What are alternative healing options you want to see on a new healer class?

[QooEr]

So what happens when you have a healer that always does damage and always does healing?

Simply put, the swing between outputs (curative and offensive) available to said healer becomes painfully minimal, making them far less flexible (and, in many cases, less engaging) than more traditional healers (if just not done so poorly as, say, XIV's).

Need more healing? Your damage is already maxed out, so your healing is too. Need more damage? Your healing is already maxed out, so your damage is too. The most you'd have available is to, say, pop a banked haste buff and just hope your damage will be sufficient to keep everyone alive.

It therefore tends towards both the inflexible and quickly stale.

It's not whether a damage-based healer CAN keep up or not that makes it a bad design. It's that it's a kit designed to have minimal opportunity to change its throughput (profile).

a damage-based healer doesnt mean that damage translates into healing all the time, or even in the same way for every single spell. it doesnt have to be a 1:1 translation of damage done to healing done. any design problem can be fixed with enough creativity.

just off the top of my head, having more skills like zoe that purely increase healing would affect the healing output without caring for the damage output. having more variation of kardia healing effects would also help (like if e.dosis gave a shield like in pvp, if phlegma gave a regen, if toxicon did aoe healing, etc). the basis for making sage lean more into "healing with damage spells" is there, and it could work if they doubled down more on that aspect instead of copying scholar's homework.

[Absurdity]

The way Kardia is implemented is meh, I give you that. It's a set small potency, doesn't stack per target hit, and there isn't even an aoe variant - it's basically just a less effective and more restricted Eos

Saying that Kardia is less effective and more restrictive than Eos is debatable, if we compare it to Embrace (because you really can't compare it to Eos' full kit) I'd argue that Kardia comes out on top, atleast with how healers are currently played. Now if healing involved GCDs all the time it would be a different story.


-Kardia is 170 potency and while Embrace should in theory be 180 potency your pet doesn't gain 100% of your stats but only 89%, so in reality Embrace heals for less than it should.
-While Kardia does absolutely nothing if you're casting healing GCDs you also don't lose access to it just because you used Dissipation and it can be targeted, unlike Embrace, so you remain full control over who gets your heal.

[HyoMinPark]

Damage to heal is a terrible idea, that makes healer essentially pointless. And Kardia is just a phat regen promoting you to spam one skill while the other 3 don’t have to

But healers are dealing damage more than they are healing…

So if a healer were to heal via the damage they dealt, wouldn’t that mean they were still healing? Therefore, healing wouldn’t be pointless? Unless you’re talking about GCD heals, which only WHM really wants to GCD heal if we’re being honest here.

[AnotherPerson]

But healers are dealing damage more than they are healing…

So if a healer were to heal via the damage they dealt, wouldn’t that mean they were still healing? Therefore, healing wouldn’t be pointless? Unless you’re talking about GCD heals, which only WHM really wants to GCD heal if we’re being honest here.

Alternatively, give more skills that work with damage via healing.

Then give more support skills that can strengthen Kardion (aka the attacking skill's aetheric output - enhancing skills as the job was described to do). Here are some examples.

1. Convert the Kardion heal effect into a stackable shield (reverse Haima).
2. Provide an additional effect to heal and shield with Kardion, where the spell's base Kardion heal is diminished by 50% but the shield is increased to 70%.
2. Funnel 50% of the next 3 spell's damage dealt into Kardion's healing.
3. Increase the next healing effect of Kardion by 70% up to 4 times (Soteria).
4. Apply Kardion to all nearby allies in range for up to 5 hits + defense mitigation.
5. Attack the enemy but apply a debuff that boosts the next 5 Kardion heals by [flat potency] when hit (siphoning aether).
6. Heal everyone at a flat potency, but also apply Kardion to all allies in range (adjusted Ixochole?).
7. Withhold the effect of Kardion - every attacking spell that activates Kardion stores 1 charge. The skill can be used again to boost the next Kardion by -X- amount of potency.
8. Enhances the next spell that activates Kardion - Immediately triple the base potency of Kardion and the spell's attack potency and make the cast instantaneous at the drawback of increasing recast time by 3x (allowing time to stack and enhance multiple skills). If some spells have too much attack potency when synergized together, this skill can be adjusted such that those spells will not work under this effect.
9. Apply Kardion to all allies, but reduce the heal effect of Kardion from 100% to 60%.

And damaging skills that can:
1. Do AoE damage + heal large amounts of HP (2 charge, cooldown).
2. Do AoE damage + apply Kardion to all nearby allies in range for up to 5 hits.
3. Do high Single Target Damage + heal small amounts of HP (2 charge, cooldown).
4. Do high Single Target Damage + shield all nearby allies (2 charge, cooldown).
5. Apply a DoT that also applies a buff to any Kardion member to heal a small amount (reverse regen).
6. High single target damage + AoE falloff + high Kardion heal, but doubled the recast time (new Toxikon allowing time to stack and enhance multiple skills).
7. Convert and store any healing effect away as a charge-able skill on the gauge as long as the skill is used. Excess healing from Kardion charges the meter gauge faster and the gauge can be spent at any time to do massive amounts of damage, potency scaled based on gauge meter. The skill also heals a certain amount when used, or applies additional effects such as 10% mitigation or large shield. Some skills can generate the gauge faster.
8. Ex: A high damaging attack with AoE falloff damage, but doesn't heal at all. Instead, it generates [+50/100] to gauge. Perfect for an ability.


For this gauge skill to not be taken advantage of, Sage has to be heavily reliant on healing through damage and their entire toolkit mostly revolves around maximizing their healing effects with DPS skills with various effects. Of course, these are all just examples of what I think Sage could have gotten.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd like to start instead by going back to the existing 4 healers and actually fleshing them out.

Frankly, we shouldn't even be discussing Time Mage as a DPS, for instance; that should be Astrologian already, as it was at its start. Double-down on the time-space theme.

Heck, double-down on and reinvigorate every initial theme of every healer. Some, like Conjury, may need to evolve over the job's levels (such as to better accommodate turning into purely generic light-flashes --err, White Magic), but that's okay so long as it doesn't strip the job of the depth it'd manage through those reinvigorated forms of past themes.

[QooEr]

I'd like to start instead by going back to the existing 4 healers and actually fleshing them out.

Frankly, we shouldn't even be discussing Time Mage as a DPS, for instance; that should be Astrologian already, as it was at its start. Double-down on the time-space theme.

Heck, double-down on and reinvigorate every initial theme of every healer. Some, like Conjury, may need to evolve over the job's levels (such as to better accommodate turning into purely generic light-flashes --err, White Magic), but that's okay so long as it doesn't strip the job of the depth it'd manage through those reinvigorated forms of past themes.

i miss time magic sooo much from ast. almost more than the old cards themselves. nothing was more satisfying than extending a bunch of regens along with lucid and lightspeed... i despise the new celestial oppositon.

[Sani2341]

While I seriously doubt SE's competency to do it at all, let alone well, an actually HoT focused Healer would be nice imho.

While all Healers currently have a Regen effect or two, ime, they all usually jsut use their various direct heal oGCDs first, with regens just to let people tick up to full.

What I'm more looking for would be a Healer that stacks various HoTs on people somewhat proactively instead of just pressing big heal x or y after damage. Ideally they'd have emergency tools that took the HoTs and maybe applied them immediatly at a certain %tage for emergency Heals. Then again, this is FFXIV, and we can't have Healing kits where spells inter act with each other beyond 'press this cd to heal more'

[UkcsAlias]

A concept i came up with:

A barrier healer which uses MP directly as the barrier. Abilities generaly focus on restoring MP to enable more healing. Has 2 basic offensive abilities: a slow cast without MP cost, and an instant cast that costs MP. And one amplified DPS ability that does cost quite a bit of MP, but does require team members to have higher HP as the damage is decided by team health (this is ment as a DPS increase on teams that barely take damage). As the MP is used as shield itself, most abilities are on a GCD, including additional healing capabilities outside of using MP (panic heals). Some abilities allow you to mark a DPS which through damage can also recharge your MP. Some traits would be better conversion rates for MP. And getting additional marks on the DPS classes to get even more MP from them. Later on as trait, when out of MP, damage does still get mitigated, but at a reduced value (to allow the player to drain the MP more reliably to get more damage).

Basicly using MP in a completely diffirent method compared to other healers, while in its basics is still being played quite similar to a scholar (until beyond a certain level your trait behaviour starts to truly take over).

[Lyth]

This is an important topic to people not currently playing a healer as well. I would love to main a healer for an expansion or two for variety, but none of the current archetypes really click for me personally.

I think part of the problem is that FFXIV's healer design never really got over ARR's WHM/SCH dichotomy and tries to compartmentalize healers into these pre-existing categories, rather than breaking the mold and creating more diverse playstyles. Why do healers have to be casters? I've seen games with melee range, aura-based healers before. When people were speculating on DNC's release during the lead in to Shadowbringers, that was my expectation on where they would take the job. Start up a dance step, and then launch into melee combos and oGCDs that proc dance effects on nearby allies.

Likewise, there was an interview leading in to Endwalker where Yoshi-p stated that the initial design for SGE was similar to the FFT Chemist concept that players suggested (i.e. to carry a medicine box and throw different potions.) The main issue with a non-magical healer like Chemist is how you do resource management. But that's quite naturally resolved using an ammo/reload system where the potential downtime from reloading forces you to make decisions on how to allocate your resources. And the Mix mechanic could very easily have been executed by combining ground effects from two potions. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the idea makes its way over to Physical Ranged instead. It's as if anything that involves the slightest bit of experimentation or risk finds its way on to DPS instead, which is why the role has a lot more variety and fun.

I probably wouldn't main a caster healer no matter how exciting the rotation, but I would 100% be willing to try out a melee-range aura healer or a Chemist/Ana style sniper healer with healing grenades. Perhaps even something with a edgier theme like using vampiric lifesteal to heal your allies (oh wait, that's WAR).

[Sunhwapark]

I loved playing a Chanter in Aion. It would be cool if we had a healer a bit like that, they had very nice melee combos and supportive spells.