Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[Aravell]

The role of healer is a bit more unique in that, unlike other jobs where their rotation is pretty much their own business, healers business is that of other players. So if you had a rotation as a healer, how well that rotation goes will become some what more dependant on your party members doing their stuff to a T and not getting killed or taking excessive damage. So imagine player feelings when people cant do their healer dps rotation cause DPS eat pancakes or make mistakes.

I'm not sure why player feelings should factor into job design?

I would hope that people who queue up for content on a healer would actually want to play a healer. If they're going to whine about losing damage because a DPS eats the orange ground candy, maybe they shouldn't be playing the very role that's meant to be fixing those mistakes?

[ty_taurus]

I'm not sure why player feelings should factor into job design?

I would hope that people who queue up for content on a healer would actually want to play a healer. If they're going to whine about losing damage because a DPS eats the orange ground candy, maybe they shouldn't be playing the very role that's meant to be fixing those mistakes?

To bounce off that, I think it's important to establish a few things:

1. There are a fair amount of players unhappy with the state of healers in FFXIV, and of those, many find the lack of DPS abilities to be a major flaw. FFXIV's combat design is and has always featured large windows of healing downtime, and the belief is that a good healer should be rewarded with fun, active DPS during that downtime, not mindlessly spamming a single attack for nearly off of it.

2. These same players are not asking for more DPS for the purpose of wanting to do more and more damage or effectively play a DPS in the guise of a healer. Good healing results in a higher amount of time one can spend on DPS. They simply want that to feel fun and rewarding rather than a boring punishment.

3. At the same time, these players are fully content engaging with the healing side of healers. In fact, the lack of DPS is not the only element criticized about modern healer design, but also the diminishing need to heal due to less frequent damage taken in combat, less spontaneous damage encountered in combat (such as boss auto attack crits), increased tank and DPS sustain tools, and the ever-expanding powercreep of each expansions new, free, DPS neutral healing resources that encounter design fails to scale with.

4. For the players who agree with the above points, good healer design is about striking a balance between the need to heal and the opportunity to attack, and neither side of that equation should feel lacking, yet currently, both sides are lacking. With almost no DPS tools at our disposal, the reward of skillful healing is boring, slow, and ruins the experience of playing healer. With a severely overtuned and bloated healing kit and a lack of actual healing to engage with, we cannot appreciate the healing abilities we have because many of them are excessive and unnecessary.

[Aravell]

To bounce off that, I think it's important to establish a few things:

I'm not sure if this was pointed at me, but you already know my stance on the healer role, so I assume not. But to clarify my points:

I'm just pointing out in my post that changing a job to remove everything that "feels bad" is stupid, especially since not every player feels bad about doing certain things. Take Aetherflow for example, people often argue that it feels bad to use Soil/Indom/Lustrate/Excog because they lose 1 ED. I personally don't feel bad for using Soil, should Aetherflow be changed because some people feel bad when they have to use Soil?

I'm also pointing out that the healer role is just that, you heal, you fix mistakes, that is what you're there to do. If someone whines about losing damage when they need to heal, I question why they're even playing a healer in the first place? It just annoys me that people keep harping on about "Only GCDs being spent on damage and all healing being relegated to OGCDs will work because using GCDs on healing feels bad!".

[ty_taurus]

I'm not sure if this was pointed at me, but you already know my stance on the healer role, so I assume not.

No, I was just pivoting off what you said. There continues to be this assumption that people who ask for more DPS on healers want to replace healing with DPSing/don't want to heal/get annoyed when they're forced to heal. Which you are countering, and I wanted to expand on that point.

[AmiableApkallu]

I'm just pointing out in my post that changing a job to remove everything that "feels bad" is stupid, especially since not every player feels bad about doing certain things. Take Aetherflow for example, people often argue that it feels bad to use Soil/Indom/Lustrate/Excog because they lose 1 ED. I personally don't feel bad for using Soil, should Aetherflow be changed because some people feel bad when they have to use Soil?

I'm also pointing out that the healer role is just that, you heal, you fix mistakes, that is what you're there to do. If someone whines about losing damage when they need to heal, I question why they're even playing a healer in the first place? It just annoys me that people keep harping on about "Only GCDs being spent on damage and all healing being relegated to OGCDs will work because using GCDs on healing feels bad!".

The thing that rankles me with the whole "feels bad" and "losing damage" mentality is that it focuses on one's personal, direct damage dealt and all but ignores the party's combined damage dealt.

Raising someone is a personal loss, but you do it because the party's total output over the entire encounter is presumably better for it. If some website with funny colored numbers doesn't recognize that, it's a problem with the website and the people using it, not healer job design.

The same goes for any other heal or for any other action that might actually require one to evaluate trade-offs and make a choice.

[Aravell]

The thing that rankles me with the whole "feels bad" and "losing damage" mentality is that it focuses on one's personal, direct damage dealt and all but ignores the party's combined damage dealt.

Raising someone is a personal loss, but you do it because the party's total output over the entire encounter is presumably better for it. If some website with funny colored numbers doesn't recognize that, it's a problem with the website and the people using it, not healer job design.

The same goes for any other heal or for any other action that might actually require one to evaluate trade-offs and make a choice.

Not only is raising someone better for the party's total damage output, it's also literally your job as a healer. A healer that won't heal or raise might as well be kicked and replaced with a RDM.

That's why I raised a hypothetical scenario before:
If a GNB/DRK says to you after a failed tankswap that resulted in the other tank's death "I can't fit Provoke into my weave window during burst, it's the other tank's fault for dying, they should've dropped stance and used Shirk!", is that an acceptable stance to have?

If it's not, why is the argument that 'healers can blame someone for not avoiding damage if they have more damage buttons' such a common one? Why would people point fingers at a tank for behaving in a way where they shirk(ha!) their own responsibilities but a healer cannot be blamed for not healing someone that took avoidable damage?

[Somnolence]

I'm not sure why player feelings should factor into job design?

I would hope that people who queue up for content on a healer would actually want to play a healer. If they're going to whine about losing damage because a DPS eats the orange ground candy, maybe they shouldn't be playing the very role that's meant to be fixing those mistakes?

Yeah, right. From what I have seen many healers in ultimate PFs are barse-brains and do the least amount of healing needed. If party is "griefing" them they kick offenders or leave, and since they are the most demanded role they are kings.

The only way to give healers DPS rotation is by moving ALL healing to oGCDs so it won't affect damage, otherwise the toxicity in PFs will skyrocket. In other words, mirroring tank design.

[Supersnow845]

Yeah, right. From what I have seen many healers in ultimate PFs are barse-brains and do the least amount of healing needed. If party is "griefing" them they kick offenders or leave, and since they are the most demanded role they are kings.

The only way to give healers DPS rotation is by moving ALL healing to oGCDs so it won't affect damage, otherwise the toxicity in PFs will skyrocket. In other words, mirroring tank design.

I say this as someone who probably does lean a little too far towards glarebot but is attempting to fix myself

If the collective community is too parse brained that it’s wallinhparties then the offending healers just need to be kicked till the collective community learns its lesson, if that’s putting hard blocks on PF content because there isn’t enough healers that’s evidence for square to fix healers, damage complexity is pretty much exogenous to this, if anything the sheer potency contained in glare rather than a diffuse rotation makes this problem worse not better

Bowing to “kingmaker glarebots” is the last thing that will actually fix the problem

[ForsakenRoe]

It just annoys me that people keep harping on about "Only GCDs being spent on damage and all healing being relegated to OGCDs will work because using GCDs on healing feels bad!".

WHM's current design shows that this is really not the case, and that a GCD-heavy healing style CAN work, with certain design elements (that being, the damage is refunded later). If SE went all in and made WHM into 'the healer with multiple tools that are GCD but refund their damage later', then it'd carve a new identity for the job: that of (at high optimization level) being able to bank those refunds, and unleash them all at once during the Presence of Mind window for a massive-impact and satisfying 2min window. It can retain it's ease of use via how upfront bursty its healing tools are, how it can respond to big incoming damage with 'I have Cure 3, try me', and how it has quite good mana economy now (thanks to lilies now effectively giving you 1600mp per minute saved, plus Thin Air).

It could have even further 'ease of access' changes that wouldn't 'simplify the fun out of the job' with things such as having Medica upgrade to Medica 2 (given that Med2 is equal potency to Med1 after a single tick), and alongside that, a trait that 'halves the cost of Cure 3 when Medica 2's HOT is active on the WHM', bringing it from 1500 down to 750 per cast (making Cure3 the new 'spam this while you've got the HOT ticking if you need extra oomph' skill). Plus it opens a hotbar space for something else to be added, to counter those who would argue 'hotbar bloat, so we can't have any extra damage buttons' (we can also do the same and have Cure 1 upgrade to Cure 2, to get another slot freed up)

Yeah, right. From what I have seen many healers in ultimate PFs are barse-brains and do the least amount of healing needed. If party is "griefing" them they kick offenders or leave, and since they are the most demanded role they are kings.

The only way to give healers DPS rotation is by moving ALL healing to oGCDs so it won't affect damage, otherwise the toxicity in PFs will skyrocket. In other words, mirroring tank design.

In the current design, that is the end goal, though. To heal entirely using OGCDs (or for WHM, OGCDs and Lilies which are damage neutral). If that's the 'only way to give healers DPS rotations', then we should already HAVE those DPS rotations. We also should not be designing around 'well maybe people will be selfish in PF'. I've played in DF and ended up with people who don't have their job stone on purpose in 50+ dungeons (for RP apparently). I've even had to, back in HW, coheal a Savage with one. We got the 'big hitboxes' thing in response to people complaining about uptime issues, and I think it's primarily because of Tanks in E6S being forced to have like 5 GCDs of downtime with the tornado soaking part. There's plenty of ways for people to be 'selfish' that aren't 'healers greeding for their barse', I've equally seen Tanks or DPS wipe the group because they gapclose in too soon for their mechanic and get everyone killed. But that's acceptable, I guess, because it's their role to do damage. Oh wait, it's not, for Tanks

Please make it make sense

Oh also, if you have extra skills (with CDs/DOT durations) added to healers, those skills will be higher potency than the filler, so as to make them get used. Thus, interrupting your 'rotation' to heal would actually be less punishing under such a system, as compared to now, because more of your skills in your timeline will be 'not filler'. Any time you have to heal and lose damage because someone ate orange pancake, you would lose a filler cast (eg a Glare). Going back to ARR, SCH's damage mainly came from it's DOTs. Ruin, it's filler at the time, was a mere 80 potency (with it's DOTs being 240, 350 and 300 respectively). Of course, if someone wants to barse, they should shut up and join a barsing PF, instead. Trying to barse in random PFs and taking it seriously like that is a fool's errand, and they have nobody but themselves to blame when they complain about 'someone ate damage and ruined my barse'. Your barse was ruined the moment you joined the PF, not the moment you watched Johnny Samurai get clipped by the AOE.

[Aravell]

Yeah, right. From what I have seen many healers in ultimate PFs are barse-brains and do the least amount of healing needed. If party is "griefing" them they kick offenders or leave, and since they are the most demanded role they are kings.

The only way to give healers DPS rotation is by moving ALL healing to oGCDs so it won't affect damage, otherwise the toxicity in PFs will skyrocket. In other words, mirroring tank design.

Have you considered that catering the role more towards the preferred playstyle of these "barse-brained" people would only serve to increase the amount of those types of people? I remember back in the earlier expansions where people rightfully called out healers who blamed the people that died from damage.

If we want healers that can prioritise the duties of their role over their funny log numbers, it needs to be harder to do damage, not easier. And if it ends up chasing away the people who care more about numbers than a smooth clear? Well, can't say I would miss them.

Of course, if someone wants to barse, they should shut up and join a barsing PF, instead.

I of course hate when someone joins a non-logging PF to boost their logs because they usually will wipe the party for a single GCD. But I also can't really blame them for doing that, because most log parties nowadays require people to have 80+ or something, have to get that somewhere. It's still a rude thing to do, but I can also understand why they do it.