This is depressing, please change things

[Erit]

What I feel like they're trying to go for, and completely failing at, is a system where as a Healer you'd be a DPS until boss mechanics start happening and you need to start healing.
But they forgot to make boss mechanics that particularly require healing, and they forgot to add the DPS part to healers.

Tanks have been DPS who press mitigations for mechanics for a few expansions, now, too, since aggro management got lobotomized. Role balance in general has been rough for a hot minute.

[Carighan]

Tanks have been DPS who press mitigations for mechanics for a few expansions, now, too, since aggro management got lobotomized. Role balance in general has been rough for a hot minute.

Yeah, and it goes even further than that.

But just for tanks, while you could argue "But in particular Paladin and Warrior are so strong", they still don't play like tanks. It's really not fun if you want to play a tank and don't actually play one beyond the boss being turned a particular way.

And beyond tanks, melee DPS in Endwalker barely were melee insofar that most bosses had a hitbox reaching all the way to Sharlayan. One caster has essentially no cast bars. Stuff is all over the place!

As for healers in particular, while more damage buttons would be ... "nice" (in the most grandma-commenting-on-stuff way), the real fix IMO is to actually deal damage that requires healing. I got SO MANY healing buttons. I'd have more than enough complexity and variety in my button presses if there were any damage to heal!

[Alice_Rivers]

As for healers in particular, while more damage buttons would be ... "nice" (in the most grandma-commenting-on-stuff way), the real fix IMO is to actually deal damage that requires healing. I got SO MANY healing buttons. I'd have more than enough complexity and variety in my button presses if there were any damage to heal!

This, literally this.

[Erit]

Yeah, and it goes even further than that.

But just for tanks, while you could argue "But in particular Paladin and Warrior are so strong", they still don't play like tanks. It's really not fun if you want to play a tank and don't actually play one beyond the boss being turned a particular way.

And beyond tanks, melee DPS in Endwalker barely were melee insofar that most bosses had a hitbox reaching all the way to Sharlayan. One caster has essentially no cast bars. Stuff is all over the place!

As for healers in particular, while more damage buttons would be ... "nice" (in the most grandma-commenting-on-stuff way), the real fix IMO is to actually deal damage that requires healing. I got SO MANY healing buttons. I'd have more than enough complexity and variety in my button presses if there were any damage to heal!

I've been running Scholar through the DT dungeons a lot lately—and cursing a blue streak over the game dropping nothing but Fending gear when my GNB is already capped—and let me tell you, I press all my buttons a lot. Not because the mechanics hit particularly hard, but because people keep trying to die to them regardless.

I think that's what the goal is with current healer design: Absolute Babysitter Mode. That's why when everyone's playing well, the role feels unfulfilling in standard content; half your kit is intended for course-correction in some capacity. It's a bit different in high-end, but I don't know much beyond hearsay.

And you can't really buff standard content to require Savage or Ultimate level play, because then the majority of the playerbase who aren't interested in those things will up stakes and fuck off. I don't think XIV could survive hemorrhaging players like that when CBU3 seems to have been hit with the "Bigger And Bigger" bug and cannot seem to stop trying to spend more and more on each expansion.

The answer, then, is to lean more into the support aspect of the role. Give us tools that let us influence encounters beyond "Hit it 'til it dies" and "un-hit target ally." Scholar can outright invalidate mechanics, Astro if played masterfully can force skips, lean into that sort of play. The "holy trinity" used to be a quadrangle, but at some point people decided mezzing was lame when it's some of the funniest shit you can do in a game. I remember when Paladin mass-blinded as part of its AoE threat management, it was always a nice treat to get the most out of that. Give us back things like Disable, or let White Mage throw out Faith or Bravery every 30s so you have to mind other people's rotations, slap it on the Black Mage right as they hit Flare Star and dump their Xenoglossy stacks.

But perhaps these are simply the ramblings of an old man lost in his ways.

[Alice_Rivers]

But that's the thing; if I want to play dps, I'll play a dps class, I won't play a healer.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I would more point to the many single player FF games of the past and what they've done with their Healer jobs and characters where applicable... Where when you don't need to cast Cure, or other healing spells, they're still either slightly less effective melee fighters, or mages... Or in the games with changeable jobs, you can attach whatever you want onto their side so they can still do things when not healing.

The healer part should be the center, you have a healer because you expect to need heals. But it's that you very much don't always need to heal every second of every fight, and because of that they should have something else going on for those times.

[Valence]

They won't make healing more heavily weighted in time spent healing and casting heals for the same reason they've started making tanks impossible to kill, notably in dungeon/casual content, because this community constantly says "it feels bad dying because the healer didn't heal me" or "it feels bad dying because the tank didn't use mitigation". Which tends to boil down to "it feels bad dying because of others".

[Azurarok]

It's more harm for the healing side imo since most healing is just done through abilities nowadays. It also doesn't reduce the amount of glare/broil/malefic/dosis cast.

Also I personally don't really want to be juggling DoTs with every healer and think it should be SCH's thing specifically.

[Zaytex]

Healer has been like this for 4-5 years, it will never change and I doubt 8.0 will fix it - the developers do not care because none of them are active healer mains and recognise healing is the least played role and has the biggest potential of gatekeeping everyone else if you're bad at it, so they intentionally make it worthless in casual content to please the other two roles.

If you want to feel needed and have fun on healer, go do content on day - week 1 where people will fuck up consistently and gear won't outpace fights yet, otherwise just accept this role is glorified insurance policy for dps/tanks if they somehow fuck up.

That's pretty much how I've made my peace with it, accepted healing is just a prog job for high end content, nothing more.

[Likethewind]

Nothing has and will change. You might as well pick up pld at this point bc tanks have been doing healers jobs for like 3 xpacs now?