Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Renathras]

So, do you want to play a DPS that heals, or a Healer that can DPS?

I play healer sometimes in FFXIV, but I main Healer in WoW as a Holy Priest. As a Holy Priest, in terms of what i can do when I DPS, I have:
Smite - Deals Single Target Damage
Holy Fire - Deals Single Target Damage and applies a short DoT
Shadow Word: Pain - DoT Damage.

Thats it.

/thread

This is the thing right here.

Some people want to play a DPS that heals - we have that, it's called RDM, and they never heal because it's "suboptimal".

Some people want to play a Healer that can DPS - this is what encounter design (regarding damage done to the part) and healer kits should be designed around.

And yeah, Holy Priest in WoW manages this with just a few damage buttons (I think they might actually have 5, though you don't use Shadow Word: Death as part of the rotation in a more general sense, and WHM has 5 DPS buttons anyway - Glare, Dia, Assize, Misery, and Holy; also Presence of Mind as, effectively, a DPS CD and Solace/Rapture as combo actions to get a Misery).

WoW Holy Priest: https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/holy-p...owns-abilities

Surge of Light on Holy Priest is just a neat ability, too, since it triggers from heals but also from Smite. It'd be like if Glare had a chance of triggering Freecure...which is actually not at all a bad design idea. Rhapsody is also a neat ability. Every 1 sec increases its healing and damage by 20%, stacks to 20. Imagine if Holy had a small heal attached and worked like that. Would even give you a reason to use Holy in your single target rotation for big damage when the buff maxed out.

It's less that FFXIV's healer kits don't have as many damage abilities (or too many healing ones) and more the abilities don't interact. Other than Lilies and Misery or Cure 1 and Cure 2 via Freecure or Plenary boosting AOE heals by 200 potency, there's not a lot of "this affects that", so abilities are kind of used in isolation. And the cases that do exist are MOSTLY cooldowns. Plenary is, Lilies are (due to being resource gated). Freecure is the only thing that really isn't, and again, Glare having a chance to proc Freecure would kind of be neat. Hell, have Freecure make "the next Cure 2 OR Medica 1 instant cast and cost no MP", that way you have the option to use it for single target OR aoe healing, and it would also mean Medica 1 isn't totally undeserving of a place on people's hotbars.

Complex healing kits can't really happen the way this game is designed (every boss fight is a dance). Only need to heal so much damage.

So more complex DPS kits are really the only other option if CBU3 isn't going to lean into the "support" role.

And yet, in ARR, healing was more GCD based than now and damage more consistent meaning healers were using far less Stone/Ruin 1 casts - even ignoring their DoT refreshes - to cast healing spells. The game has literally done this before. No, more complex dps kits are NOT the "only" option.

If healing is going to stay as is and even tanking keeps getting simplified, they should just go all in on the DPS playstyle. Consolidate the kits to have the core few skills to deal with raid wides and have spot healing option or two, move all mitigation to Tanks and fill the bars with variety of DPS or buff options.

That...is an absolutely horrible idea. Forget healers, I can't imagine TANKS would be happy with that, nor would at least half of DPSers. NIN, BRD, DNC, SMN, and RDM would probably not like that, either. The only people I can imagine liking that are SAM and BLM mains.

I'd rather have more engaging healing mechanics and things that would have me spend more time actively healing or thinking how to improvise to certain situations other than just mapping out my cooldowns on a timeline spreadsheet. That would require not just healer mechanics changed, but actual encounter design changes.

Very much agree with this.

Also agree the healers should have different damage rotations. One having nuke+DoT is probably fine. Maybe even two. But do we really need all four to have the exact same (more or less) damage kit? Probably not...

As a career WHM since launch, I would like to see more healing, less need for healer dps and possibly more utility spells for healers. That could include reducing individual job self heals and transferring mitigation and dps boosting spells. That alone would keep healers busy and justify our existence.

As it stands now, my WHM can be replaced by a WAR and that feels so sad it hurts.

God I feel this.

The problem isn't we don't have enough DPS buttons.

The problem is we use the ones we have so much because encounters have far less healing than they used to and far more non-healing Jobs that do healing/mitigation/sustain. I also have been playing since ARR (2.3) and all the people that say "The game's always been like this" - no. No it has NOT.

I used to think healers in this game should focus on healing, but having healers do DPS has been an important staple in this game since the beginning.

No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way. WHM had one oGCD heal, Benediction, on a 5 min CD. There was no way in hell a WHM could oGCD only heal like you can now. And we didn't have a fixed 10000 MP pool with fixed MP costs for spells. You had to use GCD heals, meaning you'd go OOM if you did too much damage, so WHM's often would do less damage and more healing. "healers do DPS" was not a "staple in this game since the beginning". Where that really took off was HW, because some of the raid bosses were so overtuned you HAD to have healers DPS otherwise you couldn't clear the Enrage, and this was something Yoshi P said they didn't intend to balance around, which is why no raid fights have been that bad since Gordias, which almost killed the game a second time and devastated the raid scene.

You may have heard that "over and over", but it's a lie and always has been.

And no, healers shouldn't have complex DPS kits and maybe 3 healing spells. That's not a healer, that's a DPSer. Hell, DNC already has almost that, as does RDM. Those aren't healers, they're DPSers.

What would you all like?

- Faster auto attacks and casts from the mobs.
- Everything hits a lot more harder. Raidwides, autos, tank busters, & etc.
- More RNG damage targeting different roles. Healer stacks going on DPS or tanks. Yes it exist in the game already, but the RNG I am mentioning is more of it in a shorter amount of time. Healers worship Chaos. (Tankbusters not included)
- All the of the healing potencies get reduced so healers have to do a little more sweatwork. This also includes support abilities from other roles.
- Reduce the gear creep. Yes, players will be stronker overtime, but not as much as were witnessing now. Make that materia worth it!
- More nasty debuffs that eat HP like candy, and the healers have to do something about it. Non-curable poison, heal to full doom, and something something else to that effect. Esuna doesn't get to be king of every single one of them. That's boring.
- or all of the above?

-shrugs-. There is plenty ol ways to make healing fun, and it really just boils down to balancing the stats of the game, the speed which the game fires off mechanics, finding quirky things to throw healers off in a fight, and the people you play with too. There is a lot of great players in this game, so if you're bored; just blame them for all of your problems. /s

I am all about healing. Finding ways to weave more DPS while taking care of my team is always a fun challenge, but the fun should truly be in just knowing that I do a good job keeping my team alive through nuts and all. I don't feel that way when my heals are too powerful, when fights are too slow, or that other roles can take care of themselves without the help of a healer. I can spew a long list of current issues that is involved with the potency stats in this game, but this is not the thread to talk about that.

ALL of this. I kind of said as much here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6385101

It's because there are several types of healer players.

The simplest way I've ever thought of to explain it is imagine there are three general types of people that want to play healers:

Pure/True Healer (in the sense of "True Neutral" in Baldur's Gate being the "Neutral Neutral" alignment). These are "Healer Healers". They like filling party health bars and generally helping people out in need. This is like what I am. I don't get any dopamine hit from seeing a big damage number (I couldn't even tell you what my average Misery hits OR crits for since I can't even see the number in the general explosion of VFX that is the boss model during a given encounter). But what I love is salvaging a crazy situation or keeping people alive. Throwing a Tetra on someone, landing a Cure 2 on someone, and throwing a Benison on someone else, all who were damaged right before a big boss attack, all of whom survive due to the quick actions. Recitation + Adlo + Deployment Tactics making big yellow bars such that the incoming attack doesn't even scratch anyone's health bar. That kind of thing I love. That's where my joy in this role comes from. Such people derive a lot of joy from just healing and aiding others, just generally helping out, aiding players through encounters they'd have trouble clearing on their own, patching up others mistakes, and they LOVE kits with a wide variety of heals and mitigation/shielding abilities that let them really crank out the healing or block damage outright from applying in the first place. This is your WoW Holy Priest, your FFXIV ARR WHM, your Everquest Cleric.

Support-Buffer Healers (also "Support role" players in the few MMOs that have Support as a fourth role). These people tend to want to help out their allies and are natural synergists. In life, they derive joy from making other people successful, empowering others to succeed is their jam. They love "combat-adjacent" type abilities. Stuff like AST Cards (the old/good ones or the current PvP ones), they loved that Caster role action in SB that let you give people MP and that old NIN ability that gave people TP, they love Dance Partner, Expedient, and so on. Stuff that boosts other people's capabilities, whether it be doing more damage, moving faster so they can more easily resolve mechanics, or having more resource generation. This sub-role/discipline/focus has been mostly removed from the game, though it somewhat lives on with AST and DNC (yeah, SCH has Expedient but that's about it). "part time healer, full time buffer". A sort of side-version of this is the saboteur (btw, I'm using those two names as they correspond to the two sides of this exemplified, in all places, in FF13 - the Synergist and Saboteur classes), which instead of boosting allies likes debuffing and debilitating enemies so their allies can hit them harder or better survive their attacks. This...doesn't really exist in FFXIV. It'd be a Job based around using abilities like Addle and Feint as its main rotation, if that makes any sense. "part time healer, full time debuffer", as it were. In the more extreme cases, they may not really like "healing", per see, all that much, though most like having some healing, such as an EQ Bard being mostly about buffing their allies, but also having some token or off-healing it can contribute to the party or in a pinch shift into healing if the main healer goes down or OON. This is your WoW Classic Shaman/Paladin, Everquest Shaman/Enchanter/Bard (the saboteur side, Necromancer?), FFXIV AST or DNC.

Support-DPS Healers. This is the group most dissatisfied with current healers in FFXIV. These are people that like juggling a DPSer rotation but also like not being limited to being "just a DPS". They really, genuinely ENJOY "doing 1000 dps in HW aoe packs when DPSer Jobs often had trouble pulling those numbers". They tend to be highly competitive and love blowing parses out of the water and quickly burning enemy packs as "healing via damage mitigation". But they also like to keep the corner of their eye on party health bars so they can flex the healing side of their kit at the same time. They derive pride from knowing both halves of their kit inside and out and often from being forced to use both sides to their maximum. They love having a DPS rotation and weaving heals between them without missing a beat, or cycling back and forth seamlessly between dealing damage and delivering healing. Jacks of all trades, these people would love RDM in FFXIV _if_ it wasn't for the fact RDM's (as a DPS Job in FFXIV's rigid trinity combat system) are expected to avoid Vercure for the most part and be strictly DPSers as their total focus outside of Verraising people on occasion. Like DPS players, they define their skill not just by what healing they can do but how much damage they can push, and they tend to be highly competitive unlike the Pure Healer and Support-Buffer Healers, which are more like the anime healer archetypes that just want their party to be happy/successful and measure their performance by that. This is your WoW Discipline Priest, Everqust Shaman, and in FFXIV, there really isn't one, but in ARR, HW, and SB, SCH was this. Note that this group CAN enjoy complex healing challenges, but they need to be complex and push them, and they still want at least a somewhat complex DPS experience with it.

...

The first step to any solution is acknowledging that there are different types of healer players AND that they all have a seat at the table. The people demanding higher DPS complexity on all healers aren't willing (or able?) to do the latter of those two things.

The sad thing is: FFXIV used to accommodate all four types.

Pure/True Healer players just love HEALING. Pure/True Healer and Support-Buffer Healer players love knowing their team succeeded and define a job well done as that.

PROBABLY the bulk of people that pick healing in games are one or the other of those, so healer Jobs should generally be designed around them.

This doesn't mean nothing for the others, as you can also have a healer Job for people that are Support-DPS Healer players. But that should not rule ALL healer Job design nor should it displace the other type of healer players or dictate bad encounter designs having too little healing requirements.

[Calysto]

And yet, in ARR, healing was more GCD based than now and damage more consistent meaning healers were using far less Stone/Ruin 1 casts - even ignoring their DoT refreshes - to cast healing spells. The game has literally done this before. No, more complex dps kits are NOT the "only" option.

[...]

God I feel this.

The problem isn't we don't have enough DPS buttons.

The problem is we use the ones we have so much because encounters have far less healing than they used to and far more non-healing Jobs that do healing/mitigation/sustain. I also have been playing since ARR (2.3) and all the people that say "The game's always been like this" - no. No it has NOT.

[...]

No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way. WHM had one oGCD heal, Benediction, on a 5 min CD. There was no way in hell a WHM could oGCD only heal like you can now. And we didn't have a fixed 10000 MP pool with fixed MP costs for spells. You had to use GCD heals, meaning you'd go OOM if you did too much damage, so WHM's often would do less damage and more healing. "healers do DPS" was not a "staple in this game since the beginning". Where that really took off was HW, because some of the raid bosses were so overtuned you HAD to have healers DPS otherwise you couldn't clear the Enrage, and this was something Yoshi P said they didn't intend to balance around, which is why no raid fights have been that bad since Gordias, which almost killed the game a second time and devastated the raid scene.

You may have heard that "over and over", but it's a lie and always has been.

And no, healers shouldn't have complex DPS kits and maybe 3 healing spells. That's not a healer, that's a DPSer. Hell, DNC already has almost that, as does RDM. Those aren't healers, they're DPSers.

As a former career SCH (2.x-5.99), I can say that's mostly wrong - at least for that job.
Yes ARR was mostly GCD focused, so it was more balanced between attacks and healing. The kit was also more balanced and not just ST/DoT/AoE for damage and you had cleric stance and pet actions to pay with too.
The fights were a bit less scripted : The goal was keeping the tank/party alive. after that you either payed with your dps kit or sat around.
You also had more utility as you could chose between Eos or Selene.
MP management was a thing, but it still was more forgiving that TP management at the time.

While increasing healing requirements and healing complexity would be fine, They have stated that they won't do it to not scare "new healers" (up to ultimate I guess), so what's left ? DPS and utility. Since utility can't affect difficulty, it either goes back to utility for DPS or irrelevant/niche.

[Lailani_Fey]

What I want for Christmas is ...

1. Higher healing requirements.

• The level of healing difficulty for Savage floors 1-2 should be similar to TEA p2 and floors 3-4 similar to TEA p1 but requiring less attention to other things like movement.
• TEA p1 itself should be a blueprint for healer design in Ultimates.

2. Rewarding Situational Awareness

• I want a large part of my attention to be spent on monitoring the battlefield and react to dynamic events such as players getting single-targeted by enemy abilities.
• I want to be able to recover mistakes by reacting swiftly and spend my resources doing so. Ex7 green orbs DoT is a good example. P10S poison dot is too punishing.

3. My Actions to matter

• Incoming damage is too random and unpredictable courtesy to the abundant mitigations and shields being possibly used. Some variation is alright but the party ending up with either 100% HP or 20% HP after a single raidwide is too much.
• WAR Nascent glint is a stronger single target healing ability than any healer's save benediction. It needs to be brought back in line.
• Extreme and up content should require healers.

4. Content to stay fun even with better gear

• Remove magical mitigation from gear. Better gear already yields more healing done and max hp on targets. When it also decreases damage taken, healing gets trivial too quickly.
• Heal checks should not be at the very end of a fight and get skipped with enough DPS.
• Having to raid week 1 in order for the content to be challenging should not be the default solution.

5. Resources spent on Healing vs Dps to matter

• WAR Shake It Off and PLD Divine Veil need to have a cost attached, so that they do not inflate the healing game but remain as a decision to support the healers when needed.
• Tank LB needs a cost like decreasing party damage done while active or Heal LB3 to resurrect people with half a weakness timer.
• Resource management should be slightly emphasised. Put MP costs on oGCDs.

6. Less gimmicks that eliminate or cheese a mechanic

• Tank invulns should not be able to cover all TB mechanics in a fight. Preferably they are emergency tools but not part of a rotation.
• Macrocosmos should not be able to make P3S' Life's Agonies trivial.

7. New toys

• I would like to have either a (GW1) Divine Intervention type of ability that prevents death once or a (EQ2) Stoneskin type that nullifies a unit of damage taken once. The target being hit by damage should still be inflicted by additional effects of the attack hit like debuffs/kb. It should cost around 2.4k mp and have 120s cd, idm if it replaced Rescue

8. Reworked Abilities

• Esuna should take effect immediately as opposed to the ~1s delay it has now.
• Macrocosmos should be reworked so it does not require coordination with the whole group to be effective.

[OgruMogru]

What I want for Christmas is ...


7. New toys

• I would like to have either a (GW1) Divine Intervention type of ability that prevents death once or a (EQ2) Stoneskin type that nullifies a unit of damage taken once. The target being hit by damage should still be inflicted by additional effects of the attack hit like debuffs/kb. It should cost around 2.4k mp and have 120s cd, idm if it replaced Rescue

Maaaan Gw1 had so many interesting healing and utility tools it's insane. I've been playing a lot recently and there's just so many cool and impactful abilities. It's gotta have of the most robust healer/support options of any game I've played in a loooooong time [my old characters had 80years worth of birthday presents saved up lmao] SE could just copy/steal 5 of them at random and it would be a marked improvement.

[Renathras]

As a former career SCH (2.x-5.99), I can say that's mostly wrong - at least for that job.

I said that. And have over and over again.

SCH is kind of a weird exception to the rule. In ARR, Lustrate ignored Cleric stance, and by the end SB, SCH had a ton of oGCDs.

ARR was never balanced between attacks and healing. SCH was balanced around leaning heavily into attacks and doing light spot healing or pre-shielding while WHM was balanced leaning heavily in to healing and being main healer for groups, only dealing light damage in most situations. The balance was not that all healer Jobs were balanced between attacks and healing. It's that SCH was balanced around mostly attacks and WHM around mostly healing, so that together, they completed each other and balanced around both. SCH actually had relatively few heals. Physic, Adlo, Succor, Lustrate, and Wispering Dawn, I believe (Embrace if we count it), and could Cross-Class Stoneskin. By contrast, it had an extensive DPS suite of Ruin, Ruin 2 (same damage, high MP cost to pay for free movement), Bio, Bio 2, Miasma, Bane, Shadow Flare, Energy Drain, and could Cross-Class Aero (from CNJ) for yet another DoT and Blizzard 2 (from THM) to give it a spamable AOE attack, something it otherwise lacked at the time.

My one problem with the "they won't increase healing because they've said they don't want to do it since it will scare new healers" argument is that ALSO means no new damage buttons, since they've said they don't want to do that since it scares new healers, too. All their actions have been towards reducing the healer DPS footprint in terms of abilities and complexity, and even making things like Misery and SGE MP regen that directly reward healing - even overhealing.

They aren't likely to go back on the DPS one but not the healing one, since they've been much more explicit about it and designing specifically for healers to have less DPS actions over time.

So "DPS and utility" is not what's left, as "DPS" is also not allowed.

The only thing left is actually utility. And as you say, that's irrelevant/niche. So that means we can hope for no changes at all.

...but there's no fun in that, so instead, we talk about the things we want to see.

I want to see more healing and more GCDs devoted to healing.

[Mecia]

It obviously doesnt have to be either or but i just cannot see how to make healing more interesting without touching incoming damage.

[Calysto]

...

I'd argue that WHM was the exception ; not SCH, as of HW AST had more going on in utility too ; there was never any need to nerf every healer to that level and not deliver on anything substantial in 6.0.

I'd like more "complex" healing too, but as the primary role is "keeping the party alive", it's probably the last aspect they'll touch for "accessibility reasons"
It would be nice to talk about fun and exciting new things, but we must dance around SE arbitrary and imaginary constraints ; if not for that it would be fun.
The answer to the thread question is of course "why can't we have both ?"

You usually agree to different play-styles across the role being a viable option.
Problem is SE don't as it require balancing, so we're stuck as optional HP batteries that can't do much of anything.
We could play the jobs we liked, but we're not allowed to ; "there is no fun in that" is the current healers situation.

EDIT : just nitpicking , not worth a post

Strictly speaking, I was talking about ARR.

Strictly speaking, you can't really have an exception out of 2. They were just different then

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Title. Would you rather...

I can't say fully yes or no to both points for one single reason: I want BOTH front of the kits getting their well deserved refining. Yes. I want healing to be more complex than just "push health bar to the right". Yes. I -also- want damaging to be more than just 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 plus maybe occasional other button every 40s or so.

Breaking that down brought me to my ideal wish list in no particular order:

• A proper, gradual increase of healing requirement.

  This part is super obvious. When you soften your healer playerbase with the joke that is healing requirement in casual content from lv1 to lv90 (outside from few exceptions like Bardam), of course this means they lack the incentive to actually get better. Why bother learn how to heal with Addersgall when Diagnosis spam will work for everything, amirite? Give them a proper learning curve; make the learning healers accentuate this increase. It has to remain easy enough but not too easy that even a Diagnosis-mage in The Dead Ends can satisfy the healing requirement.

• An increase to healing complexity.

  Pretty similar to first point. The difference is, this point wants to tell you that having almost all healing button basically boils down to single button press of "push life bar to the right" is very boring. Few exceptions like Macrocosmos, Earthly Star, damage refund Lilies, and opportunity cost-ridden aetherflow are fine. We need more of those. A whacky tidbit of idea that comes to mind when I wrote this reply: WHM keeps their old Cure III radius at 6y and 550p potency. But storing each lily increases its cure potency by 75 and increase its radius by 2y.

• Reduce the amount of overall healing buttons

  This one should goes without saying: we just have too many healing buttons. Cull some of the excessive ones (looking at you Fey Blessing vs Indomitability) to make more room for additional non-healing buttons.

• Additional & more spread out utilities/non damaging abilities

  Expedience is one of the best addition they ever gave in EW. Lv86 abilities are superfluous (if only they're more interactive i.e. Protraction can be deployed). Either make them interesting, or remove to add something that's actually interesting. Didn't we used to have Virus before too? Oh yeah, they now exist elsewhere... can we have that back? :^)

• An engaging dps kit to play around when healing requirement are satisfied.

  The most dreaded change of all, perhaps. Please, 22 Nuke + 2 DoT refresh per minute is beyond insulting; even moreso when all healers are condemned to this stupid a$$ 'rotation'. Also an equally important aspect of this point: make them noticeably rewarding. Otherwise there is not a proper incentive to master the job itself.

[Payadopa]

Yeah, I feel the kit's themselves aren't the issue and that the real problem is the battles/encounters/duties themselves with a small amount caused by additions to some non-healer job kits.

I dunno, I find the way you heal incredibly boring. Earthly Star is mildly interesting etc but that's about it.

[ChrysOCE]

As a career WHM since launch, I would like to see more healing, less need for healer dps and possibly more utility spells for healers. That could include reducing individual job self heals and transferring mitigation and dps boosting spells. That alone would keep healers busy and justify our existence.

As it stands now, my WHM can be replaced by a WAR and that feels so sad it hurts.

My feelings exactly.