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

[KenZentra]

Oh no I completely disagree. You dont spam heals needlessly just to get a potency increase, you are structuring your healing to get the most out of your kit, almost like a rotation. Just like how for DRG you wouldnt use Lifesurge (or whatever the guarenteed crit ability is called) just whenever it comes up, you try to make sure it is on your hardest hitting GCD to get the most out of it.

The lack of synergy with other abilities results in huge waves of damage being met with near instant recovery of that damage in about 2-3 seconds, so about 1 GCD and 1 oGCD. Healers in this aspect are less about healing and more about meeting HP checks, then continuing the brain dead nature of their dps kit, which again, the simplicity of which is a problem because healers have an extreme excess of downtime from healing.
In short, right now, Healers spend more time (GCDs) dealing damage than healing, and because of this players want more in-depth DPS kits for healers because essentially they are DPS, that just happen to heal to meet these HP checks thrown at them.

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.

On a Normal mode Raid, I spend 90% of my time healing constantly, when I dont need to heal, I reapply SW:Pain and Holy Fire. I find it really fun and rewarding.

In FFXIV, I spend 90% of my time spamming Broil and Bio and when Huge raid damage comes out, I use 2 heals and poff! The damage is gone! I get to spam Broil and Bio again.

You're kinda asking for a DPS that has to stop their rotation (even if it isnt invasive to whatever combo they have going on aside from straight up stopping dealing damage for a while) to heal. Which if SE wants to do that, all power to them. But you will see every DPS turn into a little mini healer and Tanks self-sustain even harder to cover the loss of an actual healer, cause... well, you wouldnt want to interrupt their DPS right?

[Deceptus]

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.

[ThaCa]

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.

Tanks lose heals, gain party wide mits, their current kits get consolidated too for room and get some additional dps buttons.

Most or all DPS become greedy to stop the eternal tug of war of trying to fit MCH and BLM into the mold with the rest of DPS sub roles.

[Tiramu]

I'd go for #1, better DPS toolkits. I think the healing kits are generally fine as they are aside from having low level spells update into their higher tiers (cure > cure 2 type stuff) and maybe more optimisation options on the regen healers.

When people go on about healers being easy, I think they're probably forgetting the levelling journey for new players and inexperienced groups. Healing difficulty is always going to be heavily influenced by your familiarity with the content and your groups ability. Even on the easiest healers, it can be stressful dealing with bad or inexperienced groups, especially in content you arent familiar with yourself.

I think better DPS tools would be more relevant to the games direction and add enough complexity.

[Raikai]

Title. Would you rather...

1. Heal kits stay more of less as simple as they are but their damage kits/party buffs get put back to HW/SB levels of complexity/interaction (not copy/paste those expac's but roughly that many damage buttons/interactions). Stuff like a tiny AoE that buff's people's damage, SCH getting its dots back, AST cards going back to how they were in SB, Aero 3 coming back. etc

2. Damage kits stay as they are (30 sec dot, one button spam), but their healing abilities are made significantly more complex. No more "press one button to heal everyone to full". More unique interactions, passives, cooldowns etc. Stuff like a CD where everyone's HP in an area is averaged out, a debuff on the boss heals anyone when they attack the boss, AoE heals cost way more MP/are on a cooldown. etc.

And yes, a mix of 1 and 2 is absolutely allowed and frankly, that's my preference.

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.

If that's achieved, I'd be more than fine with DPS actions being really simple - but said that, can we at least have different tools across the healers? Nuke + 30s dot is really boring. There are ways to make a really simple dps tool without copy pasting the same across everyone.

[Asako]

Ecounters don't have enough busters or damage. Those that do have big busters get invuned because they are usually 5 minutes apart. It's usually Tank A uses invun for big buster, then Tank B then Tank A again. Other than that damage is laughable.

[Hyperia]

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.

[Nabril]

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. I've heard that over and over. At this point, I believe that healers should have a complex DPS rotation to keep them engaged and maybe 3 healing spells to take care of the party.

[Gember]

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.

[Zairava]

I don't want either to be too complicated, but by this game's design between the two a bit more to the dps portion of the kit would be nice and help it feel more satisfying.