Do healers actually want a more complex damage rotation?

[flowerkatie]

So yeah, the whole ''healers are supposed to heal, and not have complex DPS rotations'' is just people not understanding this game very well (no offense).

Just because you disagree with an opinion doesn't mean the opposing party doesn't understand the game. I've enjoyed a lot of casual content as well as week one savages, ultimates and a lot of other content. I've cleared a lot of this content without casting a single GCD heal so I'm completely aware of that fact. And * shock *, I still disagree.

For starters, the role of a tank is completely different to a healer. They inherently have a lot less abilities that are specifically related to tanking because there is only so much you can do in relation to pulling emenity, their role in hard content is primarily focused around a single enemy and their options to "not do DPS" are considerably less, unlike healers who could potentially heal their parties and manage 8 different members, tanks have limited options. The role is still difficult and rewarding but your whole point of "but tanks!!" is irrelevent, the same argument could be given to some of the very basic DPS. Why can't we give them more to do if tanks can tank and damage? The answer ... they're a different role.

It is fine you don't understand my point, it just seems bizarre to me that people will acknowledge that even in the hardest content not a single GCD heal is required anymore and that healing is in a terrible state, they'll acknowledge that all healing can be done via oGCD simply by the fact that it is so easy; and that one healer can ignore healing completely during hard content and still easily clear. But then for some reason, the solution is "make DPS more engaging". I also don't understand your thinking, why is the solution to do something that you have 13 other jobs to go ahead and do? Why not take the unique role of a healer and look into resolving the issue by making the actual role useful and engaging without having to make the "filler" fun?

How fun it'll be when Square Enix implement complex DPS rotations and all healer abilities remain as oGCD only and you've become a DPS who simply weaves in heals, and yes; that's the state its in currently anyway. But your solution of doubling-down on that by working on the damage side of it rather than fixing the healing side is just (in my opinion) very silly. Fix healers and make them more engaging properly. And stop thinking people who have different opinions don't understand the game, lmao.

[HyoMinPark]

I also don't understand your thinking, why is the solution to do something that you have 13 other jobs to go ahead and do? Why not take the unique role of a healer and look into resolving the issue by making the actual role useful and engaging without having to make the "filler" fun?

To respond to this:

I don’t know how long you’ve been playing this game, nor do I know how long you’ve frequented discussion zones like this forum or maybe some of the FFXIV-related subreddits. So I don’t know if you might be aware of these discussions or not—but healers used to ask for this all the time. We begged and pleaded for more incoming damage to heal. For more reasons to actually BE a healer. The developers refused, and simply told us that, if we wanted to heal more, then go do Ultimate. They were not increasing the amount of incoming damage to allow healers to actually perform their role in content, and if we wanted to “be a healer”, go do Ultimate. This was early Endwalker when this was said. Healers on the forums started asking for more interesting DPS options a bit prior to that—but mostly because we had been asking for more ways to actually be a healer and were simply ignored.

[Rozeee]

If you want to output high damage you have 13 jobs to choose from in which you can do exactly that. However, I do agree with the healing issue to some degree - content simply needs to be more difficult so that healing is more relevant.

I want to do more damage because the game has given everyone a wealth of tool to heal themselves and the party. If the game is designed with this much self-sustain (enough to live through any normal content) then it isn't unreasonable to assume that the output of DPS is all that matters. After all, why bring a job if we don't need its main function and other jobs can clear the content faster? Healer doesn't bring anything to the table.

I don't really want to do more DPS, but this is the only way my job isn't straight useless. Content difficulty can only go so far if it's mandatory for progression. Not to say I would mind it but just being realistic.

[Connor]

Yoshi-P: “But you already have them! *points at the highly enjoyable and complex Glare IV / Baneful Impaction / Oracle / Psyche. You asked for conditional abilities, more DoTs, proc abilities* and we have delivered .’

* Translator’s note: Yoshi-P probably genuinely considers Glare IV a ‘proc ability’ because you can use it when you get a proc from presence of mind, like how he thinks ‘HP Shield’ and ‘Regen’ are buffs and not healing

[Connor]

Of course I did, my criticism is that the argument you're making is that we're being given no reason to heal so we should have engaging damage rotations instead. There are literally 13 jobs built around engaging damaging rotations so if thats what you want, go play them.

If we want to fix healers then we should advocate for exactly that, fix healers. Make healing more engaging, make it more required and give us more difficult encounters to justify it.

They literally can’t ‘fix healing’ though because if they scaled enemy damage output to be proportional to healer’s capabilities, healing requirements would skyrocket so high the average player would be entirely incapable of completing even normal content (allegedly). If they inverted the strength of gcd/ogcd, again that’s too hard for the new players. If they removed the majority of oGCD and forces healers to gcd, the forums would just be flooded with people screeching about how they’ve been turned into ‘cure bots’.
Like imagine the abject outrage people would have if they made freecure fishing a genuine advantage and not something people complain about their healer doing on Reddit.

Unfortunately, there’s simply no way to follow the logic of the game’s design without coming to the conclusion that basically the only thing players will really accept is, ‘healing must always be so easy it can be done by anyone’. And that’s not even touching on the major reworking of the entirety of ffxiv’s combat system to make ‘healers healing’ actually work. Thus, for many people the only logical follow-up is, ‘they should have more fun doing dps then’. I mean, what else are they gonna do? Support the party? Look how that turned out for Astrologian. And when it comes to removing dps options to force ‘healers to heal’, you have to look no further than Scholar’s Energy Drain removal to see how extremely unpopular that attempt was

[Arrhin]

They literally can’t fix healing though because if they scaled enemy damage output to be proportional to healer’s capabilities, healing requirements would skyrocket so high the average player would be entirely incapable of completing even normal content (allegedly). If they inverted the strength of gcd/ogcd, again that’s too hard for the new players. If they removed the majority of oGCD and forces healers to gcd, the forums would just be flooded with people screeching about how they’ve been turned into ‘cure bots’.
Like imagine the abject outrage people would have if they made freecure fishing a genuine advantage and not something people complain about their healer doing on Reddit.

Unfortunately, there’s simply no way to follow the logic of the game’s design without coming to the conclusion that basically the only thing players will really accept is, ‘healing must always be so easy it can be done by anyone’. That’s not technically touching on the major reworking of the entirety of ffxiv’s combat system to make ‘healers healing’ actually work. Thus, for many people the only logical follow-up is, ‘they should have more fun doing dps then’. I mean, what else are they gonna do? Support the party? Look how that turned out for Astrologian

I think a gentle nerf of Tank mitigation/self heal, and a slight reduction in enmity generation -might- be enough without re-balancing the whole convoluted mess. It could bring the skill floor for tanking and healing up ever so slightly without making either role too burdensome for more casual players. There does need to be SOME skill involved or what is the point of playing them?

[flowerkatie]

They literally can’t ‘fix healing’ though because if they scaled enemy damage output to be proportional to healer’s capabilities, healing requirements would skyrocket so high the average player would be entirely incapable of completing even normal content (allegedly). If they inverted the strength of gcd/ogcd, again that’s too hard for the new players. If they removed the majority of oGCD and forces healers to gcd, the forums would just be flooded with people screeching about how they’ve been turned into ‘cure bots’.
Like imagine the abject outrage people would have if they made freecure fishing a genuine advantage and not something people complain about their healer doing on Reddit.

Unfortunately, there’s simply no way to follow the logic of the game’s design without coming to the conclusion that basically the only thing players will really accept is, ‘healing must always be so easy it can be done by anyone’. And that’s not even touching on the major reworking of the entirety of ffxiv’s combat system to make ‘healers healing’ actually work. Thus, for many people the only logical follow-up is, ‘they should have more fun doing dps then’. I mean, what else are they gonna do? Support the party? Look how that turned out for Astrologian. And when it comes to removing dps options to force ‘healers to heal’, you have to look no further than Scholar’s Energy Drain removal to see how extremely unpopular that attempt was

This entire logic that people have though completely contradicts itself. If you make DPS more complex and engaging then you'll get complaints about it being too difficult, so what if they keep it somewhat simple? Then it wont fix anything, it'll still be boring? Okay, make it so being good at the rotation is irrelevent so at least its fun for some; well, now we've only tailored for parsing and people who care about doing the rotation properly.

I don't see how that fixes, if we see people "Complaining" and "Crying" as a reason that something should not be fixed then you'll never find any solution because people always dislike change.

[HyoMinPark]

What healers initially wanted was to feel more engaged while playing their role. The earliest forms of these pleas that I read and participated in were actively asking for the developers to give them more incoming damage to heal—not at a Savage-level, but just upping the damage in lower-end content just enough to make use of the myriad of healing tools the devs kept bloating our kits with.

Well, when the developers went on the record to say “We will not be increasing the amount of healing that healers need to do—if you want to heal more, then go do Ultimate”, THAT was when healers started asking for a more engaging DPS system. There were already murmurings of it around the time ShB Media Tour started up and we saw that the healers had been reduced to 1 DoT and 1 nuke. SB healing for WHM and SCH at least had 2~3 DoTs to manage to give us a bit more variety in our GCD presses.

Most healer mains aren’t asking for a DPS-role level of complexity when we ask for more damage buttons (which, again, we only started asking for when the devs made it clear our first demand of more healing to actively do would not be entertained). A lot of us were content with just bringing back a second DoT on a different timer (so, not 30s) to manage. Think Aero III on SB WHM: we had Aero II and Aero III to manage in between pressing Stone IV. Aero II was 18s and Aero III was 24s; so they were refreshed at different intervals and not always back-to-back before continuing to throw rocks at a boss. It wasn’t complex, but it broke up the single-target nuke spam monotony of the job. Plus, Aero III was AOE, so it also broke up Holy spam in dungeons.

The argument from those who always contested this was “well you just want to play a damage dealer!” or “go play a DPS job then and leave the healing to us!”. But, in my opinion, that argument missed the crux of the issue: we had already tried to ask for more healing, were denied, so we shifted to asking for SOMETHING to make all the DPSing we were doing in ANY CONTENT (so, not just Savage/Ultimate) engaging. We never asked to have a DPS role style rotation. The most I ever saw was someone asking if WHM could maybe have a 1-2 “combo” since we went into EW still only having one DoT and one nuke (and I am fairly certain they wanted that “combo” to also flow into building Lily gauge versus it being passive generation on a timer that requires no input on the part of the player).

I don’t want a complex rotation. I mainly play SGE and WHM now, since my favorite iteration of AST died when SB ended and I’m a travesty at SCH. But I would be satisfied with a second DoT on a different timer to upkeep. SGE has Phlegma to at least break up the Dosis monotony, but WHM… I go auto-pilot all the time on that job. But if they were to re-introduce Aero III (or I guess they can call it Dia IV or whatever they want) as an 18s or 24s DoT to manage alongside my other Dia DoT and Glare, personally, I’d feel pretty happy and think that’s at least a step in the right direction.



I don’t think it’s good design when a role spends 80% or more of its casts on a single nuke in any given content (Savage and Ultimate included—healers are not spending the majority of their casts on healing in there; they are spending them on their DPS spells). I’m not asking to strictly become a healbot either where I just stand around and wait for people to take damage. But if the developers are insistent on bloating healer toolkits with more healing abilities, then they need to give healers a reason to make use of them (outside of the odd DF party in a 24-man where everyone is dying to everything—fun and engagement in a role shouldn’t hinge on fishing for 24-man meme parties). I feel like a healthy balance of healing and damage dealing is what the role needs. Maybe not 50/50, but even if it was 60% damage/40% healing uptime, that would help with increased engagement.

Or (and this is a very unpopular opinion here), give me back Cleric Stance if there’s going to be so little healing and all I have is my nuke. At least then I have the stance-dancing mechanic and need to know when it’s okay to be in it, and when I need to toggle out of it to prep healing. But I was also one of the few that enjoyed the Cleric Stance dancing and was sad when it went away. Anyways…


I haven’t participated in healer discussions on here since 2022. But what little I’ve read during my sporadic visits to the forums seems largely unchanged from what most healers were asking for during the time I was active on the healer forums (2017~2022). This post is just a collection of unorganized thoughts that I wrote without much thought going into formatting them. If they’re a bit hard to follow, then I apologize. I was merely writing down everything that came to mind when I read the title of the thread.

[Arrhin]

In Dawntrail my experience so far (Limited, like my gametime) it's still the old Tank self heals issue. When I'm healing I feel like the third wheel. Tanks are self healing or mitigating through most things, aggro is baby talk to maintain so I barely need to heal. Add to this the lame DPS "rotation" and you have pissy healers. For example last night we borked a final boss mechanic in the first DT dungeon and our pug WAR solo'd the last boss. Complete and total let down for everyone except that WAR. YoshiP needs to actually play the game he holds in such high regard as, idk, something other than a DPS... Force him to run healer extensively before any further gameplay decisions are made.

[Azurarok]

I think the main reason I want them is how much worse they feel to play solo, having started the game with CNJ in 5.3 and sticking with WHM through mid-HW. I leveled the rest of the jobs to 70 partway into SB and I still remember how much I was blown away by how much more the others had.

And it's not really that I want it to be that complex on the job either. I really like what WHM has right now, between PoM, Assize, Lilies, now Glare IV. They just don't happen often enough.

Also all healers getting their nukes changed to a 1.5s cast didn't help either. AST's malefic spam worked because the card management was there. There were other ways they could've handled mobility/weaving for the others and they instead went with homogenization.