AST - Making an Easy Healer

[Semirhage]

The main reason why 1111 is constantly being mentioned, is because the healing requirements themselve are quite often lacking. Its supposed to be a thing you can do while there is nothing else to do, but this ended up being 80% of the time. Reducing that time actualy would do a lot already.

But to keep healing approachable, increasing the healing requirement would backfire. It would only hurt players that want to start healing because they will be called things like trash, and on that make the job even less popular to play. Thats why people want that 1111 to change to a 123123 to at least make that part less dull.

In a good system, 1111 would not be an issue, since you are too often busy doing the other tasks, but FF is simply not designed to be like that. And changing that now is far too much work and creates new conflicts again (you dont want someone that has to start a lvl79 dungeon to have a near full set of lvl77 gear, as thats just needlessly slowing them down, or forcing them to spend too much). Still, it would be nice if older MSQ parts would scale linearly towards the next set of tomestone gear instead of having the current ilvl spike, but i dont think you want to rework nearly all the dungeons in the game.

First, nobody who seriously approaches healing reworks wants "123123". That's not meaningful interaction. It's 1111111 with a macro. Second, varying skill levels exist between players. When one person finds content with "perfectly tuned healing, barely have any time to cast damage spells at all!", you are definitely going to find people still bashing their heads on their desks, pressing 1 over and over and over again, wanting the pain to end. And thirdly, the healing isn't all that interesting either. What little interaction exists in the healing kits is relatively shallow. Buttons do exactly what they say on the description and no more, or the ones that reward you with gauge all give you the exact same reward. Again, even if you fix these, your reward for playing well is...more time to 1111111.

I've observed this vehement opposition to improving downtime for years. There is always Sylphie reasoning behind it. Al. Ways. Whether it's "I don't LIKE damage rotations! 1111111 is FUN!" or "if you added choices to downtime you would SCARE NEWBIES! Doing damage is SCARY!" It's always there. I agree that in a well-designed system, 1111 wouldn't be as much of a problem. But then again, I've also played games with more healing uptime than FF14 has ever dreamed of outside Ultimates, and somehow still the healers had more to do than spam one spell over and over and over and over and over again with an occasional poke at a different one once per minute.