Healing is not hard

[Zolvolt]

As a Party Finder raider, I actually find healing challenging, and that's simply due to the inconsistency of people in the Party Finder, especially your co-healer.

I said this in other thread, but I'm constantly throwing GCD healing because I don't trust them, which hurts my personal DPS as a healer... But that's okay, I guess. Add to the fact that people are not consistent with their mechanic resolving, so you might have to exhaust your spot healing ogcds pretty fast. Or tanks that don't mit properly and eat so much from the tankbusters that you need to spam your single target heal. Or just having to stop so much to rez on stuff the prog point is past by because people lie about where they progged at.

While I find 'glarespam' boring, I also don't know how well I'd do in the Party Finder with a much more complex rotation, so that's kind of a conundrum to me, lol.

As a PF healer I have a love/hate relationship with this kind of thing. I main ast and sub sch and on the tree boss this expansion I fully went scholar because we kept getting scholars who would sooner let the tanks die to the dot than use aetherflow to heal it, which would cause me to GCD heal completely erasing the benefit of their energy drains.

On the first boss of the current tier I played scholar again because shield healers in PF are now the bane of my existence, but I had my OGCD's planned perfectly with what the whm we had would do both on pull and for the first fire/ice/lightning to the point where neither of us had to GCD heal, and then they started using medica 2 on every aoe.

This made me so mad. It wasn't needed, we had it perfect.

Then on p8s as scholar I had a whm who didn't want to use regen on the dots towards the end. I was over there using all my aetherflow flow and faeries link on them and they threw a fit about having to "soil their dps" to regen them. I just could not. Keep in mind I was already losing GCD for spreadlo to counter all the damage and mitigate dot damage there.

I hate the current design of healing because it's literally a "do as little as possible" game and it's the reason for almost all of the struggles I have with healing partners in savage.

[ForsakenRoe]

I hate the current design of healing because it's literally a "do as little as possible" game and it's the reason for almost all of the struggles I have with healing partners in savage.

I feel like this can be solved (partially) by having design where our damage builds towards healing tools, and healing tools build towards damage. Like, WHMs are fine with smacking Plenary Rapture when it's needed, because it doesn't cost damage, you get it back via Misery

Knowing SE though, instead of an actual gameplay loop like me/others have suggested, they'd go 'oh okay so here's a new thing at 98: a trait that makes Thin Air also cause the next garbo-GCD like Medica2 or Cure2 nourish the Blood Lily by one step'. Now you can Med2 and it's 'technically damage neutral' but like... damn that'd be bland

[Averax]

Stop booing them, they're right!

Seriously, the only time a healer gets to heal meaningfully is when content is new and people are getting hit by stuff.

[Raikai]

Stop booing them, they're right!

Seriously, the only time a healer gets to heal meaningfully is when content is new and people are getting hit by stuff.

To me is funny that is true... however this doesn't really feel that good to me. I mean, I am healing, but knowing that what is coveted for a healer - their spammy dps - is being traded off, makes me feel bittersweet about doing 'the job'.

That's probably why healing in WoW (my only other good reference) feels rewarding. Outside of very specific runs, healers aren't expected to weight in a lot of dps, and so, released from that burden, keeping people alive feels great.

[HappyHubris]

It's frustrating, because Square Enix has gotten half of healing absolutely perfect: the class "feel" and aesthetics. Playing a white mage is just bliss from an aesthetics standpoint, and the spell toolbox is pretty solid.

But then the other half - content to heal - just feels bad. The binary nature of damage and how over-provisioned healers are for incoming damage output means that that healing kit lays fallow, as I play the "heal as little as possible game" and spam glare over and over and over and over and...

This is a problem with any MMO to some extent; as your group gears up and learns mechanics you have less and less to do, potentially swapping out healers when content is on farm. But FFXIV takes it to the next level by giving everything a giant telegraph and whittling down the unavoidable damage to almost nothing.

So I end up in the following cycle every expansion:
1. OK I'm going to ignore WHM and play a nice damage dealer this time.
2. Ooo, but I remember WHM being so damn aesthetically awesome!
3. Level level level.
4. Oh yeah, there's nothing to heal.

[Rithy255]

I think the issue isn't healer is not hard it's just not Fun.

Healer needs to be changed Imo, It creates issues with how other jobs are designed also, what's even the point of strong utility from a ranged/tank job (or any other) when it doesn't save a GCD because healer already has way too many ogcds.

Personally I'd want some decrease in OGCDs, healing potency (this applies to tanks aswell, esp AOE healing), fights with more AOE damage, allow tanks to pull more ect. So healers have to spend at least a good amount of time GCD healing, obviously I'm not against healer doing damage but doing damage as a healer should be a optimisation not something you can have 100% uptime on.

[Absurdity]

Simply making healers heal more is not going to solve the problem either because if you take a really hard look at the healing toolkit it is, while incredibly overloaded, utterly bland.

Outside of a few interesting effects like Lillybell, Macrocosmos and maybe Haima/Panhaima they are bog standard "make HP or eHP bar go up by X" spells. They have barely any interaction between each other and are more often than not just fire and forget skills.

So all that would happen when you increase the consistently incoming damage, and bring it closer to WoW's attrition healing, would be that you replace 80 of the 130 boring Glare casts with equally boring Cure/Cure 2/Cure 3/Medica casts.

[Rithy255]

Simply making healers heal more is not going to solve the problem either because if you take a really hard look at the healing toolkit it is, while incredibly overloaded, utterly bland.

Outside of a few interesting effects like Lillybell, Macrocosmos and maybe Haima/Panhaima they are bog standard "make HP or eHP bar go up by X" spells. They have barely any interaction between each other and are more often than not just fire and forget skills.

So all that would happen when you increase the consistently incoming damage, and bring it closer to WoW's attrition healing, would be that you replace 80 of the 130 boring Glare casts with equally boring Cure/Cure 2/Cure 3/Medica casts.

Healers should heal more, healers job shouldn't be 100% DPS uptime.
I'm not saying healers should only use heals, they should be actively switching between damage and healing, which would make healing alot more fun (along with more buttons). At least to me fitting in as much damage as possible while also keeping people alive is fun. (while casual healers can just heal lots, so it wouldn't even be a hard role to get into).

But just giving healers more dps kits doesn't actually "fix healers" it just turns healers into DPS roles. Although not to say adding DPS is bad, just that they need to actually let healers be healers first and foremost

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Give them both.

[HappyHubris]

Simply making healers heal more is not going to solve the problem either because if you take a really hard look at the healing toolkit it is, while incredibly overloaded, utterly bland.

Outside of a few interesting effects like Lillybell, Macrocosmos and maybe Haima/Panhaima they are bog standard "make HP or eHP bar go up by X" spells. They have barely any interaction between each other and are more often than not just fire and forget skills.

So all that would happen when you increase the consistently incoming damage, and bring it closer to WoW's attrition healing, would be that you replace 80 of the 130 boring Glare casts with equally boring Cure/Cure 2/Cure 3/Medica casts.

I would disagree. Even in other MMOs with simple healing spells (e.g., Vanilla WoW), the challenge was in the triage and resource management, without skills being whiz-bang intricate game design capstones. Do you risk a slower, more efficient heal or drop your fast inefficient heal to avoid a tank staying in the death zone? Is your MP consumption sustainable? Are you standing in the optimal place for AoE heals to be effective? How long can you save your emergency cooldowns, in case there is an error? Some of the "simple heals, high skill ceiling" concepts like cancel-casting big slow heals isn't really feasible with FFXIV's engine and game design, but you absolutely will be stimulated if enough incoming damage hits to where healing requires strategic choices.

I agree that FFXIV throws too many tools at healers, and some of these options should be swapped out for mitigation cooldowns. But don't knock triage without trying it.