just want to say on my data grp healers are not the less played and the one guy claims its always the bounus class in rullets i want to know what server that is kek its 99.9% tanks
No, but for real. After learning GNB and being able to "rescue" with Heart of Corundum to save people, why does Rescue have 120s cooldown? Corundum fixes mistakes at a 25s cooldown.
@@skellysniperyt3210 i mean im pretty sure rescue is a 120 for a reason that being that it would make trolling people with it even easier than it already is and also allow for it to happen more often
The one common thing I keep hearing from healers, myself included, is that healing is fun when it's chaotic. When people are taking additional unintended damage and you have to think on the spot to recover. It's mentioned in this video too. I've not raided recently since my static is dead but that was my problem with savage. It was too punishing most of the time for that very situation to occur. I often head into newer trials just to experience healing the chaos of people being new and getting hit by stuff. The satisfaction I get when I, as a healer, get my team through the toughest of situations is why I want to heal. It's why reclears are so boring. When everyone knows where to go and what to do, is when healers have the least to do and are the least engaged.
here is a secret for u, me as a dps i am bored out of my mind on reclears as well. rotato figured out just rince and repeat, not really engaging or anythin really.
I agree with this. Healing is most fun when you think outside the box and do something very quick to recover a mistake. But right now, I feel like this breaks the expectation of a healer. Maybe it’s just from my experience, but I’ve been scolded by parties for using a party-saving GCD ability as an AST because I should have been dealing damage instead. Sitting there and dealing damage as a healer is boring
Not enough frequent/continuous but predictable damage. Tank busters are too weak. Too high incoming damage spike on mess ups. Esuna is barely seeing any use outside gimmick mechanics.
@marioharrer9999 exactly THIS ! People acting like Dps or tank don't do the exact same thing and rotation when already comfortable with the fight and reclears. It's the most boring part for EVERYONE, not just for healers.
I think one of the biggest pain points for healing is the difference between restoring HP and reviving. I love finding ways to top people off when they take unexpected damage, but unexpected deaths (especially instant deaths) are miserable.
The biggest problem for healer is that the role gets less interesting the better you are. Healing a non expert team can be quite the involved endeavour as you pull out all the stops to keep the failing party alive. In contrast a good party with a skilled healer manages mechanics and most heals can be planned out before the fight has even begun. This is also why prog is the most interesting and impactful time for healers. This is als why throwing a dps rotation into the healer kit won't solve the issue. It will just make the job even more stressful and demanding as there will be a more stringent pressure to do all the dps you can. I agree that WHM gauge (do healing -> get damage reward) is the correct direction to take while SCH gauge (choose beetween either healing or damage) is the wrong way.
As someone else already commented here somewhere, the current design is what actually increases the pressure to dps. Since almost all of your offensive potency is currently funneled into your filler every single cast of said filler counts, because every GCD you're not casting Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis is your full damage potential lost for that cast. With a more involved dps kit you wouldn't suddenly deal 2x the damage you currently do and consequently increase the pressure to dps 100% of a fight. It would simply shift your current total damage output into multiple different abilities instead of a single one. Let's take Whitemage for example, Glare III is currently your main source of damage by a pretty wide margin so every GCD that isn't Glare III is quite a lot of dps lost. Now what if WHM got two new damage GCDs added, one on a 30 second cooldown and one on a 60 second cooldown, but instead of just increasing the total damage it is instead potency taken away from Glare, so your total damage is still the same as it is right now but Glare only deals 170 potency per cast instead of 330, with the missing potency provided by the two new abilities. This means that each missed cast of Glare III is actually less punishing as long as you can land the two new abilities every 30 and 60 seconds respectively.
The problem with giving the other healers a WHM style gauge is the WHM gauge (speaking as a WHM main) is specifically to fix a core problem with the class. Namely that we have much more GCDs than other jobs and it is (besides the new wings) our only real source of mobility. It would be unfair for the other jobs to get such a gauge change, or they would have to massively buff miseries output to push it beyond DPS neutral on paper to compensate.
Yep. I love prog on a healer. Reclears put me to sleep. It's one of the reasons I'm not so fond of this tier. As a midcore raider, it died too fast and left me doing the boring parts of healing right away.
As a scholar main I've found the raid tier quite fun however I do have two criticisms , make my fairie gauge do something other than a single target tether heal and change dissipation into something else because locking yourself out of half your kit just isn't good design
Dissipation is fine because it rewards you knowing the fight and when its safe to not need it or use it for a spreadlo. It's honestly the most thought imposing part of the kit, almost like a discount cleric stance
@@SuperShesh2 No, it's not. Dissipation and Energy Drain are the two most complained about SCH abilities for good reason, and the reason isn't "people are just bad/lazy". It's because they really are not good design and largely either feel lackluster or outright bad. There are plenty of good parts of SCH's kit that require setup or thought, for example, using Protraction before a Spreadlo. Dissipation is not one of them.
@@SubduedRadical I personally enjoy Dissipation. It's fun to optimize. I'm probably in the minority there, but it's definitely not "objectively" bad. If anything, I'm glad there's still at least one job that has some punishing aspects.
I think a fun addition to Dissipation would be a sort of “Reconstitution” type ability. You can get your fairy back early, but it would come at a massive mp cost. Like, maybe make it so that you lose 90% of your current mp to cast it, so it could exist but would need to be planned around? (Just throwing out my first thought, cause yeah, losing most of our kit is… frustrating)
well I think there should be more job engagement for Dissipations for SCH, like other than the current effect, maybe add something like "when the fairy returns after Dissipation ends, all of the fairy skills CD will be reduced by 10 secs" or like "while in dissipation, any healing abilities, that requires aetherflow, has their CD reduced by 10 sec"
I agree with most of the suggestions here but I do think Komachi saying "I don't think healing should be made harder" before proposing a bunch of changes that would make it much harder is really funny My favorite suggestion in the video is to give more healers meters like White Mage's that turn your healing into damage. I agree that's an extremely satisfying mechanic to engage with.
11:22 If nothing else, take this advice from Stal. In all seriousness though, this is a really interesting take on the healer role. I mainly play healer for quick queues in roulettes and might give it a shot in Savage. My main issue with the job is that it is so reliant on party being able to do mechs properly. I personally find healing way more fun when people are new to a fight and I have to stop us from wiping. So I'd have to agree with Komachi in terms of making rotations more interesting and requiring you to think more about your actions more
I really agree with Komachi's suggestion of making more involved healing and DPS rotations. I don't like the current design of most healer kits where they just have a pile of cooldowns to cycle through that have little if any internal synergy. It would be more fun to have spells and abilities that interact with each other and flow together for optimal healing.
Agreed if the intended design is for healers to be doing damage while healing then doing damage should synergies with healing & vice versa so that healers have a full rotational kit that allows a fun DPS play style that reinforces your moments of giving heals along with your emergency buttons.
@@jaquanepatterson2537 We have 'using healing feeds into your damage' via Misery and the Lily system, so I think one of the most obvious things that could be added is a system wherein 'dealing damage feeds into your healing'. I've suggested as much as an expansion to WHM, via adding a new gauge I call 'Nature's Vigilance'. Any non-Lily GCD generates some Vigilance gauge, with GCD healing generating it way faster than damage spells (to get the player back into damage-neutral gameplay faster). My maths estimated the gauge per minute with full DPS uptime to be around 55-60. You'd then spend 50 of this Vigilance on a new move, Blessing of the Elementals, which is a strong AOE healing GCD. BOTE would also grant a new gauge element, one Petal of Earthen Ire, one Petal of Wrathful Winds, and one Petal of Raging Rivers (these petals can stack to 2 each to prevent overcap). While a Petal is present, its respective filler spell (Earth - Stone/Glare, Wind - Aero/Dia, Water - Water/Banish (new action)) is upgraded to Quake, Tornado or Flood. The potency gained by casting these three Elemental spells is equal to four Glares, making them plus the GCD that generates them damage neutral. However, like Misery, their slightly higher potency means that optimizers would want to try and place the 'refund' GCDs within the burst window There's also the whole 'you heal by dealing damage' thing that SGE was supposed to embody (and kinda fails at) but describing what I'd do there is an essay of its own
I will never understand the idea of having healers with...more involved DPS rotations. Don't get me wrong, I can think of some DPS rotations that could be interesting for healers, like imagine a healer with instant use Weaponskills (like MCH has its 1-2-3 combo and tools). That could be interesting as an oGCD healer that has tons of short CD oGCDs to do its actual healing while performing its damage rotation. But most ideas for healers is for them to be CASTERS, where your DPS rotation would get in the way of healing, or "more DoTs", the most stupid, braindead, and annoying damage mechanic in all of MMOs.
As a Healer who started with this expansion. I understand the perspective of "easy" healing. But that assumes you have a second healer in the raid with brain. The amount of times me as the Scholar has to actively keep the Tank alive with GCD heals because the WHM thinks 10k HP on a Tank is fine to spam Glare with is mesmerizing. Let alone healing becomes easier if you have a group that understands mitigation. I personally enjoy healing, and I wish it would be a bit more complex in the DPS department. But I want to point out healing isn't "easy", Especially learning fights while also getting more familiar with the Job is at first overwhelming, soo I understand that people struggle. I also feel that resources ingame about good healing are missing. Like there is no good advice from the game how to deal with chain of raidwides. The Novice Hall needs a healing rework and that badly. We can't expect any healer to pick up healing to watch youtube videos of optimal healing and mitigation rotations. Biggest painpoint for me. HoT's are really badly communicated in game as to how much healing it will do over time. The Buff itself with a timer is one thing, but you have to remember ALL HoT's by symbol and you cannot tell at all how big the effect is. Which leads to "safe healers", topping people off the whole time even if the next 20 seconds there is no incoming damage, because they see half-empty health bars.
As someone who has been healing like 6 years in this game I can give you some advice on what you are doing wrong in 2 healer fights. When I am healing and see my co-healer constantly healing the tank or spamming heals on the raid I will simply switch to pure DPS mode. Because they have demonstrated to me they aren't going to DPS so I need to make up the slack for them in that department. It is about the healing power balance between you and your co-healer. Sometimes you (to be blunt) need to play chicken with the parties HP to demonstrate to the other healer that you aren't going to do 100% of their work for them. Sometimes you just get a plainly bad co-healer but I have found that to be a rarity in most of the PUG content I have played over the years. Most of the time you end up doing all the work is because you communicate to the other healer (via overhealing) that you want to do all the healing in the fight and they happily will let you.
One of my ideas for making healer more engaging is to involve MP as a mechanic more. Neutral Sect in certain scenarios (p10s HH and DSR Wroth come to mind) and now SCH's Seraphism give healers access to some of the strongest heals at the game...at incredible MP costs when spammed. WHM's limited ogcd kit and lilies can only take it so far in prog or emergency scenarios...but it feels really good to recover a party going south by using one charge of Thin Air to rez and the other to Cure III. I would almost feel tempted to say, reduce the MP costs of GCD heals to be equivalent to filler (400MP) and have oGCD heals start at 500MP for single target and 700MP for AoE, depending on potency and CD duration. Casual players who don't know how to manage their MP well can get through most content mostly GCD healing while more skilled healers make the tradeoff between extra damage and MP management. As a bonus, piety becomes a not-completely-dead stat in scenarios where bringing enough of it saves you and your cohealer enough GCDs that it's a gain over pure damaging substats like crit.
I've been playing Scholar more now and the biggest change I've noticed from playing tank to playing healer is how much harder it is to keep time while playing healer. With tank I can anticipate when I'm pressing a mitigation down to the gcd, because I know that the mechanic will happen when I get to a specific part of my combo and I can time my mitigations to other parts of that combo. With healer, everything happens on Broil and it becomes a lot harder to keep track of time for me. Even just a 1 2 combo for healers would help so much for letting players build muscle memory
I'm a SCH main, and I will say with SCH at least, though I've also personally noticed this with AST as well (I have less experience with the others, so I can't comment as easily), you've got a couple of very important cooldowns that you want to always be cycling at specific points, so you've got a very solid timekeeper. They're longer than a basic combo on melees, but you've still got Aetherflow that you want to be very aware of (important for Mana and healing resources), which is a 60s cooldown, and you've got Astral/Umbral Draw on a 30s (mana, damage buff) for AST (you also have Earthly Star on a 60s, though you plan that a bit differently than you plan Draw or Aetherflow). Similarly, both SGE and WHM important timers that they keep track of, such as Assize (30s healing, damage, and mana) and your gauge on WHM, or your gauge on SGE. Again, I'm not as familiar with these two so I'd have to look up details for their timers. Also, all four of them need to be keeping track of their Lucid Dreaming cooldown, and you've got your 30s DoTs on all of 'em. When you get particularly familiar with a healer, at least in my experience, you end up being pretty clear on what mechanics will happen when just based on where your mana skills are in their cooldowns. None of this is to say that I don't wish I had more to think about with DPS or rotations or combos or anything, but rather a tip for something that might help you keep track of time better.
I only healed for one tier (Anabaseios), and it's crazy how I felt both extremes in terms of fun. Progging it as a SGE was genuinely the most fun I've had in this game and I remember being fully commited to becoming a healer main from then on, BUT as my static did reclears, became more consistent and better geared, the fun factor took a nosedive for me. I think healer is in a pretty good spot for progging scenarios, but they need to design fights that are fun to reclear after everything is figured out as well
Fully agree with the point about WHM lillies being a good example of how healing could work. Banking dps by using healing GCD’s would do wonders and would take minimal effort. Personally, I would prefer each healer get a suite of spells with very short CDs (think reduced healing potency Pneuma on Holy Sheltron or TBN CD) that are damage neutral heals requiring positioning to deal the damage or provide the heal. I don’t necessarily want a dps rotation, instead I want different dps buttons that simultaneously heal and require me to think about how to use them. Straight line, short range AoE, floor targeted, setup time. And I want it to be a mix of how the spell is aimed. Like, damage is a line you have to aim but healing pulses the whole party or heal is a ground targeted burst that fires a bolt of damage at the nearest enemy, so you only need to focus on aiming one aspect of each spell at a time but you need to be aware of which part is aimed for each spell
Healers simply need more engaging damage based mechanics. Take them away from the basic one button setup and give them rotations that feed into healing procs like was suggested in the video. Like what if Free Cure on WHM was changed to proc 30% of the time at the end of a three GCD damage combo? Now it's no longer bait for new healers and rewards them for participating in damage, where learning they should be doing damage in group content is the hardest thing for new healers to understand. I think a good example of a change would come from WHM lily charges. How about instead of each charge being a heal then giving a proc for a damage button, it's damage charges like BLM's job gauge, but at the end it gives a high potency heal you can deploy? Things like that would go far in making healers feel more dynamic for casual and hardcore players alike.
100% agree. I've been saying this for years. 14's fight design requires every role to optimize dps. Giving healers damage tools that feed into their healing kit would make their dps feel less redundant and fit the overall design of the game better.
As a player who went from hyper casual pure healer to dishing purple-orange numbers in savage, Stormblood SCH lives in my head rent free as the pinnacle of healer gameplay. I agree that fight design should be more engaging; built towards making sure your healers are paying attention, not getting overwhelmed with a flood of personal mechanics AND damage, and encouraging the ability to save a run if the fight design allows it (m2s stacks from hearts, for example). However, I’ll never forget the enjoyment I felt from how engaging SCH’s dps priority felt, maintaining dots and supplementing Energy Drain as able. SCH used to have a very high skill ceiling with a medium skill floor that definitely underwent some remodeling and modernized gutting. Coming from someone who raids in organized static settings, where lots of things can be consistently planned out in advance, having that extra “mini game” of maintaining dots with my rolling GCD while also keeping everyone alive was the most engaged I ever felt playing healer in FFXIV.
My concept for a healer was Chemist having a sort of mudra-like system and a ton of resource banking so you need to continue a rotation to always have a supply of your “potions” to use as needed, with full access to a basic cure and medica equivalent that’s more MP heavy than the others to encourage you to keep mixing.
I think honestly the core issue with healing just comes down to the idea that good game design is defined by interesting decision making in the moment, and the job ultimately feels extremely linear in a lot of regards. A major reason for this imo is the fact that the game is balanced under the assumption everyone will be contributing to the overall DPS as much as they can, but ultimately people are not playing healer to do a complicated DPS rotation, even though the overwhelming majority of their buttons are feeding into that end goal. How do you make interesting choices when 80% of the buttons you press are not aligned with the fantasy your job is trying to play into? I think something we should expect to see is healers adopting the 1-2-3 style of Picto, where its one button that shifts between multiple steps to visually present itself differently between attacks, and -hopefully- at the end of each sequence, providing some resource for healing, or some branching choice as a finisher. Personally, a major point of annoyance I have with something like Sages design is that it feels almost -wrong- to use your GCD shield options if you can get away with not pressing them, but you feel like it you're encouraged to want to press them to build addersting stacks. Removing the black/white, right/wrong choices and instead doing something where like.. a healer does 1-2-3-[Finisher], like how the viper gets their OGCD at the end of each string, but having that finisher be one of multiple choices which all serve different goals in different context I feel would be much more interesting. There's so many directions they could take healers, but I think right now they're in a really weird corner they need to break out of with their overall design philosophy.
This might be hard due to how the encounter design works but I just wish they made any combination of healers viable. You could maybe do this by having 1 pure pure healer (whm), 1 pure barrier healer (sch) and make 2 "in between" healers (ast & sge) leaning more to what sage has right now. That way minimal mit checks should still be doable with any comp and you're not looked out of playing your favourite healer just because someone else already picked a pure/barrier healer
Most importantly for where FFXIV is in it's design philosophy: If the primary thing you should be doing with GCDs is damage, dealing damage with GCDs should be interesting. Pressing the same button 800 times a fight and every 10-20 seconds or so you press an OGCD to top the party up is the worst design, if a dps had that sort of design at this point in the game Yoshi-P would be crucified. There just isn't an excuse for this that works for me. I also personally feel that accessibility at a base level IS important but the returns on that are very capped. If healers are too hard to play will you lose healer population? Yep. If healers are too boring to play will you lose healer population? Also yep. So denying complexity to the role doesn't really preserve the game health in the sacrifice either after a certain point you're better off having a satisfying role that is underrepresented than a tedious one that is underrepresented. Returning to a point where MP is much more limited is my personal want but I know that might not be a common want. But having to portion out a resource you will have a limited amount of through a fight and deciding how much of it you can use on damage and still have enough to meet healing demands is interesting for me, and it also creates more 'healing activity' when you have smaller, efficient heals that take up more GCD's but extend how far your MP pool stretches.
Not a healer main at all but I just have to say that I really appreciate the perspectives given in these videos. So many discussions similar to this one completely ignore the impact of any changes on those who aren't high end raiders and I appreciate the effort put in to at least consider how suggested changes actually impact newer and/or less experienced players This is particularly true when it comes to Healing as it's probably the just with the biggest gap between how it feels to play a healer when you "know what you're doing" and when you aren't a seasoned veteran (and how huge the impact of an experienced healer VS an inexperienced healer can have on the whole party). If you're going to make changes to healers (or changes to fight design in an effort to make healing more involved) you must consider all levels of healer play. I will say that I'd be wary of just pointing at one of the healer jobs and saying that "other healers should have that too" as that's what has led to so many of the roles/jobs in the game feeling as homogenized as they do. Sure the versatility of AST is probably appealing to WHMs, but if you just give WHM the tools that AST has then you might just end up with AST and AST2 and is that really what you want? Or about giving more/all of the healers something like the WHM Lily system. Sure ti seems like the most engaging system in many ways but do you really want every healer to basically play like WHM?
To share my favorite healing moment, and drive engagement: I’d say Proto-Ozma for Baldesion Arsenal. There is a lot to watch out for in that fight, Sphere’s hefty auto attacks, heavy off tank damage in cube, the shared stack auto attacks in star, baiting the stacking spreading bleed dot and spot cleansing it, keeping the dps and tanks hurting themselves with high Double Edge stacks, and all Ozma’s mechanics and raidwides along with those. Then there’s the dilemma of whether the use Sacrifice to raise someone and risk your Spirit of the Remembered not reraising you.
I love the points Kionu and Komachi made about damage and healing weaving into each other! We really need more of the damage and healing components feeling more like part of the same, interconnected kit. It would make healing more interesting, possibly more intuitive, and would allow the design team to create more fights that require GCD healing. The current binary status quo of GCD healing being a outright damage loss has always left a sour taste in my mouth.
Problem with healers is their healing buttons only matter IF someone takes damage. A healer's involvement is directly proportional to the party members/raid members knowledge of the fight. If that damage is more of a "when" it can be planned around, and that just feels like a token "your healers are helping too" moment. This sort of makes handing healers more interesting DPS rotations the only reasonable solution, since healing is naturally reactionary and you can't make it a regular thing for more than occasionally healing the tank without introducing loads more unavoidable aggro agnostic damage, which isn't engaging for the player taking that hit. And I mean, healers don't really need more to their DPS than any given tank. A PLD has like 3 OGCD attacks and the rest is all a large variety of GCDs and there are people that still love that job. People don't ask for much, they'd just like to have more than ONE button to worry about between spurts of healing.
I enjoy progging fights as a healer, but as was said multiple times in the video you are at the mercy of the fight designers in regards to whether the encounters will be fun to heal or not. Considering the fairly large investment in getting BIS for one job, I'm going to prioritize DPS as I know my experience across the encounters will remain mostly stable. Not to mention said gear can be used to make other non-Savage content go faster, like EX trial spam. So the solution to get me to heal is to improve the encounter design or just give away healer gear for free.
20:30 this idea is so incredible I just spent 30 minutes thinking about it, trying to figure out how I would implement such a thing as a new healer job. At the end of the day, it would be too different from existing healers (and have some associated kinks) so square enix would never implement such a thing, but it is still super fun to theorize. Here's what I came up with: This healer would have several damage GCD buttons. When you use them, you gain some gauge, which you can use on oGCD heals. There should be 3-4 GCD damage buttons, and each has its associated gauge (maybe like based on elements or something). Each oGCD heal requires a different one of the gauges in order to use, with some gauge overlap (some of them also have a cooldown). The idea is to mimic SCH's Aetherflow / SGE's Addersgall, where you get to choose how to spend your limited healing resources, but with the additional twist of having to prep your tools beforehand by choosing which GCD's you use. This also adds some button variety to low healing phases, with you going "OK need to prep my gauges for the next phase let me cycle through my GCDs". I think all the GCDs should have equal PPS, but you can still do fun things with it: - A completely DPS neutral instant cast, but the gauge it gives is not very useful, only used for a single target heal in the vein of lustrate/tetra/dignity. You can be the most mobile healer in the game, at the cost of your healing ability - The opposite. A 2.3 second DPS cast that gives gauge used for a sacred soil level skill - Different heal oGCD have different gauge costs. You can use the single target heal after every damage GCD and it can be spammed with enough gauge built, but the most powerful oGCDs take 4-5 GCDs to build up enough gauge and empty most of it - A 1 minute damaging oGCD that requires gauge. Using it is optimal for parsing but since it is not spammable it removes the "every aetherflow spent on healing is lost damage" problem SCH has - An oGCD that fills all gauges by 50, 3 minute cooldown - Capstone ability that requires 25 of all guages to use Of course, since your healing ability is entirely dependent on hitting the enemy, the job requires a downtime skill, an instant cast GCD that does no damage but refills all gauges by a bit. The interesting thing is, this can be the job's equivalent to GCD healing on other jobs - when you're learning a fight you use it a lot to get a lot of healing done, safety heal all mechanics, recover mistakes etc, then as you get better at the fight you can start cutting uses of this GCD in favor of more damage GCDs. Only problem is it's hard to figure out the numbers on this - if the MP cost is too low, the job becomes broken in prog, if it's too high it doesn't work as a downtime tool. If it gives too much gauge then being able to fully restore all resources in 10 seconds of downtime is broken, if it's too little then it feels terrible to press in uptime, you don't get enough bang for your buck. Due to this it might be for the best to still have GCD healing tools, and just have this downtime tool as an alternate "you can use this to sacrifice damage for healing" button in addition to the GCD heals
I feel like the fact that so much raidwide mitigation is completely outside the healers' control is also a huge issue, and one that isn't talked about a lot by higher end players since they're not affected by it. In a well coordinated static, you have a mit plan and the healers can rely on the rest of the group to actually follow said mit plan. In a pug environment or even in less well coordinated or less skilled statics however, dps and tanks often forget to use their raidwide mitigation and when they do, it can easily lead to a wipe. If that happens the healers are often blamed for not doing their job - keeping the party alive through the boss' damage - correctly, but it still just feels bad, even if they aren't blamed for it. I'd personally love to see square remove all raidwide mitigations from tanks, melee dps, and casters, and give them to healers and phys ranged DPS instead. On top of giving healers much more agency over the very thing their role exists for, it would also solidify phys ranged's role as a proper support dps, giving groups another major reason to bring them other than the 1% role buff. It'd also make healer gameplay a little more interesting since you'd be rewarded for anticipating upcoming mechanics early enough and starting to weave oGCD mits in time, instead of having to panic weave (instead of having to use 1-2 oGCD mits before a raidwide like healers do now, they'd have to use 3-5 to make up for the ones the tanks/DPS are using now). You could then even give the other dps more personal mitigations and design those in a way that rewards the player for using them frequently and correctly (similar to SAM's Third Eye).
I agree with the comment that the best healer engagements comes from your ability to triage a team and keep them going towards the finish line. It's why I feel like some of my best moments in the game as a healer come from slowly piecing a team back together in a random duty finder 24-man or 8-man fight - it's been where I have the most enjoyment in XIV. Yes, structured statics are cool but after a while, it just becomes a dance and doing your best to ensure your team members can survive (which I also agree with the comment in the video about this). I also agree with the comment of having your DPS ability tie into your healing abilities. With that being said - I do feel the healer baseline HPS numbers should remain the same, but then the players can use their DPS abilities to augment their healing potential so it makes it easier for them to handle future mechanics as they are filling the gap with DPS. A simple example would be casting Glare on WHM could reduce the amount of time they need to generate a Lily by one second. Broil can give the SCH some fairy gauge and then they add more fairy gauge abilities such as a AoE shield / fairy abilities are boosted by consuming the fairy gauge (ie Whispering Dawn's potency is doubled for 50 gauge). Things like that to make the filler times of the healer kit feel more thoughtful. I also definitely agree with the fact that all healing jobs being pushed down to 1.5s GCD removed a lot of thoughtful skill expression as well. I never liked the change but I understood a lot of clipping complaints as well. It's here to stay now but I enjoyed needing to do a lot more slide casting back in the days. In general - I am probably one of the few people who say this - I still love healers as they are right now as I do feel like being the one baby sitter to keep the others going forward and I have all the powerful tools necessary to make that happen. Being able to push a team to the end when 90% of the of the other healers would fail is very satisfying, if not also very "Scream at your monitor" rage inducing as well, LOL
IMO being able to save a pull with well placed abilities is the best feeling you can get as a healer, and the more opportunities that Sqenix put in for that to occur the better. I loved healing this tier, there were quite a few drawn out sections of fairly heavy damage that required some planning during prog but nothing that was overly punishing, and it was just fun overall.
So my perspective is more casual, but I do main healer roles in every game where that is an option. To me the crux of the issue is that FF14's encounter design is a game where the #1 priority in most situations is dealing damage, and this only changes in special scenarios (mit checks, heal checks, etc), while at the same time the design team clearly wants complex healing kits with a wide array of GCD and oGCD healing. So to state the obvious, we have a big mismatch between encounter design and job design. However I _don't_ think that one or the other is inherently flawed, just that they need to be brought in line with each other. If they want to keep the current 20 healing buttons (which it seems they do) then they need to do things like reduce tank survivability, increase the number of instances other party members take damage (I'm personally a fan of random bursts of single-target unavoidable damage), and tune down the lethality of _individual_ hits so that most of the time a healer's response to someone failing a mechanic is...healing...and not swiftcast-raise. Plus, vuln stacks are currently underutilized as a symbol of shame. 🤭 If they don't want to tune down the lethality of fights, then healers need to be just as lenient to play as tanks when it comes to failing mechanics. Not only would this offset the greater responsibility of having to mind everyone's HP, it would also make it more approachable to people new to the role. Then hopefully more people would join the healer family! They need to have more inherent survivability than DPS jobs, and the easiest way would be to give them either higher max HP or passive damage reduction just like tanks. In short, I want to have reasons to consistently focus on healing and not just damage uptime. Incoming damage needs to be less predictable to give healers more to do, and also healers need to be able to make more mistakes so that they're less at risk of triggering a wipe from getting KO'd.
Some additional thoughts in the other direction: If we focus on changing job design instead of encounter design, then it really would require a total rework of every healer job. I suspect this is why they've avoided making any real changes over the years. It's not an easy problem to solve. At baseline, in this scenario I agree that healer jobs should become more attack focused. They would borrow the same design philosophy that tanks have, swapping out some heal buttons for a robust attack rotation and limiting their role actions (healing) to actions with cooldowns that you have to manage over the course of a fight. One way to do this would be to design healers around "burst" phases similar to DPS, except that you get bursts of healing instead of damage. If we leaned into the existing job gauges, you could have each job build up their resource over time via a damage rotation and then spend their healer gauge when it's most needed. That way we can consolidate buttons into a smaller number of gauge spenders while also having a simple way for attack uptime to tie into the job role. For example Astro could gain card draws via attacking, which could then be redeemed in quick succession to cast multiple heals (or a combination of mits and heals), either ahead of time for a raidwide or more suddenly for emergency healing. Scholar could use the fairy gauge to cast their more powerful heals and dedicate their aetherflow stacks entirely to attack spells. Sage could accumulate more stacks of addersgall and speed up stack regeneration by attacking. White Mage could feed the blood lily with the blood of their enemies instead of the blood of their allies, and get healing blooms in return. Similar to tanks, each healer job could still have different levels of complexity with their attack rotation and ease of healing/mitigation, so there's still plenty of room to keep each job feeling unique. But this way the job design would actually match the gameplay of always attacking.
some comments have talked about it in here, but usually it's in the Ultimate/Criterion-level content that the healer's kit is really put to the test. Their knowledge of the fight (as well as party survivability), their ability to combo certain effects together to get the most out of that huge kit, is what that kit is designed for. Comparing that to stuff like Dungeon encounters, normal trials, etc... you're entering that content with a kit that's meant to be used in Ultimate content, this can definitely trivialize that content for some, but it also provides a good safety cushion to those who aren't at the Ultimate-level of skill in the game. There's a lot of these players who complain that they only feel like they're getting the most out of it in the Ultimates and It seems like they want that high they get from Ultimates to be present in every piece of content they touch, but that's just not possible. Add in some factors like the use of 3rd party tools to make the fights even easier (some don't use this, but let's not pretend it's not an actual issue), and the fact that once you learn a piece of content, you can't get back that feeling of chaos and going in blind...there really are people out there who love optimizing and playing at that high level, but are sad/angry that they optimized their favorite job into being boring. Just going by what I've heard in the many videos/comments I've seen on the subject of Healers, it seems a bunch of the Japanese players understand that Healers are not complex DPS. If they want to focus on complex DPS rotations and the like, then they switch to DPS. There's nothing wrong with saying you "main" a specific role, but like...there's nothing wrong with changing it up sometimes. :)
I main healer, but when I’ve cleared the tier and have become comfortable I switch to caster depending on which rsids I enjoy the most, for the remainder of the tier to find more engagement, cause after you’ve done the tier on healer, it can be a bit dull, unless you’re playing Astro, at least for me.
I dont know why but hearing these people talk about healing being easy right now makes me feel like I'm super bad. I do feel the healing in this savage tier was somewhat easy but as someone who has only done it in PF stuff like ION cannons and EE2 in m4s really felt like I had to play it well as it wasnt just use 1 ability and I am done. To me the outgoing damage was maybe a bit too infrequent as most of the time you would have your oGCDs back up again by the time the next big damage section came around but in some places there really wasnt enough time to get everything back so you had to plan out what to use where.
That's because in a vacuum, you can't heal it yourself. This is coming from top players where all 8 people in the party have optimized their actions. There's optimal mit from tanks and dps roles and maybe shields set up so that afterwards, yeah, about one or two heals need to be used. You can't really fairly compare that to average gameplay, but I also don't think it degrades their point.
It's easy for them because they have top-tier statics that don't take unexpected damage. They only spend a very, very short time in prog on any given fight
Shadowbringers White Mage needed only one thing to fix it and it was Seraph Strike from Bozja. A high MP cost action that created a strong burst window for them, which made Blood Lilly a DPS gain in a vacuum, made MP management more important, and gave more weight to good usage of the 0MP cooldown. And they never did it, god damnit.
Just chiming in to say that as a SGE main, I already love both prog and reclears in Savage/EX content. I have no issues with the job currently, but everyone's opinions are valid!
Now that I think back on it, re: 20:00 - I feel like Kionu isn't giving SGE enough credit? Addersting charges are a blast to play with in Dungeons and any other fight with downtime, and actually do come up in prog for me as well! Beyond just those though, the constant loop of Healing->Damage (Addersting for Toxicon, Addersgall's MP regen) and Damage->Healing (Kardia/Philosophia, Pneuma) is a blast IMO!
To this day I think HW AST was Peak Healer Design, you had such a fun system shuffling cards and extending/enhancing buffs that it felt rewarding to play well. I've stopped playing healer as my primary role since shadowbringers. I really like the idea of a momentum healer, or rewarding healing with dps or even movement options. Instead of x2 lightspeed, there could have been a fun option for playing a card to provide an instant cast gcd neutral spell, giving you essentially three free movement gcds per 55 seconds. That would make it close to on par with using lillies for movement, and being rewarded for using your kit. They could also add a simple DPS rotation like Dancers 12 - 50/50 - 34. Instead of rewarding fans, Empowering or storing an ogcd heal/regen as a stack to use as wanted/needed. I think there is a lot of ways to tackle this, and not everyone will be happy with whatever SQEX does in 8.0. I sadly still have no hope for FFXIV healers to ever feel rewarding to play, outside of prog in the future.
As a SAM main, hearing Kionu explain his dream healer, made me go "so he basically wants a healer that plays like a SAM... now that's a man of culture right there" :D On the healer side though, am progging TEA as SCH and I gotta say, there are definitely moments where I wouldn't want any more complex damage rotations, and there are moments that I really wish there would be some. Ultimately I feel like there definitely should be a clear distinction between GCD and oGCD heals, where the GCD ones do A LOT and the oGCD ones should be at best a supplementary option, which realistically would make the healer both simpler and more accessible, but also would make room for those more complex damage rotations. And yeah, healing kits interacting with damage kits, is one of the main reasons why WHM is still my favourite healer, also why I'm not that fond of SCH aetherflow, which feels more like DRKs 3k MP TBN cost. It doesn't interact, it just shares the resource, so you have to pick between the two, not have one fuel the other. Imagine if using Energy Drain would give you stacks that you can then use on the heals, rather than sharing that. Would definitely make SCH a lot more interesting.
I feel like the biggest reason I dropped healing for the rPhys role was because healing was either too stressful and intensive, or absolutely boring and reliant on me spamming 2 buttons and remembering to dot every 30 seconds. I feel a pretty decent fix would be giving healers a "burst" window of damaging spells / abilities that they can start at-will that amplify their healing, or vice-versa where healing will damage a targeted enemy. Something akin to a temporary reverse-kardia with at least a 60 second cd? White Mage's Blood Lily is a really nice start, rewarding players with more damage for healing, but Sage and Astro don't have nearly as satisfying buttons that reward them for healing their team, and I never picked up Scholar qwq bc it hard
My solution to create more engagement would be for there to be more healer-specific mechanics that are less scripted and/or are not avoided once overgeared/on farm. This could be things such as use of more esuna or doom type mechanics, introducing additional mechanics like these, or adding more on top of these mechanics, such as needing to esuna certain people but leaving others. Create more situations where proactive/reactive healing will always be needed, particularly on single targets, rather than only when a mistake is made. E10s comes to mind as an example I liked, where the bleed from divining wings 2 could create situations where neither healer was with bleeding member on the other side and would have to identify them and heal them as soon as they were back in range. I'm in two minds regarding adding complexity to healing and dps rotations for healers. On one hand, the lack of complexity, identity and, reactions across the kits are a bit stale and some change would be nice, I also worry for the average PF healer experience.... with how rough PF healers already are, I don't know if the playerbase could handle it...
More skill expression within healing and more monke brain stimulating attacks I think help. Healers besides WHM don't tickle that FELL CLEAVE itch really well. Something like: Sage- Ankardion: healing spells and abilities deal damage in an aoe around caster for 8 seconds based on their healing potency. Scholar- Martyr: Fairy becomes a bomb that deals damage based on your current aether stacks x600 potency and provides a regen to party. Alternative to dissipation. Astro- Revolution: mimics endsinger's planet chucker thing with damage based on number of casts done within a window. Meant for Lightspeed burst or heal checks.
Players used to complain about having to lose damage to heal. That's why healers have such powerful OGCDs now. Personally, I don't think going back is the solution and the FF14 devs have never been fond of going backwards on game design. I think fight design is the way to go to make healing feel more impactful.
Oh my healer has saved my butt in m4s with rescue. rezzed right bout time before ion cannon starts, and dragged me so i didnt fall lol. Ion Cannon seems healer heavy. For me, as a side note, I feel this is one of the best Tier's they have ever done, and may be the best intro tier so far. It's fun, and a nice balance of DPS checks, and Body checks. I hope we see more of this going forward. Love the idea of the momentum healer, there is one in LOTRO. the runekeeper mage who can be dps or heals based on how their gauge is charge would be great!
Honestly, I think they maybe should look at their philosophy on healers. Either make it healers can dps as a luxury, when the party is full of pros and a moment of downtime of mechanics is happening they can use a few extra dps buttons but otherwise they should be focusing on heals. Maybe reduce the overall potency of heals and for regen healers make it they heal better on HoT targets, shields gain potency based on current hp so it rewards preemptive shielding therefore making shield healers give A LOT of EHP for busters. Or full send healers like they did with tanks and basically make them DPS that can heal, replace a lot of the OGCD heals with GCD DPS buttons, and give regen healers a heal that puts a hot on targets (like aspected benefit or w/e astro got in place of regen) and make shields maybe give like % healing increase on the targets shielded. I feel like they are stuck between the classic healer design of other games and their own design of everyone being a DPS but just different levels of DPS with few extra responsibilities. I dunno just my penny and nickel thoughts.
Rinon, if you come across this comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a concern of mine regarding the current healer direction. When it comes to conversations about healer DPS, there's disagreement on how invested healers should be with DPS actions, but I feel that the current "one-button DPS" model all 4 healers share actually continues to add more pressure on healers to maximize DPS. Each expansion introduces more offensive power creep as DPS and tank jobs get more potency injected into their rotations, and thus healers need more potency to keep up with that power creep or killing enemies even just when solo gets slower and slower. And we've seen how literally every expansion has added more potency to each healer's filler attack spell, but doesn't this just constantly add more pressure each expansion to maximize DPS uptime and make defensive play more punishing as more damage is lost per GCD spent on healing and barrier application? What will the potency of each filler attack look like in another 10 years if we carry on like this? Will Sage's Dosis III or its successor spells have a potency of 390 in 8.0, 420 in 9.0, 450 in 10.0, and 480 in 11.0? Is that healthy for the game?
My real hope is that we see enough design changes in the coming expansions that healers won't have such a high percentage of their damage loaded into their filler spell (and as an extension that jobs won't have quite as much of a percentage of their damage tied to a nuke or nuke combo), which would alleviate the need to be constantly scaling filler damage. More oGCDs, alternative GCDs, and decision making, and load the excess potency into those I actually very much agree with the take that was mentioned in this video that all healers should have some higher level of interaction between their healing/mitigaiton capabilities and their damaging rotation, and that these two aspects should be linked - white mage does it well but it definitely does what is the simplest/least interesting form of it, and I'd love to see that paradigm explored more deeply in 8.0. I have a video coming in a couple weeks that is way too long discussing the way I feel about healers, but whilst it feels rewarding to 0 GCD heal a phase or encounter and that should remain to an extent, my preference are that healer that need to GCD heal still feel like they are contributing to the party in terms of damage because they have access to at least a couple of oGCDs that provide value, or methods to later gain damage from those invested heals
@@RinBanana Those are my thoughts exactly. And I think there's room to approach that differently between each healer. When we look at DPS jobs, we can see a wider range of complexities between their rotations. There's room for something that's more developed than the current model, but still very approachable and easy to pick up and play while also having another healer that could be more technical. That was the original hope I had for Sage--that its identity of being a "DPS healer" would mean it was more technical offensively and would have more than just one filler, one DOT, one cooldown.
I love the idea of a combo healer, and I was hoping SGE would be like that. The concept of building into different heals with different combos is super cool, though. That's something that requires a lot more advance planning and has the potential to be super rewarding.
I couldn't agree more with Oryza about whm, I hate how for no actual reason it has a way worse kit compared to ast, it even made me change into astrologian in this expan despite how I love the job theme, as for the tier it was pretty fun to heal, feels nice having some recovery when not evey mech is a body check.
From my research and ~~doomscrolling~~ anecdotes of pre shadowbringers healing, theres a few things ive seen that are important to keep in mind From what ive read about ARR and Heavensward healing, it was a mix of both actual damage options (cross classing aero/thunder, along with the other necessary healer skills), and MP management that made constant dps an actual task to think about. Stormblood i havent been able to find much on other than anecdotes of how it was the best scholar has been (and it sounds like it) With that in mind, healing has a couple of inherent problems with how its been changed over the years. 1. MP management is no longer really a thing for 90% of cases. If you keep up Lucid Dreaming and press your one mp funny button, you will be fine. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to personal preference, but it does mean one less thing for healers to do outside of healing. It also harkens back to ffxiv 1.0 a touch, with their stated problem of "you would just use the most powerful spell over and over". We are kinda back to that. 2. Dps options. Even back in ARR healers had more dps options than we do/did have in endwalker. Scholar, being a subclass of arcanist, had Bio, Miasma, Ruin, Virus, shadowflare, and could cross class Aero and Blizzard 2 if wanted. WHM had cleric stance as well as fluid aura to manage. To summarize, old healing was a mix of more damage options/dots to upkeep, while also needing to heavily manage your MP so you had it for when healing came time. Cleric Stances very existence also causes needing to know fights well to know when to use it safely. The systematic removal of all of these aspects to manage has left healer with... Exceedingly little to do. Especially when older content was designed around this. There was a quote somewhere a few years ago that the devs dont want to "put pressure on healers to have to DPS". That would be great, if that wasnt how 6 years of content were designed around. The core combat design is healing at set intervals, meaning that *something* has to fill the time between healing. Endwalker AST filled the time far better than dawntrail ast with its overly simplified damage kit, with cards being a constant management task instead of every two minutes like they are now. It was the only healer in endwalker that i felt ok bringing into low level content because it had an engaging thing to do between healing. Now, there isnt anything that is fun low level and thats a massive problem. We have over 6 years of content that is still actively done, and the changes made to make healing easier have just negatively affected low level things and high level things alike. The only solution I can see is the devs stop trying to force this healers only heal mentality they got in shadowbringers, because their options are either: leave the role feeling awful for low end and make high end need constant healing (they have not succeeded in that in 5 years of shadowbringers, endwalker and now dawntrail). Or redesign the entire game to need healing all the time, which would take monumental effort. Or they could acknowledge their core encounter design and actually give veteran healers something to do, since new healers or bad healers aren't going to press all their buttons anyways.
This whole thing is why I said that the healer changes in dawntrail would be great, if they were a start and not an end. Because this is the only things the devs did, it feels like they begrudgingly gave healers a(n) button, rather than giving them it because of job design. One extra button every 2 minutes/1 minute AT ONLY THE HIGHEST LEVELS does not a fix make when all low end content needs extra things to press. Oh, but Summoner having a rez is a far more important discussion to be having than healer state clearly according to the live letters :D
It likely wouldn't work as a rebalance for all healers, but even putting it on a new healer would be cool, to have a dps combo that works similar to NIN's handsigns, where depending on the order in which you used the 3 GCD damage abilities, it could enable a different effect on a 4th GCD ability, with some being damage and others being healing, with theoretical options like: 1->2 making 4 be a ST heal, 1->2->3 making 4 be a ST regen, and 1->3->2 making 4 be a ST shield, 2->1 making 4 be AOE heal, 2->1->3 make 4 AOE regen, and 2->3->1 make 4 AOE shield. Combos starting with 3 could be damage focused combos, like 3->1->2 making 4 apply the class's DoT, and 3->2->1 turning 4 into an AOE DoT or potentially an on-demand mitigation, but it would require a GCD full cast. This would allow for using strong GCD heals that required you to pay attention to what damage buttons you're hitting to use the correct effect, and if you don't need the heal, you wouldn't need to use the 4th GCD, you would just keep dps-ing. A change that would be able to affect current healers is to add a system alongside a 123 combo that was similar to monk's forms. Maybe it wouldn't allow access to any new buttons, but it could potentially buff the outgoing heals of specific types of heals depending on where in the combo you are when you activate them. If being on 1 in your dps combo buffs outgoing ST healing, 2 buffs outgoing AOE healing, and 3 buffs outgoing Regens/Shields(depending on whether Regen/Shield Healer), it would add some thinking into when you actually *use* your heals. For example: If I need to AOE heal on WHM, and I'm going to use Afflatus Rapture, I'd want to be in Stage 2 of my DPS combo to get the buff, but if I'm going to use Medica 3, I might prefer to be in Stage 3 to buff the HoT instead of the initial heal. Or for SCH, if I want to spread Adlo, I'd want to be on Stage 3 to buff the shield, but if I'm using Concitation, Stage 3 could buff the shield effect, but Stage 2 could buff the healing effect, allowing for different applications of the same skill depending on the scenario
I took a break from healing after Asphodelos (Melee DPS'd in Abyssos, didn't raid in the last tier) and from the small bit I've seen of the current tier I'm quite happy with how healing feels, especially in dungeons. Dungeon healing to me has always felt very... whatever, but in DT I feel much more engaged and I feel like I have a bigger impact on how a fight turns out, and I like that! If I could ask for any one thing, I'd love to see a job that operates similar to WoW's Discipline Priest (yes I'm a masochist) - a job that does the majority of it's healing directly by doing damage, see Sage's Kardia, but much more significant. I also enjoyed Disc Priest (I never actually raided in WoW so I can't comment on that) because it had an actual DPS rotation rather than a DoT and single target filler. It was simple, but still quite satisfying to pull off
I love the suggestion of 'momentum' healing. Like what if Medica turned into Medica 3 after you spent 1-2 GCDs building 'healing power' by dpsing or an emergency ogcd?
Ill give some takes as a healer main for sometime since shb. I personally think a damage rotation may not go well for healer, but i think fight design should consider the tools that healers have atm, most of which some are just really busted. While i agree the basic 1,2,3 may help the role, it may either fall to the trap where we get more greedy green dps or the job may feel very overwhelming. Fight design should change a little to cater to the healing kit we have now so healers wont get bored. The TEA example is where i see this really shine as p1 healing can be pretty tight, p2 i actually see good reason to use my arrow card and even synastry of all skills, p3 j waves hit like a truck. I acknowledge not all encounters can be like this, but hope that fights can somewhat be designed with their current healing kit in mind. That said nice video!
It would be more engaging and fun to play as a healer if every healer have some "do this and you get this"-combo like said Astro with Neutral Sect - Horoscope - AoEHeal -> Helios Horoscope + Suntouched. It feels like you do something more rather than just spamming something. Astro is the best example. "Think ahead and get rewareded" (Earthly Star, Makrokosmos, Card System) is something that goes into the right direction. I wish the other healers has some sort of this combination healing too and more engaging attacks. What I'm most frustrated with is the interaction with the faerie from scholar. The faerie gauge could be so much better like if you heal a target a second gauge will be filled. You have to use this gauge to tether with the enemy and drain HP (like a dot). If it's empty you have to fill it up again. Summon Seraph instead you can decide to damage all enemies nearby or heal everyone nearby with a 100 potency heal ('cause everyone will be healed) like aetherpact. In Dissipation mode you can gather something that's converted from healing or mp usage into a massive shield or damage. For the other two healers (whm and sage) I don't have much of examples 'cause I dont play them recently. But yea... more (combo) interaction with the skills itselfs would be amazing...
I'd love a melee based healer that builds resources when they complete combos. A combat medic. Kinda how after using 3 lilies you get a Blood Lily, after completing combos you get a resource that can be used to channel healing spells, and better cooldowns need more of that resource. That paired with another resource for less potent heals, kind of how the PLD bar fills on autoattacks. That way you get rewarded for DPSing, while managing resources.
They could pull ideas from WoW, where there are two melee healers. Holy paladins generate their resource for casting healing spells from their melee combos like you described, and mistweaver monks can both directly convert damage to healing and extend their regen effects by using their melee rotation. I've been playing it and it's a fun playstyle I with they would try out in FFXIV.
Fight design is pretty heavily centred around a 4/4 melee/ranged split. You'd run into a lot of problems in PF with another player trying to find melee uptime.
@@mosley3485 I suppose it could have a ranged combo for when you need the healers to be away from the boss. Pretty sure the dev team could figure something out if they wanted to make it happen.
@@mosley3485 red mage much? You are easily able to fit 5 people in melee range for most of bosses. Four around and one inside. Funnily enough, the one inside is usually healer.
As a long-time Xenoblade fan who only got into FFXIV around Shadowbringers, I've always wondered if we might be able to draw upon the former series' character/class game design for some possible ways to shake up ffxiv job mechanics (e.g. burst attack on a DPS which scales based on the number of debuffs applied to a target, a HLR with increased damage either relative to how many buffs are active on all allies or if the user's HP =< 90%)
I love the concept of banking mitigated and healed damage. If you have the possibility of making a GCD shield damage neutral by maybe unlocking an oGCD equivalent to a filler damage spell (essentially TBN but for shield healers) or making using mitigation damage POSITIVE or neutral (looking at you, Sacred Soil), by unlocking a damage spell or oGCD that has more potency than an Energy Drain, then you will have less healer chadding. Nothing is worse than having a SCH chad you because they refuse to use aetherflow stacks on anything other than Energy Drain. Or a SGE that refuses to shield anything because it takes away a precious Dosis. I feel making GCD healing damage neutral (if used correctly), that will reduce the impact that selfish healers have as well as encourage healers to do what their job says they should do: Heal!
I really liked the suggestion of the momentum healer using gcd combos to gain healing procs. Sage is already the most fun healer to me because of it healing off doing damage. So extra complexity for the damage rotation on top of that would be chef's kiss 👨🍳😘
"I've always wanted a momentum healer, a healer that builds off of combos..." I remember before Shadowbringers came out, there was a leak of the jobs we'd get in the expansion. I don't recall the exact contents of the leaks, but a good number of em were real. Others were... half-right, and I remember one of them was "dancer will be healer." To be honest, this really piqued my interesting because I often associate healer jobs with mage-like characters, so the idea of healing through dances sounded pretty cool. We ultimately did end up getting some healing with dancer, but as everyone knows now the job ended up being a ranged DPS. Anyways, that's pretty much what that phrase reminded me of.
It's simple. Across all content increase the amount of damage so more healing is required. If it's supposedly too hard give us markers for when healing is required. Tanks have tank buster markers, make most bosses have a "percentage health down" attack that has a special marker, letting healer know they need to heal.
I love the idea of all healers having more of a synergy of their damage and their healing like WHM and its Lilies, especially since SCH currently has *anti-synergy* where they actively want to try to get around having to use their basic healing tools so they can eek out an extra 300 potency every minute (Energy Drain and Aetherflow). Even just making Energy Drain have 3 charges with a 20s recharge timer, and each charge giving 7-8% mana, giving 1 Aetherflow, and otherwise being identical to how it is now (and removing Aetherflow, though I would miss Aetherflow for nostalgia reasons) would be a *great* step in the right direction imo.
The main problem with healers for me is that as a patch goes on, as you get better gear and as everyone learns the fights, you end up using less and less of your kit. Tanks and DPS on the other hand still get to use their full kits/rotations outside of maybe dropping a mit or feint that they don't need anymore. So tanks become better tanks, DPS get bigger numbers and healers slowly morph into boring as fuck green dps.
That's why I heal in Ultimate and DPS in Savage. Ultimate always pushes your healing kit to the very limit, and I want big number when I'm DPSing in Savage, so I'm still engaged to maximize my parse even when I know the fight well.
Personally I'd like a swing back towards GCD and particularly casted healing facing off against higher steady incoming damage. Cast times force you to make choices about casting vs moving away from mechanics and also casting a spell so the healing goes off right as the damage comes in is satisfying. Steady incoming damage with GCD healing also forces you to pay attention to squeeze in damage between heals and reduces the amount of "Raidwide happens > Press oGCD heal > Situation resolved" portions of healing. Said damage can also be dealt a bit more at random so AoE heal isn't the answer 90% of the time, spot healing is definitely harder as a controller player like myself, but I wish it had more of a place outside of someone failing a mechanic. Managing chaos is part of the fun as a healer, but with how scripted every fight is in FFXIV there's precious little of it once people learn them. I don't think giving healers damage rotations to keep track of is the right way to go. I would definitely like to see them tie the damage and healing portions closer together with more mechanics like WHMs lily gauge and perhaps adding a "your next damage spell deals more damage" buff to casted heals to offset the GCD cost of using them and rewarding spacing them out instead of spam-healing until everyone is full and then going back to just casting damage
I think one connecting thread to a lot of the points brought up in this video is: In their current state, Healers are so heavily pigeonholed into their role that they have very little else to bring to the table. It might sound nuts, but I think one possible solution would be to take some healing power away from Healers and continue giving more of it to jobs in other roles. Not every job needs to have it, of course - we can still have our selfish DPSes for people who want no part in this - but I think it would help to shift a little more of the burden of keeping the team alive away from Healers and let them focus more on doing damage while giving them utility skills/spells that impact the team in more meaningful ways. They would still have access to all the most powerful and accessible heals, but this way they aren't stuck twiddling their thumbs when everyone is actually doing their part to stay alive.
Shield healer MVP,Pure Bad,WHM worst since to far back,even tho it once was cracked,something I surely do not get.Hope it gets some love along the line,otherwise I will whine…..pls xD
There has been many times during prog where the shield bars were going through the roof, and it wasn't because people were over-mitting the mechanics. There comes a point where you have to use your big button to be efficient, but the fight doesn't give enough big mechs for those big buttons to really be useful.
In addition to what has been said, I would like piety stat to be more impactful. Adding a damage/healing bonus to it would make it more viable and desirable than just get enough to be comfy. Doing that would lead to more interesting builds like sps + pie or in conjunction with high MP attacks that you wouldn't normally spam because of their cost (and bring back miasma 2 please!).
Unless a big overhaul comes that makes encounters and jobs in general different I don't really know how much they could tinker with the roles without alienating one or the other school of thought. I do think tho that making doing damage and healing more tied to each other should be the first step to go. Misery is a really cool and fun mechanic to play around and gaining toxicon stacks during downtime is also pretty interesting. As is I think Astrologian's card system for damage is enough to make astro relatively engaging and optimizing star and macro around multiple target is fun. From that point of view, I think having savage fights with more than one boss should be explored more, also because you'd have to tanks to keep an eye on instead of just having kardia/fairy on mt and forgetting about autos completely. Scholar on the other hand, boy oh boy. I think the current aetherflow system kinda feels bad, yes parse head whatever whatever but having soil being a dps loss against kera just doesn't sit right with me. Also using lustrate in general feels really bad and makes scholar really bad at saving people using single target healing since you don't have haima as well. Let's not talk about dissipation by the way cause that's a whole other can of worms. Personally I think something cool they could do is to make scholar gauge tied to a system similar to the blood lily since aetherpact is garbage anyway and scholar has really bad weaving cause of triple energy drain but no access to instacasts that aren't dps loss. I general I think they are taking into account the discontent people have, it's just they are complicated issues and these things take long time to change, especially without burning down the kitchen in the process so they're playing it safe. Hopefully changes will be done but yeah, I can see why people who have been healing for a long time might feel disconnected from it
As a newly minted healer who's only really picked up the role starting in EW with any kind of lens towards wanting to take it more seriously I can say that I agree with the idea that there's a serious issue in regards to encounters determining the fun I'm having. ValiEX and ZoraEX were fun for me in the beginning but I did notice that the feeling didn't last long outside of strange circumstances that created clutch plays since once you get the fights down it becomes a largely predefined dance that doesn't give you any incentive other than to cure your boredom to break out and do anything new. I know that's to be expected in a low-mid tier difficulty environment like Extremes where you can afford to make more mistakes and still come away with a clear but I don't feel like they help me prepare myself well for the rigors of something meatier like Savages and Ultimates compared to what I learn with my usual role, Tank and guides while helpful don't suit someone like me who's a more kinesthetic-type as well as they could. It really feels to me like there's very little middle ground between being a fresh healer and one of the ones that are capable to crossing that gulf into becoming more advanced. I am absolutely sure I'm missing something, I don't doubt that for a second. It's just an observation from the outside as it were.
There's more discussion I think to be had on the barrier healer roles, SCH and SGE, at least in savage. Boss damage output increased this tier, while overall DPS checks have dropped considerably. This puts much less pressure on healers to "make up" the rest of the damage total and so we can be much more flexible on which mitigation abilities to apply depending on which mechanics are stressing your group. For SCH, a timely expedient is great on Mario Kart, and heavy movement phases, and sometimes you have to place fairy in spots where parties have to spread out.
I agree on the Encounter Design point. I'm a scholar main and the kit feels fine but the dungeons ALONE, were eye openers and I've seen even people in expert struggle (yikes lmao). So Savage going forward should really make people work without it being insurmountable
I think it would be cool if there was a ground cleanse, or healers can make larger safe spots with their bubbles or some spell or other. I also think healers should interact more with the boss. So for example the boss has a debuff that gives a debuff to the raid, the healer has to cleanse the boss to cleanse the raid. Or the boss puts the group under some kind of mind control and the healer has to break it. Raid wide bleeds that last longer. Healers should get their own markers, like tanks have tank busters, healers could have a requirement to clear it that includes some purify or cleansing spell. We only have one spell for purify, esuna, maybe play around with that to bring a new element to the fights. As far as dps rotation goes it would be nice if there were more options for a damage rotation, dot, damage, aoe is pretty boring. Having certain damage spells be available when certain affects are on the gauge would be cool, someone mentioned that. So when I cast spell a, it adds a gauge dot and if I cast damage spell it does one effect, if i have 2 dots it does something else, and if i have 3 dots something else. Or having something like the redmage gauge, where you have a heal bar that fills and a damage bar that fills, and you get spells based on how much that gauge is filled. Scholar would be a good candidate for that one.
I play mostly healing or casting DPS classes. I love the concept of being a healer and I love it when it feels like my team "needs" me. But I can't express enough how discouraging it is to feel like I'm being effective, until I'm dead, and then I see the tank take down the enemy on their own while I'm laying there on the ground. It's almost demoralizing. I start to feel like I wasn't ever needed, they just needed to give me a role so I could play too. Like, when a kid wants to play a bored game with the adults so they let them roll the dice and tells them it's an important job, when in reality, if the kid left, the adults are more than capable of rolling the dice on their own. Making the healers feel more needed should be focused on more. Of course, I don't play extreme/savage content, so I imaging the case is different in the harder content. The other thing as was mentioned in the video is a better DPS combo rotation for healers. As it stands, Healers are basically low DPS classes with capability of healing when needed. When a fight is going well, Healers are expected to put out DPS. But what is DPS for healers? One or two skills that you spam. Then you start to zone out, and when a heal is needed, you've stopped paying attention. Give us a 4 skill rotation with a self/group heal at the end if it's properly executed would not only feel more fun and impactful, but also rewarding. Not to mention in open world content it would make roam the maps solo more fun as well. Note: I'm nearing the end of Post-Endwalker content, so if anything has changed in Dawntrail, I'm not aware of it yet. :)
Going to shill the BLU healer experience, even though it is niche content and not as accessible to many players. Playing through old content synced with 8 casters (1-2 of which are slightly less squishy on tank mimics) with a very limited kit was some of the most engaging healing I've ever done. The reason being that it was a lot less "find the right puzzle piece at the right time" kind of gameplay and much more on-the-fly puzzle solving for how to keep the party alive, where there were meaningful decisions being made with every check e.g. How much pom cure is required to baby the tank through autos? Should stotram be used or white wind? When and where to use angel's snack? Even such things as whether you took 2 dedicated pure healers or only 1 and 1 "off-healer" who was really a dps masquerading as a healer. All of this to say, I think that BLU healing has a combination of factors such as limited healing tools and greater levels of decision making (and access to an actual dps rotation that involves more than 2-3 buttons) that leads to much more engaging gameplay compared to what's on offer in current standard high-end content. Not saying that everything should just adopt the jank of BLU content but it definitely could stand to take a cue or two
Something i really want on scholar is something else that uses our faerie gauge. Give us an AoE spender for it, or let us use it to buff the actual fairy spells. Give us a damage spell that uses it. The amount of time im sitting at max gauge currently is stupid, ive rarely got need of fae pact.
oh awesome, did she transition? good for her. i remembered she clear UCoB on a DDR mat (or maybe it was guitar hero controller) from one trans woman to another, i'm happy for her
background on me. i started the game as a healer in stormblood. raided on dancer for shb and in EW i mainly raided on dnc and war. i played tank and healer roulette i cleared UWU as dancer in SHB. for DT i wanted to go back my roots and maining healer. doing all of DT as a sch was so fun. i blind prog-ed the 1st EX as a SCH. i love healing, it will always have a soft spot in my heart Q1: i wanted more things to do as a healer. DPSing and or healing. i would only feel like i needed a lilies for most content in normal raid and dungeon Q2: I think the healer strike came from a lot of the time the community only give healers negative reinforcement. Nobody cares when a healer is amazing and people are quick to point out when the healer is doing bad. Some healers get in their head "I'm bad. everyone's going to be mad at me. Why would I play this role?" Q3: i haven't done savage but the normal modes are pretty fun Q4: give back stormblood SCH and keep the new things we got (E.G recitation,seraph,sereraphism and expedient). the Eos changes can stay
This may be a little unrelated, though i think it will affect healing enjoyment too, but i really think ffxiv should have challenge achievements Like if you clear a savage floor with unusual circumstances you get rewarded. (E.g. clear with one tank, clear with dual shield healers, clear without using something) I think this could help shake up the weekly reclear boredom. But i understand that it would probably be a bit difficult to implement for minimal reward since not everyone does more hardcore play
For me I would love to have the GCD heals just be more meaningful. Right now, they just feel like a loss any time I use them. I would love more interaction between your damaging skills and your healing GCD Spells. Or interaction between your heals and the fight itself. Like for example, what if Medica III had a damage spell tied to it, that had a cooldown on it and that increased in potency as the HoT healed damage? It could incentivize using that GCD HoT to its full potential, letting it regen that damage so you can deal back more damage to the boss and not just trying to top everyone off quickly. That may just be a round about Misery but it would at least make using Medica III feel good and warrant some use. Or what if Helios Conjunction placed a stacking buff on your party members that would increase as the HoT healed them that you could use a skill to draw out of them at your leisure to enhance your cards or buff your damaging spells? Or in an encounter, maybe there is an encroaching plague consuming the arena and if it fills enough it will kill the party (This would be like Ex difficulty) and only GCD heals can push it back? The fight itself would then incentivize GCD healing and create an avenue for further optimization and careful planning so you can still do your damage but hold the encroaching death at bay.
If healer jobs won't be changed in the significant way, fights need to do way more damage throughout the fight and not just big damage with mit stack every 20-30 secs. Make those hits weaker, but applying bleeds requiring much more healing/shielding in general to keep party alive without overstressing hp bars with near oneshot raidwides.
A combo and more momentum based healer would be incredible. Hard agree with the need for more rotations, rather than just cycling cooldowns like I do now. I think it would map to the concept of healing being something interesting at multiple skill levels well -- if you don't do the rotation right, you still get *enough* heals, but if you do it right you get rewarded. Kind of like how in casual content (most) dps don't always need to press all their buttons right to win, its just slower when they don't :)
I'm (deliberatly) swapping to play healer in FRU for my static, as I've spent the past 5 years playing on the tank and DPS roles throughout various groups. I've been hearing constantly about how healers have had it rough since the big overhauls that Shadowbringers brought in. Since I'd only played AST and SCH briefly before ShB launched, I never really got to fully grasp their kits before the streamlining. But I already feel this weird, lingering attachment to the old card system, and the Miasma II management. It's like there's a core memory that I have associated with healing, that just isn't being fulfilled in the Shadowbringers+ era. Considering I'd only gotten to the level cap about 7 months prior to ShB coming out, and it's already been 4 years since the overhaul, I think that says a lot about how rich and plentiful the kits used to be compared to today. Not that anything they've added is inherently bad. But I remember Stormblood's healers and how they played to be far more enjoyable, despite having so much more time with the current era of healing.
I kinda like when they mentioned 1-2-3 healing leading to a bigger heal and the separate damage and healing gcds idea is funny enough what I kind of wanted out of dancer when I thought it would be a healer lol. Like a melee range healer that does dance steps with a weapon to damage and heal and buff? I would love that. Like it could have the worse dps ever but I would still play it just based on the playstyle being engaging.
The white mage gauge for the lily like it was mentioned other healers should have access to something similar with their own gauge. Definitely make healing more engaging and frequent but compensate the dps loss for the dps check with being able to pull off these big hitters after healing so much.
astro might be strong right now, but way less engaging than any previous iteration; arguably one of the things that made it one of the more interesting healers to play was that each pull was dynamic in terms of your card play. Now you just throw 2 cards at pretty much the same two targets every 2 minutes and even in current savage you just dump or overwrite the rest, either not really requiring much thought. As much as I'd love the card rework to be reverted, I realize it's probably not realistic and I would at least like to see the cards aside from the damage buffs to be turned into something more engaging
WoW Discipline Priest. XIV is literally perfectly designed for that kind of healer. They have a VERY strong degree of control over our numbers and the boss's output numbers, to make it work without being drastically broken or completely garbage. Do that and you can give healers a PROPER DPS ROTATION without sacrificing the bottom bare minimum healing required in pug content. Turn the oGCD buttons into supportive healing buttons that drain and restore MP with cooldowns, giving them a pseudo-oGCD rotation that is required to be managed, even potentially on the fly, to handle increased damage output in EX+s. Just don't do something stupid like Assize or Earthly Star again with that idea. Yes, they're satisfying to push and neat and all, but if you make a *heal* button do *damage,* you've... made another damage button. The community is not going to care if it does healing. Any healing done when it comes off cooldown will be a bonus, NOT a feature. Credit where it's due. ES has a *window* to pop it, to kind of do both, but it's still a "push it NOW or your DPS tanks" button before anything else.
21:40 - OMG this! WHM needs a party mit on a 60 sec CD. Like...badly. I'd personally slap a 10% mitigation on Plenary as an easy fix since it already is a party buff that the effect could be added onto.
I think one design choice that needs to be looked at is the damage down. Right now, failing a mechanic results in a damage down. Too many can cause dps check failures. Gone are the days where a Black Mage could shield and survive, and refuse to move for more uptime. If Damage down was a healing debuff, or absorbed a certain amount of healing before it could be removed, this would open up a lot of healing space. Single target healing, regens, single healer mitigations, and spot shields before the next damage could be used. Speed runs could add complexities of sacrificing a healer gcd for more higher damage uptime. It's a skill expression, albiet group skill expression, that would add more dynamic decision making. Intentional failure for uptime could be an interesting group dynamic. That's the other problem right now... Pure healer regens are mostly overhealing. Having time where heals don't apply but regens will still tick as a mechanic is something every healer could do (medica 3, Aslyum, opposition, aspected helios, whispering dawn, sacred soil, physis, kerachole) ... it would space for heal over times to work. They're just wasted overhealing in most content. Something needs to give these life, because high end healers will allow them to breathe. Low end healers do not. And lastly, hearing Stal read the notes made my day. I've already liked, subscribed and commented, so I'll just emoji my thanks. ❤🎉❤🎉
I am definitely biased but i think the current lv70 kits hit the best balance of heals, each one feels impactful and you don't have so many you forget they exist. All the while Gcd heals are still needed, making the path to optimisation planning out those ogcds well, coordinating with your co-healer even. (except WHM, but.. WHM.) Though i would like something more than spamming 1 button over prolonged periods of not healing, and the mp system feels really bad because the only way to conserve mp when really low is to do literally nothing, and it hurts my soul.
Keep the Lily Gauge on WHM, no more homogenization. Not every job needs a dash. SCH also does have a damage skill with their gauge called Energy Drain but it was nerfed so much because how dare we try to optimize? Make ED more impactful or even upgrade it into bane for DoT gameplay.
They nerfed energy drain into the ground and yet majority of scholars use their stacks until almost nothing is left anyway 😂 Sometimes 10% dmg reduction from soil makes all the difference but they're too busy energy draining and hoping their gray/green turns into a purple. Keeping energy drain potency low is good, otherwise it promotes this garbage from people who don't care
Smh when I get 6 energy drain SCH’s who think fae illumination can replace soil. Do not buff energy drain. People are going to make SCH even more cringe than it already is.
The SCH gauge is the inverse of what these players advocate for though. With the SCH gauge you have to choose between either getting damage or doing healing. With the WHM gauge you get healing and get rewarded with damaage at the end. One is a "take your pick" leading to sweaty damage optimizazion by forgoing your healing tools while the other is encouraging you to use your healing more without a drawback to your dps.
One thing i think also contributes is that very often in the grind part, where 99% of players stay, Healers are not really put on the spotlight. When you clear dungeons with PAL or even WAR who can almost solo encounters with their kits, Healers and Tanks are not taught to work together. Even worst, as it was stated in the video, healers can sometimes be completely ignored when you have for example A warrior and a RDM or a SUM, who can also rez. That's not good. I remember multiple times where i had to pick up the healing as RDM with my weak healing spell, and yet managed to keep the WAR alive for the boss.
I think the issue is that there is nothing random happening in the game. It's all just puzzle solving and the same move sets. Make trash have 3 abilities they do randomly, make raids bosses have a larger move set they use randomly. People think it's the job, i think it's the combat.
it might be too much button bloat, but having a dps combo that rewards and ogcd heal or vise versa where using heals in combinations with a buff unlocks an ogcd damage button
![[FFXIV] Mentor Breakdown](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-hnaVEx7b3w/mqdefault.jpg)
Go to surfshark.com/rinon for 4 extra months of Surfshark.
just want to say on my data grp healers are not the less played and the one guy claims its always the bounus class in rullets i want to know what server that is kek its 99.9% tanks
As a healer main, my biggest gripe is that the Rescue CD is too long. How am i supposed to effectively rescue my dps into deadly aoe’s?
" CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE BEING RESCUED"
Do not resist.
No, but for real. After learning GNB and being able to "rescue" with Heart of Corundum to save people, why does Rescue have 120s cooldown? Corundum fixes mistakes at a 25s cooldown.
@@Ratoncitow No, my lane lines!! Please have mercy!!
@@skellysniperyt3210 i mean im pretty sure rescue is a 120 for a reason that being that it would make trolling people with it even easier than it already is and also allow for it to happen more often
The one common thing I keep hearing from healers, myself included, is that healing is fun when it's chaotic. When people are taking additional unintended damage and you have to think on the spot to recover. It's mentioned in this video too. I've not raided recently since my static is dead but that was my problem with savage. It was too punishing most of the time for that very situation to occur. I often head into newer trials just to experience healing the chaos of people being new and getting hit by stuff. The satisfaction I get when I, as a healer, get my team through the toughest of situations is why I want to heal. It's why reclears are so boring. When everyone knows where to go and what to do, is when healers have the least to do and are the least engaged.
here is a secret for u, me as a dps i am bored out of my mind on reclears as well. rotato figured out just rince and repeat, not really engaging or anythin really.
I agree with this. Healing is most fun when you think outside the box and do something very quick to recover a mistake. But right now, I feel like this breaks the expectation of a healer. Maybe it’s just from my experience, but I’ve been scolded by parties for using a party-saving GCD ability as an AST because I should have been dealing damage instead. Sitting there and dealing damage as a healer is boring
Not enough frequent/continuous but predictable damage. Tank busters are too weak.
Too high incoming damage spike on mess ups.
Esuna is barely seeing any use outside gimmick mechanics.
@marioharrer9999 exactly THIS ! People acting like Dps or tank don't do the exact same thing and rotation when already comfortable with the fight and reclears. It's the most boring part for EVERYONE, not just for healers.
I think one of the biggest pain points for healing is the difference between restoring HP and reviving. I love finding ways to top people off when they take unexpected damage, but unexpected deaths (especially instant deaths) are miserable.
The biggest problem for healer is that the role gets less interesting the better you are. Healing a non expert team can be quite the involved endeavour as you pull out all the stops to keep the failing party alive. In contrast a good party with a skilled healer manages mechanics and most heals can be planned out before the fight has even begun. This is also why prog is the most interesting and impactful time for healers.
This is als why throwing a dps rotation into the healer kit won't solve the issue. It will just make the job even more stressful and demanding as there will be a more stringent pressure to do all the dps you can. I agree that WHM gauge (do healing -> get damage reward) is the correct direction to take while SCH gauge (choose beetween either healing or damage) is the wrong way.
As someone else already commented here somewhere, the current design is what actually increases the pressure to dps.
Since almost all of your offensive potency is currently funneled into your filler every single cast of said filler counts, because every GCD you're not casting Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis is your full damage potential lost for that cast.
With a more involved dps kit you wouldn't suddenly deal 2x the damage you currently do and consequently increase the pressure to dps 100% of a fight.
It would simply shift your current total damage output into multiple different abilities instead of a single one.
Let's take Whitemage for example, Glare III is currently your main source of damage by a pretty wide margin so every GCD that isn't Glare III is quite a lot of dps lost.
Now what if WHM got two new damage GCDs added, one on a 30 second cooldown and one on a 60 second cooldown, but instead of just increasing the total damage it is instead potency taken away from Glare, so your total damage is still the same as it is right now but Glare only deals 170 potency per cast instead of 330, with the missing potency provided by the two new abilities.
This means that each missed cast of Glare III is actually less punishing as long as you can land the two new abilities every 30 and 60 seconds respectively.
The problem with giving the other healers a WHM style gauge is the WHM gauge (speaking as a WHM main) is specifically to fix a core problem with the class. Namely that we have much more GCDs than other jobs and it is (besides the new wings) our only real source of mobility. It would be unfair for the other jobs to get such a gauge change, or they would have to massively buff miseries output to push it beyond DPS neutral on paper to compensate.
Yep. I love prog on a healer. Reclears put me to sleep.
It's one of the reasons I'm not so fond of this tier. As a midcore raider, it died too fast and left me doing the boring parts of healing right away.
As a scholar main I've found the raid tier quite fun however I do have two criticisms , make my fairie gauge do something other than a single target tether heal and change dissipation into something else because locking yourself out of half your kit just isn't good design
Dissipation is fine because it rewards you knowing the fight and when its safe to not need it or use it for a spreadlo. It's honestly the most thought imposing part of the kit, almost like a discount cleric stance
@@SuperShesh2 No, it's not. Dissipation and Energy Drain are the two most complained about SCH abilities for good reason, and the reason isn't "people are just bad/lazy". It's because they really are not good design and largely either feel lackluster or outright bad. There are plenty of good parts of SCH's kit that require setup or thought, for example, using Protraction before a Spreadlo. Dissipation is not one of them.
@@SubduedRadical I personally enjoy Dissipation. It's fun to optimize.
I'm probably in the minority there, but it's definitely not "objectively" bad. If anything, I'm glad there's still at least one job that has some punishing aspects.
I think a fun addition to Dissipation would be a sort of “Reconstitution” type ability. You can get your fairy back early, but it would come at a massive mp cost. Like, maybe make it so that you lose 90% of your current mp to cast it, so it could exist but would need to be planned around?
(Just throwing out my first thought, cause yeah, losing most of our kit is… frustrating)
well I think there should be more job engagement for Dissipations for SCH, like other than the current effect, maybe add something like "when the fairy returns after Dissipation ends, all of the fairy skills CD will be reduced by 10 secs" or like "while in dissipation, any healing abilities, that requires aetherflow, has their CD reduced by 10 sec"
maybe the best healer balance is friends we made along the way....
TRUE
I agree with most of the suggestions here but I do think Komachi saying "I don't think healing should be made harder" before proposing a bunch of changes that would make it much harder is really funny
My favorite suggestion in the video is to give more healers meters like White Mage's that turn your healing into damage. I agree that's an extremely satisfying mechanic to engage with.
No warriors here, smh
they were too busy topping the hps charts
We're too busy making axe puns, talking like cavemen and soloing bosses :P
UNGA???
11:22 If nothing else, take this advice from Stal.
In all seriousness though, this is a really interesting take on the healer role. I mainly play healer for quick queues in roulettes and might give it a shot in Savage. My main issue with the job is that it is so reliant on party being able to do mechs properly. I personally find healing way more fun when people are new to a fight and I have to stop us from wiping. So I'd have to agree with Komachi in terms of making rotations more interesting and requiring you to think more about your actions more
I really agree with Komachi's suggestion of making more involved healing and DPS rotations. I don't like the current design of most healer kits where they just have a pile of cooldowns to cycle through that have little if any internal synergy. It would be more fun to have spells and abilities that interact with each other and flow together for optimal healing.
Agreed if the intended design is for healers to be doing damage while healing then doing damage should synergies with healing & vice versa so that healers have a full rotational kit that allows a fun DPS play style that reinforces your moments of giving heals along with your emergency buttons.
@@jaquanepatterson2537 We have 'using healing feeds into your damage' via Misery and the Lily system, so I think one of the most obvious things that could be added is a system wherein 'dealing damage feeds into your healing'. I've suggested as much as an expansion to WHM, via adding a new gauge I call 'Nature's Vigilance'. Any non-Lily GCD generates some Vigilance gauge, with GCD healing generating it way faster than damage spells (to get the player back into damage-neutral gameplay faster). My maths estimated the gauge per minute with full DPS uptime to be around 55-60.
You'd then spend 50 of this Vigilance on a new move, Blessing of the Elementals, which is a strong AOE healing GCD. BOTE would also grant a new gauge element, one Petal of Earthen Ire, one Petal of Wrathful Winds, and one Petal of Raging Rivers (these petals can stack to 2 each to prevent overcap). While a Petal is present, its respective filler spell (Earth - Stone/Glare, Wind - Aero/Dia, Water - Water/Banish (new action)) is upgraded to Quake, Tornado or Flood. The potency gained by casting these three Elemental spells is equal to four Glares, making them plus the GCD that generates them damage neutral. However, like Misery, their slightly higher potency means that optimizers would want to try and place the 'refund' GCDs within the burst window
There's also the whole 'you heal by dealing damage' thing that SGE was supposed to embody (and kinda fails at) but describing what I'd do there is an essay of its own
I will never understand the idea of having healers with...more involved DPS rotations. Don't get me wrong, I can think of some DPS rotations that could be interesting for healers, like imagine a healer with instant use Weaponskills (like MCH has its 1-2-3 combo and tools). That could be interesting as an oGCD healer that has tons of short CD oGCDs to do its actual healing while performing its damage rotation. But most ideas for healers is for them to be CASTERS, where your DPS rotation would get in the way of healing, or "more DoTs", the most stupid, braindead, and annoying damage mechanic in all of MMOs.
As a Healer who started with this expansion.
I understand the perspective of "easy" healing. But that assumes you have a second healer in the raid with brain.
The amount of times me as the Scholar has to actively keep the Tank alive with GCD heals because the WHM thinks 10k HP on a Tank is fine to spam Glare with is mesmerizing.
Let alone healing becomes easier if you have a group that understands mitigation.
I personally enjoy healing, and I wish it would be a bit more complex in the DPS department.
But I want to point out healing isn't "easy", Especially learning fights while also getting more familiar with the Job is at first overwhelming, soo I understand that people struggle.
I also feel that resources ingame about good healing are missing. Like there is no good advice from the game how to deal with chain of raidwides.
The Novice Hall needs a healing rework and that badly. We can't expect any healer to pick up healing to watch youtube videos of optimal healing and mitigation rotations.
Biggest painpoint for me. HoT's are really badly communicated in game as to how much healing it will do over time. The Buff itself with a timer is one thing, but you have to remember ALL HoT's by symbol and you cannot tell at all how big the effect is.
Which leads to "safe healers", topping people off the whole time even if the next 20 seconds there is no incoming damage, because they see half-empty health bars.
As someone who has been healing like 6 years in this game I can give you some advice on what you are doing wrong in 2 healer fights.
When I am healing and see my co-healer constantly healing the tank or spamming heals on the raid I will simply switch to pure DPS mode. Because they have demonstrated to me they aren't going to DPS so I need to make up the slack for them in that department. It is about the healing power balance between you and your co-healer. Sometimes you (to be blunt) need to play chicken with the parties HP to demonstrate to the other healer that you aren't going to do 100% of their work for them.
Sometimes you just get a plainly bad co-healer but I have found that to be a rarity in most of the PUG content I have played over the years. Most of the time you end up doing all the work is because you communicate to the other healer (via overhealing) that you want to do all the healing in the fight and they happily will let you.
One of my ideas for making healer more engaging is to involve MP as a mechanic more. Neutral Sect in certain scenarios (p10s HH and DSR Wroth come to mind) and now SCH's Seraphism give healers access to some of the strongest heals at the game...at incredible MP costs when spammed. WHM's limited ogcd kit and lilies can only take it so far in prog or emergency scenarios...but it feels really good to recover a party going south by using one charge of Thin Air to rez and the other to Cure III.
I would almost feel tempted to say, reduce the MP costs of GCD heals to be equivalent to filler (400MP) and have oGCD heals start at 500MP for single target and 700MP for AoE, depending on potency and CD duration. Casual players who don't know how to manage their MP well can get through most content mostly GCD healing while more skilled healers make the tradeoff between extra damage and MP management. As a bonus, piety becomes a not-completely-dead stat in scenarios where bringing enough of it saves you and your cohealer enough GCDs that it's a gain over pure damaging substats like crit.
I've been playing Scholar more now and the biggest change I've noticed from playing tank to playing healer is how much harder it is to keep time while playing healer. With tank I can anticipate when I'm pressing a mitigation down to the gcd, because I know that the mechanic will happen when I get to a specific part of my combo and I can time my mitigations to other parts of that combo. With healer, everything happens on Broil and it becomes a lot harder to keep track of time for me. Even just a 1 2 combo for healers would help so much for letting players build muscle memory
I'm a SCH main, and I will say with SCH at least, though I've also personally noticed this with AST as well (I have less experience with the others, so I can't comment as easily), you've got a couple of very important cooldowns that you want to always be cycling at specific points, so you've got a very solid timekeeper. They're longer than a basic combo on melees, but you've still got Aetherflow that you want to be very aware of (important for Mana and healing resources), which is a 60s cooldown, and you've got Astral/Umbral Draw on a 30s (mana, damage buff) for AST (you also have Earthly Star on a 60s, though you plan that a bit differently than you plan Draw or Aetherflow).
Similarly, both SGE and WHM important timers that they keep track of, such as Assize (30s healing, damage, and mana) and your gauge on WHM, or your gauge on SGE. Again, I'm not as familiar with these two so I'd have to look up details for their timers. Also, all four of them need to be keeping track of their Lucid Dreaming cooldown, and you've got your 30s DoTs on all of 'em.
When you get particularly familiar with a healer, at least in my experience, you end up being pretty clear on what mechanics will happen when just based on where your mana skills are in their cooldowns.
None of this is to say that I don't wish I had more to think about with DPS or rotations or combos or anything, but rather a tip for something that might help you keep track of time better.
Dude, as a tank main messin around with healing, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
I love healers as a tank main because they help me stay alive when the big bad boss hurts me : )
A tetragrammaton is like a kiss on the cheek
I only healed for one tier (Anabaseios), and it's crazy how I felt both extremes in terms of fun. Progging it as a SGE was genuinely the most fun I've had in this game and I remember being fully commited to becoming a healer main from then on, BUT as my static did reclears, became more consistent and better geared, the fun factor took a nosedive for me. I think healer is in a pretty good spot for progging scenarios, but they need to design fights that are fun to reclear after everything is figured out as well
Fully agree with the point about WHM lillies being a good example of how healing could work. Banking dps by using healing GCD’s would do wonders and would take minimal effort.
Personally, I would prefer each healer get a suite of spells with very short CDs (think reduced healing potency Pneuma on Holy Sheltron or TBN CD) that are damage neutral heals requiring positioning to deal the damage or provide the heal. I don’t necessarily want a dps rotation, instead I want different dps buttons that simultaneously heal and require me to think about how to use them. Straight line, short range AoE, floor targeted, setup time.
And I want it to be a mix of how the spell is aimed. Like, damage is a line you have to aim but healing pulses the whole party or heal is a ground targeted burst that fires a bolt of damage at the nearest enemy, so you only need to focus on aiming one aspect of each spell at a time but you need to be aware of which part is aimed for each spell
What i would like to see, would be something like auras, or heal/dmg jumping between targets.
Healers simply need more engaging damage based mechanics. Take them away from the basic one button setup and give them rotations that feed into healing procs like was suggested in the video. Like what if Free Cure on WHM was changed to proc 30% of the time at the end of a three GCD damage combo? Now it's no longer bait for new healers and rewards them for participating in damage, where learning they should be doing damage in group content is the hardest thing for new healers to understand.
I think a good example of a change would come from WHM lily charges. How about instead of each charge being a heal then giving a proc for a damage button, it's damage charges like BLM's job gauge, but at the end it gives a high potency heal you can deploy? Things like that would go far in making healers feel more dynamic for casual and hardcore players alike.
100% agree. I've been saying this for years. 14's fight design requires every role to optimize dps. Giving healers damage tools that feed into their healing kit would make their dps feel less redundant and fit the overall design of the game better.
As a player who went from hyper casual pure healer to dishing purple-orange numbers in savage, Stormblood SCH lives in my head rent free as the pinnacle of healer gameplay.
I agree that fight design should be more engaging; built towards making sure your healers are paying attention, not getting overwhelmed with a flood of personal mechanics AND damage, and encouraging the ability to save a run if the fight design allows it (m2s stacks from hearts, for example).
However, I’ll never forget the enjoyment I felt from how engaging SCH’s dps priority felt, maintaining dots and supplementing Energy Drain as able. SCH used to have a very high skill ceiling with a medium skill floor that definitely underwent some remodeling and modernized gutting. Coming from someone who raids in organized static settings, where lots of things can be consistently planned out in advance, having that extra “mini game” of maintaining dots with my rolling GCD while also keeping everyone alive was the most engaged I ever felt playing healer in FFXIV.
My concept for a healer was Chemist having a sort of mudra-like system and a ton of resource banking so you need to continue a rotation to always have a supply of your “potions” to use as needed, with full access to a basic cure and medica equivalent that’s more MP heavy than the others to encourage you to keep mixing.
I had the same thoughts, bro!
Same, it would be so fun.
You know it was actually thought off but ultimately we got Sage, right?
@@Nitpicky3RD Unsurprisingly, Sage is my favorite healer 😅
I think honestly the core issue with healing just comes down to the idea that good game design is defined by interesting decision making in the moment, and the job ultimately feels extremely linear in a lot of regards.
A major reason for this imo is the fact that the game is balanced under the assumption everyone will be contributing to the overall DPS as much as they can, but ultimately people are not playing healer to do a complicated DPS rotation, even though the overwhelming majority of their buttons are feeding into that end goal. How do you make interesting choices when 80% of the buttons you press are not aligned with the fantasy your job is trying to play into?
I think something we should expect to see is healers adopting the 1-2-3 style of Picto, where its one button that shifts between multiple steps to visually present itself differently between attacks, and -hopefully- at the end of each sequence, providing some resource for healing, or some branching choice as a finisher.
Personally, a major point of annoyance I have with something like Sages design is that it feels almost -wrong- to use your GCD shield options if you can get away with not pressing them, but you feel like it you're encouraged to want to press them to build addersting stacks. Removing the black/white, right/wrong choices and instead doing something where like.. a healer does 1-2-3-[Finisher], like how the viper gets their OGCD at the end of each string, but having that finisher be one of multiple choices which all serve different goals in different context I feel would be much more interesting.
There's so many directions they could take healers, but I think right now they're in a really weird corner they need to break out of with their overall design philosophy.
This might be hard due to how the encounter design works but I just wish they made any combination of healers viable. You could maybe do this by having 1 pure pure healer (whm), 1 pure barrier healer (sch) and make 2 "in between" healers (ast & sge) leaning more to what sage has right now.
That way minimal mit checks should still be doable with any comp and you're not looked out of playing your favourite healer just because someone else already picked a pure/barrier healer
Most importantly for where FFXIV is in it's design philosophy: If the primary thing you should be doing with GCDs is damage, dealing damage with GCDs should be interesting. Pressing the same button 800 times a fight and every 10-20 seconds or so you press an OGCD to top the party up is the worst design, if a dps had that sort of design at this point in the game Yoshi-P would be crucified. There just isn't an excuse for this that works for me.
I also personally feel that accessibility at a base level IS important but the returns on that are very capped. If healers are too hard to play will you lose healer population? Yep. If healers are too boring to play will you lose healer population? Also yep. So denying complexity to the role doesn't really preserve the game health in the sacrifice either after a certain point you're better off having a satisfying role that is underrepresented than a tedious one that is underrepresented. Returning to a point where MP is much more limited is my personal want but I know that might not be a common want. But having to portion out a resource you will have a limited amount of through a fight and deciding how much of it you can use on damage and still have enough to meet healing demands is interesting for me, and it also creates more 'healing activity' when you have smaller, efficient heals that take up more GCD's but extend how far your MP pool stretches.
stall is healer now confirmed
Stal's presence is healing for me
Lots of interesting perspectives would like to see some of these ideas implemented in the future
Not a healer main at all but I just have to say that I really appreciate the perspectives given in these videos. So many discussions similar to this one completely ignore the impact of any changes on those who aren't high end raiders and I appreciate the effort put in to at least consider how suggested changes actually impact newer and/or less experienced players This is particularly true when it comes to Healing as it's probably the just with the biggest gap between how it feels to play a healer when you "know what you're doing" and when you aren't a seasoned veteran (and how huge the impact of an experienced healer VS an inexperienced healer can have on the whole party). If you're going to make changes to healers (or changes to fight design in an effort to make healing more involved) you must consider all levels of healer play.
I will say that I'd be wary of just pointing at one of the healer jobs and saying that "other healers should have that too" as that's what has led to so many of the roles/jobs in the game feeling as homogenized as they do. Sure the versatility of AST is probably appealing to WHMs, but if you just give WHM the tools that AST has then you might just end up with AST and AST2 and is that really what you want? Or about giving more/all of the healers something like the WHM Lily system. Sure ti seems like the most engaging system in many ways but do you really want every healer to basically play like WHM?
To share my favorite healing moment, and drive engagement: I’d say Proto-Ozma for Baldesion Arsenal.
There is a lot to watch out for in that fight, Sphere’s hefty auto attacks, heavy off tank damage in cube, the shared stack auto attacks in star, baiting the stacking spreading bleed dot and spot cleansing it, keeping the dps and tanks hurting themselves with high Double Edge stacks, and all Ozma’s mechanics and raidwides along with those. Then there’s the dilemma of whether the use Sacrifice to raise someone and risk your Spirit of the Remembered not reraising you.
I love the points Kionu and Komachi made about damage and healing weaving into each other! We really need more of the damage and healing components feeling more like part of the same, interconnected kit. It would make healing more interesting, possibly more intuitive, and would allow the design team to create more fights that require GCD healing. The current binary status quo of GCD healing being a outright damage loss has always left a sour taste in my mouth.
Problem with healers is their healing buttons only matter IF someone takes damage. A healer's involvement is directly proportional to the party members/raid members knowledge of the fight. If that damage is more of a "when" it can be planned around, and that just feels like a token "your healers are helping too" moment.
This sort of makes handing healers more interesting DPS rotations the only reasonable solution, since healing is naturally reactionary and you can't make it a regular thing for more than occasionally healing the tank without introducing loads more unavoidable aggro agnostic damage, which isn't engaging for the player taking that hit.
And I mean, healers don't really need more to their DPS than any given tank. A PLD has like 3 OGCD attacks and the rest is all a large variety of GCDs and there are people that still love that job. People don't ask for much, they'd just like to have more than ONE button to worry about between spurts of healing.
I enjoy progging fights as a healer, but as was said multiple times in the video you are at the mercy of the fight designers in regards to whether the encounters will be fun to heal or not. Considering the fairly large investment in getting BIS for one job, I'm going to prioritize DPS as I know my experience across the encounters will remain mostly stable. Not to mention said gear can be used to make other non-Savage content go faster, like EX trial spam. So the solution to get me to heal is to improve the encounter design or just give away healer gear for free.
I like your music choices! Good videos as usual
20:30 this idea is so incredible I just spent 30 minutes thinking about it, trying to figure out how I would implement such a thing as a new healer job.
At the end of the day, it would be too different from existing healers (and have some associated kinks) so square enix would never implement such a thing, but it is still super fun to theorize.
Here's what I came up with:
This healer would have several damage GCD buttons. When you use them, you gain some gauge, which you can use on oGCD heals.
There should be 3-4 GCD damage buttons, and each has its associated gauge (maybe like based on elements or something). Each oGCD heal requires a different one of the gauges in order to use, with some gauge overlap (some of them also have a cooldown).
The idea is to mimic SCH's Aetherflow / SGE's Addersgall, where you get to choose how to spend your limited healing resources, but with the additional twist of having to prep your tools beforehand by choosing which GCD's you use. This also adds some button variety to low healing phases, with you going "OK need to prep my gauges for the next phase let me cycle through my GCDs".
I think all the GCDs should have equal PPS, but you can still do fun things with it:
- A completely DPS neutral instant cast, but the gauge it gives is not very useful, only used for a single target heal in the vein of lustrate/tetra/dignity. You can be the most mobile healer in the game, at the cost of your healing ability
- The opposite. A 2.3 second DPS cast that gives gauge used for a sacred soil level skill
- Different heal oGCD have different gauge costs. You can use the single target heal after every damage GCD and it can be spammed with enough gauge built, but the most powerful oGCDs take 4-5 GCDs to build up enough gauge and empty most of it
- A 1 minute damaging oGCD that requires gauge. Using it is optimal for parsing but since it is not spammable it removes the "every aetherflow spent on healing is lost damage" problem SCH has
- An oGCD that fills all gauges by 50, 3 minute cooldown
- Capstone ability that requires 25 of all guages to use
Of course, since your healing ability is entirely dependent on hitting the enemy, the job requires a downtime skill, an instant cast GCD that does no damage but refills all gauges by a bit.
The interesting thing is, this can be the job's equivalent to GCD healing on other jobs - when you're learning a fight you use it a lot to get a lot of healing done, safety heal all mechanics, recover mistakes etc, then as you get better at the fight you can start cutting uses of this GCD in favor of more damage GCDs.
Only problem is it's hard to figure out the numbers on this - if the MP cost is too low, the job becomes broken in prog, if it's too high it doesn't work as a downtime tool. If it gives too much gauge then being able to fully restore all resources in 10 seconds of downtime is broken, if it's too little then it feels terrible to press in uptime, you don't get enough bang for your buck.
Due to this it might be for the best to still have GCD healing tools, and just have this downtime tool as an alternate "you can use this to sacrifice damage for healing" button in addition to the GCD heals
I feel like the fact that so much raidwide mitigation is completely outside the healers' control is also a huge issue, and one that isn't talked about a lot by higher end players since they're not affected by it. In a well coordinated static, you have a mit plan and the healers can rely on the rest of the group to actually follow said mit plan.
In a pug environment or even in less well coordinated or less skilled statics however, dps and tanks often forget to use their raidwide mitigation and when they do, it can easily lead to a wipe. If that happens the healers are often blamed for not doing their job - keeping the party alive through the boss' damage - correctly, but it still just feels bad, even if they aren't blamed for it.
I'd personally love to see square remove all raidwide mitigations from tanks, melee dps, and casters, and give them to healers and phys ranged DPS instead. On top of giving healers much more agency over the very thing their role exists for, it would also solidify phys ranged's role as a proper support dps, giving groups another major reason to bring them other than the 1% role buff.
It'd also make healer gameplay a little more interesting since you'd be rewarded for anticipating upcoming mechanics early enough and starting to weave oGCD mits in time, instead of having to panic weave (instead of having to use 1-2 oGCD mits before a raidwide like healers do now, they'd have to use 3-5 to make up for the ones the tanks/DPS are using now).
You could then even give the other dps more personal mitigations and design those in a way that rewards the player for using them frequently and correctly (similar to SAM's Third Eye).
I agree with the comment that the best healer engagements comes from your ability to triage a team and keep them going towards the finish line. It's why I feel like some of my best moments in the game as a healer come from slowly piecing a team back together in a random duty finder 24-man or 8-man fight - it's been where I have the most enjoyment in XIV. Yes, structured statics are cool but after a while, it just becomes a dance and doing your best to ensure your team members can survive (which I also agree with the comment in the video about this).
I also agree with the comment of having your DPS ability tie into your healing abilities. With that being said - I do feel the healer baseline HPS numbers should remain the same, but then the players can use their DPS abilities to augment their healing potential so it makes it easier for them to handle future mechanics as they are filling the gap with DPS. A simple example would be casting Glare on WHM could reduce the amount of time they need to generate a Lily by one second. Broil can give the SCH some fairy gauge and then they add more fairy gauge abilities such as a AoE shield / fairy abilities are boosted by consuming the fairy gauge (ie Whispering Dawn's potency is doubled for 50 gauge). Things like that to make the filler times of the healer kit feel more thoughtful.
I also definitely agree with the fact that all healing jobs being pushed down to 1.5s GCD removed a lot of thoughtful skill expression as well. I never liked the change but I understood a lot of clipping complaints as well. It's here to stay now but I enjoyed needing to do a lot more slide casting back in the days.
In general - I am probably one of the few people who say this - I still love healers as they are right now as I do feel like being the one baby sitter to keep the others going forward and I have all the powerful tools necessary to make that happen. Being able to push a team to the end when 90% of the of the other healers would fail is very satisfying, if not also very "Scream at your monitor" rage inducing as well, LOL
IMO being able to save a pull with well placed abilities is the best feeling you can get as a healer, and the more opportunities that Sqenix put in for that to occur the better. I loved healing this tier, there were quite a few drawn out sections of fairly heavy damage that required some planning during prog but nothing that was overly punishing, and it was just fun overall.
So my perspective is more casual, but I do main healer roles in every game where that is an option. To me the crux of the issue is that FF14's encounter design is a game where the #1 priority in most situations is dealing damage, and this only changes in special scenarios (mit checks, heal checks, etc), while at the same time the design team clearly wants complex healing kits with a wide array of GCD and oGCD healing. So to state the obvious, we have a big mismatch between encounter design and job design. However I _don't_ think that one or the other is inherently flawed, just that they need to be brought in line with each other.
If they want to keep the current 20 healing buttons (which it seems they do) then they need to do things like reduce tank survivability, increase the number of instances other party members take damage (I'm personally a fan of random bursts of single-target unavoidable damage), and tune down the lethality of _individual_ hits so that most of the time a healer's response to someone failing a mechanic is...healing...and not swiftcast-raise. Plus, vuln stacks are currently underutilized as a symbol of shame. 🤭
If they don't want to tune down the lethality of fights, then healers need to be just as lenient to play as tanks when it comes to failing mechanics. Not only would this offset the greater responsibility of having to mind everyone's HP, it would also make it more approachable to people new to the role. Then hopefully more people would join the healer family! They need to have more inherent survivability than DPS jobs, and the easiest way would be to give them either higher max HP or passive damage reduction just like tanks.
In short, I want to have reasons to consistently focus on healing and not just damage uptime. Incoming damage needs to be less predictable to give healers more to do, and also healers need to be able to make more mistakes so that they're less at risk of triggering a wipe from getting KO'd.
Some additional thoughts in the other direction:
If we focus on changing job design instead of encounter design, then it really would require a total rework of every healer job. I suspect this is why they've avoided making any real changes over the years. It's not an easy problem to solve.
At baseline, in this scenario I agree that healer jobs should become more attack focused. They would borrow the same design philosophy that tanks have, swapping out some heal buttons for a robust attack rotation and limiting their role actions (healing) to actions with cooldowns that you have to manage over the course of a fight.
One way to do this would be to design healers around "burst" phases similar to DPS, except that you get bursts of healing instead of damage. If we leaned into the existing job gauges, you could have each job build up their resource over time via a damage rotation and then spend their healer gauge when it's most needed. That way we can consolidate buttons into a smaller number of gauge spenders while also having a simple way for attack uptime to tie into the job role.
For example Astro could gain card draws via attacking, which could then be redeemed in quick succession to cast multiple heals (or a combination of mits and heals), either ahead of time for a raidwide or more suddenly for emergency healing. Scholar could use the fairy gauge to cast their more powerful heals and dedicate their aetherflow stacks entirely to attack spells. Sage could accumulate more stacks of addersgall and speed up stack regeneration by attacking. White Mage could feed the blood lily with the blood of their enemies instead of the blood of their allies, and get healing blooms in return.
Similar to tanks, each healer job could still have different levels of complexity with their attack rotation and ease of healing/mitigation, so there's still plenty of room to keep each job feeling unique. But this way the job design would actually match the gameplay of always attacking.
some comments have talked about it in here, but usually it's in the Ultimate/Criterion-level content that the healer's kit is really put to the test. Their knowledge of the fight (as well as party survivability), their ability to combo certain effects together to get the most out of that huge kit, is what that kit is designed for. Comparing that to stuff like Dungeon encounters, normal trials, etc... you're entering that content with a kit that's meant to be used in Ultimate content, this can definitely trivialize that content for some, but it also provides a good safety cushion to those who aren't at the Ultimate-level of skill in the game. There's a lot of these players who complain that they only feel like they're getting the most out of it in the Ultimates and It seems like they want that high they get from Ultimates to be present in every piece of content they touch, but that's just not possible. Add in some factors like the use of 3rd party tools to make the fights even easier (some don't use this, but let's not pretend it's not an actual issue), and the fact that once you learn a piece of content, you can't get back that feeling of chaos and going in blind...there really are people out there who love optimizing and playing at that high level, but are sad/angry that they optimized their favorite job into being boring. Just going by what I've heard in the many videos/comments I've seen on the subject of Healers, it seems a bunch of the Japanese players understand that Healers are not complex DPS. If they want to focus on complex DPS rotations and the like, then they switch to DPS. There's nothing wrong with saying you "main" a specific role, but like...there's nothing wrong with changing it up sometimes. :)
Top Pro Players: There are problems and it is affecting the game.
Yoshi-P: You're wrong and you're playing wrong.
No, no. Yoshi-P is a god that's always right and can't do wrong. Everything he thinks up is gold and has no flaws. How dare you say this! /sarcasm
I main healer, but when I’ve cleared the tier and have become comfortable I switch to caster depending on which rsids I enjoy the most, for the remainder of the tier to find more engagement, cause after you’ve done the tier on healer, it can be a bit dull, unless you’re playing Astro, at least for me.
I dont know why but hearing these people talk about healing being easy right now makes me feel like I'm super bad. I do feel the healing in this savage tier was somewhat easy but as someone who has only done it in PF stuff like ION cannons and EE2 in m4s really felt like I had to play it well as it wasnt just use 1 ability and I am done. To me the outgoing damage was maybe a bit too infrequent as most of the time you would have your oGCDs back up again by the time the next big damage section came around but in some places there really wasnt enough time to get everything back so you had to plan out what to use where.
That's because in a vacuum, you can't heal it yourself. This is coming from top players where all 8 people in the party have optimized their actions. There's optimal mit from tanks and dps roles and maybe shields set up so that afterwards, yeah, about one or two heals need to be used. You can't really fairly compare that to average gameplay, but I also don't think it degrades their point.
It's easy for them because they have top-tier statics that don't take unexpected damage. They only spend a very, very short time in prog on any given fight
Shadowbringers White Mage needed only one thing to fix it and it was Seraph Strike from Bozja. A high MP cost action that created a strong burst window for them, which made Blood Lilly a DPS gain in a vacuum, made MP management more important, and gave more weight to good usage of the 0MP cooldown.
And they never did it, god damnit.
Just chiming in to say that as a SGE main, I already love both prog and reclears in Savage/EX content. I have no issues with the job currently, but everyone's opinions are valid!
Now that I think back on it, re: 20:00 - I feel like Kionu isn't giving SGE enough credit? Addersting charges are a blast to play with in Dungeons and any other fight with downtime, and actually do come up in prog for me as well! Beyond just those though, the constant loop of Healing->Damage (Addersting for Toxicon, Addersgall's MP regen) and Damage->Healing (Kardia/Philosophia, Pneuma) is a blast IMO!
To this day I think HW AST was Peak Healer Design, you had such a fun system shuffling cards and extending/enhancing buffs that it felt rewarding to play well.
I've stopped playing healer as my primary role since shadowbringers.
I really like the idea of a momentum healer, or rewarding healing with dps or even movement options. Instead of x2 lightspeed, there could have been a fun option for playing a card to provide an instant cast gcd neutral spell, giving you essentially three free movement gcds per 55 seconds. That would make it close to on par with using lillies for movement, and being rewarded for using your kit.
They could also add a simple DPS rotation like Dancers 12 - 50/50 - 34. Instead of rewarding fans, Empowering or storing an ogcd heal/regen as a stack to use as wanted/needed.
I think there is a lot of ways to tackle this, and not everyone will be happy with whatever SQEX does in 8.0.
I sadly still have no hope for FFXIV healers to ever feel rewarding to play, outside of prog in the future.
As a SAM main, hearing Kionu explain his dream healer, made me go "so he basically wants a healer that plays like a SAM... now that's a man of culture right there" :D
On the healer side though, am progging TEA as SCH and I gotta say, there are definitely moments where I wouldn't want any more complex damage rotations, and there are moments that I really wish there would be some. Ultimately I feel like there definitely should be a clear distinction between GCD and oGCD heals, where the GCD ones do A LOT and the oGCD ones should be at best a supplementary option, which realistically would make the healer both simpler and more accessible, but also would make room for those more complex damage rotations.
And yeah, healing kits interacting with damage kits, is one of the main reasons why WHM is still my favourite healer, also why I'm not that fond of SCH aetherflow, which feels more like DRKs 3k MP TBN cost. It doesn't interact, it just shares the resource, so you have to pick between the two, not have one fuel the other. Imagine if using Energy Drain would give you stacks that you can then use on the heals, rather than sharing that. Would definitely make SCH a lot more interesting.
I feel like the biggest reason I dropped healing for the rPhys role was because healing was either too stressful and intensive, or absolutely boring and reliant on me spamming 2 buttons and remembering to dot every 30 seconds.
I feel a pretty decent fix would be giving healers a "burst" window of damaging spells / abilities that they can start at-will that amplify their healing, or vice-versa where healing will damage a targeted enemy. Something akin to a temporary reverse-kardia with at least a 60 second cd?
White Mage's Blood Lily is a really nice start, rewarding players with more damage for healing, but Sage and Astro don't have nearly as satisfying buttons that reward them for healing their team, and I never picked up Scholar qwq bc it hard
My solution to create more engagement would be for there to be more healer-specific mechanics that are less scripted and/or are not avoided once overgeared/on farm.
This could be things such as use of more esuna or doom type mechanics, introducing additional mechanics like these, or adding more on top of these mechanics, such as needing to esuna certain people but leaving others.
Create more situations where proactive/reactive healing will always be needed, particularly on single targets, rather than only when a mistake is made. E10s comes to mind as an example I liked, where the bleed from divining wings 2 could create situations where neither healer was with bleeding member on the other side and would have to identify them and heal them as soon as they were back in range.
I'm in two minds regarding adding complexity to healing and dps rotations for healers. On one hand, the lack of complexity, identity and, reactions across the kits are a bit stale and some change would be nice, I also worry for the average PF healer experience.... with how rough PF healers already are, I don't know if the playerbase could handle it...
More skill expression within healing and more monke brain stimulating attacks I think help. Healers besides WHM don't tickle that FELL CLEAVE itch really well. Something like:
Sage- Ankardion: healing spells and abilities deal damage in an aoe around caster for 8 seconds based on their healing potency.
Scholar- Martyr: Fairy becomes a bomb that deals damage based on your current aether stacks x600 potency and provides a regen to party. Alternative to dissipation.
Astro- Revolution: mimics endsinger's planet chucker thing with damage based on number of casts done within a window. Meant for Lightspeed burst or heal checks.
Players used to complain about having to lose damage to heal. That's why healers have such powerful OGCDs now. Personally, I don't think going back is the solution and the FF14 devs have never been fond of going backwards on game design. I think fight design is the way to go to make healing feel more impactful.
Oh my healer has saved my butt in m4s with rescue. rezzed right bout time before ion cannon starts, and dragged me so i didnt fall lol. Ion Cannon seems healer heavy.
For me, as a side note, I feel this is one of the best Tier's they have ever done, and may be the best intro tier so far. It's fun, and a nice balance of DPS checks, and Body checks. I hope we see more of this going forward.
Love the idea of the momentum healer, there is one in LOTRO. the runekeeper mage who can be dps or heals based on how their gauge is charge would be great!
Honestly, I think they maybe should look at their philosophy on healers. Either make it healers can dps as a luxury, when the party is full of pros and a moment of downtime of mechanics is happening they can use a few extra dps buttons but otherwise they should be focusing on heals. Maybe reduce the overall potency of heals and for regen healers make it they heal better on HoT targets, shields gain potency based on current hp so it rewards preemptive shielding therefore making shield healers give A LOT of EHP for busters.
Or full send healers like they did with tanks and basically make them DPS that can heal, replace a lot of the OGCD heals with GCD DPS buttons, and give regen healers a heal that puts a hot on targets (like aspected benefit or w/e astro got in place of regen) and make shields maybe give like % healing increase on the targets shielded. I feel like they are stuck between the classic healer design of other games and their own design of everyone being a DPS but just different levels of DPS with few extra responsibilities.
I dunno just my penny and nickel thoughts.
Rinon, if you come across this comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a concern of mine regarding the current healer direction. When it comes to conversations about healer DPS, there's disagreement on how invested healers should be with DPS actions, but I feel that the current "one-button DPS" model all 4 healers share actually continues to add more pressure on healers to maximize DPS.
Each expansion introduces more offensive power creep as DPS and tank jobs get more potency injected into their rotations, and thus healers need more potency to keep up with that power creep or killing enemies even just when solo gets slower and slower. And we've seen how literally every expansion has added more potency to each healer's filler attack spell, but doesn't this just constantly add more pressure each expansion to maximize DPS uptime and make defensive play more punishing as more damage is lost per GCD spent on healing and barrier application? What will the potency of each filler attack look like in another 10 years if we carry on like this? Will Sage's Dosis III or its successor spells have a potency of 390 in 8.0, 420 in 9.0, 450 in 10.0, and 480 in 11.0? Is that healthy for the game?
My real hope is that we see enough design changes in the coming expansions that healers won't have such a high percentage of their damage loaded into their filler spell (and as an extension that jobs won't have quite as much of a percentage of their damage tied to a nuke or nuke combo), which would alleviate the need to be constantly scaling filler damage. More oGCDs, alternative GCDs, and decision making, and load the excess potency into those
I actually very much agree with the take that was mentioned in this video that all healers should have some higher level of interaction between their healing/mitigaiton capabilities and their damaging rotation, and that these two aspects should be linked - white mage does it well but it definitely does what is the simplest/least interesting form of it, and I'd love to see that paradigm explored more deeply in 8.0. I have a video coming in a couple weeks that is way too long discussing the way I feel about healers, but whilst it feels rewarding to 0 GCD heal a phase or encounter and that should remain to an extent, my preference are that healer that need to GCD heal still feel like they are contributing to the party in terms of damage because they have access to at least a couple of oGCDs that provide value, or methods to later gain damage from those invested heals
@@RinBanana Those are my thoughts exactly. And I think there's room to approach that differently between each healer. When we look at DPS jobs, we can see a wider range of complexities between their rotations. There's room for something that's more developed than the current model, but still very approachable and easy to pick up and play while also having another healer that could be more technical. That was the original hope I had for Sage--that its identity of being a "DPS healer" would mean it was more technical offensively and would have more than just one filler, one DOT, one cooldown.
I love the idea of a combo healer, and I was hoping SGE would be like that. The concept of building into different heals with different combos is super cool, though. That's something that requires a lot more advance planning and has the potential to be super rewarding.
I couldn't agree more with Oryza about whm, I hate how for no actual reason it has a way worse kit compared to ast, it even made me change into astrologian in this expan despite how I love the job theme, as for the tier it was pretty fun to heal, feels nice having some recovery when not evey mech is a body check.
From my research and ~~doomscrolling~~ anecdotes of pre shadowbringers healing, theres a few things ive seen that are important to keep in mind
From what ive read about ARR and Heavensward healing, it was a mix of both actual damage options (cross classing aero/thunder, along with the other necessary healer skills), and MP management that made constant dps an actual task to think about.
Stormblood i havent been able to find much on other than anecdotes of how it was the best scholar has been (and it sounds like it)
With that in mind, healing has a couple of inherent problems with how its been changed over the years.
1. MP management is no longer really a thing for 90% of cases. If you keep up Lucid Dreaming and press your one mp funny button, you will be fine. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to personal preference, but it does mean one less thing for healers to do outside of healing. It also harkens back to ffxiv 1.0 a touch, with their stated problem of "you would just use the most powerful spell over and over". We are kinda back to that.
2. Dps options. Even back in ARR healers had more dps options than we do/did have in endwalker. Scholar, being a subclass of arcanist, had Bio, Miasma, Ruin, Virus, shadowflare, and could cross class Aero and Blizzard 2 if wanted. WHM had cleric stance as well as fluid aura to manage.
To summarize, old healing was a mix of more damage options/dots to upkeep, while also needing to heavily manage your MP so you had it for when healing came time. Cleric Stances very existence also causes needing to know fights well to know when to use it safely.
The systematic removal of all of these aspects to manage has left healer with... Exceedingly little to do. Especially when older content was designed around this. There was a quote somewhere a few years ago that the devs dont want to "put pressure on healers to have to DPS". That would be great, if that wasnt how 6 years of content were designed around. The core combat design is healing at set intervals, meaning that *something* has to fill the time between healing. Endwalker AST filled the time far better than dawntrail ast with its overly simplified damage kit, with cards being a constant management task instead of every two minutes like they are now. It was the only healer in endwalker that i felt ok bringing into low level content because it had an engaging thing to do between healing. Now, there isnt anything that is fun low level and thats a massive problem. We have over 6 years of content that is still actively done, and the changes made to make healing easier have just negatively affected low level things and high level things alike.
The only solution I can see is the devs stop trying to force this healers only heal mentality they got in shadowbringers, because their options are either: leave the role feeling awful for low end and make high end need constant healing (they have not succeeded in that in 5 years of shadowbringers, endwalker and now dawntrail). Or redesign the entire game to need healing all the time, which would take monumental effort.
Or they could acknowledge their core encounter design and actually give veteran healers something to do, since new healers or bad healers aren't going to press all their buttons anyways.
This whole thing is why I said that the healer changes in dawntrail would be great, if they were a start and not an end. Because this is the only things the devs did, it feels like they begrudgingly gave healers a(n) button, rather than giving them it because of job design. One extra button every 2 minutes/1 minute AT ONLY THE HIGHEST LEVELS does not a fix make when all low end content needs extra things to press.
Oh, but Summoner having a rez is a far more important discussion to be having than healer state clearly according to the live letters :D
It likely wouldn't work as a rebalance for all healers, but even putting it on a new healer would be cool, to have a dps combo that works similar to NIN's handsigns, where depending on the order in which you used the 3 GCD damage abilities, it could enable a different effect on a 4th GCD ability, with some being damage and others being healing, with theoretical options like: 1->2 making 4 be a ST heal, 1->2->3 making 4 be a ST regen, and 1->3->2 making 4 be a ST shield, 2->1 making 4 be AOE heal, 2->1->3 make 4 AOE regen, and 2->3->1 make 4 AOE shield. Combos starting with 3 could be damage focused combos, like 3->1->2 making 4 apply the class's DoT, and 3->2->1 turning 4 into an AOE DoT or potentially an on-demand mitigation, but it would require a GCD full cast. This would allow for using strong GCD heals that required you to pay attention to what damage buttons you're hitting to use the correct effect, and if you don't need the heal, you wouldn't need to use the 4th GCD, you would just keep dps-ing.
A change that would be able to affect current healers is to add a system alongside a 123 combo that was similar to monk's forms. Maybe it wouldn't allow access to any new buttons, but it could potentially buff the outgoing heals of specific types of heals depending on where in the combo you are when you activate them. If being on 1 in your dps combo buffs outgoing ST healing, 2 buffs outgoing AOE healing, and 3 buffs outgoing Regens/Shields(depending on whether Regen/Shield Healer), it would add some thinking into when you actually *use* your heals.
For example: If I need to AOE heal on WHM, and I'm going to use Afflatus Rapture, I'd want to be in Stage 2 of my DPS combo to get the buff, but if I'm going to use Medica 3, I might prefer to be in Stage 3 to buff the HoT instead of the initial heal.
Or for SCH, if I want to spread Adlo, I'd want to be on Stage 3 to buff the shield, but if I'm using Concitation, Stage 3 could buff the shield effect, but Stage 2 could buff the healing effect, allowing for different applications of the same skill depending on the scenario
I took a break from healing after Asphodelos (Melee DPS'd in Abyssos, didn't raid in the last tier) and from the small bit I've seen of the current tier I'm quite happy with how healing feels, especially in dungeons. Dungeon healing to me has always felt very... whatever, but in DT I feel much more engaged and I feel like I have a bigger impact on how a fight turns out, and I like that!
If I could ask for any one thing, I'd love to see a job that operates similar to WoW's Discipline Priest (yes I'm a masochist) - a job that does the majority of it's healing directly by doing damage, see Sage's Kardia, but much more significant. I also enjoyed Disc Priest (I never actually raided in WoW so I can't comment on that) because it had an actual DPS rotation rather than a DoT and single target filler. It was simple, but still quite satisfying to pull off
I love the suggestion of 'momentum' healing. Like what if Medica turned into Medica 3 after you spent 1-2 GCDs building 'healing power' by dpsing or an emergency ogcd?
Ill give some takes as a healer main for sometime since shb.
I personally think a damage rotation may not go well for healer, but i think fight design should consider the tools that healers have atm, most of which some are just really busted. While i agree the basic 1,2,3 may help the role, it may either fall to the trap where we get more greedy green dps or the job may feel very overwhelming. Fight design should change a little to cater to the healing kit we have now so healers wont get bored. The TEA example is where i see this really shine as p1 healing can be pretty tight, p2 i actually see good reason to use my arrow card and even synastry of all skills, p3 j waves hit like a truck. I acknowledge not all encounters can be like this, but hope that fights can somewhat be designed with their current healing kit in mind.
That said nice video!
It would be more engaging and fun to play as a healer if every healer have some "do this and you get this"-combo like said Astro with Neutral Sect - Horoscope - AoEHeal -> Helios Horoscope + Suntouched. It feels like you do something more rather than just spamming something. Astro is the best example. "Think ahead and get rewareded" (Earthly Star, Makrokosmos, Card System) is something that goes into the right direction. I wish the other healers has some sort of this combination healing too and more engaging attacks.
What I'm most frustrated with is the interaction with the faerie from scholar. The faerie gauge could be so much better like if you heal a target a second gauge will be filled. You have to use this gauge to tether with the enemy and drain HP (like a dot). If it's empty you have to fill it up again. Summon Seraph instead you can decide to damage all enemies nearby or heal everyone nearby with a 100 potency heal ('cause everyone will be healed) like aetherpact. In Dissipation mode you can gather something that's converted from healing or mp usage into a massive shield or damage.
For the other two healers (whm and sage) I don't have much of examples 'cause I dont play them recently.
But yea... more (combo) interaction with the skills itselfs would be amazing...
I'd love a melee based healer that builds resources when they complete combos. A combat medic.
Kinda how after using 3 lilies you get a Blood Lily, after completing combos you get a resource that can be used to channel healing spells, and better cooldowns need more of that resource.
That paired with another resource for less potent heals, kind of how the PLD bar fills on autoattacks. That way you get rewarded for DPSing, while managing resources.
They could pull ideas from WoW, where there are two melee healers. Holy paladins generate their resource for casting healing spells from their melee combos like you described, and mistweaver monks can both directly convert damage to healing and extend their regen effects by using their melee rotation.
I've been playing it and it's a fun playstyle I with they would try out in FFXIV.
Fight design is pretty heavily centred around a 4/4 melee/ranged split. You'd run into a lot of problems in PF with another player trying to find melee uptime.
@@mosley3485 I suppose it could have a ranged combo for when you need the healers to be away from the boss.
Pretty sure the dev team could figure something out if they wanted to make it happen.
@@mosley3485 red mage much? You are easily able to fit 5 people in melee range for most of bosses. Four around and one inside. Funnily enough, the one inside is usually healer.
@@SayukiSuzukiMizuno If RDM is a melee job then SGE is our melee healer because it has Phlegma.
play xenoblade
play xenoblade
As a long-time Xenoblade fan who only got into FFXIV around Shadowbringers, I've always wondered if we might be able to draw upon the former series' character/class game design for some possible ways to shake up ffxiv job mechanics
(e.g. burst attack on a DPS which scales based on the number of debuffs applied to a target, a HLR with increased damage either relative to how many buffs are active on all allies or if the user's HP =< 90%)
@@SAI-Max_D and now we got Xenoblade X DE?!?!?! 👀
I love the concept of banking mitigated and healed damage. If you have the possibility of making a GCD shield damage neutral by maybe unlocking an oGCD equivalent to a filler damage spell (essentially TBN but for shield healers) or making using mitigation damage POSITIVE or neutral (looking at you, Sacred Soil), by unlocking a damage spell or oGCD that has more potency than an Energy Drain, then you will have less healer chadding.
Nothing is worse than having a SCH chad you because they refuse to use aetherflow stacks on anything other than Energy Drain. Or a SGE that refuses to shield anything because it takes away a precious Dosis.
I feel making GCD healing damage neutral (if used correctly), that will reduce the impact that selfish healers have as well as encourage healers to do what their job says they should do: Heal!
I really liked the suggestion of the momentum healer using gcd combos to gain healing procs. Sage is already the most fun healer to me because of it healing off doing damage. So extra complexity for the damage rotation on top of that would be chef's kiss 👨🍳😘
"I've always wanted a momentum healer, a healer that builds off of combos..."
I remember before Shadowbringers came out, there was a leak of the jobs we'd get in the expansion. I don't recall the exact contents of the leaks, but a good number of em were real. Others were... half-right, and I remember one of them was "dancer will be healer." To be honest, this really piqued my interesting because I often associate healer jobs with mage-like characters, so the idea of healing through dances sounded pretty cool. We ultimately did end up getting some healing with dancer, but as everyone knows now the job ended up being a ranged DPS. Anyways, that's pretty much what that phrase reminded me of.
It's simple. Across all content increase the amount of damage so more healing is required. If it's supposedly too hard give us markers for when healing is required. Tanks have tank buster markers, make most bosses have a "percentage health down" attack that has a special marker, letting healer know they need to heal.
I love the idea of all healers having more of a synergy of their damage and their healing like WHM and its Lilies, especially since SCH currently has *anti-synergy* where they actively want to try to get around having to use their basic healing tools so they can eek out an extra 300 potency every minute (Energy Drain and Aetherflow). Even just making Energy Drain have 3 charges with a 20s recharge timer, and each charge giving 7-8% mana, giving 1 Aetherflow, and otherwise being identical to how it is now (and removing Aetherflow, though I would miss Aetherflow for nostalgia reasons) would be a *great* step in the right direction imo.
The main problem with healers for me is that as a patch goes on, as you get better gear and as everyone learns the fights, you end up using less and less of your kit. Tanks and DPS on the other hand still get to use their full kits/rotations outside of maybe dropping a mit or feint that they don't need anymore. So tanks become better tanks, DPS get bigger numbers and healers slowly morph into boring as fuck green dps.
That's why I heal in Ultimate and DPS in Savage. Ultimate always pushes your healing kit to the very limit, and I want big number when I'm DPSing in Savage, so I'm still engaged to maximize my parse even when I know the fight well.
@@adonisdarkbladecorrect, which becomes a problem where a healer only becomes fun in ultimate or criterion content and not much else
Personally I'd like a swing back towards GCD and particularly casted healing facing off against higher steady incoming damage. Cast times force you to make choices about casting vs moving away from mechanics and also casting a spell so the healing goes off right as the damage comes in is satisfying. Steady incoming damage with GCD healing also forces you to pay attention to squeeze in damage between heals and reduces the amount of "Raidwide happens > Press oGCD heal > Situation resolved" portions of healing. Said damage can also be dealt a bit more at random so AoE heal isn't the answer 90% of the time, spot healing is definitely harder as a controller player like myself, but I wish it had more of a place outside of someone failing a mechanic.
Managing chaos is part of the fun as a healer, but with how scripted every fight is in FFXIV there's precious little of it once people learn them.
I don't think giving healers damage rotations to keep track of is the right way to go. I would definitely like to see them tie the damage and healing portions closer together with more mechanics like WHMs lily gauge and perhaps adding a "your next damage spell deals more damage" buff to casted heals to offset the GCD cost of using them and rewarding spacing them out instead of spam-healing until everyone is full and then going back to just casting damage
I think one connecting thread to a lot of the points brought up in this video is: In their current state, Healers are so heavily pigeonholed into their role that they have very little else to bring to the table.
It might sound nuts, but I think one possible solution would be to take some healing power away from Healers and continue giving more of it to jobs in other roles. Not every job needs to have it, of course - we can still have our selfish DPSes for people who want no part in this - but I think it would help to shift a little more of the burden of keeping the team alive away from Healers and let them focus more on doing damage while giving them utility skills/spells that impact the team in more meaningful ways. They would still have access to all the most powerful and accessible heals, but this way they aren't stuck twiddling their thumbs when everyone is actually doing their part to stay alive.
Shield healer MVP,Pure Bad,WHM worst since to far back,even tho it once was cracked,something I surely do not get.Hope it gets some love along the line,otherwise I will whine…..pls xD
There has been many times during prog where the shield bars were going through the roof, and it wasn't because people were over-mitting the mechanics. There comes a point where you have to use your big button to be efficient, but the fight doesn't give enough big mechs for those big buttons to really be useful.
In addition to what has been said, I would like piety stat to be more impactful. Adding a damage/healing bonus to it would make it more viable and desirable than just get enough to be comfy.
Doing that would lead to more interesting builds like sps + pie or in conjunction with high MP attacks that you wouldn't normally spam because of their cost (and bring back miasma 2 please!).
Unless a big overhaul comes that makes encounters and jobs in general different I don't really know how much they could tinker with the roles without alienating one or the other school of thought. I do think tho that making doing damage and healing more tied to each other should be the first step to go. Misery is a really cool and fun mechanic to play around and gaining toxicon stacks during downtime is also pretty interesting. As is I think Astrologian's card system for damage is enough to make astro relatively engaging and optimizing star and macro around multiple target is fun. From that point of view, I think having savage fights with more than one boss should be explored more, also because you'd have to tanks to keep an eye on instead of just having kardia/fairy on mt and forgetting about autos completely. Scholar on the other hand, boy oh boy. I think the current aetherflow system kinda feels bad, yes parse head whatever whatever but having soil being a dps loss against kera just doesn't sit right with me. Also using lustrate in general feels really bad and makes scholar really bad at saving people using single target healing since you don't have haima as well. Let's not talk about dissipation by the way cause that's a whole other can of worms.
Personally I think something cool they could do is to make scholar gauge tied to a system similar to the blood lily since aetherpact is garbage anyway and scholar has really bad weaving cause of triple energy drain but no access to instacasts that aren't dps loss. I general I think they are taking into account the discontent people have, it's just they are complicated issues and these things take long time to change, especially without burning down the kitchen in the process so they're playing it safe. Hopefully changes will be done but yeah, I can see why people who have been healing for a long time might feel disconnected from it
As a newly minted healer who's only really picked up the role starting in EW with any kind of lens towards wanting to take it more seriously I can say that I agree with the idea that there's a serious issue in regards to encounters determining the fun I'm having. ValiEX and ZoraEX were fun for me in the beginning but I did notice that the feeling didn't last long outside of strange circumstances that created clutch plays since once you get the fights down it becomes a largely predefined dance that doesn't give you any incentive other than to cure your boredom to break out and do anything new.
I know that's to be expected in a low-mid tier difficulty environment like Extremes where you can afford to make more mistakes and still come away with a clear but I don't feel like they help me prepare myself well for the rigors of something meatier like Savages and Ultimates compared to what I learn with my usual role, Tank and guides while helpful don't suit someone like me who's a more kinesthetic-type as well as they could. It really feels to me like there's very little middle ground between being a fresh healer and one of the ones that are capable to crossing that gulf into becoming more advanced. I am absolutely sure I'm missing something, I don't doubt that for a second. It's just an observation from the outside as it were.
There's more discussion I think to be had on the barrier healer roles, SCH and SGE, at least in savage. Boss damage output increased this tier, while overall DPS checks have dropped considerably. This puts much less pressure on healers to "make up" the rest of the damage total and so we can be much more flexible on which mitigation abilities to apply depending on which mechanics are stressing your group. For SCH, a timely expedient is great on Mario Kart, and heavy movement phases, and sometimes you have to place fairy in spots where parties have to spread out.
I agree on the Encounter Design point. I'm a scholar main and the kit feels fine but the dungeons ALONE, were eye openers and I've seen even people in expert struggle (yikes lmao). So Savage going forward should really make people work without it being insurmountable
I think it would be cool if there was a ground cleanse, or healers can make larger safe spots with their bubbles or some spell or other. I also think healers should interact more with the boss. So for example the boss has a debuff that gives a debuff to the raid, the healer has to cleanse the boss to cleanse the raid. Or the boss puts the group under some kind of mind control and the healer has to break it. Raid wide bleeds that last longer. Healers should get their own markers, like tanks have tank busters, healers could have a requirement to clear it that includes some purify or cleansing spell. We only have one spell for purify, esuna, maybe play around with that to bring a new element to the fights. As far as dps rotation goes it would be nice if there were more options for a damage rotation, dot, damage, aoe is pretty boring. Having certain damage spells be available when certain affects are on the gauge would be cool, someone mentioned that. So when I cast spell a, it adds a gauge dot and if I cast damage spell it does one effect, if i have 2 dots it does something else, and if i have 3 dots something else. Or having something like the redmage gauge, where you have a heal bar that fills and a damage bar that fills, and you get spells based on how much that gauge is filled. Scholar would be a good candidate for that one.
I play mostly healing or casting DPS classes. I love the concept of being a healer and I love it when it feels like my team "needs" me. But I can't express enough how discouraging it is to feel like I'm being effective, until I'm dead, and then I see the tank take down the enemy on their own while I'm laying there on the ground. It's almost demoralizing. I start to feel like I wasn't ever needed, they just needed to give me a role so I could play too. Like, when a kid wants to play a bored game with the adults so they let them roll the dice and tells them it's an important job, when in reality, if the kid left, the adults are more than capable of rolling the dice on their own. Making the healers feel more needed should be focused on more. Of course, I don't play extreme/savage content, so I imaging the case is different in the harder content.
The other thing as was mentioned in the video is a better DPS combo rotation for healers. As it stands, Healers are basically low DPS classes with capability of healing when needed. When a fight is going well, Healers are expected to put out DPS. But what is DPS for healers? One or two skills that you spam. Then you start to zone out, and when a heal is needed, you've stopped paying attention. Give us a 4 skill rotation with a self/group heal at the end if it's properly executed would not only feel more fun and impactful, but also rewarding. Not to mention in open world content it would make roam the maps solo more fun as well.
Note: I'm nearing the end of Post-Endwalker content, so if anything has changed in Dawntrail, I'm not aware of it yet. :)
Going to shill the BLU healer experience, even though it is niche content and not as accessible to many players. Playing through old content synced with 8 casters (1-2 of which are slightly less squishy on tank mimics) with a very limited kit was some of the most engaging healing I've ever done. The reason being that it was a lot less "find the right puzzle piece at the right time" kind of gameplay and much more on-the-fly puzzle solving for how to keep the party alive, where there were meaningful decisions being made with every check e.g. How much pom cure is required to baby the tank through autos? Should stotram be used or white wind? When and where to use angel's snack? Even such things as whether you took 2 dedicated pure healers or only 1 and 1 "off-healer" who was really a dps masquerading as a healer. All of this to say, I think that BLU healing has a combination of factors such as limited healing tools and greater levels of decision making (and access to an actual dps rotation that involves more than 2-3 buttons) that leads to much more engaging gameplay compared to what's on offer in current standard high-end content. Not saying that everything should just adopt the jank of BLU content but it definitely could stand to take a cue or two
"Best efforts" is doing some heavy lifting
Something i really want on scholar is something else that uses our faerie gauge. Give us an AoE spender for it, or let us use it to buff the actual fairy spells. Give us a damage spell that uses it. The amount of time im sitting at max gauge currently is stupid, ive rarely got need of fae pact.
i want to see healer combo rotations, and monk like interconnectivity in terms of damage and healing, like monk's single-target and aoe skill combos
oh awesome, did she transition? good for her. i remembered she clear UCoB on a DDR mat (or maybe it was guitar hero controller) from one trans woman to another, i'm happy for her
background on me. i started the game as a healer in stormblood. raided on dancer for shb and in EW i mainly raided on dnc and war. i played tank and healer roulette i cleared UWU as dancer in SHB. for DT i wanted to go back my roots and maining healer. doing all of DT as a sch was so fun. i blind prog-ed the 1st EX as a SCH. i love healing, it will always have a soft spot in my heart
Q1: i wanted more things to do as a healer. DPSing and or healing. i would only feel like i needed a lilies for most content in normal raid and dungeon
Q2: I think the healer strike came from a lot of the time the community only give healers negative reinforcement. Nobody cares when a healer is amazing and people are quick to point out when the healer is doing bad. Some healers get in their head "I'm bad. everyone's going to be mad at me. Why would I play this role?"
Q3: i haven't done savage but the normal modes are pretty fun
Q4: give back stormblood SCH and keep the new things we got (E.G recitation,seraph,sereraphism and expedient). the Eos changes can stay
This may be a little unrelated, though i think it will affect healing enjoyment too, but i really think ffxiv should have challenge achievements
Like if you clear a savage floor with unusual circumstances you get rewarded. (E.g. clear with one tank, clear with dual shield healers, clear without using something)
I think this could help shake up the weekly reclear boredom. But i understand that it would probably be a bit difficult to implement for minimal reward since not everyone does more hardcore play
For me I would love to have the GCD heals just be more meaningful. Right now, they just feel like a loss any time I use them. I would love more interaction between your damaging skills and your healing GCD Spells. Or interaction between your heals and the fight itself.
Like for example, what if Medica III had a damage spell tied to it, that had a cooldown on it and that increased in potency as the HoT healed damage? It could incentivize using that GCD HoT to its full potential, letting it regen that damage so you can deal back more damage to the boss and not just trying to top everyone off quickly. That may just be a round about Misery but it would at least make using Medica III feel good and warrant some use.
Or what if Helios Conjunction placed a stacking buff on your party members that would increase as the HoT healed them that you could use a skill to draw out of them at your leisure to enhance your cards or buff your damaging spells?
Or in an encounter, maybe there is an encroaching plague consuming the arena and if it fills enough it will kill the party (This would be like Ex difficulty) and only GCD heals can push it back? The fight itself would then incentivize GCD healing and create an avenue for further optimization and careful planning so you can still do your damage but hold the encroaching death at bay.
If healer jobs won't be changed in the significant way, fights need to do way more damage throughout the fight and not just big damage with mit stack every 20-30 secs.
Make those hits weaker, but applying bleeds requiring much more healing/shielding in general to keep party alive without overstressing hp bars with near oneshot raidwides.
A combo and more momentum based healer would be incredible. Hard agree with the need for more rotations, rather than just cycling cooldowns like I do now. I think it would map to the concept of healing being something interesting at multiple skill levels well -- if you don't do the rotation right, you still get *enough* heals, but if you do it right you get rewarded. Kind of like how in casual content (most) dps don't always need to press all their buttons right to win, its just slower when they don't :)
I'm (deliberatly) swapping to play healer in FRU for my static, as I've spent the past 5 years playing on the tank and DPS roles throughout various groups. I've been hearing constantly about how healers have had it rough since the big overhauls that Shadowbringers brought in. Since I'd only played AST and SCH briefly before ShB launched, I never really got to fully grasp their kits before the streamlining. But I already feel this weird, lingering attachment to the old card system, and the Miasma II management.
It's like there's a core memory that I have associated with healing, that just isn't being fulfilled in the Shadowbringers+ era. Considering I'd only gotten to the level cap about 7 months prior to ShB coming out, and it's already been 4 years since the overhaul, I think that says a lot about how rich and plentiful the kits used to be compared to today. Not that anything they've added is inherently bad. But I remember Stormblood's healers and how they played to be far more enjoyable, despite having so much more time with the current era of healing.
i'd like it if every Healer had that kind of dot thing SCH used to have and SGE has now
I kinda like when they mentioned 1-2-3 healing leading to a bigger heal and the separate damage and healing gcds idea is funny enough what I kind of wanted out of dancer when I thought it would be a healer lol. Like a melee range healer that does dance steps with a weapon to damage and heal and buff? I would love that. Like it could have the worse dps ever but I would still play it just based on the playstyle being engaging.
The white mage gauge for the lily like it was mentioned other healers should have access to something similar with their own gauge. Definitely make healing more engaging and frequent but compensate the dps loss for the dps check with being able to pull off these big hitters after healing so much.
astro might be strong right now, but way less engaging than any previous iteration; arguably one of the things that made it one of the more interesting healers to play was that each pull was dynamic in terms of your card play. Now you just throw 2 cards at pretty much the same two targets every 2 minutes and even in current savage you just dump or overwrite the rest, either not really requiring much thought. As much as I'd love the card rework to be reverted, I realize it's probably not realistic and I would at least like to see the cards aside from the damage buffs to be turned into something more engaging
WoW Discipline Priest. XIV is literally perfectly designed for that kind of healer. They have a VERY strong degree of control over our numbers and the boss's output numbers, to make it work without being drastically broken or completely garbage.
Do that and you can give healers a PROPER DPS ROTATION without sacrificing the bottom bare minimum healing required in pug content. Turn the oGCD buttons into supportive healing buttons that drain and restore MP with cooldowns, giving them a pseudo-oGCD rotation that is required to be managed, even potentially on the fly, to handle increased damage output in EX+s.
Just don't do something stupid like Assize or Earthly Star again with that idea. Yes, they're satisfying to push and neat and all, but if you make a *heal* button do *damage,* you've... made another damage button. The community is not going to care if it does healing. Any healing done when it comes off cooldown will be a bonus, NOT a feature. Credit where it's due. ES has a *window* to pop it, to kind of do both, but it's still a "push it NOW or your DPS tanks" button before anything else.
21:40 - OMG this! WHM needs a party mit on a 60 sec CD. Like...badly. I'd personally slap a 10% mitigation on Plenary as an easy fix since it already is a party buff that the effect could be added onto.
We already have a Totem healer! It's Scholar!
Now as the sole AST of my FC...time to ..well I dont have a dash....SPRINT AWAY!
I think one design choice that needs to be looked at is the damage down. Right now, failing a mechanic results in a damage down. Too many can cause dps check failures. Gone are the days where a Black Mage could shield and survive, and refuse to move for more uptime.
If Damage down was a healing debuff, or absorbed a certain amount of healing before it could be removed, this would open up a lot of healing space. Single target healing, regens, single healer mitigations, and spot shields before the next damage could be used. Speed runs could add complexities of sacrificing a healer gcd for more higher damage uptime. It's a skill expression, albiet group skill expression, that would add more dynamic decision making. Intentional failure for uptime could be an interesting group dynamic.
That's the other problem right now... Pure healer regens are mostly overhealing. Having time where heals don't apply but regens will still tick as a mechanic is something every healer could do (medica 3, Aslyum, opposition, aspected helios, whispering dawn, sacred soil, physis, kerachole) ... it would space for heal over times to work. They're just wasted overhealing in most content. Something needs to give these life, because high end healers will allow them to breathe. Low end healers do not.
And lastly, hearing Stal read the notes made my day. I've already liked, subscribed and commented, so I'll just emoji my thanks. ❤🎉❤🎉
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I am definitely biased but i think the current lv70 kits hit the best balance of heals, each one feels impactful and you don't have so many you forget they exist.
All the while Gcd heals are still needed, making the path to optimisation planning out those ogcds well, coordinating with your co-healer even. (except WHM, but.. WHM.)
Though i would like something more than spamming 1 button over prolonged periods of not healing, and the mp system feels really bad because the only way to conserve mp when really low is to do literally nothing, and it hurts my soul.
as a masochist all of this really appeals to me should i swap to healer bros
It’s encouraged! Please try out the healer role for yourself 🙌
Keep the Lily Gauge on WHM, no more homogenization. Not every job needs a dash. SCH also does have a damage skill with their gauge called Energy Drain but it was nerfed so much because how dare we try to optimize? Make ED more impactful or even upgrade it into bane for DoT gameplay.
They nerfed energy drain into the ground and yet majority of scholars use their stacks until almost nothing is left anyway 😂
Sometimes 10% dmg reduction from soil makes all the difference but they're too busy energy draining and hoping their gray/green turns into a purple. Keeping energy drain potency low is good, otherwise it promotes this garbage from people who don't care
Smh when I get 6 energy drain SCH’s who think fae illumination can replace soil. Do not buff energy drain. People are going to make SCH even more cringe than it already is.
The SCH gauge is the inverse of what these players advocate for though. With the SCH gauge you have to choose between either getting damage or doing healing. With the WHM gauge you get healing and get rewarded with damaage at the end. One is a "take your pick" leading to sweaty damage optimizazion by forgoing your healing tools while the other is encouraging you to use your healing more without a drawback to your dps.
One thing i think also contributes is that very often in the grind part, where 99% of players stay, Healers are not really put on the spotlight. When you clear dungeons with PAL or even WAR who can almost solo encounters with their kits, Healers and Tanks are not taught to work together. Even worst, as it was stated in the video, healers can sometimes be completely ignored when you have for example A warrior and a RDM or a SUM, who can also rez. That's not good. I remember multiple times where i had to pick up the healing as RDM with my weak healing spell, and yet managed to keep the WAR alive for the boss.
I think the issue is that there is nothing random happening in the game. It's all just puzzle solving and the same move sets. Make trash have 3 abilities they do randomly, make raids bosses have a larger move set they use randomly. People think it's the job, i think it's the combat.
it might be too much button bloat, but having a dps combo that rewards and ogcd heal or vise versa where using heals in combinations with a buff unlocks an ogcd damage button
As a casual player, I like Sage and White Mage and I wouldn't change a thing. Except maybe reduce the cooldown on Physis.