Creative Studio III: Please Reconsider Healer Design Before Evercold

[Clarissa_Jiffrey]

Hi Creative Studio III,

I am not often active on the forums. Usually, my friends are, and we discuss new developments in person. That being said, I feel strongly enough about this topic that I need to make myself heard.

Please understand that this comes from a place of love for Final Fantasy XIV. This is heartfelt feedback from someone who deeply cares about the game.

I have always loved playing support roles, and White Mage has long been my preferred healer. For a time, I even mained White Mage in Extreme and some Savage content during Shadowbringers and the beginning of Endwalker.

It saddens me to say that I have been increasingly unhappy with the philosophy shift regarding tanks and healers since the end of Shadowbringers. Watching the developer panel at Fan Festival left me genuinely concerned.

At present, playing a healer in much of the game often feels less like fulfilling a support role and more like playing an underperforming DPS. Tanks are frequently durable enough to sustain themselves or require very little healing at all, especially as item levels rise throughout a patch cycle. This often leaves me repeatedly casting Glare III, occasionally refreshing a damage-over-time effect, and using damage abilities during burst windows. Even Afflatus Misery, while visually satisfying, often feels underutilized because unnecessary overhealing is discouraged, often for good reason.

Seeing the proposed one-button DPS direction for White Mage during the developer panel made me deeply concerned for the future of White Mage and the healer role as a whole. As players gain more gear, healing often becomes less engaging, more repetitive, and increasingly monotonous.

I want healing to feel fun and rewarding at all levels of play, not only in Savage content. I want to enjoy my role even when my party is highly geared and performing well. Repeatedly pressing a single damage button is not engaging gameplay. White Mage’s visuals are beautiful, but visual design alone cannot replace gameplay depth. I want to feel that my role meaningfully contributes to the group beyond simply filling downtime with repetitive actions. In some Expert Dungeons, it can even feel as though a party would function more efficiently with an additional DPS instead.


I sincerely hope you reconsider your philosophy regarding healer design.

Please make healer roles enjoyable whether active healing is needed or not.

I do not believe the healer population issue can be solved simply by making the role easier. The problem has rarely been that healing itself is too difficult. More often, many players are uncomfortable with the responsibility and social pressure that comes with healing. Healers are frequently blamed for mistakes beyond their control: when tanks fail to mitigate, when DPS ignore mechanics, or when avoidable deaths occur. This social burden discourages many players far more than gameplay complexity ever has.

Because of this, simplifying healing further may not solve the underlying issue. In fact, reducing the DPS component and gameplay engagement of healers even more risks alienating the dedicated players who have remained loyal to these jobs through Endwalker and Dawntrail.

So once again, I respectfully ask you to reconsider this direction and use your incredible talent and experience to make healers genuinely fun throughout every stage of the game.

Thank you sincerely for your continued dedication to Final Fantasy XIV. I truly hope you will make the right decisions before January 2027.

Kind regards,
Izumi

[Carighan]

You are essentially advocating for the Guild Wars 2 solution, no?

Which is always an option, but looking at GW2 it basically had to build itself different from the ground up to support that.

[ty_taurus]

Something I've said before and will continue to say is that all jobs need to be designed to be enjoyable in all content they can participate it. There is more to FFXIV than just raids and group content. Solo content or content designed to be doable solo like the MSQ, deep dungeons, variant dungeons, field operations, FATEs, hunts, etc. need to be fun and interesting even when you're playing a Healer. Placing more emphasis on the healing aspect of healer gameplay is absolutely a good thing, but the reality is you don't always have a reason to heal. FFXIV just isn't a game that vomits damage across the party endlessly. That doesn't mean you need a full DPS hotbar for healers. There's a lot you can do by having a handful of actions that are have a lot of interplay.

Even in group content, having a modest selection of DPS gameplay that is fun and dynamic should be seen as a reward for a job well done as a healer. Because that's often how a healer gets to flex their skills as a healer. The more effective and efficient you are at healing, the more time you will naturally have to DPS. And if you end up in a party with 0 survival instincts, than your attention will naturally lean more on healing and that's okay.

[Supersnow845]

It’s shocking the percentage of the playerbase who wrote healers off in casual content because “80% of the games content is supposed to be boring” as if that’s a defence of healer design

[ty_taurus]

I know this is a weird and relatively shallow way to try and measure the design quality of a job, and there's more that should naturally go into the development of jobs, but I think all job kits should go through the "Zenos Test." You need to take that job into the final battle with Zenos at the end of Endwalker. The goal is for every job to be fun to use against him and look cool doing it. If the job is neither fun nor looks cool, then something has to change. Frankly, I don't see how White Mage would accomplish either of those at this time.

[Supersnow845]

I know this is a weird and relatively shallow way to try and measure the design quality of a job, and there's more that should naturally go into the development of jobs, but I think all job kits should go through the "Zenos Test." You need to take that job into the final battle with Zenos at the end of Endwalker. The goal is for every job to be fun to use against him and look cool doing it. If the job is neither fun nor looks cool, then something has to change. Frankly, I don't see how White Mage would accomplish either of those at this time.

You could also do it as “can you think of a way to make this job meteors job in the next expansion and have it look cool and get people psyched up”

I’m struggling to imagine how you’d do that for any healer

[Sani2341]

You could also do it as “can you think of a way to make this job meteors job in the next expansion and have it look cool and get people psyched up”

I’m struggling to imagine how you’d do that for any healer

To be fair, any caster is facing an up hill battle there, save maybe redmage, simply because jobs that get up close have an easier time getting cool shots and poses.

That Said, defenitly agree with the overall Sentiment.

Every job should feel fun, either bc of engaging mechanics or entertaining visuals, in most MSQ solo duties.

Players need to do hundreds of hours of those. Even if they like the idea of being a Healer, sooner or later, many will jump to jobs more entertaining in MSQ duties. And looking at queue Times, Pf fillrates etc, anecdotaly there is a noteable lack of healer mains that make it to the end of MSQ as healer mains.

EDIT: just occured to me. Do any of you think anyone in SE did so much as a single solo duty on healer in this game's MSQ?

[Carighan]

So what healer design for EC do you know that you are critiqueing?

Because you have only seen the WHM skills (not even all), you have not seen the healer-side of the skills in action (and hence can't judge ~75% of the skills), and you don't know any of the other 3 healers to draw conclusions from comparisons between them, either.

From the sound of your individual details, you should be on board with making healers mostly about healing, and mostly about support. Which the skills shown for WHM seem to indicate, but of course that's a big if because it assumes they'll change encounter design (or passive defense on tanks) to actually induce a lot of healing requirements (as in, everyone has tons of health, takes tons of damage constantly, but doesn't die quickly -> lots of healing to be done all the time to top people back up). We cannot know this yet, I suppose this'll be a thing they talk about in Berlin tbh.

Could it be bad? Almost certainly not, on account of how phenomenally (and frankly comically) bad the current design is. You could shotgun-delete skills and you'd produce better class designs. You could remove all oGCDs and it'd be a better design, if only because it's less RSI inducing and equally bad for everything else. FFXIV current class designs are a design dead-end. They cannot be sustained, and frankly should have been ripped out 2+ expansions ago. The devs have always been against doing sweeping reworks (not the minor stuff like AST card changes, I mean actual sweeping reworks like what we're getting now!), and it shows by how shocked the community is with them happening now after so many years. And yet for any other MMORPG, constantly iteration and replacement of core elements like class designs (or in WoW the talent trees, in GW2 the elite spec setups, etc etc) are fairly normal. It has to happen, as without this constant experimentations the design can't get out of any dead end it is stuck in, and find better overall design highs.

[Supersnow845]

In the nicest way possible if WHM is some ridiculous outlier that doesn’t in any way shape or form represent what an average EC healer will look like that’s on square for showing the wrong healer

Based on EC WHM’s showing IF (BIG FAT IF) they proportionally increase healing to the point that sanctity stacks feel like a fun refund for needed GCD healing and not just bloat you spend because you have them like current lilies then EC WHM would be a decent improvement over DT WHM. Though improvement over DT WHM is a low low bar to clear and that’s based on the assumption we get something (increased healing) we’ve been told we are getting three expansions running and still haven’t gotten

I don’t really know why people are so against the idea of drawing conclusions from what was shown. If square didn’t want us to draw pretty beige conclusions that most people have then show us something that doesn’t induce those conclusions, the ball is in square’s court, it’s always in their court, we don’t control what they show at fanfest

[Carighan]

I don’t really know why people are so against the idea of drawing conclusions from what was shown.

~27 years of playing MMORPGs, honestly. It never works out the way the community doomsings it beforehand.

WotLK class changes were the end of WoW. The end of WotLK was, again. Cataclysm was so bad an expansion it destroyed WoW. GW2 was terrible compared to GW1, and obviously failed instantly as a result. Adding a 9th class to it broke everything. Elite specs will never work, and destroy GW2. EQ1 cannot sustain adding Velious as a continent. Kerafyrm as a design point is the end of EQ, and the game will be ultra-elitist from here on out, etc etc etc etc. The list is absolutely endless.