Healers need an overhaul

[Deceptus]

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 seems like he has realized they've designed themselves into a corner. I hope something fruitful comes of it.

IMHO they need to stop worrying so much about the numbers, and focus on if the jobs are FUN and engaging. Because if they're not fun, what's the point?

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.

[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.

[Banriikku]

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

*snip*

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.[/B]

This is a sad answer from the Yoshida. Because it means he does not understand and know how healers are played in FF14 at all. Yoshida and his team created this "healer thing" with the "only dps will be rewarded" mentality. They could review this but no, its always they players fault and not the bit gigantic incentive for more dps. Big sigh...

Its funny he could test it, very fast and easy: play an encounter as a healer.
Dps is rewarded nothing else BECAUSE healing is not random and on top of that binary.

They created it, not the players. Also why the frick does he cater to ALL PLAYER should be able to play healer ? No other job has this nonsense attached to it...
BLM - not good enough than drop it
NIN - too many bunnys ? Lern it or leave it!
MCH, your ping is bad ? Please f-off.

Why is the healer job the only one with "even my 90 year old unlce from Alabama can play it" mentality attached to it ? Makes no sense and is damaging. WE have many jobs so you can PICK ONE/SOME you like and CAN PLAY not you can play everything.

[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]

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/

[Hyperia]

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/

Sigh... voice my opinion and FFLogs is tossed at me...

Airight... I'll go back to lurking and keep my head down, I'll let the 96%+ DPS up time people talk.

[ty_taurus]

Sigh... voice my opinion and FFLogs is tossed at me...

Airight... I'll go back to lurking and keep my head down, I'll let the 96%+ DPS up time people talk.

Well that just broke my heart.

[MintnHoney]

Sigh... voice my opinion and FFLogs is tossed at me...

Airight... I'll go back to lurking and keep my head down, I'll let the 96%+ DPS up time people talk.

I can't exactly speak for Liam, but I doubt that they meant anything harmful or to invalidate you (considering that, prior to that, they had actually chosen to go through each of your post's discussion points). If anything, you could have ignored that part and just chosen to continue in the discussion anyway, and just chosen to talk about the other 3/4ths of his reply to your post.

That's what I'd do. I barely heal anymore, and when I do, it's barely coherent since I just don't care (and we still succeed, go figure, haha~). That doesn't mean I'm not going to send messages to Square Enix on a weekly basis reminding them that healing is a boring chore and that this bleeding of healing veterans won't cease until it no longer is.