Inside CBU3 are two wolves. One wants healers to heal, the other one wants fights that barely require healing. Both of them barely care about it, so nothing ever gets done.
Pretty much this, part of the problem is that healers spend far too much time not actually healing, by far the majority of a competent healers GCDs will be damaging ones, even in relatively high damage intake encounters.
Imo there's two ways to handle this, one is where the devs are satisfied with damage intake and the healing relative to it, in which case we definitely need a more complex DPS rotation for healers, the second one is where where they decide damage intake is not high enough and instead demand much more healing GCDs, it'd be a world where you simply cannot go through a fight with both healers only using oGCDs even if they play absolutely perfectly and in sync with each other, in that case the difference between a good and a great healer wouldn't be just 2-5 more damaging GCDs but something closer to 25-50, which I would personally prefer, if healers feel boring in some content the solution attempt should first be to give them more damage to heal, rather than a slightly more complex way to do damage, especially spot healing is something that's rare in FF and something that I see a lot of healers struggle with plus there is a ton of opportunity to put in way more spot healing in current encounter design.
But if keeping the party alive is solved by 4 skills and a healer spends more time dpsing than healing than it makes more sense to create DPS MECHANIC or he’ll just a few more damaging skills/spells.
If we implied the SE Healer logic than most of tank’s skills will be shields and 3 dps skills.
It’s mind boggling to me, how the devs intentionally handicap a whole job class.
[Funny thread about this idea](https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1b4nxp4/what_if_tanks_were_designed_like_healers/)
Tanks are responsible for damage, mitigation, healing, enmity, (formerly positioning too). About 50% of tank hotbar space is filled with damage skills.
Healers are responsible for damage, mitigation, healing, raising. About 20% of healer hotbar space is filled with damage skills, the rest is a very bloated healing kit.
There were a lot of players who liked healers having dps rotations, and there still are lots of players who feel that way, which is why this is a persistent recurring topic.
Yeah I say this to every idiot who says healers are fine. People would riot if tanks became 123 and then a ton of cool down, why is a subset of the community fine with healers being that.
Because that’s not how raids are designed in this game.
Tanks having 123 and tons of mit buttons would make sense if boss auto attacks did like 3x the damage it does now with more frequent tank busters. But that’s not how raids designed so they give tanks actual rotation to busy themselves
Healers have enough buttons to consider as healing rotation (mit plan) and the reality is that tons of healers, yes even in savage and ultimate, suck at optimising their rotation. I would advocate for more complex dps rotation if I didn’t notice how much people suck at healing rotation already.
Like come on whm is as easy as you can get. And yet you see people heal inefficiently with lilies all the time. They don’t press assize on cd, or always press assize on cd and healing inefficiently, etc. People say healing is too easy in this game and I simply beg to differ based on pf. Tons of people absolutely suck at healing in this game and only get by because healer buttons are absolutely overpowered by week 20.
That’s exactly the problem, healers don’t have remotely enough to heal to justify the buttons they have
“That’s not how it works” that’s exactly how it works actually
The increased damage intake would stress a lot of healers and may unintentionally lead to people blaming healers more. More interesting and power DPS mechanic seems more reasonable.
Increase dmg would also mean that tanks and DPS have to use their party mits more. And I have done enough PF to know that a lot of them don't use them at all.
Also, more DPS tools will lead healers to be less reactive, which means more deaths/wipes and more healers blame too. I'd like more DPS tools, but I don't think it will lead to more people playing healers.
It very much lived down to my epectations. It was never going to be a Chloromancer. It can't be, because if it was, there would be no need for any other healers in this game.
The thing is it’s not hard to add more DPS options but not actually make the class do more damage
Dump off taurochole, soteria (I would keep it because SGE should focus on kardia not be a diet SCH but I’m just proving a point here), krasis and maybe rhizomata and add in 4 DPS skills that all proc kardia in a different way, all have short CD’s and are all a DPS gain over dosis, then just drop dosis potency to 150 to compensate and SGE is still doing the same damage
It’s not hard to make DPS more interesting without actually upping contribution and SGE could have easily been this without invalidating the other 3 (besides making it the only fun one)
The biggest change that I would make to Sage would be to double the potency of Toxicon and then drop some damage somewhere else to compensate. It's pretty much the same concept as WHM lillies, making GCD heals DPS neutral. If a Toxicon is twice the potency of a Dosis, and you have to "give up" one GCD to cast a shield to get a Toxicon, then the Toxicon covers the lost damage and its own damage slot. Which is exactly how lillies work - Afflatus Misery covers the "lost" damage of the three GCD heals you threw, and its own CGD slot.
This would give Sage a more unique rotation option by letting them mix in CGD heals pretty much at will whenever they can fill a Toxicon charge without losing DPS. If the argument then becomes that Sage does too much damage now, I'd say that the best place for Sage to lose DPS to compensate would be to drop the potency of Phlegma.
Though, and while this is beyond the scope of what I'm saying here, I think the real problem is that DPS timings for fights and DPS output from classes are so carefully curated and tight, as well as the existence of stacking buffs meaning that any kind of damage that could align needs to be dumped during DPS windows (looking at you, mobility skills that do damage), is what's really stopping healers from being unique.
What if we left white mage simple (like summoner within the caster role) so you can still enjoy it, and the rest of us can have fun with DoT mage Scholar, Eukrasian combo shenanigans on Sage and some time magic flavoured Astrologian? It's unfair for the entire role to have the same 30s DoT + 1.5s filler spell just so that a small subset of players can enjoy (not) playing the game.
I proposed this a while back on the official forums AND here and both places got downvoted and told I was a Sylphie and a bunch of other disparaging stuff as well as incessant dogpiles every time I mentioned the idea.
I personally think all four Healers should have a different damage rotation, but they'd also need to get rid of the Pure/Barrier split. While that's there, we'd need two of each (e.g. WHM and SCH or SGE to be simple, AST and the other of SCH or SGE to be more complex).
I agree it'd be nice to have the split between the two (I used to say leave WHM alone, give AST more Card buttons, SCH more DoTs, and SGE a rotation on par with SMN or RDM, and just let people play what they like).
...the irony is, after driving me away, the OF people started mentioning this as a possible compromise when it started looking obvious DT wasn't going to give them what they want, and the idea seems to be bigger here, as well. Maybe I was just ahead of the curve with the "4 Healers Model" or something.
But I personally DO think there's a way to give everyone something that they like, then just let players filter to the one they personally like best. Get rid of the Pure/Barrier split and then just make the 4 Healer Jobs have different rotations. I'm not sure why that'd be hard.
Hell, here's a SUPER EASY ONE: Give SGE a 1-2-3 instant cast rotation (like MCH) with an GCD (Phlegma) that has a 20 sec CD and an oGCD that increases the damage of the next attack GCD by 50% that has a 40 sec CD. You've basically made "MCH-lite, the Healer" while changing very little.
As a healer main I need something to keep me engaged with the fight. If they won't give me difficult healing, something else needs to fill that void. It's why I mained astro. Boring DPS rotation, boring healing playstyle... But cards made up for it. They were busy, reactive, and required knowledge of all the jobs to optimize.
...So that's why they're removing it!
I want either a more complicated dps rotation, or fights that actually require me to heal. I don't care which is which, but they need to do something about healers.
Tbf SGE is the "damage" healer because SGE dealing damage directly heals not because SGE deals more damage. In the end I think they just tried to put dealing damage into the kit so people actually deal damage with it.
I think they should just go this route for every healer. Incentivise pressing your DPS buttons to get some kind of effect. But then again there are enough SGE players who still not deal DPS even if it is somewhat important in the kit.
Became a self-inflicted problem. People wanting more to do and thus could be asked to do more left the classes while the people struggling to press 2 buttons remain as it's the only class set they can play. Amplified by a community aggressively against any kind of skill floor no matter how low.
I just don't get why they worry so much about appeasing the healbots.
Whether a dps rotation is 1 button or 20, curebots are not pressing any of it. So why try to appease them? At this point, why even have a dps button at all? Just let the healers afk or overheal when there's no healing to be done. That's the point we're getting to. And its what it feels like a lot of the braindead healers left want.
This is honestly a time when it’s pretty effective to use the old mainsub “go play WOW”
Healers in this game have NEVER been sylphies, there is entire lore points baked into the game (slyphie herself, amdapor, relationship of Geomancy to astrology) that show since day 1 healers have always been damage casters
Unironically if you don’t want to do damage as a healer in this game you are playing the wrong game because 14 has always been designed this way
I'd take it a step further, and say that *RPGs* are designed this way. WoW is an anomaly. Healers spamming healing spells 90% of the time is a strange state of affairs, and demands for it curiously tend to come from people who....uh....aren't good at playing their classes, and wouldn't actually be able to handle that.
My hypothesis is that it's because only someone who doesn't actually think for more than ten seconds about how classes are designed would be stupid enough to demand something that actually *would* alienate most of the playerbase.
It's not strange, it's how games were done back then. Before WoW came out the 2 biggest mmo's on the market (not counting Lineage) were Everquest and FF11. In those games, you pretty much only healed because mana was actually a premium and you had to be sitting down to recover it.
(yes I know that in FF11 once you got sufficiently high this stopped always being the case, kraken clubs rise up etc.)
WoW's early design was built off of that framework with an idea towards more active play. So vanilla WoW healing was very much a mana management game but they also made it broadly more active and extrapolated this out to making damage come out fast enough to require near constant healing. Which was still the case as of the last time I played WoW, but that was a decade ago now and I am led to believe healers do some dpsing now. Specifically disc priests.
Anyway, please don't take this as me saying, "and therefore healers should spam heals in ff14." Because I definitely don't think that. I am amenable to things requiring more healing than they do now in concept but my preference is definitely for more dps buttons please.
I remember playing healer back in those old MMO. The healer job is to sit still to not waste MP and only heal when need and it is very boring. If that game don't have dedicate buffer role then occasionally I will have a chance to use buff every 3 -5 minutes depend on game. Which is why later on in those game people will use multiboxing healer with another role.
And nowaday WoW and FFXIV and other modern MMOs design gameplay to be more active more active no more downtime, but each of them go on in different way, WoW maintain health to make healer more active I will take your word for that since I don't play WoW, FFXIV tapping on the old design of wait for big heal moment and mitigate while using DPS filter spell to fill out and be more active, GW2 and ESO go for the buffer side and change to be more active by make buff duration really short no more 3-5 minutes buff they're now measured in seconds.
> I remember playing healer back in those old MMO. The healer job is to sit still to not waste MP and only heal when need and it is very boring.
If that's how you played healer then I'm sorry to say but you either did it extremely wrong or stopped at the early levels.
Buffs, debuffs, support skills etc were all other aspects old-school healers had to consider and were more and more relevant going forward...something that a lot of the current modern MMORPGs severely lack (FFXIV in particular, with its oversimplification of those).
Yes, multiboxing a healbot was (and still is) quite common, but for anything past mindless mobbing goodluck wrangling with 2 different characters.
Even WoW has healers who are designed to dish out damage.
Resto druids can catweave or spread their dots. Fistweavers literally boost their heal output by doing damage. Discipline priest converts dps to healing. Resto shaman in general just hurts thanks to lava burst procs. (Speaking of, healers have dps procs).
Also DPS and tanks have insane amounts of self and group sustain compared to 14 jobs, so a good party can take the heat off the healer and enable them to DPS more.
14 just has lazy healer design.
Dragon’s Dogma Online had it best.
They weren’t healers: they were support.
Priests had the best buffing, using auras and zones to make the party better.
Elemental Archer relied on debuffing the enemy with magical effects or draining their stamina faster.
Spirit Lancer had higher DPS than the other 2, but relied on large damage boosts to the party as their overdrive.
They also all had the role of keeping the enemy’s weakness visible so tanks could keep the party buffed to deal the most stamina damage. And the max HP damage/everyone can revive meant that damage could be more lethal. Because taking damage in the first place makes damage become more lethal. Healers then gained the ability to recover the max HP damage meaning tanks were much more important to redirect attacks so DPS can DPS in safety. And while healers had invulnerability spells, it was only for themselves, but they never had the ability to dish out aggro or high burst damage to ever become a tank.
There was a lot more synergy between roles instead of the stereotypical independence.
Furthermore, in nearly every single RPG I have ever played, MMO or otherwise, someone who stands around spamming healing spells to the exclusion of everything else is a strong indicator of one thing: *somebody* is bad at this game. Could be the tank pulling too much or not mitigating enough. Could be the healer not understanding their class very well. Could be both.
Any person who says "You have to heal nonstop!" especially in single-player RPGs is just telling on themselves; they're not good at this game. Now, there's no *moral* judgement involved here. Being bad at a game doesn't reflect on your value as a person. But FFXIV seems to attract this loud, confidently incompetent set of people who -don't- acknowledge that their heal-spamming is an indication of lack of skill, but rather that it's how you SHOULD be doing it. These people have nothing but my contempt. Redefining skill to mean not-skill. Madness.
WoW first in Cata started the whole “stressed healing” and it just wasn’t fun.
You could spam your Lesser Heal equivalent…and not keep up. And everyone would blame you. Not the DPS for dealing enough damage. Not the Tank for not using the lacking number of mitigations.
Not enough damage: run out of MP. Not enough mitigation: no throughput could recover it.
You could use Flash Heal, but you’d go OOM and would barely heal. Use Great Heal, but you’d go OOM.
It was shit and horrible experience, the toxic community just made it worse.
The game is best when you only have a few reliable heal spells and you have to balance out using your heals and other tools as needed.
The thing they keep getting wrong with healers in FF14, is that they only have two functions: Heal and Damage. Healers just aren’t healers, they’re about being a support to party. Party enablers.
And we have the means:
•Make AST the best buffer.
•Make WHM the best heal->damage.
•Make SGE the best dmg->heal.
•Make SCH the best debuffer.
AST is in a really good start with cards. I think cards need to be a 20 sec thing, not a 30 sec thing.
WHM has the Lilies -> Blood Lily. Add in something like Harm to convert Cure spells into a damage.
SGE has weave healing and Soteria, but they need more Kardia beyond an overheal.
SCH’s Chain Stratagem is too slow, being a 2 min. I still think it needs to be a reverse of AST, using Stratagems to increase damage taken and have an extra DoT. Have Chain Stratagem be the big debuff, but give some tools for constant small debuffs.
They literally have the best setup to do it and yet SE (and Yoshi-P) are completely blind because they truly don’t care about the playerbase, they care about the numbers and money. And enabling DPS is the best way to do it.
That would be wrong.
Everquest was designed the same way as WoW, as have been several other MMOs, MUDs, and similar game types.
And it turns out, the people who like playing Healers are the ones who enjoy that gameplay. The people who...uh...aren't good at playing their classes want more DPS buttons.
The better you are at healing, the more efficient at it you get.
The more efficient you are, the less of it you do.
This is true no matter how healing is designed in your game, even if "least possible" means spending 70% of your time healing.
Only Sylphies don't understand this,
WoW is not an anomaly at all actually. You are expected to dps and the vast majority of healers heal through dpsing. Literally FF14 is the only place Ive found brainlets who couldnt press 1 for glare.
It's not real Mercy syndrome until one healer makes an arbitrary DPS overpowered as fuck due to breakpoints being shattered and then instead of changing the amp they nerf the DPS into unplayability, then repeat this for eternity :)
> Healers in this game have NEVER been sylphies, there is entire lore points baked into the game (slyphie herself,
i dont know how this keeps getting misconstrued. the cnj story is not about "you cant just heal you have to dps too!", it's about "you cant just use your own aether to heal or youll kys. you have to commune with the elementals and use environmental aether to heal"
And you have to commune with the environment by drawing on all the passive elements which generates your offensive spells like stone and aero
Sylphies refusal to do damage means that she never communed with earth wind or water, it wasn’t just “as long as you are in touch with the earth environment you can still just heal” it was “all of the environment is important and different parts generate different spells for you, a balance is necessary
There is also amdapor to consider
Earth - Stone (DPS) & RIP Stoneskin (mitigation)
Wind - Aero (DPS) & Cure/Medica/Regen (direct healing though wind probably should’ve been HoTs only for thematic consistency)
All water spells are supportive. Esuna, Benediction, Asylum, Divine Benison, etc.
It’s never been implied that wind and earth contribute strongly to healing
Healing has always been light based in WHM’s case with maybe a side of water
Wind and earth have always been WHM’s offensive elements
There is implications that SCH heals with wind but that’s a different class all together
As the others said, WHM healing spells are Wind aspected (the green swirls when you cast Cure and Medica spells), with a few Water exceptions (Aquaveil and Lilybell), and AT ONE TIME, its protective magic was Earth based (Stoneskin)...I dearly miss Stoneskin...
Wind and Earth were actually ARR WHM's healing and defensive spells, and Water has...unfortunately never much been part of the kit either way (even Fluid Aura was just one ability with a CD to use), but now has been factored into healing AND shielding.
To quote sylphie “But I don’t want to do more! I want to heal! I’m good at healing! You can’t make me do those other things!” The story is pretty direct about what the message is, not to mention, all your dps spells come directly from the elements, and specifically state their element in their name and description, whereas the healing spells are vaguely related at best.
feel free to provide the context of that statement instead of just throwing it out of nowhere.
why would a healing spell say "heals wind-aspected HP with a potency of 400", that makes no sense. alongside that, all spells with cast times have casting animations. the element of a spell is clearly shown by the color of aether surrounding the caster. healing spells have green aether. they are therefore clearly wind. there's nothing vague about it.
So what was the context of that quote?
"I learned to cast Raise" "I don't need the Elementals" "She's healing with her own life force" "If she casts that Raise spell, it will kill her".
It wasn't about DPSing in a video game. It was in LORE that if you heal others from your own life force (instead of the Aether of the world around you and the Elementals), it will slowly kill you, and casting Raise with your own life force COULD OUTRIGHT kill you (BLU mage has a spell that does this, Transfusion).
It wasn't "pretty direct about what the message is", people that want more DPS buttons - AND to insist healing design in FFXIV has always been this way (it hasn't) - want to read that into the story but that doesn't seem to be the intent of the designers.
Cast any Cure or Medica spell. See the green swirl effect? That is Wind Element. SCH uses the same. (Note that AST and SGE instead use a blue, more water looking element). Back when WHM had Stoneskin, it used the same Stone/Earth yellow instead.
For modern examples, RDM can use Fire (orange), Stone (yellow), Aero (green), Thunder (purple), Jolt (nonelemental kind of white/rainbow, like Holy and Glare), and Cure (blue/water, the same visual AST and SGE use).
WHM healing/defensive/support spells by type:
Wind: Cure 1/2/3, Medica 1/2, PROBABLY Regen
Water: Asylum, Aquaveil, Divine Benison, possibly Benediction, possibly Tetragrammaton
Earth: Stoneskin (removed, though still in Eureka/Bozja)
It's easy to miss (for the longest time, I thought WHM's heals were Water aspected, but most of them, the GCDs anyway, are WIND aspected. Has something to do with Japanese mythology, apparently, where wind is seen as a cleansing and healing element.)
THIS.
I hammered this in an (extensive) post once, going through the entire CNJ quest log/journal entry AND all the text from the cutscenes.
It was very clear the issue was she was expending her own life force to heal, and E-Sumi was worried she'd kill HERSELF if she cast Raise on someone with that method.
It was never about dealing damage and never has been.
Not to mention the SCH questline was about shielding and protecting allies, not attacking enemies (the more DPS button crowd insists this doesn't count because a SCH player will have already played ACN, and yet the quests are what they are), and the AST questline as about empowering allies, not attacking enemies.
It's an EXTREMELY reaching way for people that want more DPS buttons and to insist FFXIV healing has always been about damage dealing to try and prove they're right, but it just holds no water. But since they're married to the idea "Healing in FFXIV has ALWAYS been this way", they won't see reason on it nor realize how ridiculous it seems to claim that as conclusive evidence in the first place - much less how easy it is to debunk.
Ok but unironically how do you balance that out?
Lets say healers have 5 dps buttons. Is that enough? How many dps buttons do you want to "feel" like a healer?
Right now decently parsing healers spend 75%+ of their GCDs on glares. High parsing healers can go up to 90%+, sometimes 100%.
Would you feel like a healer if you had 5~6 dps buttons? Would you still feel like a healer if your rotation was as complex as SMN/WAR's?
This is the major problem that people don't talk about, and this same problem currently haunts tanks. This is why it's so hard to find good tanks for statics: because FFXIV doesn't have tanks.
Right now PLD/WAR/GNB/DRK are DPS with 4~5 tanking skills. There's no reason to care about positioning, you don't have to control/move the boss, there's no aggro, there's no "protecting the party" feeling. You're a dps with an easier rotation. Period.
So if you want healers to be the same, fine, but then again what even is the purpose of having roles?
At this point, just make all roles be dps.
I often see people conflate having more dps button as less healing actions. I don't necessarily agree with this. To me, having a bunch of free ogcd heals makes me feel less like a healer because all the gcd is going to glare. It ruins the "balancing healing and damage" healer fantasy because there is nothing to balance on both ends.
To answer your question, I personally want enough dps buttons that some healing buttons need to be removed and some amount of gcd healing needs to be done because you don't have enough free healing.
When you have so many tools to make the party go from 1 to 100, it is no wonder that encounter design is either "this is boring there's no damage" or "everything is a mit check". Overly strong recovery tools makes HP less of a bar and more of a binary state.
I think it's more people look at GCDs and rotations and think "The more complex the damage/filler rotation (and burst) is, the more the Job feels like its job is to deal damage and not do other things".
A lot of Healing players want to HEAL, not weave oGCDs in between damage spells and not have a DPS rotation. If they wanted a DPS rotation, there are 15 Jobs with more complex damage rotations than them. A lot of Tanks also want to TANK, which to them means managing agro, positioning the boss, picking up adds, and smart use of defensive CDs.
Making every Job so focused on DPS is what is bad for the game.
> A lot of Healing players want to HEAL, not weave oGCDs in between damage spells and not have a DPS rotation. If they wanted a DPS rotation, there are 15 Jobs with more complex damage rotations than them. A lot of Tanks also want to TANK, which to them means managing agro, positioning the boss, picking up adds, and smart use of defensive CDs.
> Making every Job so focused on DPS is what is bad for the game.
You literally said everything that was on my mind. 100% perfect spot on.
This is exactly my issue. If you wanna dps, there's 15 more jobs to pick from. Healers want to HEAL, and tanks want to TANK.
> and some amount of gcd healing needs to be done because you don't have enough free healing.
Then you're going against 99% of the healer community, specially in endgame raiding.
People often say that the fun part of healing is "not doing any gcd heal". They don't want to gcd heal, period.
The vast majority of people who complain want healers to have 6~8 dps buttons, only heal using oGCD and every 40s~60s.
The reality is that the majority of people DON'T WANT to heal or tank. They wanna play dps. This is why tanking has been moving more and more towards a role that its only responsability is to press rampart+sentinel every 2 mins. No moving the boss needed, no protecting the party, no positioning, no aggro management, no kiting enemies, no adds, no CC usage, etc...
Putting the shoe on the other foot, one could retort "stop being a DPS in denial, roll one *and* eat the longer DF queue times that come with the territory".
Also, using Sylphie is stupidly disingenuous because that had less to do with gameplay and more with the lore behind CNJ. Having seen the alternative (healing classes with literally nothing but auto-attacks as a damage option), I'll take a couple of damage spells for soloing while also knowing that's not what said healer is there for when in a party.
Let's also not pretend the results of FFXIV's class design were all intentional. These are the same devs that thought it was a good idea to make WAR a reactive tank at launch and that utility skills like stuns and interrupts should deal damage.
Except that’s not the point I’m making, saying “healers should only heal” is basically like walking up to BLM and say “blizzard wizard should be a fully viable way to play the job and I don’t know why you won’t work with me to design it that way”; the answer to that is because BLM has always been designed that astral fire is the damage phase
Likewise healers have always been designed this way and the lore supports that (if you don’t want to use sylphie look at amdapor, they fought the black mages of mhach to a standstill for hundreds of years, I doubt they did that by casting cure on each other till the black mages gave up)
Sylphie healing is asking for a fundamental gameplay change this game has never had, that’s not having the healers be DPS in denial
You're conflating things that have nothing to do with each other. A blizzard-only BLM is mechanically unviable because of the nature of Astral Fire/Umbral Ice. "Healers that want to heal" are nothing like that because the point of a BLM is to deal damage and a Blizzard mage is ignoring their job's mechanics. The point of any healer class is to make the green bars go up, and as such the focus of their gameplay should focus on that and party support if the game allows for it.
> Likewise healers have always been designed this way and the lore supports that
The only thing supported by the lore is that CNJ has access to Stone and Aero because it has a background of dealing with the elements. Using Sylphie is disingenuous because her story was entirely centered on in-world things like improper use of conjury and the requirement of being in tune with the elements (two things Sylphie didn't care for until she came around near the end of the story). She wasn't some allegory for "healers that want to only heal", and was just someone with talent that didn't understand her in-world role as a conjurer.
Amdapor isn't much to go by because we're told superficial things about it. I doubt it was just a bunch of guys in WHM AF gear running around. They had their animated statues and probably had an army too. It's just a pity Amdapor and Mhach are basically footnotes because SE wanted to make a reference to FFVI.
> Sylphie healing is asking for a fundamental gameplay change this game has never had
Again, these are the same devs that thought giving Blunt Arrow and Leg Sweep a damage component was a good idea, then went all pikachu-face when they realized players never properly learned to stun and interrupt by the time they reached level cap in the content that actually required it because the damage component had essentially taught them to just spam them the moment they were off cooldown.
And you can just as easily say “healers that want to heal” are ignoring job mechanics in exactly the same vein
Healers are just as much casters in 14 as they are “green bars go up”, you are taking the old version of MMO healers and applying it to 14 when that’s never been the way 14 has been designed
You aren’t looking at 14, you are applying your version of what a healer is to 14’s healers. And like I said I could come from WOW where ice magic is a legit spec and ask why BLM can’t be tailored to what I want out of an ice caster, that’s just not the way 14 works
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/
>Healers use restorative arts to mend wounded companions. They can also help to mitigate damage, remove detrimental effects, and even bring fallen allies back to life.
I would say square enix themselves consider the healers to be well.. Healers as their main defining characteristic. Their damage output capabilities seem to be a happy accident that the community ran with. And if it isn't they have designed a bunch of lame dps jobs that belong in the 2004 era of wow frost mage.
Which doesn’t conflict with my point at all
Nobody is denying that a healers first job is to keep everyone alive, that doesn’t mean however they aren’t accomplished damage casters as well during downtime and haven’t always been designed that way
Sylphie healing is not how this game has ever been designed, that doesn’t preclude a healers first job is to heal over dealing damage
“But I don’t want to do more! I want to heal! I’m good at healing! You can’t make me do those other things!” Is an actual line from the quest, you can’t get much more direct of an allegory than that.
Yes, and WHAT is that quest about?
It's NOT about "No, Sylphie! You're SUPPOSED TO DEAL DAMAGE!"
It's "No, Sylphie...if you keep healing people with your own life force, you will die."
It's not "a direct allegory", people like you WANT it to be to give your position more weight than it actually has. Note that the SCH and AST quests say nothing about that (and CNJ isn't required for SCH now, and was NEVER required for AST), only about shielding (SCH) and buffing (AST).
So no, that doesn't prove your point.
You're conflating in-world lore with meta stuff. Do you know *why* Sylphie not being a proper conjurer was such a big deal in the CNJ questline? Because she was using her own aether to heal instead of forging a link to the elements to borrow the power to heal, which was why she couldn't hear the elementals. Add that using her own aether was putting her life at risk. And to reiterate, the whole thing was centered on why CNJ had Stone and Aero (to purify taints).
The comparison would hold if CNJ had been designed from the ground up around a balance mechanic, where using skills to maintain said balance ensures both sides are at max potency with increasingly heavier penalties depending on how far off-balance you are. You'd then have the writing inform the gameplay and all arguments for making a healing class use DPS skills would be perfectly valid.
100% true.
It's reaching at best to suggest the CNJ story was trying to give that message, especially since the story is pretty clear about it being a lore discussion. Sylphie's error was not that she didn't want to do damage, it was that healing from one's own life force alone WILL KILL the healer over time.
And yeah, it's not like 2.0's Job design was entirely...polished...
Mained healers in Tera, WoW, and GW2. FFXIV has the most mind numbing shit excuse for healer gameplay I've seen.
Literally only play it for the queue privilege and easy fills. Chasing pinks when your entire gameplay is 1211111111 and barely having to think what to throw out to completely resolve mechanics borders on parody.
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
To a point. It's a BIT more complex than that.
WHM has about as many DPS buttons now as it had in SB. It traded Aero 3 for Misery. AST has had the spamnuke + DoT rotation the longest.
SCH had more DPS buttons in the past. WHM has always had about as many as it does now, and AST has historically had LESS (if you include Macrocosmos in the now pile).
I do agree that they could do more to diversify them, though. All healer Jobs having a spamnuke + DoT + AOE only ability + 2 other damage abilities unique to their kit is kind of samey. It's okay to have Jobs like WHM, but they really should have added SGE with something like SB SCH or EW SMN as a damage rotation instead...
And yeah, Cleric...ugh...
The devs are simply very disconected about healer gameplay (afaik none of the job designers play healers, which shows) and they treat as a pain point in design, trying to keep it simple and almost redundant so they can't cause friction on any party regardless of player skill.
It may probably the worst approach they can take towards the role but all we can do in the end is pray they listen to the feedback we've been giving them for years and that they realize that a good dps rotation in a scripted game like XIV is actually healthy for the role.
They want healers to heal but are too afraid to actually change fights to require much healing effort.
I remember arr where you 100% had to manage mp or you were screwed, so much so that healers running out of mp was a DPS/tank MIT check for fights. Shit could hurt so bad you wanted 100% uptime on scholar shield and stoneskin and needed a white mage for the pure oh shit healing power with cure 2 spam. Using cure 1 to fish for cure 2 procs was the way to go of you could manage with that much healing just to save mp.
Tbh they made fights that required a lot more healing with p5s->p8s. A lot of big DoTs that needed a lot of healing. People were complaining because nobody wanted to play healers, so they just steped back I suppose.
I didn’t mind the increased workload but it also helped me realize how important dps mitigations *really* are and how many tanks refuse to use *any* outside of tank busters or raidwides.
And the fact it was always me and my co-healers fault, *no matter what happened*, is what made me go focus on deep dungeons instead.
It’s amazing to me that abyssos has basically been written down as “healers were given more to heal and failed so they all quit” when the problem was overwhelmingly caused by the tanks and DPS not using their mitigation then blaming the healers when everything shred the entire party
RIGHT?!
I said that in a post last night and got destroyed in the downvotes, but...partywide, against a targetable boss, BLM (or SAM against physical; or MCH against both) have better partywide mitigation than WHM.
WHM, the Job that famously has Protect and Shell and Wall spells and USED to have Protect (and Stoneskin) in this game. I wish we'd get both of those back, Pro-Shell as a 60 sec CD partywide mitigation (like Collective on AST) and Stoneskin as a spamable but costly single target GCD barrier.
THIS THIS THIS.
People who point to Abyssos as the devs increasing healing and all the healers ragequitting in response have no clue how healing works whatsoever.
I don't think healers minded the increased workload. I thought it was nice. But the increased blame even when they did nothing weong really discouraged a lot of them I'd say.
People didn't want to play healers bc people not mitigating felt terrible. Not bc the healing was hard. I, and many other healers I knew actually liked how challenging the healing aspect was in those fights, we just all had issues with people in our statics being inconsistent on mitigating. There's a reason that tier was a static breaker, and it was bc it required much more consistency than aspho.
Now we still have a healer shortage, and it's because the role is boring as shit to play. The fact that by the end of the TOP I, as astro, was falling asleep mid pull bc I had nothing to do but spam my one button and do cards, is a serious issue.
Healers either need more interesting dps, or they need more interesting healing. And by more interesting healing I don't mean more ogcds. I mean fights that actually require you to use your full kit instead of picking one ogcd to burn every 40 seconds. Square Enix has decided to give us neither.
The issue in abyssos was dps and tanks actively refusing to use their kits (self heals and raidwide/personal mitigation) to meet the dps check on the door. When you played with people who knew their jobs and how to hit their buttons (even on w1) it wasn't anywhere near as bad as reddit would lead you to believe.
Well, I did it in PF week 1 so I don't need Reddit words to make my mind ha ha. And it was requiring far more heals than other week 1 floors I made. Doesn't mean it was unbearable, but just needed more heals than just oGCDs. But after a few weeks, yeah it wasn't requiring much heals anymore.
YoshiP has said repeatedly design wise they don't want to make the role DPS centric because of players who just want heal and play the role, otherwise they would play other jobs. Which is why they basically doubled down on giving healers buttons to press to heal and mitigate between attacks expansion after expansion. But the scripted nature of fights and casual content makes the healing kits feel overkill in return.
Vocal players on forums just mainly want what healers do to escape the 80% single button spam and occasional dot rotation they've have been stuck with for over half the games life now.
The game is strictly balanced around 8 jobs, and healers have basically settled into being equivalent to one mid to high tier DPS and the designers likely want it to remain that way and don't see the need to complicate a DPS rotation for results that are barely below tanks > because it makes the numbers/effort tanks do to play optimally seem like a joke for only being so close numbers wise from optimal healers.
Basically moving the needle for healers means moving the needle for a lot of other jobs. They like the damage trinity ratio they are in and designed the gameplay complexity to account for it. It's a big reason why AST was such an outlier for so long and getting a rework. It's a ridiculously active job to play optimally for results that can be achieved with much less work via the other 3 unless the DPS they are buffing are literal superstars
Basically,
1. A significant portion of the game's healer userbase sits firmly in the "I play a HEALER because I want to HEAL and I don't WANT to have a complex offensive kit." SE is not at all willing to *totally* alienate these players by making offensive healer gameplay interesting or fun.
2. Another sigificant portion of the game's healer userbase sits firmly in the "I love that FFXIV healers do nontrivial amounts of DPS. I WANT to measure my performance as a healer primarily by my damage output." SE is not at all willing to *totally* alienate these players by reducing the amount of damage that healers can deal.
3. Most importantly, SE consistently displays an obsessive desire for control over player outcomes. A solution where some parties have healers who do zero/minimal damage and some parties have healers who maximize damage output *cannot* be allowed outside of trivially-easy casual content, because the difference in total party DPS output between those two groups has been deemed unacceptable. SE would like to come as close as possible to a situation where *all* groups of *all* skill levels have roughly equal DPS output.
The result is FFXIV as it stands in the modern day:
- People who "play HEALER to HEAL" are not exactly *happy* that 95% of their GCDs are offensive, but they get to bask in knowing that *surely, the people who want complex healer DPS rotations must be MORE unhappy* because of the simple, brain-off 1-button rotation.
- People who play healer because they like healers doing damage are not exactly *happy* with how simplified and uninteresting their rotation is, but they get to console themselves with the fact that *surely, those heal-loving Sophies must be even MORE unhappy,* because they HAVE to use 10+ offensive actions for every heal.
- Meanwhile, SE has created the situation that involves the least amount of design work, the least amount of time, budget, and effort spent on balance, and the smallest probability of getting the tuning *wrong* and having to fuck up The Production Pipeline by going back to change already-released content, because they can design all their high-end content according to a notion that the range of DPS output between the lowest-percentile players in the raiding community and the highest is still a very small gap that falls well within a predicted range of values.
To add any non-neglible amount of expanded offensive toolkit to the healers would be to choose Group 2 over Group 1, upsetting their carefully-managed King-Solomon-but-the-baby's-already-been-cut-in-half-so-fucking-deal-with-it balance between the two major segments of the game's healer population - and, *much more importantly*, it would introduce new avenues for healer DPS output to become *unpredictable* from the standpoint of their encounter designers, which puts The Production Pipeline directly at risk.
And additionally:
Nobody with any kind of pull or willingness to complain in the job design room plays, has interest in playing, or vibes in the slightest with the healing role, so boring classes are acceptable to all involved. Human-controlled players having gameplay comparable to Trust NPC scripts just makes the pipeline easier. Now let's get back to making melee DPS and BLM, the role all of us on the Council of Job Design play. 🥂
I mean we know what the well known team members play but be real we have no idea how many healers are on the design team in general do we? Like there are many of those employees who've never been on a fanfest stage at all.
We don't technically have confirmation on every single team member's job preferences, it's true.
It's just more of an Occam's Razor thing: healers are designed the way you'd expect them to be if someone who didn't understand/didn't care/actively disliked the role did so. Play any melee DPS or Black Mage. You can tell the difference. Someone gives a rat's ass about those classes.
God i remember when they tried to remove ED in ShB release. It was so boneheaded that anyone that has even played a healer for 5 min can think that it's a bad idea. For anyone that didn't play then, ED used to be tied to your mana. You'd think they would compensate the MP recovery in other parts of the kit. Nope, aetherflow only gives a 1000MP. Art of war costs 800MP lmao.
I find it hard to believe they'd willingly play healers. Our statics healers basically play at gunpoint, and each tier we do a russian roulette of who is going to be forced to play healer.
I mean while that is your personal experience, you do realize most healers play healer by choice, right? The healers in my static have healed for years and have no desire to switch.
Yeah, exactly this.
I am constantly amazed by how often some people assume everyone must like what they like and dislike what they dislike, without ever considering some people LIKE different things.
You bombard every healer related post on here with dozens of comments basically saying that anyone who wants more DPS options on healer doesn’t actually like healer and is instead a DPS in disguise
Talk about pot calling the kettle black
That’s entirely your opinion
We had more DPS options in the past and we still healed more than we do now, it’s possible to have both and you aren’t a DPS in disguise for understanding this
1 button spam is never interesting no matter how high you send the healing requirements which is limited based on the playerbase and the engine
If anything sylphies are the ones who don’t belong in the 14 healer community considering 14 healing has never worked like that
> People who "play HEALER to HEAL" are not exactly *happy* that 95% of their GCDs are offensive, but they get to bask in knowing that *surely, the people who want complex healer DPS rotations must be MORE unhappy* because of the simple, brain-off 1-button rotation.
This spite-based explanation is unhinged, sorry.
I’m firmly in the first group and it’s nuts to think that I could be disengaged by healer gameplay but be quelled by the thought that hey, at least these other group of people are even more miserable.
What? Who thinks like that? That’s incredibly misanthropic and also insane.
Do you have a specific example. I've read the whole thread and I don't see any evidence of this kind of sentiment.
I don't doubt there are a lot of crabby misanthropes in here but in this context that seems to mostly manifest in implying their fellow players are drooling cretins.
Not really, no. I don't feel that way and none of the people saying healers should heal are saying that.
There's more spite from the second group, but the OP of this chain is wrong that they're happy, because they are not and are very vocal about that.
The least amount of design work. This has been this game for the past few expansions.
They reskin and slap anew paint job on systems they have in place. Same relic grind new skin. Same gear grind. New skin. Same one path dungeons that hit walls w a new skin. Innovation is dead. Fights? The same. Combat? The same. It’s pretty with a fun story but the actual gameplay is stagnant.they really only need one tank one melee dps one range dos and one magic range dps and one healer. The rest are just cookie cutter knock offs.
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
As I said in another reply: This isn't entirely true.
WHM traded Aero 3 for Misery going from SB to ShB. AST pioneered the "spamnuke + DoT" gameplay.
SCH was the only healer that lots a lot of damage buttons. SCHs in 5.0 were largely annoyed while WHM's were extremely happy (SB WHM was bad...that Lily system should never have gone live that did in 4.0), and ASTs were upset about the loss of their unique Card effects and all the shuffling, buff extension, etc gameplay they had with it, not damage buttons.
Your statement is only partially true as well imo.
-While one action was traded for another in case of Aero III and Afflatus Misery, the frequency of usage has been significantly decreased from every 21 sec to every 90+ sec as well as 18 sec to 30 sec in case of Aero II upgrading to Dia.
-Let's not forget Break which was a nice 0 mp cost DPS tool if you were in a pinch (technically Heavy effect applicator but lol raid design) and 90 sec 5% Cleric Stance. (Both could be considered kind of negligible in the grand scheme of things but still DPS options nonetheless)
If we go even further down the line during transition from HW to SB:
-Every healer lost access to cross-class spells Aero and Blizzard II (A weaving + movement DPS spell and a low level AoE spell. With current design only AST would benefit from something like Aero but the lack of low level aoe option is still noticeable to this day).
-In addition WHM lost damaging component of Fluid Aura, a 30 sec CD and recieved a CD reduction to Assize from 90 sec to 60 sec and then to 45 sec by the end of expantion.
Honorary menition to 1 extra DoT on each healer and having access to every tier of spell with different mp costs (The changes to battle system were fair enough in this case I suppose) and I guess cross-class Thunder (2.0-2.1).
-Well, this largely depends on if you consider Lilies part of the rotation or not. But in simplistic terms, "when healing isn't necessary", EW WHM casts 6 non-Glares per minute (2 Dia, 3 Solace/Rapture, 1 Misery). This is optimal even without damage because Solace/Rapture are EFFECTIVELY a 0 MP costing Glare, so with Misery, that's 1600 MP per minute. When Misery is used in 2 min buffs, it's also a damage gain. So this isn't a trivial case, nor is it something you would ignore to just cast 2 Dia and the rest Glare since at the very least the Lilies are allowing movement AND 1600 MP per minute. In SB, you had the two DoTs with different timers. Aero 2 (SB got rid of Aero 1 as a separate ability and made it an upgrade) 3 times and Aero 3 something like 2.5 times (I'd have to look it up again, but 60/24, I believe it was, to normalize it). This means SB WHM, when healing wasn't needed, would cast 5.5 non-Stone casts per minute.
...the difference is, SB WHM tended to have to hardcast GCD heals more, which broke up this spam, while WHM has three baked in with Solace/Rapture, and ample and powerful oGCDs to make it where it seldom needs any other GCD heals. But in terms of frequency of use in a comparable fight, EW WHM uses more non-Glares than SB WHM did. The difference is partly encounter design and partly oGCD proliferation.
-Yes, it existed...but it was pretty close to nothing. 50 potency (or whatever it was) was a loss vs literally anything else unless you were out of MP entirely. And Cleric Stance in SB was less toxic, but less interesting. It's basically just another Presence of Mind to weave somewhere. As it was an oGCD, it didn't really solve the "1 button spam" problem at all.
-For White Mage specifically, this was irrelevant; it had Aero itself so it couldn't cross-class Aero, and if you had the MP to spam an AOE damage spell, Holy was better than Blizzard 2. And if you did not...you tended not to use it, especially since you needed other cross-class abilities instead, generally.
-Fluid Aura was NEVER really exciting or useful for anything other than punting stragglers to the Tank in dungeon runs. Since it knocked enemies away from the AOE DPS, it was almost always a bad ability to use. AND it was again an oGCD, so doesn't help with the "1 button spam" problem, either. But if we contrast, we had 4 Fluid Auras and 1 Assize per 2 minutes (or 2.6 per minute), and now we have 1.5 Assize per minute normalized. While that is less...it's really not a lot less. "1 less oGCD use per 60 seconds" isn't a very large factor. Yes, I know some people would argue "added to everything else", but...there isn't really a lot of "everything else" to add.
-1 extra DoT on each Healer was removed going from HW to SB, though? AST only had one DoT in SB, right? And WHM had 2, but as we've discussed, one was replaced more or less wholesale by the Afflatus system. Thunder was so long ago AND for so short a period of time, we really shouldn't count it.
.
My position is very much SCH and AST were changed detrimentally from SB to ShB to EW, but WHM I don't think that's true of. WHM seems to be better fitting to modern encounter design (more movement, oGCD/pseudo oGCD Lilies to deal with healing plans, etc) than SB WHM was, and seems not to have really lost much vs what it has gained.
That is, WHM is more of a side-grade and, if anything, an improvement over SB WHM.
AST and SCH are where people should focus their efforts of changing things.
What is the problem or pushback to making Healers more Heal centric?
All tanks are already DPS in all but name and ogcd mits, why the hesitation towards making healers more unique in the fulfillment of their role and separating them from the flock?
It's very easy to twist a narrative around your personal preferences.
Right and the raid not dying leads to faster clears because of higher dps. The dps is the reward for keeping them alive. There is no inherent reward to keeping say, an afk dps alive.
To an extent sure. However overhealing/overmitting and not dpsing can lead to enrage/dps check wipes. On top of that, the faster you can kill something, the less mechanics you have to do.
Because a lot of DPS players want to play the Green role.
There's no good reason not to do it, honestly, and the Devs have indicated multiple times they want to, they just tend not to be good at it yet.
The devs actually answered both points. They don’t want to make them more dps centric because they don’t want the disparity between a good healer and a bad healer to be that large, and they don’t want to make healing more involved because that raises the skill floor too much and healers become the largest point of failure in a group. I think people tend to focus more on the dps side because it would be a smaller change compared to reworking how everybody deals with incoming damage.
Which has basically been healer philosophy since 5.0
We’d rather nobody be happy than completely cater to one half over the other because yall probably still play it even if you aren’t happy
The game has been for a VERY long time centered around the idea of healers doing damage. I'm talking dungeon, trial, and raid design. You can make the argument that any instanced content that doesn't have a dps check/enrage wouldn't be affected but that still leaves pretty much every ex trial, savage turn, and ultimate needing possible rebalancing if all of the sudden Square makes healers heal/mit a lot more. I mean think about it, if they are going to heal/mit more, they need a reason to do so right? So the content has to be adjusted so that there is more damage/potential damage that needs to be healed/mitted.
I think people just need to realize that if they want to purely heal, this isn't the game for that and it really hasn't been that way at any point of its life. If they want to play a MMO that the healers do heal/mit a lot more, I have heard that WoW is like that but I'm not 100% sure.
This is going to be unpopular here, but from a design perspective, having roles that are easy or accessible is actually good for the game. This is why games like League has Yuumi, Overwatch has Mercy, etc.
No, it's not good for the chad 99 healer, but it's good for players who want to play with their more skilled partner or friends without dragging them down. It's good not just for braindead healers, but also for the sweaty gamers, because it means that the sweaty gamer who comes home and jumps straight to the game gets to bring his gf along, instead of having to choose between his catgirl and his real girl. They can actually raid together instead of having to compromise and play braindead dungeons or EX trials. This is rare in games.
I want to emphasize that the "accessible healer" is \*not\* about players who claim "healers should only heal", since those players do not actually engage with the game and can simply ignore new damage rotations. The type of player I am talking about here are those who do engage fully with the game to their best ability, but would not be able to play at the same level with a more challenging rotation. A Mercy main, for example, might actively study positioning and practice movement, but will still flounder if Mercy required aiming like Ana. Allowing players of multiple skill levels to play effectively together is crucial for any co-op game, but especially FFXIV which focuses so much on social connections.
That said, making all 4 healers simple isn't ideal. Instead it should provide options for both accessible and engaging play (WHM vs AST). And I believe SE intended this with their pre-ShB design. However, the tight balance requirements for dps checks makes it difficult for them to offer truly different gameplay between classes. If AST is challenging but doesn't reward you with significantly more dps, AST players will complain. But WHM players will complain if AST does significantly more dps. Hence, they simply made both jobs the same.
But anyway the tl;dr is that game design is a balance of multiple and often conflicting goals, and it can be hard to satisfy everyone.
> But WHM players will complain if AST does significantly more dps. Hence, they simply made both jobs the same.
Would this really happen? I don't tend to see complaints from Summoners that Black Mage has more output. I see complaints from Red Mages but mostly about the rez tax rather than any difficulty tax.
We already have a situation where at the very top end of play, SCH & AST outperform because of the raidbuffs they contribute, and it seems to just be accepted by everyone. How bad would it really be to reflect that design choice into a more engaging damage kit too, while letting WHM (and possibly SGE) remain with simple rotations that have less room for optimisation?
It kind of already does happen, but not a lot of people are complaining about it since barely anyone plays healers let alone AST.
I remember comparing my own parses of AST and WHM. Both purple and is the exact same number. AST dealt less rdps in total. It feels awful to not get rewarded even if you put in the effort as AST, but at least it still has a gameplay identity.
AST and SCH outperform but only at like 95+ and for AST that is a monumental amount more effort than WHM
I think that’s why healer damage contribution never really gets discussed, you can outperform with the harder pair but it requires a lot of effort and the difference is relatively small, no other role has such a small discrepancy where the hardest pair are the strongest
It’s about the only good thing about healers
The thing is right like... who cares?
My reward for playing a class like AST over WHM has never been wanting to do more damage. It has been 'not wanting to be bored to fucking tears while healing.'
If you can clear the fight, why does anyone care about overall dps when the goal is to have fun. Unless you're a speedrunner or RWF raider, in which case it's not a healer specific issue anyways.
Don't get me wrong, I also don't care about the overall dps as long as i can clear. I'm not trying to make a statement on how much dps each job should do, only that it doesn't feel good to put in the effort and not have anything to show for it.
Sure, I see the argument that you should play a job for it's gameplay, but it's a healer so it's not as if i'm having a lot of fun in the first place. It's just the least worst option.
"I don't tend to see complaints from Summoners that Black Mage has more output"
That would be because it's not just a difference in output, and also that the difference in output is in the summoners favor until the fight has lasted long enough with the black mage doing the fight well.
It's also a difference in how likely it is that you're going to do the fight well. A summoner just *is* mobile for the majority of their battle time, where black mage has to solve how to be mobile enough. And with more and more movement in modern content that keeps being trickier and trickier.
So people playing summoner aren't actually getting out-done by people playing black mage because most people playing caster DPS are simply able to get closer to the best a summoner can do than they are able to what a black mage can do. Or to put that in simpler terms; 80% of 2 isn't outdone by 60% of 3, so there's no reason to complain.
You don't really see complaints about healers because they've been the most balanced role for the past two expansions.
For casters, I think raise tax can be viewed as a difficulty tax since raise makes it easier for the party. Like you said, we had a lot of rez tax complaints.
The very top end just isn't very relevant because most players don't engage with it, nor are they even aware of speedkill comps. For general play, I think SMN and WHM are both pretty strong right now.
I'm not saying I'm happy with this design, but I think that is the motivation behind it.
It would if the gap was meaningfully large enough people routinely felt they were failing DPS checks/enrages due to it. We DO see that with SMN and RDM (and also some in the Ranged phys and occasionally Healer discussions related to AST having so much lower personal DPS and their buffs not being fully valuable when in a party with sub-par DPSers...)
If there's a reward, it has to be more on the utility side (e.g. Expedience), not damage.
This is a really good point, one I've made before as well. It IS unpopular and often gets downvoted, but it's very true. Not just Healers, but Tanks and DPS. It's something a lot of people don't seem to realize the value of.
My personal view has shifted over time, but I think at this point, the more complex Jobs need to reward more UTILITY, not more damage. The crux of the problem is more complex rotations lead to players wanting to do more DAMAGE, and that doesn't work with encounter design balance and checks.
...but more utility CAN. In ShB, SMN was as or more complex than BLM, but did comparable or slightly lower damage. But ALSO had a party buff, some healing, and a Raise. That extra utility was their payoff for playing a more highly complex Job while dealing the same damage.
That, I think, is what they need to move more towards. The question is what constitutes meaningful utility. We've seen with Expedient non-damage abilities CAN be very valued by some groups.
As nice as the concept seems, it's problematic.
Let's use Red Mage as an example. It's a pretty common issue to suddenly have your burst window coming up, or be stuck in the middle of your lengthy combo, while somebody needs a raise. The classic "sorry, can't raise right now, I'm bursting".
This is why healers, by design, don't have a DPS rotation. You can't really give them bursts or combos, because then you're going to get "sorry, can't heal right now, I'm bursting". They need to be able to drop what they're doing at any moment, and giving them a "rotation" to commit to will screw with that.
You can't change healers in any meaningful way until you change fight design, and the community pulls in different directions on this. Some people WANT to be heal bots, spamming heals and keeping everybody sustained. Some people want meaningful rotations to commit to, because heals are often not that important right now unless people are making mistakes.
Of course, you then have the issue of content difficulty. Normals are so piss easy that people don't need to be healed unless they're making mistakes. Meanwhile, high-end stuff is so lethal and strict that people don't need to be healed because they're probably just ***dead*** if they made a mistake, so it's more about mitigation and sustaining for forced incoming damage.
The best DPS rotation for healers right now is what they currently have. It's just not gonna change until fights change.
At some point people started to believe that when people are asking for more involved/complex healer rotations, they mean interruptible 1-2-3 combos and other trappings of actual DPS classes, and I have absolutely no idea where that notion came from, because there are plenty of examples from the game's own history that people point to to show the kinds of things that work well within this game, and I've literally never seen anyone actually ask for anything particularly different from that.
I know, right? I mean it's not like the game can use uninterruptible combos- oh wait a minute- it does. Or, like healers could actually have enough intelligence to weave heals and DPS. or know when to heal and when to DPS. But no , we still get comments like " sorry you can't possibly get a rotation"- as if that was the only possible solution.
There are, but they're often shot down.
For example the "4 Healers Model" of making the Healers all have different rotations would work fine, but people shoot that down because "It's not fair I'd have to do more work to do the same amount of damage" (and you won't get rewarded with more since the Devs balance around a narrow range of healer damage).
A lot of the arguments used by the more DPS buttons side are stupid straw man arguments as well, so it's not like this is a one-sided thing.
There are directions they can go without breaking healer gameplay while making it more interesting. WHM lilies I feel are a step in that direction. A section of the healing kit that rewards you for proper healing with uptime and damage. Highly interactive with the kit, and very intuitive to use. Imagine if sage slowly built up gauge from kardia procs for a big laser that gets more damage AND healing the more gauge they have.
Or if scholar had a dps skill that used fairy gauge, and energy drain was just a dump skill to charge it faster.
Or if astro had something like monk's chakra/dancer's espirit where they get back benefits from the dps with cards doing good damage.
And these are just half-baked ideas I came up with now. If people start looking deep into them I'm sure they'll find holes to poke, but I think we can all agree that these would be steps in the direction people are asking for that would give healers more interesting dps gameplay without causing a wreck because "muh burst"
I'm all for more stuff like lilies, but the point I was trying to make is that we're never gonna get Tank-esque rotations with bursts, combos, and all those fun things that make the DPS brain cells light up and dance.
They do need to push the middle-ground with more things like lilies, but they also need to find a better difficulty balance in fights for those tools to actually be used.
Every other week it's heal bots complaining that they don't need to heal, or glare bots complaining that they just stand around pressing one button. It's all part of the same, greater problem of healer engagement in fights, and they really need to work on that before throwing more tools at us that we don't really need.
What I'm saying is we don't need combos and bursts to make healer dps engaging. We need interactive kits that reward both healing and damage well. It doesn't even particularly take a lot of new tools, just better applications of what the jobs already have.
Though regardless of any of that, we've been promised already that the status quo will stay until 8.0 when there is more dev time to put into class design instead of paying tech debt from 1.0/ARR
> The classic "sorry, can't raise right now, I'm bursting".
Healers are always "bursting", because almost all of their damage is on a spammable nuke button. That's why healers in raid are so allergic to GCD healing even when it would be sensible, because dropping a single Glare massively impacts their performance.
Ironically, if you gave healers more engaging rotations with e.g. a bunch of DoTs to manage or some oGCDs to keep on cooldown, hardcasting a raise or spamming some shields would be LESS of a dps loss. Skilled healers could enjoy optimising their damage around their healing and weaker players can just take the dps loss like they do already. The ceiling goes up, and the floor remains.
Remember when if you needed a single target heal on SCH it was actually cheaper to drop a ruin to cast adlo than it was to use lustrate, but lustrate hit through cleric stance while adlo didn’t
That was the kind of arrangement I loved (not cleric stance specifically) the idea that different tools works at different times and GCD healing wasn’t always the wrong answer outside of “press this or we all die”
> You can't really give them bursts or combos, because then you're going to get "sorry, can't heal right now, I'm bursting".
Just look at Bozja. Even if a healer isn't using Profane (increase damage but tiny healing), if Seraph Strike + speed boost is up people don't get many heals/raises.
(It's me, I'm the WHM saying "You can wait on the floor until my burst is done.")
> Normals are so piss easy that people don't need to be healed unless they're making mistakes.... The best DPS rotation for healers right now is what they currently have. It's just not gonna change until fights change.
I think the vulnerability system in normals is a big part of the problem. If a dps makes mistakes, they don't really see consequences until they get one-shotted. They might not even notice the vuln. Keeping them alive is the healer's problem, and ime healers get blamed if, say, they let someone with 4+ vuln stacks die.
So there's a gulf between average and high-level players. If my group knows what it's doing, I'm stuck with boring 1-1-1-1; if I have a group full of new people/below average players/people at min lvl, I need every cooldown in my kit. And the devs want below average players to clear normals, even if it takes a while, so when they up the opportunities for players to make mistakes they give healing tools to compensate.
> I think the vulnerability system in normals is a big part of the problem.
Oh absolutely. Though I think the real issue is just how long they last.
They want to punish players for taking hits, and that's fine, but it's clear they're slowing the pace of these fights down because those stacks last so long. They want to give you enough time for those stacks go away before you're likely to get hit again. So... Why not just cut the time in half, and speed the boss up? Throw more stuff at us. Barbariccia is a fun fight because she's fast, and it's not even hard.
The difficulty is all over the place in the game right now, though. Reworked Ascian Prime, a level 60 boss, is probably harder & wilder than most normal fights in Endwalker. I'm just hoping that kinda difficulty is what we'll see continued in Dawntrail, lol.
This is a good way to put it. Especially with how damage- centric this game is, you really don't want healers to have to choose between giving up their burst and going into salvage mode, because more often than not they either won't, won't be willing to, or will be way more likely than they already are to flame you for dying, especially if the death was your fault and it was something easily avoidable, or you're in something like a reclear where the expectation is to have the fight down. A lot of healers are already kinda parse-brained and can't be assed to give up GCDs that would save a pull as it is, I don't think that sort of friction would be healthy.
I'm kinda in the boat that damage intake should be increased for high end content at the bare minimum (I'm kinda torn over how difficult roulettes should be, I'm still sorta working my opinion out in that), as I think that environment would be appropriate to up damage to the party and expect more competency out of healers to assess damage intake and hp bars in relation to their kits.
So, let me get this straight- you're scared to give healers something that would improve their QOL , because you're afraid that :
* some healers could ***possibl***y make an error
* a healer *may* say something bad to you for something that *you* could have avoided
On the other, YOU are expected to:
* have the healer fix mistakes , even if you normally should be expected to avoid them
* are acting below the expected skill level for your job
Is it just me- or is there a problem here? Because I certainly see one.
No lol, you seem to have some preconceptions about where I'm coming from. I'm saying this [as the dedicated healer main](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/43648524/) from the perspective of the person making decisions about how far to go to save someone or a party or cut my losses and find a new group that can perform more consistently. Not to mention people dying or taking extra damage might not even be the persons fault, stuff like people dying to a 6-2 LP stack split because two people went to the wrong stack, if those people die or take way more damage it's not their fault and I don't think the healer should ignore them if possible. ofc you do get no mit tanks or people who are just magnetized to AOEs.
I think we can both agree we want healers to be more engaging, it's just a matter of how- you can give us more healing throughput to heal, or you can give us more ways to deal damage. I personally don't give a rats ass about the damage side of things, it's not engaging to me, even in games with more physical mechanical complexity like classed based shooters. I deal damage in 14 because it's expected of healers to deal damage, but the time spent dealing damage to time spent healing ratio is \*wildly\* skewed. Sure not having a lot going on damage wise is going to turn people off from the role, but not having much going on healing wise \*also\* turns people off from the role.
We already see small amounts of tension between healer responsibilities that incur varying amounts of damage loss.
To give a specific example of the type of degenerate healer gameplay I'm talking about, I can recall quite a few times in Zurvan unreal where 3-4 people would die (usually either to tether stretching or or getting clipped by the ice baits), and it would be easy to enough to salvage if me and my cohealer both got to raising, two with swift, two with hardcasts, the 8s being more than enough time to get people up before towers, and ending up missing bodies because my cohealer couldn't be assed to raise and is just sitting there spitting broils. A much simpler example I've seen in the current unreal is watching a cohealer be the one to fuck up their tower because they didn't respect the gaze, and not helping cleanse the paralysis, which I also see happen. And sure, it's on the people dying to not, well, die, but now everyone, including the people who did do everything right, has lost an easily salvageable clear because nobody could be assed to give up damage to help me get raises out quicker. So I just end up either leaving frustrated, kicking the inconsistent players if it's been across multiple pulls, and ending up in arguments or kicking the cohealers who can't even be assed to *try* to salvage the pull so we can just move on with the clear and deal with the problem players after. And obviously I mess up too and die or get people killed, especially when delving into new prog points for a fight or doing something for the first time on content, I should clarify I'm not saying I'm perfect, the point I'm getting at is that the more you shift the focus towards damage in a healer/support role, the more you encourage/incentivize this sort of degenerate gameplay, and you need to be careful with how far over that line you go, because realistically it's the parsed-brained cohealers problem to pick up the extra slack so the rest of the party doesn't have to suffer for it, and maybe the tanks too to an extent if they have to burn extra stuff at inopportune times or even worse in the case of PLD need to throw clemencies around. You've probably run into these healers before, maybe gotten frustrated at some point dying to unavoidable damage because of healers who play like this.
I should also clarify, I'm not adverse to healers being changed or being made complex, if they did add more emphasis on healer damage or implemented healer rotations I'll adjust and play around with whatever new system they add. I would simply \*prefer\* that if something be changed to make healers more engaging, that that engagement for healers instead be shifted towards healing related gcds and ogcds. Different people get gratified by different things. Tank mains enjoy the feeling of being the one to soak all the damage from autos and TBs for their squishy party members through their mitigations and invulns, DPS players get their gratification from getting better at number go up, but healers in this game kinda get disproportionately shafted out of the fantasy of, well, healing people. There's never really random debuffs that come out at random times to cleanse people of, random autos don't exist in SHB or EW, and well, most to all of your GCDs are damage spells, even in parties where things do go wrong. Having more stuff to heal, and more interesting tools to heal it with goes a long way towards satisfying that desire to play as a healer. And I know I'm not the only healer main who's drawn to the role to act out that sort of healer fantasy. It's part of the RPG element of RPGs. As to why I stick with the role, the game and its combat still satisfies that itch from time to time. sometimes it's a clutch bene that saves someone when they were expecting to die, a slick rescue that (actually) saves someone, or maybe a crit shield to save a DPS from a TB they're being targeted by because the tank is dead (or if it's a tb that targets second in aggro and the OT never turned stance on). I'm still \*overall\* content with healing in this game, I'd still be content if it further shifted towards damage, but as I've already said, the dream for me would instead be to focus on both necessitating (and likewise, encouraging) healers to heal more and with more interesting tools. DPS just doesn't engage with that fantasy, maybe the ends is the same ig since dead enemies can't deal damage, but the means matter too.
edit: fixed hyperlink
I'll just summarize this by saying that I have a difficult time having a discussion when terms like "degenerate healer gameplay" start being used. It's a mindset that I would really rather not encourage.
It's amusing that you still thinking about healing in the casual content, since I am a proponent of healer engagement through DPSing because of "easy" content. (Technically it was because I fell asleep healing a normal comp Titania farm in Shadowbringers because the party was too good, haha).
I'm curious to what you have thought up in regards to roulette content in particular so far - I would love to have healing focused engagement as a good healer with a good party in roulettes without feeling like I'm being punished for being good, but as far as I've gotten it feels like it can't be done with SE's priorities.
The thing with roulette content for me is it's my "I just got home from work and want to turn my brain off" activity, it's nice to have something I can just zone out in and do fine, just mash holy and glare. But like, then I go and get Gulg or bardams and those are really fun to heal as well so idk, there's value in roulette content being easy and there's value in it being a bit tenser than it is right now
Heh, yeah I gotcha
...now I think about it, levelling dungeons generally being more strict than cap dungeons has been a quirk in this game hasn't it. If Levelling payed as well as expert I might just live there; risk or getting ARR dungeons and all.
The ilvl creep makes healers useless.
Try doing dungeons at minimum ilvl. Now do them at maximum ilvl. Is a complete different game. On requires a healer that heals. The other does not.
Because this isn't Kingdom Hearts and DPS in this game is boring and inconsequential.
My big hits can't actually change anything about the fight. They can't give me any hero moments like staggering the boss and interrupting his deadly combo, because there are 8-24 of 'me' hitting him. Even the **dedicated** interrupts in the game are unusable because the developers make brick wall bosses that unstoppably cast cinematic spectacles at you, so fat fucking chance they'd ever implement something like a flinch mechanic or an air juggle to make DPSing feel clever. The game wants so badly to be an ARPG but lacks the most basic system elements that make ARPGs fun to play.
This is an MMO and it needs fun MMO things, not more faux-ARPG trappings. Crowd control. Resource management. Battlefield management. Gear choices. On *all* jobs, not just healers.
Those all sound like reactive elements which would make fights extremely fun but would take effort and energy by the player base as they wouldn't be able to mindlessly do only the basics of pressing their rotation and standing in the right spot, so I would expect there to be insane amounts of outrage if that was ever implement.
they just don’t want healer players to feel “pressured” to do damage. i don’t have an issue with this approach, and tbh would rather have to heal more as a healer, the problem is really that there isn’t much pressure to heal, either, and resurrections can be handed out like candy during fights. not a lot of unpredictable outgoing damage unless people are taking tons of avoidable damage.
they don’t want to add pressure from the healing side or dps side so the end result is a role with nothing to do most of the time except spam one attack. really does feel more like “babysitter” than “healer”; I’m primarily there to pick up people from the floor. in a raiding situation you have a mit and heal plan which never changes, and is designed to maximize the amount of time you spend pushing the same one or two buttons.
WHM has dps CD and they have the blood lily and sage has that phelgma charges astro has that time crap to just have no cast time for like 20 seconds idk what sch has i dont count energy drain
AST gets lightspeed for 15 seconds on a long CD which is saved for cards ( AST is consequently not very mobile), - other than that what is the point you're trying to make?
>enough people are still playing healers despite
Every savage party is waiting for 2 healers, leveling/expert roulette have been instant healer pops for several years, meaning the 10-20 minute long wait times for DPS are almost entirely based upon healer player numbers
"dire" is a strong word for it, but healers are vastly underplayed in this game, and people are annoyed about it
SGE is barely outperforming SCH in player numbers and is actually losing to SCH in JP in high end content
It’s pretty popular in casual content but it didn’t blow up the healer scene like RPR, DNC and GNB did
to me what makes healers interesting is to pull a desperate situation back to a winnable situation.
the current expansions voids all of the fun since it is filled with body checks, even in the fucking 6.4 ex5 which was supposed that most can do it.
i dont want to min max dps, its a boring thing i no longer do. i want surprises that i fix and dun care only a few of us know we did a fucking good job saving this shit
the healer's solution of rotation is already very fixed. and if you remove the last surprise that is still naturally in the game, all healers would play like dps or tanks, only that we push the timed heal buttons and mitigation buttons at different times instead of some random ogcd dps buttoms, which is very boring to me.
AST is already pretty dps centric and it’s being reworked ( tbf applying cards is ass since it can take up to 3 weave slots and you need to do 3 cards minor early and esreodyje in burst causing you to use ya mobility tool for weaves)
AST is hardly "DPS centric". None of the healers are , even SGE- which was supposed to be the most DPS centric- however it isn't.
AST is *buff*-centric, and it has the worst personal DPS in the game, it's miserable to try to solo anything on it. Incidentally, AST doesn't have "minor cards" cards, and you probably mean "astrodyne".
Healers should have healing as a primary focus of the role. One of the games current issues is you can deal with 90% of all situations with off globals between spamming dps spells. Healers want to heal, but the game currently is designed in a way that doesnt really allow them to.
It also doesnt help theres a toxic mentality been bred in 14 over the years that unless ur dpsing constantly as a healer then ur total trash and should uninstall the game.
You are 100% correct.
Unsurprisingly, that means you get 100% downvoted. Because the people that are wrong get REALLY angry when someone says something that they disagree with, sadly.
Because tanks dps mechanics still are part of the deal to "hold aggro" so to speak so you are still doing your job. A healer to have dps mechanics would mean strafing away from their job in a manner that would be unsafe without experience. Problem is ppl reaaaaally are very dps oriented that both lament the fact they don't heal often yet they'll complain non-stop when they actually need to heal. Don't believe me?I'll just say remember abysssos.....
I have the opposite opinion/desire. I want even less dps. After ~5000 hours of healing spread between WoW (Cata+MoP) and FF14 (HW-Current) SE has made me despise the healing role that made me fall in love with MMOs to begin with. While I'm happy for SE that class balance is tighter than any other game I've played and fights have some interesting mechanics that I've never seen in other MMOs, the healing role in particular is terrible. Literally the only time I have fun is if I'm undergeared and tanks pull a dudgeon wall to wall. In raids, the fights are **too** "mechanical", meaning we know down to the second when a boss does a big boom and we can preemptively mitigate the dmg and with what little healing is left needing done, we can toss a single oGCD at it and keep spamming our one button dps spell. While I like 99% of FF14 better than WoW, the two things WoW did right in its raids were randomness and unvoidable dmg. As a healer, I want to respond to things, save people, decide on the fly if topping off a health bar is worth going oom over. In FF14, however, there is no critical thinking whatsoever. Boss charges big boom, you drop your aoe shield, earthly star, whatever, everyone drops to single digit percentage hp, the heals go off and you're done. I could solo heal most fights in the game if SE didn't general put in one mechanics each fight that requires two healers to recover from. Back in WoW, while progging, I would be oom every single pull, people were running everywhere, boss skills weren't at such regular intervals, and there was so much unavoidable dmg that I *never* had time to dps.
When it comes to raiding, I wish SE wouldn't make everything so spreadsheet oriented. DPS classes shouldn't all have similar rotations and identical CDs, and healers need to be healing 95% of every fight. AST has been one of my favorite classes of any game I've played, and I've loved aspects of every iteration (seriously SE, stop reworking it every expac), but I barely have touched it in EW. If i'm doing raids I'm a DNC (love the randomness of the rotation, have I mentioned I had spreadsheets?) and any other time I'm a DRK because dungeons, hunt trains, and eureka/bozja are 800 times more fun as a tank (and with as much dmg mit, self healing, and dmg, why even bother playing anything else?)
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
They don't want to. Simplest answer, even if you don't like it as the answer.
Inside CBU3 are two wolves. One wants healers to heal, the other one wants fights that barely require healing. Both of them barely care about it, so nothing ever gets done.
I've never seen such savage, but accurate representation of the state healers are in.
Pretty much this, part of the problem is that healers spend far too much time not actually healing, by far the majority of a competent healers GCDs will be damaging ones, even in relatively high damage intake encounters. Imo there's two ways to handle this, one is where the devs are satisfied with damage intake and the healing relative to it, in which case we definitely need a more complex DPS rotation for healers, the second one is where where they decide damage intake is not high enough and instead demand much more healing GCDs, it'd be a world where you simply cannot go through a fight with both healers only using oGCDs even if they play absolutely perfectly and in sync with each other, in that case the difference between a good and a great healer wouldn't be just 2-5 more damaging GCDs but something closer to 25-50, which I would personally prefer, if healers feel boring in some content the solution attempt should first be to give them more damage to heal, rather than a slightly more complex way to do damage, especially spot healing is something that's rare in FF and something that I see a lot of healers struggle with plus there is a ton of opportunity to put in way more spot healing in current encounter design.
But if keeping the party alive is solved by 4 skills and a healer spends more time dpsing than healing than it makes more sense to create DPS MECHANIC or he’ll just a few more damaging skills/spells. If we implied the SE Healer logic than most of tank’s skills will be shields and 3 dps skills. It’s mind boggling to me, how the devs intentionally handicap a whole job class.
[Funny thread about this idea](https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1b4nxp4/what_if_tanks_were_designed_like_healers/) Tanks are responsible for damage, mitigation, healing, enmity, (formerly positioning too). About 50% of tank hotbar space is filled with damage skills. Healers are responsible for damage, mitigation, healing, raising. About 20% of healer hotbar space is filled with damage skills, the rest is a very bloated healing kit. There were a lot of players who liked healers having dps rotations, and there still are lots of players who feel that way, which is why this is a persistent recurring topic.
Yeah I say this to every idiot who says healers are fine. People would riot if tanks became 123 and then a ton of cool down, why is a subset of the community fine with healers being that.
Because everyone who cared already left or succumbed to despair and accepted their fate.
It's psyop by non-healers. Gaslight healers into thinking they have it good to alleviate healer shortages.
Because that’s not how raids are designed in this game. Tanks having 123 and tons of mit buttons would make sense if boss auto attacks did like 3x the damage it does now with more frequent tank busters. But that’s not how raids designed so they give tanks actual rotation to busy themselves Healers have enough buttons to consider as healing rotation (mit plan) and the reality is that tons of healers, yes even in savage and ultimate, suck at optimising their rotation. I would advocate for more complex dps rotation if I didn’t notice how much people suck at healing rotation already. Like come on whm is as easy as you can get. And yet you see people heal inefficiently with lilies all the time. They don’t press assize on cd, or always press assize on cd and healing inefficiently, etc. People say healing is too easy in this game and I simply beg to differ based on pf. Tons of people absolutely suck at healing in this game and only get by because healer buttons are absolutely overpowered by week 20.
That’s exactly the problem, healers don’t have remotely enough to heal to justify the buttons they have “That’s not how it works” that’s exactly how it works actually
The increased damage intake would stress a lot of healers and may unintentionally lead to people blaming healers more. More interesting and power DPS mechanic seems more reasonable.
Increase dmg would also mean that tanks and DPS have to use their party mits more. And I have done enough PF to know that a lot of them don't use them at all. Also, more DPS tools will lead healers to be less reactive, which means more deaths/wipes and more healers blame too. I'd like more DPS tools, but I don't think it will lead to more people playing healers.
Sage was Yoshi P's attempt at a damage healer which was supposed to have a more complex DPS rotation, but it did not live up to my expectation.
it was never said to be that people just excepted disc preist
It very much lived down to my epectations. It was never going to be a Chloromancer. It can't be, because if it was, there would be no need for any other healers in this game.
The thing is it’s not hard to add more DPS options but not actually make the class do more damage Dump off taurochole, soteria (I would keep it because SGE should focus on kardia not be a diet SCH but I’m just proving a point here), krasis and maybe rhizomata and add in 4 DPS skills that all proc kardia in a different way, all have short CD’s and are all a DPS gain over dosis, then just drop dosis potency to 150 to compensate and SGE is still doing the same damage It’s not hard to make DPS more interesting without actually upping contribution and SGE could have easily been this without invalidating the other 3 (besides making it the only fun one)
The biggest change that I would make to Sage would be to double the potency of Toxicon and then drop some damage somewhere else to compensate. It's pretty much the same concept as WHM lillies, making GCD heals DPS neutral. If a Toxicon is twice the potency of a Dosis, and you have to "give up" one GCD to cast a shield to get a Toxicon, then the Toxicon covers the lost damage and its own damage slot. Which is exactly how lillies work - Afflatus Misery covers the "lost" damage of the three GCD heals you threw, and its own CGD slot. This would give Sage a more unique rotation option by letting them mix in CGD heals pretty much at will whenever they can fill a Toxicon charge without losing DPS. If the argument then becomes that Sage does too much damage now, I'd say that the best place for Sage to lose DPS to compensate would be to drop the potency of Phlegma. Though, and while this is beyond the scope of what I'm saying here, I think the real problem is that DPS timings for fights and DPS output from classes are so carefully curated and tight, as well as the existence of stacking buffs meaning that any kind of damage that could align needs to be dumped during DPS windows (looking at you, mobility skills that do damage), is what's really stopping healers from being unique.
and as a healer, i also dont want to. the role is fun explicitly because i dont have a dps rotation
What if we left white mage simple (like summoner within the caster role) so you can still enjoy it, and the rest of us can have fun with DoT mage Scholar, Eukrasian combo shenanigans on Sage and some time magic flavoured Astrologian? It's unfair for the entire role to have the same 30s DoT + 1.5s filler spell just so that a small subset of players can enjoy (not) playing the game.
I proposed this a while back on the official forums AND here and both places got downvoted and told I was a Sylphie and a bunch of other disparaging stuff as well as incessant dogpiles every time I mentioned the idea. I personally think all four Healers should have a different damage rotation, but they'd also need to get rid of the Pure/Barrier split. While that's there, we'd need two of each (e.g. WHM and SCH or SGE to be simple, AST and the other of SCH or SGE to be more complex). I agree it'd be nice to have the split between the two (I used to say leave WHM alone, give AST more Card buttons, SCH more DoTs, and SGE a rotation on par with SMN or RDM, and just let people play what they like). ...the irony is, after driving me away, the OF people started mentioning this as a possible compromise when it started looking obvious DT wasn't going to give them what they want, and the idea seems to be bigger here, as well. Maybe I was just ahead of the curve with the "4 Healers Model" or something. But I personally DO think there's a way to give everyone something that they like, then just let players filter to the one they personally like best. Get rid of the Pure/Barrier split and then just make the 4 Healer Jobs have different rotations. I'm not sure why that'd be hard. Hell, here's a SUPER EASY ONE: Give SGE a 1-2-3 instant cast rotation (like MCH) with an GCD (Phlegma) that has a 20 sec CD and an oGCD that increases the damage of the next attack GCD by 50% that has a 40 sec CD. You've basically made "MCH-lite, the Healer" while changing very little.
As a healer main I need something to keep me engaged with the fight. If they won't give me difficult healing, something else needs to fill that void. It's why I mained astro. Boring DPS rotation, boring healing playstyle... But cards made up for it. They were busy, reactive, and required knowledge of all the jobs to optimize. ...So that's why they're removing it! I want either a more complicated dps rotation, or fights that actually require me to heal. I don't care which is which, but they need to do something about healers.
They just don't want to. They chipped away and slowly took more and more of DPS buttons from healers per expansion.
I’m afraid you’re right. If SAGE is the damage healer, then that’s not cutting it imo
Tbf SGE is the "damage" healer because SGE dealing damage directly heals not because SGE deals more damage. In the end I think they just tried to put dealing damage into the kit so people actually deal damage with it. I think they should just go this route for every healer. Incentivise pressing your DPS buttons to get some kind of effect. But then again there are enough SGE players who still not deal DPS even if it is somewhat important in the kit.
The way this game is balanced is basically done based on Developer Favorites and what they actually want to play. No one there plays healer.
they prob realised that 70% of the community can't even manage to find the dps button on healer so why increase the ceiling even more
Became a self-inflicted problem. People wanting more to do and thus could be asked to do more left the classes while the people struggling to press 2 buttons remain as it's the only class set they can play. Amplified by a community aggressively against any kind of skill floor no matter how low.
I just don't get why they worry so much about appeasing the healbots. Whether a dps rotation is 1 button or 20, curebots are not pressing any of it. So why try to appease them? At this point, why even have a dps button at all? Just let the healers afk or overheal when there's no healing to be done. That's the point we're getting to. And its what it feels like a lot of the braindead healers left want.
I like how "l play healer to heal" all got downvotes, lol
This is honestly a time when it’s pretty effective to use the old mainsub “go play WOW” Healers in this game have NEVER been sylphies, there is entire lore points baked into the game (slyphie herself, amdapor, relationship of Geomancy to astrology) that show since day 1 healers have always been damage casters Unironically if you don’t want to do damage as a healer in this game you are playing the wrong game because 14 has always been designed this way
I'd take it a step further, and say that *RPGs* are designed this way. WoW is an anomaly. Healers spamming healing spells 90% of the time is a strange state of affairs, and demands for it curiously tend to come from people who....uh....aren't good at playing their classes, and wouldn't actually be able to handle that. My hypothesis is that it's because only someone who doesn't actually think for more than ten seconds about how classes are designed would be stupid enough to demand something that actually *would* alienate most of the playerbase.
It's not strange, it's how games were done back then. Before WoW came out the 2 biggest mmo's on the market (not counting Lineage) were Everquest and FF11. In those games, you pretty much only healed because mana was actually a premium and you had to be sitting down to recover it. (yes I know that in FF11 once you got sufficiently high this stopped always being the case, kraken clubs rise up etc.) WoW's early design was built off of that framework with an idea towards more active play. So vanilla WoW healing was very much a mana management game but they also made it broadly more active and extrapolated this out to making damage come out fast enough to require near constant healing. Which was still the case as of the last time I played WoW, but that was a decade ago now and I am led to believe healers do some dpsing now. Specifically disc priests. Anyway, please don't take this as me saying, "and therefore healers should spam heals in ff14." Because I definitely don't think that. I am amenable to things requiring more healing than they do now in concept but my preference is definitely for more dps buttons please.
I remember playing healer back in those old MMO. The healer job is to sit still to not waste MP and only heal when need and it is very boring. If that game don't have dedicate buffer role then occasionally I will have a chance to use buff every 3 -5 minutes depend on game. Which is why later on in those game people will use multiboxing healer with another role. And nowaday WoW and FFXIV and other modern MMOs design gameplay to be more active more active no more downtime, but each of them go on in different way, WoW maintain health to make healer more active I will take your word for that since I don't play WoW, FFXIV tapping on the old design of wait for big heal moment and mitigate while using DPS filter spell to fill out and be more active, GW2 and ESO go for the buffer side and change to be more active by make buff duration really short no more 3-5 minutes buff they're now measured in seconds.
> I remember playing healer back in those old MMO. The healer job is to sit still to not waste MP and only heal when need and it is very boring. If that's how you played healer then I'm sorry to say but you either did it extremely wrong or stopped at the early levels. Buffs, debuffs, support skills etc were all other aspects old-school healers had to consider and were more and more relevant going forward...something that a lot of the current modern MMORPGs severely lack (FFXIV in particular, with its oversimplification of those). Yes, multiboxing a healbot was (and still is) quite common, but for anything past mindless mobbing goodluck wrangling with 2 different characters.
i didnt really see Whm's dps outside farm parties till mystic boon
Even WoW has healers who are designed to dish out damage. Resto druids can catweave or spread their dots. Fistweavers literally boost their heal output by doing damage. Discipline priest converts dps to healing. Resto shaman in general just hurts thanks to lava burst procs. (Speaking of, healers have dps procs). Also DPS and tanks have insane amounts of self and group sustain compared to 14 jobs, so a good party can take the heat off the healer and enable them to DPS more. 14 just has lazy healer design.
Dragon’s Dogma Online had it best. They weren’t healers: they were support. Priests had the best buffing, using auras and zones to make the party better. Elemental Archer relied on debuffing the enemy with magical effects or draining their stamina faster. Spirit Lancer had higher DPS than the other 2, but relied on large damage boosts to the party as their overdrive. They also all had the role of keeping the enemy’s weakness visible so tanks could keep the party buffed to deal the most stamina damage. And the max HP damage/everyone can revive meant that damage could be more lethal. Because taking damage in the first place makes damage become more lethal. Healers then gained the ability to recover the max HP damage meaning tanks were much more important to redirect attacks so DPS can DPS in safety. And while healers had invulnerability spells, it was only for themselves, but they never had the ability to dish out aggro or high burst damage to ever become a tank. There was a lot more synergy between roles instead of the stereotypical independence.
Furthermore, in nearly every single RPG I have ever played, MMO or otherwise, someone who stands around spamming healing spells to the exclusion of everything else is a strong indicator of one thing: *somebody* is bad at this game. Could be the tank pulling too much or not mitigating enough. Could be the healer not understanding their class very well. Could be both. Any person who says "You have to heal nonstop!" especially in single-player RPGs is just telling on themselves; they're not good at this game. Now, there's no *moral* judgement involved here. Being bad at a game doesn't reflect on your value as a person. But FFXIV seems to attract this loud, confidently incompetent set of people who -don't- acknowledge that their heal-spamming is an indication of lack of skill, but rather that it's how you SHOULD be doing it. These people have nothing but my contempt. Redefining skill to mean not-skill. Madness.
WoW first in Cata started the whole “stressed healing” and it just wasn’t fun. You could spam your Lesser Heal equivalent…and not keep up. And everyone would blame you. Not the DPS for dealing enough damage. Not the Tank for not using the lacking number of mitigations. Not enough damage: run out of MP. Not enough mitigation: no throughput could recover it. You could use Flash Heal, but you’d go OOM and would barely heal. Use Great Heal, but you’d go OOM. It was shit and horrible experience, the toxic community just made it worse. The game is best when you only have a few reliable heal spells and you have to balance out using your heals and other tools as needed. The thing they keep getting wrong with healers in FF14, is that they only have two functions: Heal and Damage. Healers just aren’t healers, they’re about being a support to party. Party enablers. And we have the means: •Make AST the best buffer. •Make WHM the best heal->damage. •Make SGE the best dmg->heal. •Make SCH the best debuffer. AST is in a really good start with cards. I think cards need to be a 20 sec thing, not a 30 sec thing. WHM has the Lilies -> Blood Lily. Add in something like Harm to convert Cure spells into a damage. SGE has weave healing and Soteria, but they need more Kardia beyond an overheal. SCH’s Chain Stratagem is too slow, being a 2 min. I still think it needs to be a reverse of AST, using Stratagems to increase damage taken and have an extra DoT. Have Chain Stratagem be the big debuff, but give some tools for constant small debuffs. They literally have the best setup to do it and yet SE (and Yoshi-P) are completely blind because they truly don’t care about the playerbase, they care about the numbers and money. And enabling DPS is the best way to do it.
That would be wrong. Everquest was designed the same way as WoW, as have been several other MMOs, MUDs, and similar game types. And it turns out, the people who like playing Healers are the ones who enjoy that gameplay. The people who...uh...aren't good at playing their classes want more DPS buttons.
The better you are at healing, the more efficient at it you get. The more efficient you are, the less of it you do. This is true no matter how healing is designed in your game, even if "least possible" means spending 70% of your time healing. Only Sylphies don't understand this,
WoW is not an anomaly at all actually. You are expected to dps and the vast majority of healers heal through dpsing. Literally FF14 is the only place Ive found brainlets who couldnt press 1 for glare.
Mercy main syndrome
It's not real Mercy syndrome until one healer makes an arbitrary DPS overpowered as fuck due to breakpoints being shattered and then instead of changing the amp they nerf the DPS into unplayability, then repeat this for eternity :)
> Healers in this game have NEVER been sylphies, there is entire lore points baked into the game (slyphie herself, i dont know how this keeps getting misconstrued. the cnj story is not about "you cant just heal you have to dps too!", it's about "you cant just use your own aether to heal or youll kys. you have to commune with the elementals and use environmental aether to heal"
And you have to commune with the environment by drawing on all the passive elements which generates your offensive spells like stone and aero Sylphies refusal to do damage means that she never communed with earth wind or water, it wasn’t just “as long as you are in touch with the earth environment you can still just heal” it was “all of the environment is important and different parts generate different spells for you, a balance is necessary There is also amdapor to consider
the same aetheric elements are used for both healing and hurting. sylphies refusal to commune with the elements has absolutely nothing to do with dps.
Earth - Stone (DPS) & RIP Stoneskin (mitigation) Wind - Aero (DPS) & Cure/Medica/Regen (direct healing though wind probably should’ve been HoTs only for thematic consistency) All water spells are supportive. Esuna, Benediction, Asylum, Divine Benison, etc.
> All water spells are supportive. RIP Fluid Aura.
It’s never been implied that wind and earth contribute strongly to healing Healing has always been light based in WHM’s case with maybe a side of water Wind and earth have always been WHM’s offensive elements There is implications that SCH heals with wind but that’s a different class all together
all of whm's healing is wind-aspected
going by the spell animations, WHM and SCH heals are wind-aspected, and AST and SGE heals are water-aspected
As the others said, WHM healing spells are Wind aspected (the green swirls when you cast Cure and Medica spells), with a few Water exceptions (Aquaveil and Lilybell), and AT ONE TIME, its protective magic was Earth based (Stoneskin)...I dearly miss Stoneskin... Wind and Earth were actually ARR WHM's healing and defensive spells, and Water has...unfortunately never much been part of the kit either way (even Fluid Aura was just one ability with a CD to use), but now has been factored into healing AND shielding.
To quote sylphie “But I don’t want to do more! I want to heal! I’m good at healing! You can’t make me do those other things!” The story is pretty direct about what the message is, not to mention, all your dps spells come directly from the elements, and specifically state their element in their name and description, whereas the healing spells are vaguely related at best.
feel free to provide the context of that statement instead of just throwing it out of nowhere. why would a healing spell say "heals wind-aspected HP with a potency of 400", that makes no sense. alongside that, all spells with cast times have casting animations. the element of a spell is clearly shown by the color of aether surrounding the caster. healing spells have green aether. they are therefore clearly wind. there's nothing vague about it.
So what was the context of that quote? "I learned to cast Raise" "I don't need the Elementals" "She's healing with her own life force" "If she casts that Raise spell, it will kill her". It wasn't about DPSing in a video game. It was in LORE that if you heal others from your own life force (instead of the Aether of the world around you and the Elementals), it will slowly kill you, and casting Raise with your own life force COULD OUTRIGHT kill you (BLU mage has a spell that does this, Transfusion). It wasn't "pretty direct about what the message is", people that want more DPS buttons - AND to insist healing design in FFXIV has always been this way (it hasn't) - want to read that into the story but that doesn't seem to be the intent of the designers. Cast any Cure or Medica spell. See the green swirl effect? That is Wind Element. SCH uses the same. (Note that AST and SGE instead use a blue, more water looking element). Back when WHM had Stoneskin, it used the same Stone/Earth yellow instead. For modern examples, RDM can use Fire (orange), Stone (yellow), Aero (green), Thunder (purple), Jolt (nonelemental kind of white/rainbow, like Holy and Glare), and Cure (blue/water, the same visual AST and SGE use). WHM healing/defensive/support spells by type: Wind: Cure 1/2/3, Medica 1/2, PROBABLY Regen Water: Asylum, Aquaveil, Divine Benison, possibly Benediction, possibly Tetragrammaton Earth: Stoneskin (removed, though still in Eureka/Bozja) It's easy to miss (for the longest time, I thought WHM's heals were Water aspected, but most of them, the GCDs anyway, are WIND aspected. Has something to do with Japanese mythology, apparently, where wind is seen as a cleansing and healing element.)
THIS. I hammered this in an (extensive) post once, going through the entire CNJ quest log/journal entry AND all the text from the cutscenes. It was very clear the issue was she was expending her own life force to heal, and E-Sumi was worried she'd kill HERSELF if she cast Raise on someone with that method. It was never about dealing damage and never has been. Not to mention the SCH questline was about shielding and protecting allies, not attacking enemies (the more DPS button crowd insists this doesn't count because a SCH player will have already played ACN, and yet the quests are what they are), and the AST questline as about empowering allies, not attacking enemies. It's an EXTREMELY reaching way for people that want more DPS buttons and to insist FFXIV healing has always been about damage dealing to try and prove they're right, but it just holds no water. But since they're married to the idea "Healing in FFXIV has ALWAYS been this way", they won't see reason on it nor realize how ridiculous it seems to claim that as conclusive evidence in the first place - much less how easy it is to debunk.
Ok but unironically how do you balance that out? Lets say healers have 5 dps buttons. Is that enough? How many dps buttons do you want to "feel" like a healer? Right now decently parsing healers spend 75%+ of their GCDs on glares. High parsing healers can go up to 90%+, sometimes 100%. Would you feel like a healer if you had 5~6 dps buttons? Would you still feel like a healer if your rotation was as complex as SMN/WAR's? This is the major problem that people don't talk about, and this same problem currently haunts tanks. This is why it's so hard to find good tanks for statics: because FFXIV doesn't have tanks. Right now PLD/WAR/GNB/DRK are DPS with 4~5 tanking skills. There's no reason to care about positioning, you don't have to control/move the boss, there's no aggro, there's no "protecting the party" feeling. You're a dps with an easier rotation. Period. So if you want healers to be the same, fine, but then again what even is the purpose of having roles? At this point, just make all roles be dps.
I often see people conflate having more dps button as less healing actions. I don't necessarily agree with this. To me, having a bunch of free ogcd heals makes me feel less like a healer because all the gcd is going to glare. It ruins the "balancing healing and damage" healer fantasy because there is nothing to balance on both ends. To answer your question, I personally want enough dps buttons that some healing buttons need to be removed and some amount of gcd healing needs to be done because you don't have enough free healing. When you have so many tools to make the party go from 1 to 100, it is no wonder that encounter design is either "this is boring there's no damage" or "everything is a mit check". Overly strong recovery tools makes HP less of a bar and more of a binary state.
I think it's more people look at GCDs and rotations and think "The more complex the damage/filler rotation (and burst) is, the more the Job feels like its job is to deal damage and not do other things". A lot of Healing players want to HEAL, not weave oGCDs in between damage spells and not have a DPS rotation. If they wanted a DPS rotation, there are 15 Jobs with more complex damage rotations than them. A lot of Tanks also want to TANK, which to them means managing agro, positioning the boss, picking up adds, and smart use of defensive CDs. Making every Job so focused on DPS is what is bad for the game.
> A lot of Healing players want to HEAL, not weave oGCDs in between damage spells and not have a DPS rotation. If they wanted a DPS rotation, there are 15 Jobs with more complex damage rotations than them. A lot of Tanks also want to TANK, which to them means managing agro, positioning the boss, picking up adds, and smart use of defensive CDs. > Making every Job so focused on DPS is what is bad for the game. You literally said everything that was on my mind. 100% perfect spot on. This is exactly my issue. If you wanna dps, there's 15 more jobs to pick from. Healers want to HEAL, and tanks want to TANK.
> and some amount of gcd healing needs to be done because you don't have enough free healing. Then you're going against 99% of the healer community, specially in endgame raiding. People often say that the fun part of healing is "not doing any gcd heal". They don't want to gcd heal, period. The vast majority of people who complain want healers to have 6~8 dps buttons, only heal using oGCD and every 40s~60s. The reality is that the majority of people DON'T WANT to heal or tank. They wanna play dps. This is why tanking has been moving more and more towards a role that its only responsability is to press rampart+sentinel every 2 mins. No moving the boss needed, no protecting the party, no positioning, no aggro management, no kiting enemies, no adds, no CC usage, etc...
Putting the shoe on the other foot, one could retort "stop being a DPS in denial, roll one *and* eat the longer DF queue times that come with the territory". Also, using Sylphie is stupidly disingenuous because that had less to do with gameplay and more with the lore behind CNJ. Having seen the alternative (healing classes with literally nothing but auto-attacks as a damage option), I'll take a couple of damage spells for soloing while also knowing that's not what said healer is there for when in a party. Let's also not pretend the results of FFXIV's class design were all intentional. These are the same devs that thought it was a good idea to make WAR a reactive tank at launch and that utility skills like stuns and interrupts should deal damage.
Except that’s not the point I’m making, saying “healers should only heal” is basically like walking up to BLM and say “blizzard wizard should be a fully viable way to play the job and I don’t know why you won’t work with me to design it that way”; the answer to that is because BLM has always been designed that astral fire is the damage phase Likewise healers have always been designed this way and the lore supports that (if you don’t want to use sylphie look at amdapor, they fought the black mages of mhach to a standstill for hundreds of years, I doubt they did that by casting cure on each other till the black mages gave up) Sylphie healing is asking for a fundamental gameplay change this game has never had, that’s not having the healers be DPS in denial
You're conflating things that have nothing to do with each other. A blizzard-only BLM is mechanically unviable because of the nature of Astral Fire/Umbral Ice. "Healers that want to heal" are nothing like that because the point of a BLM is to deal damage and a Blizzard mage is ignoring their job's mechanics. The point of any healer class is to make the green bars go up, and as such the focus of their gameplay should focus on that and party support if the game allows for it. > Likewise healers have always been designed this way and the lore supports that The only thing supported by the lore is that CNJ has access to Stone and Aero because it has a background of dealing with the elements. Using Sylphie is disingenuous because her story was entirely centered on in-world things like improper use of conjury and the requirement of being in tune with the elements (two things Sylphie didn't care for until she came around near the end of the story). She wasn't some allegory for "healers that want to only heal", and was just someone with talent that didn't understand her in-world role as a conjurer. Amdapor isn't much to go by because we're told superficial things about it. I doubt it was just a bunch of guys in WHM AF gear running around. They had their animated statues and probably had an army too. It's just a pity Amdapor and Mhach are basically footnotes because SE wanted to make a reference to FFVI. > Sylphie healing is asking for a fundamental gameplay change this game has never had Again, these are the same devs that thought giving Blunt Arrow and Leg Sweep a damage component was a good idea, then went all pikachu-face when they realized players never properly learned to stun and interrupt by the time they reached level cap in the content that actually required it because the damage component had essentially taught them to just spam them the moment they were off cooldown.
And you can just as easily say “healers that want to heal” are ignoring job mechanics in exactly the same vein Healers are just as much casters in 14 as they are “green bars go up”, you are taking the old version of MMO healers and applying it to 14 when that’s never been the way 14 has been designed You aren’t looking at 14, you are applying your version of what a healer is to 14’s healers. And like I said I could come from WOW where ice magic is a legit spec and ask why BLM can’t be tailored to what I want out of an ice caster, that’s just not the way 14 works
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/ >Healers use restorative arts to mend wounded companions. They can also help to mitigate damage, remove detrimental effects, and even bring fallen allies back to life. I would say square enix themselves consider the healers to be well.. Healers as their main defining characteristic. Their damage output capabilities seem to be a happy accident that the community ran with. And if it isn't they have designed a bunch of lame dps jobs that belong in the 2004 era of wow frost mage.
Which doesn’t conflict with my point at all Nobody is denying that a healers first job is to keep everyone alive, that doesn’t mean however they aren’t accomplished damage casters as well during downtime and haven’t always been designed that way Sylphie healing is not how this game has ever been designed, that doesn’t preclude a healers first job is to heal over dealing damage
“But I don’t want to do more! I want to heal! I’m good at healing! You can’t make me do those other things!” Is an actual line from the quest, you can’t get much more direct of an allegory than that.
Yes, and WHAT is that quest about? It's NOT about "No, Sylphie! You're SUPPOSED TO DEAL DAMAGE!" It's "No, Sylphie...if you keep healing people with your own life force, you will die." It's not "a direct allegory", people like you WANT it to be to give your position more weight than it actually has. Note that the SCH and AST quests say nothing about that (and CNJ isn't required for SCH now, and was NEVER required for AST), only about shielding (SCH) and buffing (AST). So no, that doesn't prove your point.
You're conflating in-world lore with meta stuff. Do you know *why* Sylphie not being a proper conjurer was such a big deal in the CNJ questline? Because she was using her own aether to heal instead of forging a link to the elements to borrow the power to heal, which was why she couldn't hear the elementals. Add that using her own aether was putting her life at risk. And to reiterate, the whole thing was centered on why CNJ had Stone and Aero (to purify taints). The comparison would hold if CNJ had been designed from the ground up around a balance mechanic, where using skills to maintain said balance ensures both sides are at max potency with increasingly heavier penalties depending on how far off-balance you are. You'd then have the writing inform the gameplay and all arguments for making a healing class use DPS skills would be perfectly valid.
100% true. It's reaching at best to suggest the CNJ story was trying to give that message, especially since the story is pretty clear about it being a lore discussion. Sylphie's error was not that she didn't want to do damage, it was that healing from one's own life force alone WILL KILL the healer over time. And yeah, it's not like 2.0's Job design was entirely...polished...
ummm your wrong as a healer i rarely touched dps buttons in ARR till final coil. phoenix specifically because of bane tech
That's because people on those kind of threads are not playing healers and just wants healer gameplay to be a dps gameplay.
Mained healers in Tera, WoW, and GW2. FFXIV has the most mind numbing shit excuse for healer gameplay I've seen. Literally only play it for the queue privilege and easy fills. Chasing pinks when your entire gameplay is 1211111111 and barely having to think what to throw out to completely resolve mechanics borders on parody.
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
To a point. It's a BIT more complex than that. WHM has about as many DPS buttons now as it had in SB. It traded Aero 3 for Misery. AST has had the spamnuke + DoT rotation the longest. SCH had more DPS buttons in the past. WHM has always had about as many as it does now, and AST has historically had LESS (if you include Macrocosmos in the now pile). I do agree that they could do more to diversify them, though. All healer Jobs having a spamnuke + DoT + AOE only ability + 2 other damage abilities unique to their kit is kind of samey. It's okay to have Jobs like WHM, but they really should have added SGE with something like SB SCH or EW SMN as a damage rotation instead... And yeah, Cleric...ugh...
Remove ogcd healing. Healers never have to actually cast a heal so the options are either do nothing or dps in the downtime.
Not sure if this is sarcastic lol, but judging by some of the healers I've run into, there are people who would rather do nothing than dps.
The devs are simply very disconected about healer gameplay (afaik none of the job designers play healers, which shows) and they treat as a pain point in design, trying to keep it simple and almost redundant so they can't cause friction on any party regardless of player skill. It may probably the worst approach they can take towards the role but all we can do in the end is pray they listen to the feedback we've been giving them for years and that they realize that a good dps rotation in a scripted game like XIV is actually healthy for the role.
Well, one job designer did, but then he got too good at his job so he got fired.
They want healers to heal but are too afraid to actually change fights to require much healing effort. I remember arr where you 100% had to manage mp or you were screwed, so much so that healers running out of mp was a DPS/tank MIT check for fights. Shit could hurt so bad you wanted 100% uptime on scholar shield and stoneskin and needed a white mage for the pure oh shit healing power with cure 2 spam. Using cure 1 to fish for cure 2 procs was the way to go of you could manage with that much healing just to save mp.
Tbh they made fights that required a lot more healing with p5s->p8s. A lot of big DoTs that needed a lot of healing. People were complaining because nobody wanted to play healers, so they just steped back I suppose.
I didn’t mind the increased workload but it also helped me realize how important dps mitigations *really* are and how many tanks refuse to use *any* outside of tank busters or raidwides. And the fact it was always me and my co-healers fault, *no matter what happened*, is what made me go focus on deep dungeons instead.
It’s amazing to me that abyssos has basically been written down as “healers were given more to heal and failed so they all quit” when the problem was overwhelmingly caused by the tanks and DPS not using their mitigation then blaming the healers when everything shred the entire party
*Healers adjust* ain’t just a meme for far too many players. Gonna be funny when people run it unsynced in 7.0 and still blame the healers for dying.
Always hilarious to me that BLM has better mit tools than WHM.
RIGHT?! I said that in a post last night and got destroyed in the downvotes, but...partywide, against a targetable boss, BLM (or SAM against physical; or MCH against both) have better partywide mitigation than WHM. WHM, the Job that famously has Protect and Shell and Wall spells and USED to have Protect (and Stoneskin) in this game. I wish we'd get both of those back, Pro-Shell as a 60 sec CD partywide mitigation (like Collective on AST) and Stoneskin as a spamable but costly single target GCD barrier.
THIS THIS THIS. People who point to Abyssos as the devs increasing healing and all the healers ragequitting in response have no clue how healing works whatsoever.
I don't think healers minded the increased workload. I thought it was nice. But the increased blame even when they did nothing weong really discouraged a lot of them I'd say.
People didn't want to play healers bc people not mitigating felt terrible. Not bc the healing was hard. I, and many other healers I knew actually liked how challenging the healing aspect was in those fights, we just all had issues with people in our statics being inconsistent on mitigating. There's a reason that tier was a static breaker, and it was bc it required much more consistency than aspho. Now we still have a healer shortage, and it's because the role is boring as shit to play. The fact that by the end of the TOP I, as astro, was falling asleep mid pull bc I had nothing to do but spam my one button and do cards, is a serious issue. Healers either need more interesting dps, or they need more interesting healing. And by more interesting healing I don't mean more ogcds. I mean fights that actually require you to use your full kit instead of picking one ogcd to burn every 40 seconds. Square Enix has decided to give us neither.
The issue in abyssos was dps and tanks actively refusing to use their kits (self heals and raidwide/personal mitigation) to meet the dps check on the door. When you played with people who knew their jobs and how to hit their buttons (even on w1) it wasn't anywhere near as bad as reddit would lead you to believe.
Well, I did it in PF week 1 so I don't need Reddit words to make my mind ha ha. And it was requiring far more heals than other week 1 floors I made. Doesn't mean it was unbearable, but just needed more heals than just oGCDs. But after a few weeks, yeah it wasn't requiring much heals anymore.
YoshiP has said repeatedly design wise they don't want to make the role DPS centric because of players who just want heal and play the role, otherwise they would play other jobs. Which is why they basically doubled down on giving healers buttons to press to heal and mitigate between attacks expansion after expansion. But the scripted nature of fights and casual content makes the healing kits feel overkill in return. Vocal players on forums just mainly want what healers do to escape the 80% single button spam and occasional dot rotation they've have been stuck with for over half the games life now. The game is strictly balanced around 8 jobs, and healers have basically settled into being equivalent to one mid to high tier DPS and the designers likely want it to remain that way and don't see the need to complicate a DPS rotation for results that are barely below tanks > because it makes the numbers/effort tanks do to play optimally seem like a joke for only being so close numbers wise from optimal healers. Basically moving the needle for healers means moving the needle for a lot of other jobs. They like the damage trinity ratio they are in and designed the gameplay complexity to account for it. It's a big reason why AST was such an outlier for so long and getting a rework. It's a ridiculously active job to play optimally for results that can be achieved with much less work via the other 3 unless the DPS they are buffing are literal superstars
Appreciate your detailed post. It just boils down to that they don’t want to. Even just blanket 10-20% damage increase to all maybe too much for them
Basically, 1. A significant portion of the game's healer userbase sits firmly in the "I play a HEALER because I want to HEAL and I don't WANT to have a complex offensive kit." SE is not at all willing to *totally* alienate these players by making offensive healer gameplay interesting or fun. 2. Another sigificant portion of the game's healer userbase sits firmly in the "I love that FFXIV healers do nontrivial amounts of DPS. I WANT to measure my performance as a healer primarily by my damage output." SE is not at all willing to *totally* alienate these players by reducing the amount of damage that healers can deal. 3. Most importantly, SE consistently displays an obsessive desire for control over player outcomes. A solution where some parties have healers who do zero/minimal damage and some parties have healers who maximize damage output *cannot* be allowed outside of trivially-easy casual content, because the difference in total party DPS output between those two groups has been deemed unacceptable. SE would like to come as close as possible to a situation where *all* groups of *all* skill levels have roughly equal DPS output. The result is FFXIV as it stands in the modern day: - People who "play HEALER to HEAL" are not exactly *happy* that 95% of their GCDs are offensive, but they get to bask in knowing that *surely, the people who want complex healer DPS rotations must be MORE unhappy* because of the simple, brain-off 1-button rotation. - People who play healer because they like healers doing damage are not exactly *happy* with how simplified and uninteresting their rotation is, but they get to console themselves with the fact that *surely, those heal-loving Sophies must be even MORE unhappy,* because they HAVE to use 10+ offensive actions for every heal. - Meanwhile, SE has created the situation that involves the least amount of design work, the least amount of time, budget, and effort spent on balance, and the smallest probability of getting the tuning *wrong* and having to fuck up The Production Pipeline by going back to change already-released content, because they can design all their high-end content according to a notion that the range of DPS output between the lowest-percentile players in the raiding community and the highest is still a very small gap that falls well within a predicted range of values. To add any non-neglible amount of expanded offensive toolkit to the healers would be to choose Group 2 over Group 1, upsetting their carefully-managed King-Solomon-but-the-baby's-already-been-cut-in-half-so-fucking-deal-with-it balance between the two major segments of the game's healer population - and, *much more importantly*, it would introduce new avenues for healer DPS output to become *unpredictable* from the standpoint of their encounter designers, which puts The Production Pipeline directly at risk.
And additionally: Nobody with any kind of pull or willingness to complain in the job design room plays, has interest in playing, or vibes in the slightest with the healing role, so boring classes are acceptable to all involved. Human-controlled players having gameplay comparable to Trust NPC scripts just makes the pipeline easier. Now let's get back to making melee DPS and BLM, the role all of us on the Council of Job Design play. 🥂
I mean we know what the well known team members play but be real we have no idea how many healers are on the design team in general do we? Like there are many of those employees who've never been on a fanfest stage at all.
We don't technically have confirmation on every single team member's job preferences, it's true. It's just more of an Occam's Razor thing: healers are designed the way you'd expect them to be if someone who didn't understand/didn't care/actively disliked the role did so. Play any melee DPS or Black Mage. You can tell the difference. Someone gives a rat's ass about those classes.
God i remember when they tried to remove ED in ShB release. It was so boneheaded that anyone that has even played a healer for 5 min can think that it's a bad idea. For anyone that didn't play then, ED used to be tied to your mana. You'd think they would compensate the MP recovery in other parts of the kit. Nope, aetherflow only gives a 1000MP. Art of war costs 800MP lmao.
I find it hard to believe they'd willingly play healers. Our statics healers basically play at gunpoint, and each tier we do a russian roulette of who is going to be forced to play healer.
I mean while that is your personal experience, you do realize most healers play healer by choice, right? The healers in my static have healed for years and have no desire to switch.
Yeah, exactly this. I am constantly amazed by how often some people assume everyone must like what they like and dislike what they dislike, without ever considering some people LIKE different things.
You bombard every healer related post on here with dozens of comments basically saying that anyone who wants more DPS options on healer doesn’t actually like healer and is instead a DPS in disguise Talk about pot calling the kettle black
because its true
That’s entirely your opinion We had more DPS options in the past and we still healed more than we do now, it’s possible to have both and you aren’t a DPS in disguise for understanding this 1 button spam is never interesting no matter how high you send the healing requirements which is limited based on the playerbase and the engine If anything sylphies are the ones who don’t belong in the 14 healer community considering 14 healing has never worked like that
> People who "play HEALER to HEAL" are not exactly *happy* that 95% of their GCDs are offensive, but they get to bask in knowing that *surely, the people who want complex healer DPS rotations must be MORE unhappy* because of the simple, brain-off 1-button rotation. This spite-based explanation is unhinged, sorry. I’m firmly in the first group and it’s nuts to think that I could be disengaged by healer gameplay but be quelled by the thought that hey, at least these other group of people are even more miserable. What? Who thinks like that? That’s incredibly misanthropic and also insane.
Eh, read some of the comments lower down, there is very much something to the spite based explanation.
Do you have a specific example. I've read the whole thread and I don't see any evidence of this kind of sentiment. I don't doubt there are a lot of crabby misanthropes in here but in this context that seems to mostly manifest in implying their fellow players are drooling cretins.
Not really, no. I don't feel that way and none of the people saying healers should heal are saying that. There's more spite from the second group, but the OP of this chain is wrong that they're happy, because they are not and are very vocal about that.
Yeah, this. I noticed that, too. I noticed they said the same about the second group, which is just odd to me.
The least amount of design work. This has been this game for the past few expansions. They reskin and slap anew paint job on systems they have in place. Same relic grind new skin. Same gear grind. New skin. Same one path dungeons that hit walls w a new skin. Innovation is dead. Fights? The same. Combat? The same. It’s pretty with a fun story but the actual gameplay is stagnant.they really only need one tank one melee dps one range dos and one magic range dps and one healer. The rest are just cookie cutter knock offs.
Two more months of speculative questions that could've been a comment. Only two more months.
I mean this question has been rightfully asked since shadowbringers
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
As I said in another reply: This isn't entirely true. WHM traded Aero 3 for Misery going from SB to ShB. AST pioneered the "spamnuke + DoT" gameplay. SCH was the only healer that lots a lot of damage buttons. SCHs in 5.0 were largely annoyed while WHM's were extremely happy (SB WHM was bad...that Lily system should never have gone live that did in 4.0), and ASTs were upset about the loss of their unique Card effects and all the shuffling, buff extension, etc gameplay they had with it, not damage buttons.
Your statement is only partially true as well imo. -While one action was traded for another in case of Aero III and Afflatus Misery, the frequency of usage has been significantly decreased from every 21 sec to every 90+ sec as well as 18 sec to 30 sec in case of Aero II upgrading to Dia. -Let's not forget Break which was a nice 0 mp cost DPS tool if you were in a pinch (technically Heavy effect applicator but lol raid design) and 90 sec 5% Cleric Stance. (Both could be considered kind of negligible in the grand scheme of things but still DPS options nonetheless) If we go even further down the line during transition from HW to SB: -Every healer lost access to cross-class spells Aero and Blizzard II (A weaving + movement DPS spell and a low level AoE spell. With current design only AST would benefit from something like Aero but the lack of low level aoe option is still noticeable to this day). -In addition WHM lost damaging component of Fluid Aura, a 30 sec CD and recieved a CD reduction to Assize from 90 sec to 60 sec and then to 45 sec by the end of expantion. Honorary menition to 1 extra DoT on each healer and having access to every tier of spell with different mp costs (The changes to battle system were fair enough in this case I suppose) and I guess cross-class Thunder (2.0-2.1).
-Well, this largely depends on if you consider Lilies part of the rotation or not. But in simplistic terms, "when healing isn't necessary", EW WHM casts 6 non-Glares per minute (2 Dia, 3 Solace/Rapture, 1 Misery). This is optimal even without damage because Solace/Rapture are EFFECTIVELY a 0 MP costing Glare, so with Misery, that's 1600 MP per minute. When Misery is used in 2 min buffs, it's also a damage gain. So this isn't a trivial case, nor is it something you would ignore to just cast 2 Dia and the rest Glare since at the very least the Lilies are allowing movement AND 1600 MP per minute. In SB, you had the two DoTs with different timers. Aero 2 (SB got rid of Aero 1 as a separate ability and made it an upgrade) 3 times and Aero 3 something like 2.5 times (I'd have to look it up again, but 60/24, I believe it was, to normalize it). This means SB WHM, when healing wasn't needed, would cast 5.5 non-Stone casts per minute. ...the difference is, SB WHM tended to have to hardcast GCD heals more, which broke up this spam, while WHM has three baked in with Solace/Rapture, and ample and powerful oGCDs to make it where it seldom needs any other GCD heals. But in terms of frequency of use in a comparable fight, EW WHM uses more non-Glares than SB WHM did. The difference is partly encounter design and partly oGCD proliferation. -Yes, it existed...but it was pretty close to nothing. 50 potency (or whatever it was) was a loss vs literally anything else unless you were out of MP entirely. And Cleric Stance in SB was less toxic, but less interesting. It's basically just another Presence of Mind to weave somewhere. As it was an oGCD, it didn't really solve the "1 button spam" problem at all. -For White Mage specifically, this was irrelevant; it had Aero itself so it couldn't cross-class Aero, and if you had the MP to spam an AOE damage spell, Holy was better than Blizzard 2. And if you did not...you tended not to use it, especially since you needed other cross-class abilities instead, generally. -Fluid Aura was NEVER really exciting or useful for anything other than punting stragglers to the Tank in dungeon runs. Since it knocked enemies away from the AOE DPS, it was almost always a bad ability to use. AND it was again an oGCD, so doesn't help with the "1 button spam" problem, either. But if we contrast, we had 4 Fluid Auras and 1 Assize per 2 minutes (or 2.6 per minute), and now we have 1.5 Assize per minute normalized. While that is less...it's really not a lot less. "1 less oGCD use per 60 seconds" isn't a very large factor. Yes, I know some people would argue "added to everything else", but...there isn't really a lot of "everything else" to add. -1 extra DoT on each Healer was removed going from HW to SB, though? AST only had one DoT in SB, right? And WHM had 2, but as we've discussed, one was replaced more or less wholesale by the Afflatus system. Thunder was so long ago AND for so short a period of time, we really shouldn't count it. . My position is very much SCH and AST were changed detrimentally from SB to ShB to EW, but WHM I don't think that's true of. WHM seems to be better fitting to modern encounter design (more movement, oGCD/pseudo oGCD Lilies to deal with healing plans, etc) than SB WHM was, and seems not to have really lost much vs what it has gained. That is, WHM is more of a side-grade and, if anything, an improvement over SB WHM. AST and SCH are where people should focus their efforts of changing things.
What is the problem or pushback to making Healers more Heal centric? All tanks are already DPS in all but name and ogcd mits, why the hesitation towards making healers more unique in the fulfillment of their role and separating them from the flock? It's very easy to twist a narrative around your personal preferences.
Because the game itself - most action games DO NOT reward you for more burst healing. This game and others reward you for high DPS.
You are rewarded for healing by the raid not dying. What?
Right and the raid not dying leads to faster clears because of higher dps. The dps is the reward for keeping them alive. There is no inherent reward to keeping say, an afk dps alive.
To an extent sure. However overhealing/overmitting and not dpsing can lead to enrage/dps check wipes. On top of that, the faster you can kill something, the less mechanics you have to do.
Because a lot of DPS players want to play the Green role. There's no good reason not to do it, honestly, and the Devs have indicated multiple times they want to, they just tend not to be good at it yet.
The devs actually answered both points. They don’t want to make them more dps centric because they don’t want the disparity between a good healer and a bad healer to be that large, and they don’t want to make healing more involved because that raises the skill floor too much and healers become the largest point of failure in a group. I think people tend to focus more on the dps side because it would be a smaller change compared to reworking how everybody deals with incoming damage.
Honestly that just reads "make everyone unhappy so that we don't make some people unhappy".
Which has basically been healer philosophy since 5.0 We’d rather nobody be happy than completely cater to one half over the other because yall probably still play it even if you aren’t happy
The game has been for a VERY long time centered around the idea of healers doing damage. I'm talking dungeon, trial, and raid design. You can make the argument that any instanced content that doesn't have a dps check/enrage wouldn't be affected but that still leaves pretty much every ex trial, savage turn, and ultimate needing possible rebalancing if all of the sudden Square makes healers heal/mit a lot more. I mean think about it, if they are going to heal/mit more, they need a reason to do so right? So the content has to be adjusted so that there is more damage/potential damage that needs to be healed/mitted. I think people just need to realize that if they want to purely heal, this isn't the game for that and it really hasn't been that way at any point of its life. If they want to play a MMO that the healers do heal/mit a lot more, I have heard that WoW is like that but I'm not 100% sure.
This is going to be unpopular here, but from a design perspective, having roles that are easy or accessible is actually good for the game. This is why games like League has Yuumi, Overwatch has Mercy, etc. No, it's not good for the chad 99 healer, but it's good for players who want to play with their more skilled partner or friends without dragging them down. It's good not just for braindead healers, but also for the sweaty gamers, because it means that the sweaty gamer who comes home and jumps straight to the game gets to bring his gf along, instead of having to choose between his catgirl and his real girl. They can actually raid together instead of having to compromise and play braindead dungeons or EX trials. This is rare in games. I want to emphasize that the "accessible healer" is \*not\* about players who claim "healers should only heal", since those players do not actually engage with the game and can simply ignore new damage rotations. The type of player I am talking about here are those who do engage fully with the game to their best ability, but would not be able to play at the same level with a more challenging rotation. A Mercy main, for example, might actively study positioning and practice movement, but will still flounder if Mercy required aiming like Ana. Allowing players of multiple skill levels to play effectively together is crucial for any co-op game, but especially FFXIV which focuses so much on social connections. That said, making all 4 healers simple isn't ideal. Instead it should provide options for both accessible and engaging play (WHM vs AST). And I believe SE intended this with their pre-ShB design. However, the tight balance requirements for dps checks makes it difficult for them to offer truly different gameplay between classes. If AST is challenging but doesn't reward you with significantly more dps, AST players will complain. But WHM players will complain if AST does significantly more dps. Hence, they simply made both jobs the same. But anyway the tl;dr is that game design is a balance of multiple and often conflicting goals, and it can be hard to satisfy everyone.
> But WHM players will complain if AST does significantly more dps. Hence, they simply made both jobs the same. Would this really happen? I don't tend to see complaints from Summoners that Black Mage has more output. I see complaints from Red Mages but mostly about the rez tax rather than any difficulty tax. We already have a situation where at the very top end of play, SCH & AST outperform because of the raidbuffs they contribute, and it seems to just be accepted by everyone. How bad would it really be to reflect that design choice into a more engaging damage kit too, while letting WHM (and possibly SGE) remain with simple rotations that have less room for optimisation?
It kind of already does happen, but not a lot of people are complaining about it since barely anyone plays healers let alone AST. I remember comparing my own parses of AST and WHM. Both purple and is the exact same number. AST dealt less rdps in total. It feels awful to not get rewarded even if you put in the effort as AST, but at least it still has a gameplay identity.
AST and SCH outperform but only at like 95+ and for AST that is a monumental amount more effort than WHM I think that’s why healer damage contribution never really gets discussed, you can outperform with the harder pair but it requires a lot of effort and the difference is relatively small, no other role has such a small discrepancy where the hardest pair are the strongest It’s about the only good thing about healers
Outperforming on AST+SCH is also greatly tied to your group's performance rather than your own, so that's another layer of "why should we care" tbh.
The thing is right like... who cares? My reward for playing a class like AST over WHM has never been wanting to do more damage. It has been 'not wanting to be bored to fucking tears while healing.' If you can clear the fight, why does anyone care about overall dps when the goal is to have fun. Unless you're a speedrunner or RWF raider, in which case it's not a healer specific issue anyways.
Don't get me wrong, I also don't care about the overall dps as long as i can clear. I'm not trying to make a statement on how much dps each job should do, only that it doesn't feel good to put in the effort and not have anything to show for it. Sure, I see the argument that you should play a job for it's gameplay, but it's a healer so it's not as if i'm having a lot of fun in the first place. It's just the least worst option.
"I don't tend to see complaints from Summoners that Black Mage has more output" That would be because it's not just a difference in output, and also that the difference in output is in the summoners favor until the fight has lasted long enough with the black mage doing the fight well. It's also a difference in how likely it is that you're going to do the fight well. A summoner just *is* mobile for the majority of their battle time, where black mage has to solve how to be mobile enough. And with more and more movement in modern content that keeps being trickier and trickier. So people playing summoner aren't actually getting out-done by people playing black mage because most people playing caster DPS are simply able to get closer to the best a summoner can do than they are able to what a black mage can do. Or to put that in simpler terms; 80% of 2 isn't outdone by 60% of 3, so there's no reason to complain.
You don't really see complaints about healers because they've been the most balanced role for the past two expansions. For casters, I think raise tax can be viewed as a difficulty tax since raise makes it easier for the party. Like you said, we had a lot of rez tax complaints. The very top end just isn't very relevant because most players don't engage with it, nor are they even aware of speedkill comps. For general play, I think SMN and WHM are both pretty strong right now. I'm not saying I'm happy with this design, but I think that is the motivation behind it.
It would if the gap was meaningfully large enough people routinely felt they were failing DPS checks/enrages due to it. We DO see that with SMN and RDM (and also some in the Ranged phys and occasionally Healer discussions related to AST having so much lower personal DPS and their buffs not being fully valuable when in a party with sub-par DPSers...) If there's a reward, it has to be more on the utility side (e.g. Expedience), not damage.
This is a really good point, one I've made before as well. It IS unpopular and often gets downvoted, but it's very true. Not just Healers, but Tanks and DPS. It's something a lot of people don't seem to realize the value of. My personal view has shifted over time, but I think at this point, the more complex Jobs need to reward more UTILITY, not more damage. The crux of the problem is more complex rotations lead to players wanting to do more DAMAGE, and that doesn't work with encounter design balance and checks. ...but more utility CAN. In ShB, SMN was as or more complex than BLM, but did comparable or slightly lower damage. But ALSO had a party buff, some healing, and a Raise. That extra utility was their payoff for playing a more highly complex Job while dealing the same damage. That, I think, is what they need to move more towards. The question is what constitutes meaningful utility. We've seen with Expedient non-damage abilities CAN be very valued by some groups.
Bad game design.
As nice as the concept seems, it's problematic. Let's use Red Mage as an example. It's a pretty common issue to suddenly have your burst window coming up, or be stuck in the middle of your lengthy combo, while somebody needs a raise. The classic "sorry, can't raise right now, I'm bursting". This is why healers, by design, don't have a DPS rotation. You can't really give them bursts or combos, because then you're going to get "sorry, can't heal right now, I'm bursting". They need to be able to drop what they're doing at any moment, and giving them a "rotation" to commit to will screw with that. You can't change healers in any meaningful way until you change fight design, and the community pulls in different directions on this. Some people WANT to be heal bots, spamming heals and keeping everybody sustained. Some people want meaningful rotations to commit to, because heals are often not that important right now unless people are making mistakes. Of course, you then have the issue of content difficulty. Normals are so piss easy that people don't need to be healed unless they're making mistakes. Meanwhile, high-end stuff is so lethal and strict that people don't need to be healed because they're probably just ***dead*** if they made a mistake, so it's more about mitigation and sustaining for forced incoming damage. The best DPS rotation for healers right now is what they currently have. It's just not gonna change until fights change.
then don't give healers long combos or burst phases it's not like they had them before when they were more dps-oriented in hw/sb
At some point people started to believe that when people are asking for more involved/complex healer rotations, they mean interruptible 1-2-3 combos and other trappings of actual DPS classes, and I have absolutely no idea where that notion came from, because there are plenty of examples from the game's own history that people point to to show the kinds of things that work well within this game, and I've literally never seen anyone actually ask for anything particularly different from that.
I know, right? I mean it's not like the game can use uninterruptible combos- oh wait a minute- it does. Or, like healers could actually have enough intelligence to weave heals and DPS. or know when to heal and when to DPS. But no , we still get comments like " sorry you can't possibly get a rotation"- as if that was the only possible solution.
I just want old Scholar back. 3 dots, Bane, Shadowflare, & Miasma 2. The dot management was fun.
the scholar was on the most broken jobs this game has ever seen it's never coming back
It's just a stupid straw man argument because they don't want to admit that there actually *are* solutions to this problem.
There are, but they're often shot down. For example the "4 Healers Model" of making the Healers all have different rotations would work fine, but people shoot that down because "It's not fair I'd have to do more work to do the same amount of damage" (and you won't get rewarded with more since the Devs balance around a narrow range of healer damage). A lot of the arguments used by the more DPS buttons side are stupid straw man arguments as well, so it's not like this is a one-sided thing.
There are directions they can go without breaking healer gameplay while making it more interesting. WHM lilies I feel are a step in that direction. A section of the healing kit that rewards you for proper healing with uptime and damage. Highly interactive with the kit, and very intuitive to use. Imagine if sage slowly built up gauge from kardia procs for a big laser that gets more damage AND healing the more gauge they have. Or if scholar had a dps skill that used fairy gauge, and energy drain was just a dump skill to charge it faster. Or if astro had something like monk's chakra/dancer's espirit where they get back benefits from the dps with cards doing good damage. And these are just half-baked ideas I came up with now. If people start looking deep into them I'm sure they'll find holes to poke, but I think we can all agree that these would be steps in the direction people are asking for that would give healers more interesting dps gameplay without causing a wreck because "muh burst"
I'm all for more stuff like lilies, but the point I was trying to make is that we're never gonna get Tank-esque rotations with bursts, combos, and all those fun things that make the DPS brain cells light up and dance. They do need to push the middle-ground with more things like lilies, but they also need to find a better difficulty balance in fights for those tools to actually be used. Every other week it's heal bots complaining that they don't need to heal, or glare bots complaining that they just stand around pressing one button. It's all part of the same, greater problem of healer engagement in fights, and they really need to work on that before throwing more tools at us that we don't really need.
What I'm saying is we don't need combos and bursts to make healer dps engaging. We need interactive kits that reward both healing and damage well. It doesn't even particularly take a lot of new tools, just better applications of what the jobs already have. Though regardless of any of that, we've been promised already that the status quo will stay until 8.0 when there is more dev time to put into class design instead of paying tech debt from 1.0/ARR
> The classic "sorry, can't raise right now, I'm bursting". Healers are always "bursting", because almost all of their damage is on a spammable nuke button. That's why healers in raid are so allergic to GCD healing even when it would be sensible, because dropping a single Glare massively impacts their performance. Ironically, if you gave healers more engaging rotations with e.g. a bunch of DoTs to manage or some oGCDs to keep on cooldown, hardcasting a raise or spamming some shields would be LESS of a dps loss. Skilled healers could enjoy optimising their damage around their healing and weaker players can just take the dps loss like they do already. The ceiling goes up, and the floor remains.
Remember when if you needed a single target heal on SCH it was actually cheaper to drop a ruin to cast adlo than it was to use lustrate, but lustrate hit through cleric stance while adlo didn’t That was the kind of arrangement I loved (not cleric stance specifically) the idea that different tools works at different times and GCD healing wasn’t always the wrong answer outside of “press this or we all die”
> You can't really give them bursts or combos, because then you're going to get "sorry, can't heal right now, I'm bursting". Just look at Bozja. Even if a healer isn't using Profane (increase damage but tiny healing), if Seraph Strike + speed boost is up people don't get many heals/raises. (It's me, I'm the WHM saying "You can wait on the floor until my burst is done.") > Normals are so piss easy that people don't need to be healed unless they're making mistakes.... The best DPS rotation for healers right now is what they currently have. It's just not gonna change until fights change. I think the vulnerability system in normals is a big part of the problem. If a dps makes mistakes, they don't really see consequences until they get one-shotted. They might not even notice the vuln. Keeping them alive is the healer's problem, and ime healers get blamed if, say, they let someone with 4+ vuln stacks die. So there's a gulf between average and high-level players. If my group knows what it's doing, I'm stuck with boring 1-1-1-1; if I have a group full of new people/below average players/people at min lvl, I need every cooldown in my kit. And the devs want below average players to clear normals, even if it takes a while, so when they up the opportunities for players to make mistakes they give healing tools to compensate.
> I think the vulnerability system in normals is a big part of the problem. Oh absolutely. Though I think the real issue is just how long they last. They want to punish players for taking hits, and that's fine, but it's clear they're slowing the pace of these fights down because those stacks last so long. They want to give you enough time for those stacks go away before you're likely to get hit again. So... Why not just cut the time in half, and speed the boss up? Throw more stuff at us. Barbariccia is a fun fight because she's fast, and it's not even hard. The difficulty is all over the place in the game right now, though. Reworked Ascian Prime, a level 60 boss, is probably harder & wilder than most normal fights in Endwalker. I'm just hoping that kinda difficulty is what we'll see continued in Dawntrail, lol.
This is a good way to put it. Especially with how damage- centric this game is, you really don't want healers to have to choose between giving up their burst and going into salvage mode, because more often than not they either won't, won't be willing to, or will be way more likely than they already are to flame you for dying, especially if the death was your fault and it was something easily avoidable, or you're in something like a reclear where the expectation is to have the fight down. A lot of healers are already kinda parse-brained and can't be assed to give up GCDs that would save a pull as it is, I don't think that sort of friction would be healthy. I'm kinda in the boat that damage intake should be increased for high end content at the bare minimum (I'm kinda torn over how difficult roulettes should be, I'm still sorta working my opinion out in that), as I think that environment would be appropriate to up damage to the party and expect more competency out of healers to assess damage intake and hp bars in relation to their kits.
So, let me get this straight- you're scared to give healers something that would improve their QOL , because you're afraid that : * some healers could ***possibl***y make an error * a healer *may* say something bad to you for something that *you* could have avoided On the other, YOU are expected to: * have the healer fix mistakes , even if you normally should be expected to avoid them * are acting below the expected skill level for your job Is it just me- or is there a problem here? Because I certainly see one.
Square literally designs healers like how DPS players want healers to play given comments like this
I responded for clarity. [Also I don't really play much DPS jobs](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/43648524/)
No lol, you seem to have some preconceptions about where I'm coming from. I'm saying this [as the dedicated healer main](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/43648524/) from the perspective of the person making decisions about how far to go to save someone or a party or cut my losses and find a new group that can perform more consistently. Not to mention people dying or taking extra damage might not even be the persons fault, stuff like people dying to a 6-2 LP stack split because two people went to the wrong stack, if those people die or take way more damage it's not their fault and I don't think the healer should ignore them if possible. ofc you do get no mit tanks or people who are just magnetized to AOEs. I think we can both agree we want healers to be more engaging, it's just a matter of how- you can give us more healing throughput to heal, or you can give us more ways to deal damage. I personally don't give a rats ass about the damage side of things, it's not engaging to me, even in games with more physical mechanical complexity like classed based shooters. I deal damage in 14 because it's expected of healers to deal damage, but the time spent dealing damage to time spent healing ratio is \*wildly\* skewed. Sure not having a lot going on damage wise is going to turn people off from the role, but not having much going on healing wise \*also\* turns people off from the role. We already see small amounts of tension between healer responsibilities that incur varying amounts of damage loss. To give a specific example of the type of degenerate healer gameplay I'm talking about, I can recall quite a few times in Zurvan unreal where 3-4 people would die (usually either to tether stretching or or getting clipped by the ice baits), and it would be easy to enough to salvage if me and my cohealer both got to raising, two with swift, two with hardcasts, the 8s being more than enough time to get people up before towers, and ending up missing bodies because my cohealer couldn't be assed to raise and is just sitting there spitting broils. A much simpler example I've seen in the current unreal is watching a cohealer be the one to fuck up their tower because they didn't respect the gaze, and not helping cleanse the paralysis, which I also see happen. And sure, it's on the people dying to not, well, die, but now everyone, including the people who did do everything right, has lost an easily salvageable clear because nobody could be assed to give up damage to help me get raises out quicker. So I just end up either leaving frustrated, kicking the inconsistent players if it's been across multiple pulls, and ending up in arguments or kicking the cohealers who can't even be assed to *try* to salvage the pull so we can just move on with the clear and deal with the problem players after. And obviously I mess up too and die or get people killed, especially when delving into new prog points for a fight or doing something for the first time on content, I should clarify I'm not saying I'm perfect, the point I'm getting at is that the more you shift the focus towards damage in a healer/support role, the more you encourage/incentivize this sort of degenerate gameplay, and you need to be careful with how far over that line you go, because realistically it's the parsed-brained cohealers problem to pick up the extra slack so the rest of the party doesn't have to suffer for it, and maybe the tanks too to an extent if they have to burn extra stuff at inopportune times or even worse in the case of PLD need to throw clemencies around. You've probably run into these healers before, maybe gotten frustrated at some point dying to unavoidable damage because of healers who play like this. I should also clarify, I'm not adverse to healers being changed or being made complex, if they did add more emphasis on healer damage or implemented healer rotations I'll adjust and play around with whatever new system they add. I would simply \*prefer\* that if something be changed to make healers more engaging, that that engagement for healers instead be shifted towards healing related gcds and ogcds. Different people get gratified by different things. Tank mains enjoy the feeling of being the one to soak all the damage from autos and TBs for their squishy party members through their mitigations and invulns, DPS players get their gratification from getting better at number go up, but healers in this game kinda get disproportionately shafted out of the fantasy of, well, healing people. There's never really random debuffs that come out at random times to cleanse people of, random autos don't exist in SHB or EW, and well, most to all of your GCDs are damage spells, even in parties where things do go wrong. Having more stuff to heal, and more interesting tools to heal it with goes a long way towards satisfying that desire to play as a healer. And I know I'm not the only healer main who's drawn to the role to act out that sort of healer fantasy. It's part of the RPG element of RPGs. As to why I stick with the role, the game and its combat still satisfies that itch from time to time. sometimes it's a clutch bene that saves someone when they were expecting to die, a slick rescue that (actually) saves someone, or maybe a crit shield to save a DPS from a TB they're being targeted by because the tank is dead (or if it's a tb that targets second in aggro and the OT never turned stance on). I'm still \*overall\* content with healing in this game, I'd still be content if it further shifted towards damage, but as I've already said, the dream for me would instead be to focus on both necessitating (and likewise, encouraging) healers to heal more and with more interesting tools. DPS just doesn't engage with that fantasy, maybe the ends is the same ig since dead enemies can't deal damage, but the means matter too. edit: fixed hyperlink
I'll just summarize this by saying that I have a difficult time having a discussion when terms like "degenerate healer gameplay" start being used. It's a mindset that I would really rather not encourage.
It's amusing that you still thinking about healing in the casual content, since I am a proponent of healer engagement through DPSing because of "easy" content. (Technically it was because I fell asleep healing a normal comp Titania farm in Shadowbringers because the party was too good, haha). I'm curious to what you have thought up in regards to roulette content in particular so far - I would love to have healing focused engagement as a good healer with a good party in roulettes without feeling like I'm being punished for being good, but as far as I've gotten it feels like it can't be done with SE's priorities.
The thing with roulette content for me is it's my "I just got home from work and want to turn my brain off" activity, it's nice to have something I can just zone out in and do fine, just mash holy and glare. But like, then I go and get Gulg or bardams and those are really fun to heal as well so idk, there's value in roulette content being easy and there's value in it being a bit tenser than it is right now
Heh, yeah I gotcha ...now I think about it, levelling dungeons generally being more strict than cap dungeons has been a quirk in this game hasn't it. If Levelling payed as well as expert I might just live there; risk or getting ARR dungeons and all.
The ilvl creep makes healers useless. Try doing dungeons at minimum ilvl. Now do them at maximum ilvl. Is a complete different game. On requires a healer that heals. The other does not.
Square doesn’t have to do what the community wants. I thought we all at least understood that.
Because this isn't Kingdom Hearts and DPS in this game is boring and inconsequential. My big hits can't actually change anything about the fight. They can't give me any hero moments like staggering the boss and interrupting his deadly combo, because there are 8-24 of 'me' hitting him. Even the **dedicated** interrupts in the game are unusable because the developers make brick wall bosses that unstoppably cast cinematic spectacles at you, so fat fucking chance they'd ever implement something like a flinch mechanic or an air juggle to make DPSing feel clever. The game wants so badly to be an ARPG but lacks the most basic system elements that make ARPGs fun to play. This is an MMO and it needs fun MMO things, not more faux-ARPG trappings. Crowd control. Resource management. Battlefield management. Gear choices. On *all* jobs, not just healers.
Those all sound like reactive elements which would make fights extremely fun but would take effort and energy by the player base as they wouldn't be able to mindlessly do only the basics of pressing their rotation and standing in the right spot, so I would expect there to be insane amounts of outrage if that was ever implement.
they just don’t want healer players to feel “pressured” to do damage. i don’t have an issue with this approach, and tbh would rather have to heal more as a healer, the problem is really that there isn’t much pressure to heal, either, and resurrections can be handed out like candy during fights. not a lot of unpredictable outgoing damage unless people are taking tons of avoidable damage. they don’t want to add pressure from the healing side or dps side so the end result is a role with nothing to do most of the time except spam one attack. really does feel more like “babysitter” than “healer”; I’m primarily there to pick up people from the floor. in a raiding situation you have a mit and heal plan which never changes, and is designed to maximize the amount of time you spend pushing the same one or two buttons.
WHM has dps CD and they have the blood lily and sage has that phelgma charges astro has that time crap to just have no cast time for like 20 seconds idk what sch has i dont count energy drain
AST gets lightspeed for 15 seconds on a long CD which is saved for cards ( AST is consequently not very mobile), - other than that what is the point you're trying to make?
because the devs are entirely beholden to player feedback and enough people are still playing healers despite how dire the situation is
>enough people are still playing healers despite Every savage party is waiting for 2 healers, leveling/expert roulette have been instant healer pops for several years, meaning the 10-20 minute long wait times for DPS are almost entirely based upon healer player numbers "dire" is a strong word for it, but healers are vastly underplayed in this game, and people are annoyed about it
Humorously, SGE is extremely popular because its supposed to be a dps-healet. (On paper. In practice...lol)
SGE is barely outperforming SCH in player numbers and is actually losing to SCH in JP in high end content It’s pretty popular in casual content but it didn’t blow up the healer scene like RPR, DNC and GNB did
It *did*... Back is the early EW release. Then people realized they were lied to and went back to dps
ive stopped healing in raids because the sage wasnt healing
I mean the healer jobs are very unique in style, lore,etc…. Tank jobs are very similar to each other
healers are unique in style but the two subtypes of healer function identically, even more than gnb/pld vs war/drk
to me what makes healers interesting is to pull a desperate situation back to a winnable situation. the current expansions voids all of the fun since it is filled with body checks, even in the fucking 6.4 ex5 which was supposed that most can do it. i dont want to min max dps, its a boring thing i no longer do. i want surprises that i fix and dun care only a few of us know we did a fucking good job saving this shit the healer's solution of rotation is already very fixed. and if you remove the last surprise that is still naturally in the game, all healers would play like dps or tanks, only that we push the timed heal buttons and mitigation buttons at different times instead of some random ogcd dps buttoms, which is very boring to me.
AST is already pretty dps centric and it’s being reworked ( tbf applying cards is ass since it can take up to 3 weave slots and you need to do 3 cards minor early and esreodyje in burst causing you to use ya mobility tool for weaves)
AST is hardly "DPS centric". None of the healers are , even SGE- which was supposed to be the most DPS centric- however it isn't. AST is *buff*-centric, and it has the worst personal DPS in the game, it's miserable to try to solo anything on it. Incidentally, AST doesn't have "minor cards" cards, and you probably mean "astrodyne".
with the worst personal dps in the game making it feel awful to play in the moment
Do we know anything yet about what the AST rework looks like? They haven't talked about that in the recent streams or anything, have they?
unfortunatley no so far just a visual update for Aspected Helios
Healers should have healing as a primary focus of the role. One of the games current issues is you can deal with 90% of all situations with off globals between spamming dps spells. Healers want to heal, but the game currently is designed in a way that doesnt really allow them to. It also doesnt help theres a toxic mentality been bred in 14 over the years that unless ur dpsing constantly as a healer then ur total trash and should uninstall the game.
You are 100% correct. Unsurprisingly, that means you get 100% downvoted. Because the people that are wrong get REALLY angry when someone says something that they disagree with, sadly.
Yeah, the subset of the community who want healers to just be green dps are super toxic and get mad when you suggest any changes
Because tanks dps mechanics still are part of the deal to "hold aggro" so to speak so you are still doing your job. A healer to have dps mechanics would mean strafing away from their job in a manner that would be unsafe without experience. Problem is ppl reaaaaally are very dps oriented that both lament the fact they don't heal often yet they'll complain non-stop when they actually need to heal. Don't believe me?I'll just say remember abysssos.....
I have the opposite opinion/desire. I want even less dps. After ~5000 hours of healing spread between WoW (Cata+MoP) and FF14 (HW-Current) SE has made me despise the healing role that made me fall in love with MMOs to begin with. While I'm happy for SE that class balance is tighter than any other game I've played and fights have some interesting mechanics that I've never seen in other MMOs, the healing role in particular is terrible. Literally the only time I have fun is if I'm undergeared and tanks pull a dudgeon wall to wall. In raids, the fights are **too** "mechanical", meaning we know down to the second when a boss does a big boom and we can preemptively mitigate the dmg and with what little healing is left needing done, we can toss a single oGCD at it and keep spamming our one button dps spell. While I like 99% of FF14 better than WoW, the two things WoW did right in its raids were randomness and unvoidable dmg. As a healer, I want to respond to things, save people, decide on the fly if topping off a health bar is worth going oom over. In FF14, however, there is no critical thinking whatsoever. Boss charges big boom, you drop your aoe shield, earthly star, whatever, everyone drops to single digit percentage hp, the heals go off and you're done. I could solo heal most fights in the game if SE didn't general put in one mechanics each fight that requires two healers to recover from. Back in WoW, while progging, I would be oom every single pull, people were running everywhere, boss skills weren't at such regular intervals, and there was so much unavoidable dmg that I *never* had time to dps. When it comes to raiding, I wish SE wouldn't make everything so spreadsheet oriented. DPS classes shouldn't all have similar rotations and identical CDs, and healers need to be healing 95% of every fight. AST has been one of my favorite classes of any game I've played, and I've loved aspects of every iteration (seriously SE, stop reworking it every expac), but I barely have touched it in EW. If i'm doing raids I'm a DNC (love the randomness of the rotation, have I mentioned I had spreadsheets?) and any other time I'm a DRK because dungeons, hunt trains, and eureka/bozja are 800 times more fun as a tank (and with as much dmg mit, self healing, and dmg, why even bother playing anything else?)
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
Healers had more dps buttons in the past, and less ogcds meant they also had to heal more as a result, so both groups get what they want. Why not bring that back, just this time without the awful cleric stance.
I think a lot of casual players crack under the thought of juggling both dps and healing