skills moving forward. By having these offensive abilities some players, like new healers, might feel pressured like “oh do I have to have good DPS while I’m healing?” or some players might be aggressive like “oh hey you have an offensive skill in your kit, why don’t you use it?” and I don’t think that’s optimal either.

But of course we do have the new job, Sage, which will allow for this unique gameplay where if you land an attack it heals at the same time. Or if there’s like a particular barrier ability that you cast and once that’s depleted it increases the resource which could lead to an attack which is very unique. I think players would be interested in trying that out for sure.

Don't tell us to ask for more "fight where you actually need to utilize the entire kit". Tell Yoshida because he seems to think those fights would make the game to challenging and cause stress on healers. Guess which section of the playerbase that refers to? It's not the DPS healers but the Sylpies who struggle to heal 24 mans.

[Raven2014]

No more or less so than now.

That's the point. I never said FF14 had "amazing" healing mechanic from the beginning. I simply said at least there were "some" consideration. Was they good? No. However 10 years ago from Midas when there were two paths to diverse, the dev choose the DPS path. Instead of improve the healing experience, instead of making resource managing more deliberate meaningful, they decided instead of simply strip those things a way. There have been a questions in the community for a while now: why do we still have MP when it's so much of an after thought? Because the complain about 6.0 WHM is why. The community's mentality has been spoiled to the point that any attempt to walk back will make fierce resistance.

You can say healers use to have 3-4 things going for them. Was those thign good or well thought out? No!. But instead of improving those thing to give Healer a unique identity, they simply strip away all that doesn't work so well to simplify healing to the barebone that we have these day. Like, strip away the healing give and replace them with a DPS rotation ... what healers gonna become? SMN light?

30+ year old boomer MMO attrition healer ""gameplay"" is hot garbage and spamming Medica Medica Medica is as unengaging and boring as spamming Glare Glare Glare is.

Well, first off I don't think 30 years old is the threshold for Boomer. Also I wish I were a boomer, 'cause that would mean I got to retired now and sit back sipping tea when you youngsters agonize about your daily life. Honestly I don't know what my generation are. Not old enough to be boomer, but still older than millennia. And you know what, I don't even care to find out. Boomer, Millenia, gen X, gen Z .etc. I have never see a single of those label used in possitive manner, often time they always used as a way to mock the people in question like you're using. Congratulation, you fall for the trap set by politician activist to create this "us vs them" mentality with all of these divisive label, I personally don't care much for them.

And even if someone is a boomer ... so what? They would be entitled to their prefer play style as much as you do. With the amount of vitriol threw around in the last couple page because someone just prefer a different play style ... The same people who always demand their preference is respect, that feel the developer offend them just because the wrong body language ... Sometime I do wonder, do people still have a mirror in their house any more?

I'm sorry I can't hear you over how fun and engaging the Sylphietron 6000 is. Spamming Medica and Cure are truly the pinnacle of healer gameplay. Real Healers love it so much.

I'm not sure if oyu can't hear, but I know for sure you can't read. If you gonna reply and mock someone on top of that, at least try to read what they wrote. Because right now you're just making stuff to mock. I'm not sure who is your target because it ain't me, 'cause I didn't say the thing you're mocking about.

[Raven2014]

Welcome to Final Fantasy XIV, where DPS is the only metric which matters.You mention "traditional healers." Explain to me how I'm supposed to be a "traditional healer" in Algaia where I've literally pressed Dosis 500 times? If there's a magical way I can make content deal more damage, please, do tell.

I already did though? Either you missed my point or you actually didn't read them.

I already stated:

- I am actually green DPS. I don't like it much, but I'm fully conform to the gaming norm. When I'm in party I will make sure I play to the most efficient as the class/role designed for, regardless of my opinion.

- That the games for years had been designed to ingrain the players base with the green DPS mentality.


I merely mentioned "traditional healing" as my prefer preference, as my wish and dream how the game would be designed. I think people are so vitriol and hostile toward my reference that they just skimped through and press me on stuffs that I had never said. To be clear, if you're in my Algaia run and you spam medica, I would consider you griefing. While I would not initiate the vote kick, I wouldn't blink if the party decide to kick you either. I do not ask people to spam heal in current contents. I wish content would be designed where spamming heal is a necessity.

Is ... that ... clear?

[Raven2014]

Well that isn’t happening in this game. The issue with the first point is that this games gcd system is really slow at 2.5 seconds, you can’t have damage coming out that fast. With the second point, there is hardly any real chip damage in this game. It’s all burst. With point 3 all healers have so many tools with getting mp back, be it Lucid, exclusive moves or ogcds. Point well that’s really not in the realm of the pure healers outside of temperance, collective and neutral sect. Point 5 hardly any need to precast when we know when the damage is coming and how much it does.

Frankly, my problem is not really about healing itself, but more about role indentity. Right now there are so much conflation between roles that it both make it a balancing nightmare and a messy ball of unclear purpose. The Green DPS issue is merely the poster child of the issue, but hardly the only issue. My solution, in full, is actually very radical:

- Take away all party wide buff from DPS. Make them all selfish DPS. They're in charge of their own optimization and no one else. Also, remove stuff like fient and addle.

- Tank should only be in charge of personal defensive cool down, and maybe debuff the boss. They should not be double up duty to party wide mitigation.

- Support classes (p.range) should have the exclusive job as buffing the party, they should be the only one with party wide buffs.

- Remove majority if not all but the most basic self healing (i.e second wind) from all classes.

- Healers should be exclusive in charge of healing and raid wide mitigation.


I feel this way you can amp up the complexity and difficulty for each "role" that is unique to them. Instead of this melting pots "everyone does everything just some better than the others with DPS the only true go to".