Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[Mithron]

I want more complex DPS rotations on healer. SGE was not the answer. The community should learn that DPSing as healer is expected because the game will never be designed for constant heals. Get over it.

[ty_taurus]

I want more complex DPS rotations on healer. SGE was not the answer. The community should learn that DPSing as healer is expected because the game will never be designed for constant heals. Get over it.

See, from the very beginning, one of the things that set FFXIV apart from WOW was that healers were more involved in combat. Even when ARR healers had a lot less pressure to DPS, they had the time, MP, and ability to do so effectively. I don’t understand why they didn’t embrace that. Because even with healers having neutered DPS abilities now, it’s not only possible, but also quite easy to have 100% DPS uptime in most content, even in Savage for everyone but astro (if we’re counting Lily heals as “DPS uptime” for white mage). The Savage part might not be easy like normal content, but absolutely possible.

FFXIV should be the MMO for healers that want to be aggressive and active participants in combat. I do thing there should be a healer who’s DPS is indirect to supply players with a healer that feels more heavily support oriented. I’ve described such a healer as an engine builder who has to set up and prepare their important heals and support tools while simultaneously generating their DPS passively. Something like that would give people who don’t like DPS a playstyle that better suits their fantasy while still functioning within the mega XIV establishes. But different games within the same genre will naturally offer different experiences. WOW healing, while not completely void of DPSing, does have a significantly higher emphasis on healing and sustain. Why not let FFXIV be the MMO that does the opposite?

[ty_taurus]

^ once again responding on my phone results in a rainbow of typos >.> I’ll fix it later.

[Colt47]

Sage was interesting. I don't think the idea of healing while shooting someone works too well since it depends too much on who is required to move. If the healer has to move a lot then they got to go back to using standard healing, and even when they are not moving a lot, the healing from the attacks usually is pretty meager. It is a night and day difference from Scholar where you always have at least some amount of massive healing going out, even if you are not attacking directly.

[Supersnow845]

Sage was interesting. I don't think the idea of healing while shooting someone works too well since it depends too much on who is required to move. If the healer has to move a lot then they got to go back to using standard healing, and even when they are not moving a lot, the healing from the attacks usually is pretty meager. It is a night and day difference from Scholar where you always have at least some amount of massive healing going out, even if you are not attacking directly.

Movement on the modern healers is disgustingly free, you can spend 30% of every GCD moving, even more if you know your approx slide casting timing

Kardia just needed to be more related to SGE’s kit than a slightly worse but slightly more flexible embrace

[ForsakenRoe]

Personally, I can't wait for the usual suspects to turn up on reddit and the like, to say 'look how much damage the dungeons do, you wont even have time to THINK about doing damage as a healer', only for said dungeons to be easily wall-to-wallable (and even 0-healed when doing the lv100 dungeons as we currently do) as usual, just as has been the case with SHB and EW's pre-release media tour info

The pattern never deviates, and the same goes for the playerbase. They've been wrong twice now already, might as well go for a hat trick, right? Of course, if I'm wrong and the dungeons actually DO hit harder (at least, hard enough to actually make us consider 'can I get this damage GCD or does it have to be spent on healing' with fairly increased regularity) then I'll eat my words but be happy to, because it means we'd have some more gameplay as healer. Of course, we'd also have more gameplay as healer if SE would just give us some more damage buttons for our rotation, which would raise the skill ceiling but not the skill floor, meaning casuals are not adversely affected, but the optimizers have more to optimize.

Plus, the casuals would get excited anyway because 'cool new attacks'. I remember when Misery was first shown. Most of us in my static-at-the-time were like 'that looks cool', and general consensus on the internet seemed to be 'that looks cool', the optimization-minded WHM of our static-at-the-time was busy working out how long the gauge took to charge, if it was a GCD or OGCD, how much potency it'd have to be to be damage neutral (so that it'd actually get used). And to the guy's credit, his prediction was 'at least 900p', which was exactly what it turned out to be. Point is, Misery is a great example of this in action. Casuals use the heals and Misery whenever they feel is a good time, and it feels cool to use Misery and get big number. Optimizers shift their entire healing plan around so that they can use the required Lily spends to charge that Misery, in ways that are more beneficial to them, eg. as a movement GCD so they can do the required healing AND move at the same time. And then they can put Misery into raidbuffs, effectively moving three Glares from outside raidbuffs, into raidbuffs.

Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.

Kardia just needed to be more related to SGE’s kit than a slightly worse but slightly more flexible embrace

The ideal situation for SGE would be (IMO) something along the lines of 'basic GCDs cost zero MP (this includes Prognosis/Diagnosis), Eukrasia/PanKardia/Zoe/Soteria/Krasis are the MP spenders and all augment your Kardia effect in various ways (eg increased potency, making casts instant, making Kardia AOE, etc)', with the absolute most casual level of casual gameplay being 'hit Prognosis for damage and it's MP free so you can spam it if you like', and optimized gameplay being 'aiming to do the required healing and shielding for the encounter entirely via Kardia Augmentation' (which ideally would be tuned in Savage to be 'exceptionally difficult to perfect (zero GCDs wasted on heals), but doable')

[Absurdity]

Even if the first six dungeons actually end up hitting harder, that says nothing about the entire rest of the game or even just the expansion. They could hit like a truck and we can still end up sitting in expert, trials, raids, 24man, extremes and savage spamming 1-1-1-1-1-1-1 for minutes without interruption.

[ty_taurus]

Leveling dungeons always hit harder because of the significantly smaller max item level threshold, ironically making them the most challenging dungeons to heal (relatively speaking) compared to max level dungeons which otherwise hit like a squeaky toy. It’s honestly quite sad considering that all max level dungeons, with the exception of the first set of dungeons available at the launch of a new expansion, are already power crept in item level before they’re even released.

[sindriiisgaming]

In 2017, Yoshi-P went on record stating the developers do not expect Healers to contribute to DPS.* Like so many things, some people liked this and some people disliked this, but regardless it provided some valuable insight into the way the devs approach the design of content and roles.

My question is: a lot of time has passed since 2017, so I'm wondering if since then Yoshi-P has ever gone on record as having either altered or reinforced this stance. If so, I'd be grateful if someone could provide the source for whatever he said about it.

I'm just curious to know what the devs have officially said about this sort of thing. Thanks for the help on that!

*Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5la_nyC5BO0&t=282s

people keep thinking the buttons are the issue, but theyre not. its the combat thats stale, healing should not be a dps race but due to the game pushing enrage, everything is. its a fundimental flaw with this combat system we have, and even if you had no heals and all dps.. youde still hate it eventually. because every job is a dps dressed up as a tank/healer

[IDontPetLalas]

people keep thinking the buttons are the issue, but theyre not. its the combat thats stale, healing should not be a dps race but due to the game pushing enrage, everything is. its a fundimental flaw with this combat system we have, and even if you had no heals and all dps.. youde still hate it eventually. because every job is a dps dressed up as a tank/healer

I don't know what "healing as a DPS race" you're talking about, nor where you see enrages "everywhere" as there aren't enrages in a good deal of the game content. In harder content healers have contributed to DPS while healing for years. It isn't new, in easier content while many enjoy doing so technically it's completely optional to DPS and be able to complete the content as a healer in parties.

I also don't understand where you see people asking for all DPS and no heals.