Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Carighan]

YoshiP himself mentioned that's not what he wants healing to be

I mean, the lead dev both not personally liking healing (clearly) and also (clearly) having little understanding of players who do sure explains a lot about the issues of the entire healer role in this game and their absolutely bonkers design that makes even the GW2 "Throw 240 skills at the wall and hope 5 stick so someone can make a spec from them"-approach sensible by comparison. Sigh.

[Connor]

Yeah sorry I remembered the quote after asking.

But the item level bit was a point I argued before too, and that isn't the kind of healing I really want either, so I'm most likely being more bitter than I should be.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years it’s that the devs will selectively take any fuel they can get to justify their extremely unsatisfactory decisions.
I.E ‘healers (like three of them) complained about savage dps uptime so we condensed the entire thing into one button and will exclusively add overpowered oGCDs heals from now on’, ‘people complained about their buff timers needing synch’d so we make every single one have the same timer’, etc. They don’t seem to care whether it’s representative of what people ‘want’ as a whole as long as they can use it to justify their poor decisions.

Obviously it’s an objective fact that healers dps in FFXIV. But everytime that gets pointed out and used against others to funnel the argument towards ‘give them more attacks’ (which, again, technically they did lol), it’s giving the devs the message ‘oh look we’re doing things right [because this one guy’s feedback suggests so]’.

What devs needs to realise is that it’s their exact design philosophy that’s at the root of all the healer issues in the first place; they can’t just ‘add a dps ogcd’ and fix the problem, nor can they just scale healing higher if toolkit potencies stay the same. They need to make actual substantive changes to the design relative to player feedback and their actual vision of what healers should be. Not just throwing band aids over a gaping wound lol

[NobleWinter]

I've been a healer main since ARR and the healing experience got better in Heavensward which was amazing and then I had a few complaints in Stormblood when things got simplified and then Shadowbringers rolled around and ruined everything. I'm now currently unsubscribed because healing is just downright painful. I'm not having fun and that's what the game is for. It should be fun to heal and not just while you're learning for a few months as a brand new player. This game is intended to hold interest for YEARS on end and the devs have completely lost the plot when it comes to healer design for enjoyment and longevity. Play long enough and every healer is the same. Every encounter is the same. It's all boring and infuriating is the final stop for any healer player with a brain. This game makes too much money to have absolutely no one putting any effort into healer skills, animations, lore, etc. Why does Ruin 2 still look like manure after a decade? When will WHM be able to use a lily aoe heal in the first Ultimates? How many failed card reworks will the game see for Astro. Why are their two different classes that are both just functionally Scholar? It is pure insanity at this point.

[Nero-Voidstails]

YoshiP himself mentioned that's not what he wants healing to be during the EW media tour, though we don't know if that's still what he thinks.

He also explains next in that clip that gearing up will reduce healing required, so it's inevitable that they'll end up with more healing downtime.

that is to be expect obviously haha but I will say this when a tank doesn't need healing in any content is a problem and even more when a ultimate is clear without healer. yes they use tanks with heavy healing and that's the problem as long as healing are on other job the less and less healer are needed. Most healer doesn't complain because they can't heal they complain because the balance isn't there at all. We don't want more DPS button we want to feel more important and not just a green DPS. if I want more button I will go DPS too I don't say all healing is bad on other job but should be tone down heavily or! Have tanks play differently and more risky like warrior could use more HP and less defence trust me the healers would be healing them even if it's not often it's still more.

I just think that the balance of all role have been broken and no one want to see it because everything is about DPS not because a fight need more esuna or doom check like monastery and the doom of dead end that need to be fully heal to not diecas little as they feel just that make a healer feel important and needed but if they can fully heal without your help you aren't needed. so right now a healer is nothing more then a weak and pathetic DPS.

for me I just want the game to be more balanced between role so everyone feel important I don't want my downtime to be 95% of a battle or a dungeon even

[Mesarthim]

I've been a healer main since ARR and the healing experience got better in Heavensward which was amazing and then I had a few complaints in Stormblood when things got simplified and then Shadowbringers rolled around and ruined everything. I'm now currently unsubscribed because healing is just downright painful. I'm not having fun and that's what the game is for. It should be fun to heal and not just while you're learning for a few months as a brand new player. This game is intended to hold interest for YEARS on end and the devs have completely lost the plot when it comes to healer design for enjoyment and longevity. Play long enough and every healer is the same. Every encounter is the same. It's all boring and infuriating is the final stop for any healer player with a brain. This game makes too much money to have absolutely no one putting any effort into healer skills, animations, lore, etc. Why does Ruin 2 still look like manure after a decade? When will WHM be able to use a lily aoe heal in the first Ultimates? How many failed card reworks will the game see for Astro. Why are their two different classes that are both just functionally Scholar? It is pure insanity at this point.

I started in 3.2 as a healer main, and it stayed that way until I heard about the shadowbringer changes. It was a great expansion but by the gods it ruined my interest in healing. I now have a priority of tank >= Dps >>>>> Healing for roulette choice, only queueing if even tank times are slow. I'm only touching sage because it's the healer I dislike the least. If you asked a friend of mine you could receive a book-sized rant from me about AST (which is fine now but doesn't change the fact my job main for 1/3 of HW and all of SB was nuked from orbit).

Healing as far as FFXIV goes is not something I ever do to enjoy myself now, it is done because it's a last resort. Also hot take from myself but the 30s dot is boring because they do not interact with kits at all. I'll still take it because healers... really don't have anything else. Sage has a decent number of other attacks but they all have gigantic cooldowns so it all boils down to dosis spam.

[Azurarok]

A little unrelated, and not that I really trust them to replace them with something effective, but other than so we have *something* else to optimize, do we even need the DoTs at this point? I feel they were designed around Cleric Stance (and fester for SCH?) and just kinda lost their usefulness over the changes starting with SB. WHM and AST also don't have them in PvP now and yet they still feel better to play as well. Think the mobile version also just got rid of them outright.

At least with Aero/Bio/Combust, their having been 18s made them barely a gain over 1, so I think it was more reasonable to use them more for movement, like purposefully delay refreshing by a few seconds so you can move and avoid dropping a casted spell. Them being 30s makes them less useful for that, with the 1.5s glare/broil pushing it further.

[Connor]

A little unrelated, and not that I really trust them to replace them with something effective, but other than so we have *something* else to optimize, do we even need the DoTs at this point? I feel they were designed around Cleric Stance (and fester for SCH?) and just kinda lost their usefulness over the changes starting with SB. WHM and AST also don't have them in PvP now and yet they still feel better to play as well. Think the mobile version also just got rid of them outright.

At least with Aero/Bio/Combust, their having been 18s made them barely a gain over 1, so I think it was more reasonable to use them more for movement, like purposefully delay refreshing by a few seconds so you can move and avoid dropping a casted spell. Them being 30s makes them less useful for that, with the 1.5s glare/broil pushing it further.

Fester was a Summoner ability when it had the DoT interaction thing. Scholar did get Bane though which spread the DoTs to nearby enemies which was a pretty big part of the job for many people. They’re fairly easy to mix up too though lol

I feel like the DoTs are something that much better on paper than in practice. Like, it’s a nice idea, ‘healers that aren’t as comfortable with dps can just throw up a DoT every now and then and focus on healing as opposed to optimising filler spells or whatever.
Naturally though, that really isn’t how they work in theory because DoTs simply don’t make up that much of a healer’s overall output compared to the filler spell for just using them to ever be viable. At least I think they don’t? Not to mention overabundance of oGCD healing etc.

Whether DoTs can/should go I think is more of a case-by-case thing though. Like, for White Mage I could see them not having one since it’s mostly about high potency attacks anyway like Afflatus. Or Astrologian not having one since it’s more party dps oriented than personal anyway. Scholar is usually the most popular healer considered for being the ‘DoT master’ given how it was before. And lastly Sage, which honestly I’m not sure about. Maybe they could keep the one single / one aoe DoT but make them stack?

[Azurarok]

Fester was a Summoner ability when it had the DoT interaction thing. Scholar did get Bane though which spread the DoTs to nearby enemies which was a pretty big part of the job for many people. They’re fairly easy to mix up too though lol

Oh right, forgot about Bane somehow. I've wondered if it did have fester in the past but guess not, then.

I feel like the DoTs are something that much better on paper than in practice. Like, it’s a nice idea, ‘healers that aren’t as comfortable with dps can just throw up a DoT every now and then and focus on healing as opposed to optimising filler spells or whatever.
Naturally though, that really isn’t how they work in theory because DoTs simply don’t make up that much of a healer’s overall output compared to the filler spell for just using them to ever be viable. At least I think they don’t? Not to mention overabundance of oGCD healing etc.

Whether DoTs can/should go I think is more of a case-by-case thing though. Like, for White Mage I could see them not having one since it’s mostly about high potency attacks anyway like Afflatus. Or Astrologian not having one since it’s more party dps oriented than personal anyway. Scholar is usually the most popular healer considered for being the ‘DoT master’ given how it was before. And lastly Sage, which honestly I’m not sure about. Maybe they could keep the one single / one aoe DoT but make them stack

Optimization also ends up pressuring players to keep them refreshed consistently, which I've noticed is something not everyone likes to have to track. That said, I agree it should be by the job too. Give people who enjoy that kinda stuff a space for it, we have 4 jobs after all. It'd help dehomogenize the role too.

[Shurrikhan]

Fester was a Summoner ability when it had the DoT interaction thing. Scholar did get Bane though which spread the DoTs to nearby enemies which was a pretty big part of the job for many people. They’re fairly easy to mix up too though lol

What's funny is both essentially should have just been Arcanist abilities, allowing Summoner to focus on leveraging its summons for damage and/or pseudo-tanking post-split while Scholar focused on Galvanize its decently different form of supplementation / complementation via its summons.

I feel like the DoTs are something that much better on paper than in practice. Like, it’s a nice idea, ‘healers that aren’t as comfortable with dps can just throw up a DoT every now and then and focus on healing as opposed to optimising filler spells or whatever.
Naturally though, that really isn’t how they work in theory because DoTs simply don’t make up that much of a healer’s overall output compared to the filler spell for just using them to ever be viable. At least I think they don’t? Not to mention overabundance of oGCD healing etc.

Well, they're effectively soft-CDs with an additional free charge per enemy as a cleave mechanic (though eventually surpassed by AoE spam, if any, especially without something like Bane), and additional TTK consideration.

Imagine an instant-cast attack that does 30% of filler damage baseline, but charges over 30 seconds since last use to deal an extra 220% damage, eventually doing 2.4x filler damage. Optimally, then, you'd use it every 30 seconds. By doing so, you get an extra 3 fillers of damage per minute, or a 12.5% damage increase. However, you could also toss one in earlier for uptime when you'd otherwise have no other useful instant-cast option, can snapshot one in early to take advantage of raidbuffs even if desynced, etc.

That's in essence our 30s DoTs.

...Except (A) the snapshotting early doesn't actually hurt the (new) DoT since it's already fully charged (and the previous one is all that would be hurt), and (B) the actual DoTs can also get that damage bonus per target, giving better AoE scaling up to the point where it's surpassed by straight AoE spam and/or the victim's TTK falls too low. So they're a tad more interesting than the soft-CD.

They're a high bang-for-buck system. They're just hard to notice because they're now so infrequent. Compare the current 2 casts per 60s of Dia on a WHM now, for instance, with the 6 Aero IIs, 3.33 Aeros, and 2.5 Aero IIIs per minute for roughly 12 DoT casts per minute on a Heavensward White Mage. Even assuming zero GCD heals, which was far less frequent back then, filler attacks could only count for half of one's attacks. With even just a quarter of uptime spent on heals, the filler attack would likewise be just a quarter of uptime. After all, WHM had 4 attacks useful in ST combat even with without using any CC (used per *|12|18|24s), whereas now there are only 3 (used per *|30|60s).

[Carighan]

I feel they could do a lot with extremely simple changes not requiring extra buttons, though. I mentioned this before, but a simple thing I'd do is rework the existing DPS space to accomodate unique per-healer damage profiles:

* Sage can hold down Dosis: After the initial cast that works as-now, the lasers begin rapid-firing as long as the button is held, one-by-one, one every 0.5s at first, over 6s this accelerates to one every 0.25s. Each laser causes 25% of the normal damage, 25% of the normal Kardia healing and costs 25% of the normal mana. They fire as long as you can hold them down. This is a 20% increase at first, rising to a 150% increase as they accelerate.
* Scholar can swap their fairy between a healing and a DPS mode. Tether becomes a very strong DoT in this mode while 10 energy is gained with each nuke cast. While fairy is tethered to an enemy, your DoT button turns into a carbon-copy of it you can also channel at the same target, doubling the already high damage.
* Astro's nuke becomes a 1-2-3 autocombo. Each #3 "waxes" the moon in the UI element of Astros. The more full it is, the faster GCD heals cast but the less they heal, while GCD nukes become slower but stronger. Each GCD heal cast "wanes" the moon, with opposing effects. Total output entirely unaffected, but speed vs power of each cast changes continuously so there's no reliable cadence (fits Astro IMO, dunno).
* White Mage loses their nuke, replaced by another very short and kinda weak DoT (5s or so) that is channeled. While this DoT ticks (once per second), it also tries to bleed one tick (3s) off of all other DoTs applied by this player, accelerating them to deal more damage faster. Several other abilities are now DoTs with overly long durations to make space to accelerate them: Assize applies a 60s DoT instead of direct damage, Afflatus Misery still an area nuke but weaker but applies a 120s DoT, Glare IV weaker but applies 15s per cast (duration stacks) of a DoT, too. So in total you can stack up to 4 concurrent DoTs, while spamming your channeled DoT to accelerate them and deal high per-second damage.