Latest Official Developer Statements About Healer DPS?

[UkcsAlias]

I think that server side framerate limitations are preventing too many actions from happening at once. So they are often required to do hard hitters instead of a more constant bleeding damage. Yet such sort of damage can do quite a lot on the healer side.

But i might have an idea that can force healer requirements, increase esuna usage (and with variety in strategies on usage), and is easy to understand:
Each raid wide aoe the boss does adds 1 special vuln stack. This stack lasts until the end of the fight, but can be removed by esuna.

The effect of this is that if these arent mitigated, the incoming damage simply becomes too high to mitigate. And the way these can act can even vary:
- We can make the stack only affect the next aoe cast and cause it to apply an additional fixed damage value (20% max hp per stack), while it can be mitigated, it wont be easy to mitigate 100% damage hits repeatedly
- The vuln stack simply is a counter. After having X, you die.
- It simply increases incoming damage as we know now. Can still be a hassle without changing much otherwise.

And some more notible ideas:
- Boss aoe applies doom to everyone with 60s countdown. Esuna cures this. Easy, but breaks any non healer meta.
- Team missing health causes next boss aoe to deal that missing health as damage (no more staying below 50%). And with modifier could also be made a 66% or 75% (double or triple missing hp in damage)

But i think the vuln stack idea could on that be a good way to adjust fights in a more generic way.

[Absurdity]

SE tried to solve this in Abyssos. Their method of solving lack of healing required is to make raidwides that deal more than the max HP of the party so you just die unless you mitigate it, which(to no one's surprise) made double shield healer a much better option than 1 shield + 1 regen.

I don't think the fight designers truly understand how to make a proper healing-intensive fight, which is weird, because Barbariccia is a good fight design that fits the bill of "more healing requirement" rather than Rubicante/Golbez and their mechanics which can just kill you from full without mitigation.

But that brings us to the usual problem, even if they made proper healing-intensive fights they will still be 100% limited to just savage, ultimate and maybe the odd extreme. So in the majority of content, expert roulette, alliance raid, normal raid, treasure maps, etc you will still be bored to death.

Not to mention that if you take a good hard look at healer's healing kits they're not very interesting either, outside of very few exceptions like Haima, Liturgy and Macrocosmos. So you've replaced spamming Glare with spamming Medica, the most bland "make HP bar go up" spell ever, GG.

[ForsakenRoe]

But that brings us to the usual problem, even if they made proper healing-intensive fights they will still be 100% limited to just savage, ultimate and maybe the odd extreme. So in the majority of content, expert roulette, alliance raid, normal raid, treasure maps, etc you will still be bored to death.

Yes, this is the point that gets lost in the sauce it seems. It's not a case of 'healer is boring in Savage because 111111', it's that if you've done {whatever level of content} and gotten accustomed to that level of gameplay, then anything below that is more bland because 111111. Changing Savage to hit harder so we have to heal more, for example, does not address the tedium of 24mans or EX roulette, they'll still be as monotonous as before, because we cannot bump them too much or casual players will suffer (supposedly). So instead, a simple, yet focused 2 or 3 changes to each healer's damage rotation, balanced in such a way that ignoring the new additions is a smaller potency loss than something like 'ignoring your DOT' is right now, is what to look into, I think. If someone is skilled enough to use the new rotation, they can. If they are not, they can ignore parts of it until they get more comfortable with the job and start to throw in more and more of the rotation. Nobody is going to cause a wipe in Lapis Manalis because they could not work out how to effectively use their new Miasma DOT on SCH. They might, however, cause a wipe if they cannot keep up with the fact Cagnazzo has learned how to make his water AOEs do 30% more damage, or that they had to press more healing spells, ran out of MP for the first time in their time playing FFXIV and could not cast any more spells.

None of us went from zero damage spells to instantly full blast. We started by throwing in our DOT here and there, then maybe a Stone or two, and working our way up. In fact, I would put real money on the following statement being true:

'Back in SB, when SCH had Miasma at 24s and Bio2 at 30s, a fairly large chunk of the playerbase settled for just refreshing both at the same time when Miasma needed refreshing, clipping Bio by 6s each time for a small DPS loss.'

It wasn't 'required' for SCHs to make sure to NEVER clip Bio's duration in the way described above. Those two lost ticks per 24s would not have been the make-or-break thing that causes a clear vs enrage, especially when AST existed in the form that it did. But some love to imply that any amount of extra complexity will have casuals causing wipes left and right due to missed DOT ticks and losing casts due to analysis paralysis on 'what damage button do I press next'

[Tint]

Yes, this is the point that gets lost in the sauce it seems. It's not a case of 'healer is boring in Savage because 111111', it's that if you've done {whatever level of content} and gotten accustomed to that level of gameplay, then anything below that is more bland because 111111. Changing Savage to hit harder so we have to heal more, for example, does not address the tedium of 24mans or EX roulette, they'll still be as monotonous as before, because we cannot bump them too much or casual players will suffer (supposedly).

With the amount of healing and mitigation tools non-healers have available they pretty much can increase the healing requirements in easier content. When the casual healer can't keep up then the rest of the party can step up their game.

[ForsakenRoe]

With the amount of healing and mitigation tools non-healers have available they pretty much can increase the healing requirements in easier content. When the casual healer can't keep up then the rest of the party can step up their game.

Not all damage is avoidable, though. Should SE tune healing required from the healer around the party standing in every AOE, zero AOEs, or some point in between? And if it's some midpoint, where, 50% of AOEs stood in? 75%, 25%? When you consider how much damage EG the thunder tiger guy in Aetherfont can put out if you stand in every AOE, it's ridiculously high. But you're not meant to, you're meant to dodge those AOEs. And if you dodge every AOE, suddenly the damage he does to you is woefully low. So, do we need less dodgeable damage and more raidwide damage? Maybe that's got the beginnings of an idea, but again, it'll potentially cause some casuals to be unable to keep up and cause wipes. If 'more damage buttons' is not the solution for that reason, then more healing required sure isn't, imo

Imagine that every time that thunder guy does a jump to place lightning tendrils to dodge, he also does proximity damage from where he lands. Suddenly, even with dodging those four back to back jumps, and dodging the lightning they spawn, you still have to worry about taking say 30%-50% of your HP bar per jump (based on gear and distance), and the threat of someone getting combo'd by that damage, into a lightning they didn't quite dodge, means you have to be more on the ball with healing. But again, what if the healer is unable to keep up? What if they cannot heal because they're too focused on trying to dodge the mechanic, so someone dies? Or worse, what if it's the healer that dies to this extra damage? It's been used as a reason in the past, to keep things more approachable for casuals: 'if the healer is the only source of Res and goes down, the party is all but doomed to a wipe, so SE tries to keep the stress of the healer role lower to avoid that outcome'. Adding more healing required in this regard would run counter to that design approach

[Teno]

Considering what they've created with sage and pvp, yes they want healers to be offensive, no matter what yoship said back then.

And I sure hope the 6.1 pvp has shown them what needs to be done for healers, as it's an excellent and much more thoughtful direction with clear identities for each job.

[ASkellington]

Considering what they've created with sage and pvp, yes they want healers to be offensive, no matter what yoship said back then.

And I sure hope the 6.1 pvp has shown them what needs to be done for healers, as it's an excellent and much more thoughtful direction with clear identities for each job.

No I agree they don't want healers to be more offensive. They just haven't faced the reality that unless you give healers something else to do (buffing, debuffing, cc cleansing, more healing) they're going to be more offensive because that's all a healer's kit is.

They also haven't faced the reality that take our healing kit away (say in a SOLO instance where all anyone really needs is Second Wind) our kit is depressingly boring which is what it looks at when a healer gets good.

[Absurdity]

Can we please stop with this misconception that Sage is dps focused healer? It's complete nonsense.

Let's go through Sage's dps skills: Eukrasian Dosis (the DoT), Dosis, Phlegma (every 40 seconds), Toxicon (a movement tool), Dyskrasia (AoE), Pneuma (every 120 seconds).
Now let's check White Mage, the stereotypical healer's healer: Dia (the DoT), Glare, Assize (every 40 seconds), Holy (AoE), Afflatus Misery (technically every 60 seconds).

Sage has a whopping 1 extra dps skill and it is just a movement tool. Pneuma does damage but since it's the same as Dosis you will never use it for dps, it's simply a GCD heal that isn't a dps loss.
While Afflatus Misery seems to just exist to make up for the dps loss from using Lily spells it however can actually be a dps gain if the fight has downtime in which you can spend lilies.

Sage is not the "DPS healer™", it's just the healer that loses out on free healing when they're not spamming their Glare equivalent. It's basically SCH, but your fairy does nothing if you're not casting Dosis.

[Teno]

Yes sage IS the dps healer, it's been from the start. The problem is that also from the start, it received the same scholar copy pasta in the end. See the contradiction ?

See pvp for sage's true design

[PercibelTheren]

Not to mention that if you take a good hard look at healer's healing kits they're not very interesting either, outside of very few exceptions like Haima, Liturgy and Macrocosmos. So you've replaced spamming Glare with spamming Medica, the most bland "make HP bar go up" spell ever, GG.

I honestly think this is the core issue of why healers feel so boring. The healing abilities themselves are effective tools, but they're not FUN. I would like them to diversify what they do. I like delayed healing abilities like Macrocosmos. Lean into some healing tools giving a heal over time but little spot healing. Make some abilities spot healing without the regen. Make me use the correct tool for the job. Right now every raidwide is solved by "just use whichever OGCD is not on cooldown."