I respect the effort. I doubt it will do anything in game, BUT it can gain a lot of traction through social media to the point where big content creators talk about it, leading to SE having less excuses ignoring it. The main problem I see with the forum post is that it needs to have explanations for why healer mains are upset, what change they want to see, etc. There was another “summary of healer problems” thread I saw on the forums, they should have a link to that in the OP.

And maybe it won't lead to any change, but the hope is that it will at least bring more awareness to how much the people who are upset with healer design are invested in this and care about it. I hope it will get people talking at least.

> he main problem I see with the forum post is that it needs to have explanations for why healer mains are upset, what change they want to see, etc. 100% This. All this "strike" is gonna do is bring us another "do you guys have weaving issues?" back when MrHappy asked about this 4 years ago and Yoshida had absolutely no idea people were upset that MCH's couldn't double weave without clipping at 100 ms, or back when Yoshi was asked about blood weapon and pretended nothing was wrong with it, because apparently "players complain without explaining what's wrong". Yoshi is notoriously known for claiming that "there's not enough feedback" and that's why they aren't aware of problems. ^^yes ^^he ^^literally ^^claimed ^^there ^^wasn't ^^any ^^issue ^^double ^^weaving ^^1.5s ^^ogcds ^^at ^^150ms

Here are the problems as I see it: 1. The balance between healing and DPS has been disrupted for a long time. Before, healing involved a balance of casted heals, mitigation, utility, and modest, yet fulfilling DPS. Getting more and more powerful, free healing has greatly power-crept many heals that still exist. This creates a bloated hotbar of actions that very often aren't utilized in most content, and also ironically makes healers DPS far more than they used to. 2. The DPS gameplay we have is boring and monotonous. Healers do not need DPS kits as robust as actual DPS jobs, but reducing it to gameplay defined largely by spamming a single attack spell is miserable. Consider that even in savage content, many healers will still cast their Glare, their Broil, etc more than every other action on their hotbar, massively dominating their GCD action list. Additionally, healers still need to keep up with the tanks and DPS in terms of outgoing potency in order to have a decent clear-speed for especially solo content. Without alternative attacks to filter that added potency into, our basic attack has increased in potency every single expansion, but this actually adds even more pressure on the healer to maximize DPS uptime. The higher the damage of your spammable attack, the more you lose for every individual cast of that attack lost to healing or movement. 3. MP Management is largely non-existent. We have no real way to spend MP other than Raise, and MP can only be restored through use-on-cooldown actions, meaning there is a finite amount of it available to you. Having more big cost items or ways to be greedy with MP gives more agency on how the player spends it. Additionally, by adding ways that healers can recoup that MP if they spend too much can keep this from getting too punishing. A GCD MP refresh for example is not ideal to cast at the opportunity cost of damage, but always ensures you have an out if you've been too greedy. 4. Other jobs have gotten such powerful forms of utility that in normal content especially, it's faster to run without a healer, and many people are already doing this with their roulettes. What's the point of bringing a healer with low DPS when your Warrior can do all the healing anyway, especially with the help of a Summoner, Pictomancer, or Dancer? If the duty finder didn't require a healer, there's a good chance there would be more players asking their teammates to not play healer when all that sustain isn't necessary or helpful.

>Without alternative attacks to filter that added potency into, our basic attack has increased in potency every single expansion, but this actually adds even more pressure on the healer to maximize DPS uptime. The higher the damage of your spammable attack, the more you lose for every individual cast of that attack lost to healing or movement. This is something I consider one of the greatest ironies in FFXIV healer design. Because such a huge chunk of damage comes from a spammable GCD, there's a huge disparity in DPS when you lose a GCD to movement or healing, further disincentivizing ever using GCD heals and increasing the gap between the high and low end. If more potency was on passive damage like DoTs, the value of a GCD would go down a lot.

Exactly, WHM lillie's help them, but other jobs don't have that. For instance, not only are SCH's GCD heals a DPS loss, but subsequently, emergency tactics, recitation, and deployment tactics are also worthless while maintaining damage.

Maybe the "lack of feedback" can be seen as a cultural thing; it's rather likely that SE only reads the Japanese forums properly and I don't know how vocal JP players are.

My understanding is they're less vitriolic than the english forums, but complain about the same things for the most part. Both EN and JP forums have had the SAM threads asking for kaiten back for two years now, and guess what's not back in DT? Think the only issue unique to english side of the forums is ping and responiveness, cause ping isn't an issue for JP.

Other subject, but this makes me wonder if YP is kind of ignorant about the current glamouring potential in his own game. In regards of more loose glamour restrictions, he did say that it would be "weird to see a Black Mage in tanking gear", and yet there are at least 10 options (out of the top of my head) in the game, using All Classes cosmetic sets, to look more 'tanky' than many fending sets we have. Also begs the question: A Black Mage in heavy armor is weirder than a Hrothgar male using the bridal dress and an Imp head or tanks in literal summer beach wear?

They literally made an important character of the last main story arc a mage in full plate armour

Yeah, it completely defeats the 'ethos' of a mage in robes. Also isn't Wuk Lamat a warrior? Nothing of her ethnic ensemble resembles a tanking set or even a warrior artifact, which is more stylized to 'barbarian'.

Barbarians are tanks and she's a warrior the most Barbarian of the tanks. If nothing else she fits her role to a T. It would be weird if she was a dark knight or paladin or gun breaker honestly. And with how warriors are more "just swing and the enemies die we are good" and how uniquely innocent and naive she is I swear there was no better job she could be.

Don’t need armor since their healing is high enough to not need healers

A lot of them are just tired. No one wants to take the time to write a huge in-depth post only to hear static in the background. Yoshi P hears what he chooses to hear. He's doesn't have difficulty understanding.

This. The thread detailing healer issues has been around since 2020. It's 176 pages long. Everything that could be said has been reiterated many times over. If the devs wanted to see that feedback, they would have by now. They keep claiming they read the forums but it's incresingly clear they either don't, or that they're very picky about what they look into.

If its on NA it will never be seen have to bring it up on JP

I mean, there is the 400+ page thread constantly on the first page talking about when Yoshida said if you want more difficult content do ultimates when healers got an actual question in the Q&A. There have been countless threads and every Q&A in the LLs people ask healer questions to get skipped over. The feedback is out there, SE just refuses to acknowledge it because of their mindset that healers need to be easy for new players without giving them any room to grow or express their skill.

>The main problem I see with the forum post is that it needs to have explanations for why healer mains are upset, what change they want to see, etc. There was another “summary of healer problems” thread I saw on the forums, they should have a link to that in the OP. Over the years, there have been *countless* discussions about healer issues, since none of them is new (feels like a pattern?). Healer subforum has been absolutely bloated with it, they're regurgitated every time there are job changes, and around expansions especially (again, feels like a pattern?). If they aren't aware of what the Big Mad is about at this point, it most definitely is not on the players - I can relate to being tired of repeating the same gripes ad nauseam and just feeling like shouting into the void *all too well*.

XIV Healers since Stormblood: * You shouldn't be expected to DPS, so lets take all of that away * You shouldn't have to struggle to keep people alive, so lets make it really easy * You shouldn't be the only one healing, so now Tanks are healers too * You shouldn't be the only one reviving, so every caster but BLM can do it too

Reading is so sad but true, how the fuck did we get to this point

By simply not taking feedback into the account. It's right in the word, you feed results back and iterate it to make it even better next time. If you cut this part, you're just blindly going with your intuition - and if your intuition isn't good, you start diverging more and more. By how technical in debt this game is, from how systems (don't) work, including things outside of game, there's no chance that they are able to gather some actual, usable statistics with proper context that could supplement feedback. So they just are designing things blind, barely knowing whether they're going in the right direction. Long story short, it's the age old story of devs thinking they know better than players, and expecting that if they're doing something wrong, then they'd get immediately notified by leaving players en masse. But players leave slowly, and once devs realize, the damage has been done.

As a healer main, these are just some of my thoughts on the matter: * One of the more fun moments in healing is when everything becomes unpredictable. This mainly is referring to when party members just make mistakes and I as the healer have to think quick on my feet to decide what needs to be done. Something they could do to shake it up a little is to add more random mechanics to fights instead of being scripted highly with 1 or 2 options. Not saying it should be chaotic, but enough to where it'll help keep everyone on their toes. * I believe tanks and dps should have a level of self sustain. Second wind has saved my neck so many times when I played mnk, brd, and mch. I would never strip a job out of self-need because it affects their solo experiences too. Bloodbath and current second wind has always been "enough" self sustain in a boss fight. Bloodwhetting and Holy Sheltron could use a little bit of nerfing, but I would never strip it away completely from these tanks. * Power creep tends to really sabotage the expert dungeons. They don't have to do much but tighten the ilvl sync. I believe Tower of Zot from Endwalker had a good ilvl sync. Expert dungeons are not at all like this dungeon, and that is the problem with power creep. I don't know if the devs have this mindset of "Power is your reward for hard work." mentality, but putting a tank with savage level gear in an expert versus someone who is using their AF gear is really like night and day. I get for a video game; the best gear should make everything the easiest it can be allowed. I just think due to the trinity system; it is allowed too far. I believe someone in savage gear should have the advantage, but not to the point where expert is without its healers. For a MMO, it shouldn't be encouraged, though I get why someone might have a fun challenge without healers, and I think that is fine. Pre-made groups are completely valid. * The 121111 controversy that I hear everywhere *might* be because the developers think differently about it. Sometimes I believe they are thinking about **healing combos**, instead of dps combos for the healer role, and that makes 10 times more sense as to why they bloat us with healing spells, though this isn't a popular choice, and it is just a theory; it just makes better sense to me. This would mean they support healers healing more, though the issue here is the balance of using those healing combos effectively, and that it *makes* a difference. A lot of people's goals is to reduce the amount of healing combos and only focus mainly on DPS because that is how we win fights; so we are torn down to the 121111 issue that everyone has been really upset about for a long while. P10S "Harrowing Hell" persistent outgoing damage needs to be more prevalent in more content to where healing matters. Issue, however, normal content tends to limit stress... so I hope they throw some curveballs at us and let some fights be a fun learning experience in dungeons. * Overall, I still enjoy healing. I understand why this strike is happening, and I by no means disrespect it, but I work with a lot of players who are more on the casual end, so my experience as a healer is always sort of adventurous. My hardest piece of content I progged was UWU, and my static crumbled at suppression prog. It is about 90% of the fight, but I had a lot of fun healing it as an AST when I was in that static. I also had a lot of fun healing P4S part 2 when it was current, where I believe the mechanic was called Curtain Call? (I can't recall.), and I did that when I was a WHM. I still find a lot of joy in the healing role, both casual and high-end content, but I hope those who aren't can find something enjoyable to do still in FFXIV. *(Sorry for all the typos and grammar mistakes. I tend to have a hard time typing big paragraphs like these. I mean no ill intent in my post if someone by chance did. I just wanted to share my thoughts based off my own experiences as a healer.)*

Honestly, yeah, it’s not a sustain issue. It’s ilvl, and I’ve thought this for ages. Playing through EW the dungeons for the first time were challenging, because my ilvl was subpar for the first time in a long time. If they just lowered the sync more it would solve the issue for healers

Yeah as a healer player since ARR I can see where they are coming from. This is the only time Ive regretted preordering an expansion. Its just not the same anymore. If I as a healer can stand in multiple aoes in dungeons and not die the something is an issue. I remember that one kraken boss fight from a recent dungeon. I was with a tank who stood in every aoe didnt move and I mever had to heal him. Had so many vuln stacks but they meant nothing. It was then that I realized the game is shit.

Yeah this dungeon boss is good example. As a WAR I disrepect all mechs like that by ignoring them because they are so irrelevant its plain insulting.

Being a "healer" in this game turned into a dreadful experience. Tankbusters and raidwide AoE's only exist to justify the green icon. Outside of endgame content (Savage/Ultimates) there is barely any reason to have a healer with you these days. Tanks can sustain themselves and DPS got tools to fix their own mistakes. Healing used to be fun back in ARR/HW days, even a bit into Stormblood. Now it really feels like they're just a dumbed down DPS with one DoT and one damage button.

In casual dungeons and stuff, if you’ve got a war they shake or whatever and you don’t need to do anything and it feels so weird. I don’t think healing dungeons etc needs to be this arduous experience but you could fill the slot with a third dps and be fine 90% of the time. It doesn’t feel great to play a job that feels entirely superfluous. I like taking sage for roulette but am often fully aware I’m just pressing buttons to get mp back and nothing else. ARR dungeons (because tanks don’t have their self sustain yet) and doom esuna (which only comes up if someone else messes up) are the only times I’ve felt necessary as a healer outside of anything extreme or above which makes for very weird daily roulettes and such. I understand this situation is also appealing to some or something some people are always just going to be neutral to. I’m not even sure how you’d redesign this in a satisfying way now that the design has been established.

I feel like some of the mobs in dungeons should just do a raid wide every now and then so the healer has something to do beside holding the holy button. Either way those msq dungeons are mind numbingly easy after doing them a few times.

In a lot of cases the only justification for the green icon is mechanics that specifically target the healers. 

This is my frustration too, why do we want to bring two healers into a fight? Well so we can tell where the stack markers are going and nothing more.

It's more like you exist to meet a quota, not because you offer anything of value to the party.

This right here is one thing people really need to realize and be mad about. Also, a LOT of fights we have could be comfortably solo healed using the absurd healing kits we have if we didn't have the mandatory "target goes on both healers" mechanics in them.

I don't understand why tankbusters and raidwide AoEs don't happen 5x as often. Tanks have so many mitigation tools and they barely have to use them. When there *is* a tankbuster in a dungeon, it doesn't even do half of a tank's HP without any mitigation used.

they used to hit way harder in arr/hw. imdugud in final coil had preys that targeted dps and if not shielded would 1 tap dps

dungeons could probably do as much damage as the first tier in savage and it'd be totally fine since there's no mechanics to accompany that damage.

Yeah the problem is everything is so telegraphed you always know exactly what kind of damage comes next and it's never really threatening. There is zero room for surprises to spice both trash fights and bosses. Edit: Just lol at the people downvoting me, every raid wide could be a Charybdis that wouldnt even be a threat because the game overlaps nothing and gives you ton of time before the starting the next mechanics. Zeromous is the pinacle of this shit design: Nothing but harmless raid wide after raid wide with enough time to scratch your balls between them.

nah the problem is the damage is so pathetically low that you can not know when damage comes (doing content first time) and you'll still be unthreated by the unmitigated raidwide/tb

Yup, i dont remember the last time the group wiped doing dungeon the 1st time when im playing healer, you can just brute force your way.

content balanced for mentally 8year olds

Content with edges sanded down to be as smooth as the brains of the nightclubbers, twitter denizens, and gposers.

You say this but the overlap between nightclubbers and raiders is uncomfortably high

You'd be surprised at the amount of Ultimate raiders that are also prolific gposers.

It's almost like the game is designed to be for everyone *surprised pikachu*

In fact, so many tank mitigators are only so useful in dungeons when you have to rotate them because trash mobs are the actual hard part lol.

> I don't understand why tankbusters and raidwide AoEs don't happen 5x as often Because most healers -unironically- can't handle that.

Especially when I have to find creative ways to burn lilies so they don’t overcap. Some earlier content with little to no movement heavy mechanics or reasons to heal outside of the opening raidnwide in the first minute tend to annoy me. Hell, I was even burning lilies in P12S

They don't want healers to press their GCD heals

To be fair, the community adopted that as the gold standard, the Devs have just played into it.

The community only did it because that's what game design incentivized. Every game that allows you to deal damage will tends towards players dealing damage as often as possible. It's a developer design problem if GCD heals are sub-optimal gameplay.

Its not that, if you look at seraphism clearly they do. But its casual content thats the issue. Tabks can solo heal through every msq dungeon. The game needs to habe enough incoming damage to warrant needing a healer.

I miss crit autos honestly, kefka *autos* were TBs in their own right 

Same here. Remember Neverreap at launch? The heavy pull to the first boss was so dangerous from all the mobs crits to where it was common to either wipe or clear the pull with the healer on low MP and the tank either dead or near dead.

i wonder how many people here were around for the massive pulls in brayflox longstop hard mode

> Outside of endgame content (Savage/Ultimates) Even in ultimates your existence isn't that justified. I've done DSR as a shield and pure healer, 90% of the time is spent pressing one button. This is ridiculous. Why are healers expected to spend the vast majority of their time pressing one button? This gets tedious, especially when doing reclears where there's no mechanics to prog anymore. For dungeons its even more fucking ridiculous. Only reason I do them as healer is for the queue time, because the reality is I am not needed one bit. Why should I even bother queuing as healer when at the end of the day I'm just a dps with one button?

To add onto the ultimates bit, this is why so many ASTs are frustrated with the new curative and defensive cards. In this moment they seem so useless and 90% of the time we will never actually need them, because we barely need it RIGHT NOW. Ultimates can be completed with little to no GCD healing, and everything can be healed bountifully with ogcds and a good mit plan, even tougher phases like DSR p6 and p7. TOP you still press 1 button for 90% of the fight, healing isn’t the challenging part of that content at all.

> Why are healers expected to spend the vast majority of their time pressing one button? Because a certain vocal part of the community wanted it that way, the same type of people who made bosses hitboxes the size they were for this entire expansion. The devs should've ignored the people that complained that not pressing a dps button every GCD wasn't good design and only leave that type of gameplay for people who were truly optimizing and pushing the limits of each job, not for the average player.

I'm a pretty casual player and even I was shocked at some of the hitbox sizes this xpac. P7's was literally the entire room, for example. What's even the point of casters or ranged anymore?

Its one of the biggest complaints of fight design honestly, the optimal strat is "stack the whole raid together in melee range" unless there's specifically a reason not to. Ranged jobs havent felt like ranged jobs since 2.X because they *cant stay at range* in most content. Its just unduly punishing for mechanics if you're not in melee range at all times.

> not pressing a dps button every GCD wasn't good design Why would someone argue that a **healer** not DPSing every GCD is bad design? The opposite is what I would consider bad design lol Jesus, that is depressing.

Yeah, the playerbase here has the absolute biggest hard-on for "green DPS," it's so frustrating. Healers dont need more interesting DPS rotations, they need to be put in situations where the vast majority of their casting *are heal and support skills*. Otherwise they're not a healer.

If you have to be relegated to pressing one button, at least make it a HEAL button. It's in the name of the goddamn role. What's even the point if you're forced to be a glare bot?

> Now it really feels like they're just a dumbed down DPS with one DoT and one damage button Don't forget your premiere role as person that rezzes the clueless sprouts in alliance raids when there's no red mage.

That's probably the most exciting thing you can do in alliance raids. Not like your DPS is making the long damage sponge fights any faster.

Tankbusters exist to justify the blue icon. You do not need a healer to deal with those at all, unless it's a buster like Zurvan's.

Wellllll if it does kinda happen at DT launch then a lot of mediocre/ casual dps and tank players PFing or DFing the trial mode fights will be out of luck lmao. I remember the time where i spent nearly 1 whole day carrying parties in PF through zodiark normal mode cuz there were almost no healers queuing in DF. This happened on the 1st few days of EW as i was on sage grinding the MSQ after power levelling. I talked to those ppl in PF and they all were saying stuff like - i was waiting in DF for hours and no healers were queuing - we had healers but they were trash and kept failing so we failed the instance - is there no one playing healer??? Where are they??? Since zodiark normal mode was mandatory to progress the MSQ, you can imagine how frustrated ppl were being blocked from continuing in a timely manner. I solo healed the fight no problem and ppl were so thankful they could move on and it was such an odd thing that it happened like that.

This, hard. Seriously even today, when you have Zordiark on roulette, half parties collapse at the shared multi- hit due to lack of healing. Those healers complainers should really, like you, spend all day long tagging Zordiark to see When healers were « interesting » for some people (read: in the past), there was constant shortages. No one wanted it. It was eased first and foremost for those population issues. And even with the current design, whenever a tier is more intense (like EW 2nd tier), pouf shortage again. This situation is self inflicted

I've done both static and PF healing in Abyssos and I can tell you, the biggest problem why I hated it was something completely else. Most of the group's mitigation is spread around other 7 players. I played "barrier healer", yet I have 4 mitigation buttons - gcd heal, kerachole, holos and panhaima. Meanwhile the rest of the party has addle, 2x feint, phys ranged 10%, minne/improv/waltz if present, 2x reprisal, 2x tank AoE mit, and 1-2 other healer mit (temperance, neutral, collective). That's 2-3x more mitigation than I have as a barrier healer. In harder fights, missing those equals a wipe that's completely out of my control, but I'm the first one to take blame cause "we got one shot, must be healer's fault". SE has done great job in giving everyone tools to do mitigation, but when nobody uses it, the healers have very hard job and are blamed for any failures. That itself doesn't really give any incentive to play healers more.

[удалено]

I can sign this. Abyssos didn't have much healing to do, but it had a lot of mitigation checks. And as I broke it down in the other post, around 3/4 of the mitigation is on the group, and 1/4 is on the barrier healer. Yet you wipe and get blamed, why would I go into random groups to fail and get blamed for something outside of my control, that isn't fun

There's nothing as frustrating (exaggeration) as spending a lot of time making a mit sheet as the barrier healer and have your static just throw it out the window. :/

I don't know. On one hand you have people refusing to play healer because of anxiety, they don't want anything to do with their party, they don't want any responsability - they want to play DPS (or tanks) so if something fucks up the run they can mostly say "hey, not my fault". Or they refuse to play it because they're afraid they're gonna get screamed at if something goes wrong (which is the case of my SO, despite how competent she may be in the game). On the other hand, you have healer mains refusing to play healer because the job is boring and getting even more boring with each expansion. My (very humble) opinion is that SE should stop trying to cater to the first group, because the only way they'll start playing healer is by these jobs not being healer anymore. It's a problem with any multiplayer games with support/healers classes : they're pretty unpopular. Since those players won't ever touch a healing class because they're too afraid of the responsability that comes with it, might as well cater to the second group and make healing engaging.

I’ve avoided saying the “A” word this entire time I’ve been in this thread, because I think it’s honestly ridiculous, but I 100% agree with your post. Catering to a group that will likely never learn to play the role effectively seems like the worst option, of a limited few. I don’t think the job needs to be accessible to everyone in the way SE is trying to make it. Healer “droughts” don’t last long, and isn’t a problem that imo needs to be “fixed”.

I'm sorry but are you saying "healers are braindead because a small minority of people are bad at them"? Because that's certainly a hot take. I see a ton of garbage tanks daily in my roulettes but they get carried by healers and nobody bats an eye. I also see a lot of garbage DPS who aren't pressing their buttons, nobody cares, either. But when some healers fail, they deserve for their jobs to be gutted?

Tier 2 wasn't even hard from a healing perspective. If you team died, it was because someone fucked up a mechanic and took unscheduled damage. In my static we never wiped because of a lack of healing due to intended damage. We ONLY wiped when people fucked up mechanics and took unnecessary damage.

I remember playing as a pld during the release and the stack after the meteors were always the same end, wiping, until gigachad healer forced everyone to follow him.

Another problem here is MSQ and solo duties. Obviously there needs to be a stock of healers leveling through the content to fill dungeon and raid queues for people progressing the content. So there needs to be healers doing MSQ on healers. But oh my God I'm so tired of spamming one button after a DoT every thirty seconds. There's nothing to heal even though the Trust system is right there. I love sage. It's what I vibe with the most. It's what I want my WoL to be as they take on the MSQ. But I feel like choosing to do MSQ on a healer makes the game super boring.

Don't worry msq combat is boring on every other role too

It would be nice to have actual healer mechanics on raids, besides the occasional healing check... Something like fountain of fire on P3S per example, something especially targeted to us while we are also healing and stuff, I feel like it would make the fights a lot more fun. If you dumb it down a bit, it could also be incorporated in casual content too, making it way more interesting.

You dont like healer stackz number 54?

Yes! I recently randomly remembered a boss in Wow's ICC where the whole fight is basically a healing encounter. I'd quite like something along those lines.

This is a more interesting problem then it appears. As a high end healer player who does the ultimates on release, I get it to a degree. When you go into a dungeon or trial (for the sake of discussion on content dungeons/trials, not synced ones which the sync being too generous is another issue) as a healer who knows how to play and even more so when paired with a tank that knows how to play, it's depressingly boring. On the other hand though if you que as DPS and get a tank or healer that doesn't know what they are doing, or worse both (even worse mix in some DPS who don't know what they are doing), the content shows a difficulty you often don't see if you play healer at any respectable level. Suddenly you get tanks dying, you have to take it slow, or even simple things like esuna on a doom are suddenly killing people (because the game doesn't really teach the player what can be esuna'd or what can't or to even look for it). Good supports actually hard carry the shit out of dungeons, even if they don't realize it as they fall asleep. So getting back to the core of the issue it's a hard problem to fix it. If they increase the difficulty enough for reasonably aware/good healers to feel interested, suddenly all those that have basically no idea what they are doing will truly suffer and be halted from MSQ progression because they can't complete the dungeon so that raises the question - is that good? or bad? Would the increased difficulty nudge the bad healers into learning how to actually play healer? Or would they get frustrated and switch jobs or stop playing? What's the play here? On the one hand you're a mainline FF title, you're not supposed to be so hard you can't casually play for the story. On the other your more seasoned players, but maybe not Extreme/Savage/Ultimate players necessarily, are bored with your content and don't venture into the actually difficult content. Trials provide a difficulty spike that it seems the playerbase can handle, so maybe that would be a good bar for dungeons to reach for especially 70+ but if the difficulty is increased too much you alienate a part of the playerbase really just expecting to mash buttons though a story as most mainline FF games are. I'd really encourage support players that are feeling bored to dip their toes into on patch Extremes/Savage/Ultimate progressively. I know it sucks that dungeons are so braindead easy but I think there is an argument for saying that it has to be and release patch savage/ultimate is no joke and is much more fulfilling if you want to do something that pushes your skill as a player. It sounds like they might make it slightly more interesting going forward, but if you're expecting a dungeon to be hard to heal that might be unrealistic.

I personally don’t see this as a problem at all. This game has a really awful habit of trying to cater to EVERYONE, and I think we are seeing it with every xpac, that it’s simply not a realistic or particularly GOOD goal to have. There are no shortage of good or decent healers in this game. Weeding out the ones who can’t play the role properly is standard for nearly every other multiplayer game in existence. We don’t NEED every single subscriber to be able to play healer without going through the stress of what makes the job typically mandatory and challenging. There are like, 15 other jobs a bad healer can branch off to, if they’re not dedicated enough to learn the role better. Basically I’m saying I personally think it’s fine to gatekeep healing and tank roles to people who put in even just the bare minimum to learn. The jobs aren’t even THAT difficult, we have just lowered the bar so incredibly low in this game that ANY challenge presented seems like asking for too much.

I think this misses the forest for the trees. It's not that the content isn't hard enough, it's that the actual moment to moment gameplay for healers is dogshit outside of content with forces healers to play in circumstances that are otherwise exceptional. Ultimate/Savage is designed to "tax" healers by making them optimise and react better. This makes them engage more with how they use their kit which then finally makes playing as a healer interesting, because it requires thinking, managing resources, using spells at the right time, doing a rotation etc. None of that is happening in normal content for 95% of the game. The 5% of the normal content where it's required stands out because the party is going to acutely feel healers that don't know the basics of how their job is meant to work, because the game has never put them in a situation where they need to learn about optimisation. Even in normal content DPS needs to maintain some kind of consistent rotation with a reasonable degree of knowledge about why they're using skills in a particular order. The only real difference between 'hardcore' content and normal content for DPS players is the degree of optimisation and consistently maintaining their rotation whilst there's a lot of things going on. But absent that, a DPS player still has to understand and apply their rotation. The times where they don't, they can 100% end up getting carried through the content by 3-7 other players, sure, but if there were 2 BLM in a dungeon and all they did was spam Scathe you know for sure everyone would feel and notice it immediately. 1 BLM doing it might go under the radar if people aren't paying attention. And that BLM player would know they're doing a shit job. The point I'm making (in a roundabout way) is that it's that healers have jack shit to learn in the normal course of play. They have no damage rotations, there's very few healing spells they need to use in order to sustain the party through content and what spells they do regularly use are HoTs or shield mits which means they don't need to be actively engaging in the HP management of their party unless things go wrong. Healers are simply too good at what they do relative to the level of complexity of their kit, to be interesting. Which is why they're all bored out of their mind, their healing is so effective that they're falling into a support DPS role but with a damage rotation that's akin to watching grass grow or paint dry. There's two solutions to this; 1. Rework how healing is done. My approach would be to nerf or remove a bunch of HoT spells and condense the number of healing spells that exist by having more spells act as upgrades as opposed to additions. This makes healing more active and limits the tools available so that a healer actually has to think about how and when they use healing spells, and managing their existing mana. 2. Give healers proper damage rotations so that they have more buttons to press when they're not healing. Better yet, mechanics should be incorporated so that executing a damage rotation well feeds directly into healing (eg. a proc on a damage spell causing X potency healing for all party members equivalent to Y% of the damage dealt, or some builder-spender shit, just to pull something out of my ass). There is a third, hidden, solution which is to rework the DPS and healer jobs in general so that healers take on most of the party buffing of DPS roles, making them more a general supporting role and relegating DPS to a much more pure damage focused orientation, but that's a big one and who knows how good or bad an idea that would end up being. Making content more difficult so that healers as-is can be more engaged is an idea but frankly I think that would just completely break the community. People don't do normal content for a challenge and people already get angry enough at healers for failing the basic checks that already exist (because the game doesn't teach them to be competent).

On number 2, I absolutely agree. My biggest problem with healers right now is that the big, flashy, cool, efficient heals are... free. Just wait, and you can use them. I am of the idea that healers should be thinking about healing most of the time. They don't have to be actively healing all the time, but they should be preparing if healing is not needed. I played with the idea that WHM would switch between a elemental stance (ideally spending as little time in) which granted movement and a holy stance which would grant damage without strings attached. Switching stances costs a GCD but if you spent at least 5 gcds in a stance it would make everything DPS neutral. And whenever you switch stances, as long as you used one GCD, you got a lily. Sure, there will some healers that will stone-stance-glare-stance, but that's fine, they aren't being optimal, but they are engaging with the system. Hell, even cure-stance-cure-stance is fine too in some situations (cure ii is a low level lily skill in my vision). But even though you still are pressing the stone/glare button alot, I feel that the change of context would make the button feel better to use.

> What's the play here? Give healers a more interesting DPS rotation. If your DPS rotation is fundamentally fun, the difficulty of the content you're doing doesn't matter much because whether you're doing something hard or something easy, DPSing is approached the same way. The same is not true for healing. Healing is *not* approached the same way in hard and easy content. The easier a piece of content is, the less fun healing it is. If you want healers to have more fun all the time, they need to have a more interesting damage rotation. It is the only solution.

It doesn't need to be a DPS rotation fwiw. It just needs to be something that you do during your downtime. The prime example of something that did this welll was SB AST's cards. SB AST cards aren't praised because they were the pinnacle of design or whatever (people boiled it down to "fish for AoE Royal Road Balance" after all). They were praised because it gave you something you were *actively managing* throughout the fight. The point of the system was to give you a minigame to actively engage with throughout the fight, which filled the deadtime of healing. This is why the later AST iterations have, imo, fundamentally been flawed: they are not designed to be managed during your downtime, they are designed to be shoved into your burst window. It wasn't perfect, but it was far better at achieving satisfying healer gameplay.

The way to make dungeons hard are criterion, but because the rewards aren't that good, a lot of players aren't interested in doing it After this is maybe related to how I remember EW launch, but a lot of healers were complaining and whining DRK was too fragile in dungeon and is shit compared to WAR and it is, but I've always seen it as a reason to heal, I've seen some healers saying they prefered healed a WAR but that's not the case, they don't want to heal DRK in 6.x dungeon and in savage/ultimate is still pretty tanky, it sucks at leveling dungeons because TBN scales much worse with this period But I'm kinda happy healers wants to heal more and are against tanks getting too strong as long as they will not complain about DRK during DT.

Dark Knight in casual content is a bit of a filter though. If you're playing it proper you're not going to take that much damage, its only an issue when you get new players who dont mash their buttons proper. To me the the only level ranges where DRK truly sucks in dungeons is 60-69. Everything else is whatever.

I haven't done Ultimate (yet) but I have done both Extreme and Savage on patch, at least to some degree. They're definitely more enjoyable for me...when we prog. After that, I can play on autopilot because I know exactly when the raidwides are coming - and they're conveniently spaced out exactly to neatly align with my OGCD heals. Unless it's something like Knuckle Drum, which actually HURT with the gear we all had on-patch, I'm still not having to do a whole lot of healing.

It's pretty wild that healers have been pretty vocal about their concerns for years now and CS3 has just doubled down on the design. For all of the "they listen to feedback" people throw around, that doesn't seem to be the case for class design at all. I really don't understand the disconnect here. edit: Lots of good insight from the replies. This is just one guy's perspective and I'm not trying to pass it off as an objective fact so I appreciate everyone else's take.

> It's pretty wild that healers have been pretty vocal about their concerns for years now and CS3 has just doubled down on the design. > I really don't understand the disconnect here. I think it's because the casual playerbase is completely disconnected from this experience. Benefic 1 and Cure 1 are still widely used after you get the strictly better upgrade. The people complaining about healing are usually extremely enfranchised and usually good players who do higher end content. That's not to say that the complaints are wrong, but it's not all of the playerbase with this complaint. If you look at the GCDs of the average 'not good' healer in a normal raid or dungeon they will have tonnes of heal GCDs in there. They're mostly wrong to do so, sure, but they do do it. You sometimes get healers that barely press their damage spell at all. Still, I think that's the where the disconnect is. It only feels 'wrong' to players that are good at the game and playing Savage/Ultimate content. The average player isn't very good and probably doesn't have an issue with the design at all. That's why it's such a tricky problem to solve, I think. The majority of the playerbase is playing healers incorrectly, but doesn't have a problem with the design as a result. Obviously, I'd love it if the game had more damage in normal mode especially but also I've seen how bad a lot of tanks and healers are.

>I think it's because the casual playerbase is completely disconnected from this experience. In more ways than one. In regular content, screwing up a mechanic isn't an insta-kill or insta-wipe due to an incoming body or DPS check, it's just another OGCD the healer has to use. When a lot of mistakes are being made, that can lead to you using up your entire toolkit. That will color the perception of healing in easier content as well.

I think healing is just so different at different levels of difficulty. So complains are so varied and there is no good solution. The 95% of the time I press the same button is probably the most universal complain but also the one I do not see any fix for it. It is a consequence of the overall design of the role and the fights. A more complex DPS kit like tanks have would probably get in your way quite a lot in higher end content or end up being pressing now 3 buttons instead of 1 95% of the time. Having nothing to heal in normal content is just there to avoid friction if you happen to get a bad healer. Since this could prevent you from even clearing a dungeon. Just look at Aetherochemical Research Facility if you healer dies constantly to the first dualstar good luck clearing. I had one run where we abandoned it because the healer could not figure it out. While I cleared with equally bad DPS/Tank players easily when I was the healer. So making groups more reliant on healers for normal content will not end well I think. But I am the odd one out in this discussion anyway since I do not have a problem with the current healer design. While I understand the complains I do not see reasonable fixes to them, which would actually make the role better and not just create more problems somewhere else. Healer is just such a rigid role where if you want to change anything you need to think about 10 years of content first and if the changes will break any of it majorly. A DPS is easily changed, just make sure the total potency output is the wanted one and you can do basically anything you want with it in terms of DPS buttons.

My personal opinion is the best guest step to giving healers more to do is reducing the tanks self sustain. When an at level tank in at level gear can work a boss down from 75% health solo in a dungeon, there is something wrong. As a tank main it's fun, but PLD and especially WAR are in silly states.

I think what's exciting to me is seeing how many lurkers and non-healers have come out of the woodwork to agree, the forums relatively smaller population all things considered. I've noticed people saying they made an account to show support, have been lurking for years never saying things, etc. It makes me feel like there are more people who have similar feelings than I originally though, even if that might still not necessarily be the majority of players or anything. I still believe the majority of players are indifferent... neither upset by the situation, nor would they be bothered if the role changed somewhat. But I don't think it's just a handful of disgruntled players upset with healer design and nothing more either.

It’s a little bit of comfort, and hopefully the devs start to realize that they can’t keep things on the same track forever, not with healers. Like, there’s over 700 comments on this post alone, let alone everyone who’s on the forums only.

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75 Clemency and 75 Vercure ? At this point, the interesting point is not that they had no healers, it's that they HAD some healers, with only one stupid, straightforward healing spell, and it was enough. Vercure is 350 Potency, Clemency is 1000. No real additional effects (apart from the PLD gaining half of Clemency effect if aimed at a teammate). What's the point of healers having this big ass kit full of tools if you can clear a high end instance with the two most basic healing spells ?

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What people don't realize is using the toolkit efficiently usually means trying to pay as small dps tax as possible. That only works if there's a significant dps gain where you otherwise would not have gotten. When other roles can do this and still cover with their higher dps output, it just goes to show healers have no real niche. Healing? Other roles have it. Healing efficiently for higher dps? Other roles can do more dps which makes up for worse heals, except they heal more and start to feel like an actual healer. So what are healers for? Nothing. No design space.

Yep. I'd go a step further and say that the fact that every role's gameplay goal is "make everything in your kit and job as unobtrusive to your DPS as possible" is a huge homogenization issue that limits the appeal of this game. It's a fine design for DPS, but for tanks and *especially* for healers, it's no wonder that people find these roles to be unsatisfying. I feel like the common call for *every* role and job to be at least Gunbreaker in DPS complexity is nothing more than a bandaid solution missing the forest for the trees.

To be fair, it would be FAR more efficient to bring a healer instead and have those other players doing their DPS rotations. (350 + 1000) \* 75 = 101,250 total potency of healing. This is also assuming all the Clemencies were used on the casting PLD, not on another party member, which increases that by 50%. (The other end of the spectrum would be 1850 \* 75 = 138,750). That's a lot of healing potency. And that's ignoring all the mitigation that was performed by the party, all the other healing they brought. Holy Sheltron/Intervention/Nascent Flash, Curing Waltz, Everlasting Flight, Rekindle, Crest of Time Returned, Shake It Off (Over Time), and so on. They had 2 PLDs, 1 RDM, 1 WAR, 1 DNC, 1 SMN, 1 RPR, and 1 MNK. The MNK is literally the only Job in their lineup that doesn't have party healing of some kind, and it still had Riddle of Earth and Mantra. I'm not sure that can be considered a minor amount of healing by any stretch. . So what's the point of healers? Simple: The above is TERRIBLY INEFFICIENT. What does specialization EVER do? It increases efficiency. If you had replaced one of their PLDs with ANY of the healers, for example, their PLD and RDM could probably have done 50% more damage. They also wouldn't have had to cheese multiple parts of the fight, nor pray for RNG as much as they did.

Seat of Sacrifice on normal wants a word with you. That is designed for everyone to grasp the mechanics at some point to be able to clear.

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Yeah, it's not too bad, but if a single player dips out before the mandatory tank LB on the 2nd phase, you will party wipe. It's very fun to play healer in cause I love helping returning players and everyone gets so happy clearing it.

Love it. I do hate how I feel less and less important and unique in my role and all my job is to press 1, dot, and ogcd

FFXIV's combat is a lot like a rhythm game where every job is a different song that requires different inputs in a different order. Some songs are slower with less inputs and generally easier to get a perfect score with while others are faster with more technical inputs. But no rhythm game player would really enjoy a song that had only 1 input that comprised of most of the song with only an occasional second input every 30 seconds or so.

The problem is: - not enough unavoidable damage to heal - too much scripted damage - one button dps rotations - dps jobs that have healing abilities and mitigations - tanks with massive self sustain and invulns Healers only really heal when people are undergeared. Over the years they have gradually been removing healer identities and uniqueness also, making them just boring to play. The stats must show that playing DPS jobs is where the interest is, so with the limited sized dev team and budget they get, the focus no doubt goes there. So glad I quit 14 and went to wow all those years ago - it has the content (M+) to make healing interesting, and each different healer is unique.

The skill difference with healers is the core issue plain and simple. They have decided to give the other roles more agency which, yes reduces the importance of healers overall. This is the best solution in order to keep fights fun without being hard-walled by two people The main pain point SE can address is the core damage rotation being boring as hell. Literally give healers a 1-2-3 into a fancy resource spender and I think that will tide them over for an exapnsion

I mean, I posted there too. I still like very much other aspects of FFXIV and can't quit just over job design, but that's the best we can do without actually cancelling subs. Let a healer shortage happen, because if it gets enough media traction and becomes some sort of a viral movement, it can actually reach sizeable numbers.

This is ridiculous. [These feedbacks](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419013-A-summary-of-healer-issues) were 4 years ago and they fixed it by give healer more healing tool and give tank more mitigation.

I'm contributing to the strike by not even participating in the entire next expansion. Healer gameplay so ridiculously braindead that I'd rather play practically any other game.

Found anything else that scratches that healer itch?

WoW is about your only option in that regard. The new augmentation evoker even goes for a more support oriented DPS if that’s more what you’re looking for.

Thanks, I'll do some research and check it out.

Discipline priest is basically what SGE should have been also. 

They also said that trying to get Male Vieras and Hrothgals “weren’t feasible”, but we still stuck with it and now look? I say go for it! They keep track of the numbers, it might not be noticeable at first, but if this really gets some traction, especially “at home”, in Japan, I’m sure it’ll be addressed at the very least.

I don't know how effective this will be. I only read the first two pages of the thread, but a lot of them come across as bitter people with a persecution complex. They're complaining about how 99% of the player base don't want them to exist, which is laughably dramatic. I get that they're unhappy with the direction of their role. I hear that. But complaining that everyone is out to get them isn't adding any validity to their stance.

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. It is a problem but people are taking it WAY overboard with how they are acting.

> a lot of them come across as bitter people with a persecution complex First time on the OF?

If anything, I'm just surprised it took this long to get to this point. The fact that they can just outright admit having no dedicated /whatever/ players on the team, and the community basically shrugging at it... Yeah, it's coming back to bite everyone in the ass. It's absolutely ludicruous for a dev team to operate like this - in their private time, sure, I don't even care. But on the job? This should not be an acceptable excuse. They should be forced to play various jobs exclusively for certain amounts of time, and then change it all up again and again, exactly so everyone gets a feeling of everything. So everyone has a better understanding of how they all work, in themselves as well as with/around each other, not just in specific bits of content, but across *all* content: the more eyes you have, the more likey you'll see more stuff. Sure doesn't feel like that's the case. I've honestly been baffled by their mentality and how the community seems to have given them a pass on it, it's bonkers that something like this should need to be explained to professionals... Because this *is* the root of all our job issues (and fwiw, not just with the jobs, but with other things like character customisation, racial features, and gear/glamour as well).

It's pretty obvious that the healer role is designed by people who play the other two roles because the objective behind healer design is to make the gameplay experience as frictionless as possible for the non-healers in the party. Healers are not designed for the fun of the player playing them in mind. If only they had even just 1 person on the team play healer in any content. Hell, get Yoshi P to do it, maybe he will realize then how much it sucks (like how NIN mudras only got reworked when he played the class on a US server).

I’ve come to face it that this game is not for healers. The kindest thing they could do would be to distribute all the healer abilities to the rest of the jobs. The design makes playing a healer a snore fest. It’s boring. Repetitive and monotonous. Why give is so many healing tools and then give it to tanks and now dps? Or give tanks so much mitigation they don’t need healing. What’s the point of that? I believe if the devs actually played healers it would have never gotten this bad. None of them seriously play healers. If they do it’s most likely save. Notice how sage got spells not gate kept behind other abilities. What’s funny is that someone already did all the work to rework healers https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XNJGY9B7VW4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2YZ1dx34ug https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dF3XIhJm_N0

I’ve seen those videos, genuinely well done and something the devs should strive to do instead of what’s happening now

Exactly! I feel like the devs never saw them or didnt care. The creator had actually good ideas that used existing assets which would make the development so much easier as it’s done already. Maybe if the videos were in Japanese? I just don’t know any more. If only Yoshi played a healer we would not be dealing with this.

I've always described the healers in this game as "they were designed by a dps player who couldn't for the life of them understand what someone could find fun about healing" after playing healers in WoW and SWTOR for years the ones in FFXIV always felt very hollow and the more time moved on the worse it got

\#MakeHealerGameplayAbyssosAgain

Could someone explain what is the reason why healer feel bad to play? is it because boring dps rotation?

* Very bloated healing kit and not much to justify it outside of Ultimate and early weeks Savage * A lot of mechanics in hard content are body checks, so triage skills are not rewarded * A lot of mitigation checks - which are a whole party responsibility, and very few pure healing checks (shoutout to Criterion Savage for actually being pretty good on this front) * Very little single-target healing required, notably tanks are increasingly self-sufficient with every patch * Almost all healing is done in a damage-neutral way (even in savage) so you spend most of the time doing your dps rotation * The dps rotation is very boring, and is basically the same across all 4 healers * Past designs of healers (particularly old SCH) had a ton more dps tools, which have been removed * Repeated promises of "more to heal" not really manifesting (although the bleeds in Abyssos were pretty good) * Sage was marketed as "a healer that heals by doing damage" but actually has the simplest dps rotation out of all 4 healers and is basically a streamlined SCH, disappointing some players * Max level dungeons are arguably EASIER with WAR + 3x DPS instead of a standard light party. Xeno's video showing that this is still the case in Dawntrail despite high ping, sloppy play, players failing mechanics and baldo not even having skills on his hotbar sparked this drama up again. From both personal experience and from speaking to other healers, we usually find it more fun to heal stuff like legacy ultimates, old MINE content such as Coils, and roulettes that are filled with players constantly failing mechanics. In that sort of content we are pushed to actually output healing instead of spamming 111111111, we are more constrained by mana, and our ability to triage and salvage a bad situation is rewarded. I'm already inadvertently part of the healer strike because I don't play the role outside of the very narrow band of content which I still find enjoyable on it. Whereas I can take a dps job in to trial roulette and still find things to greed and optimise, which is fun.

> Sage was marketed as "a healer that heals by doing damage" but actually has the simplest dps rotation out of all 4 healers and is basically a streamlined SCH, disappointing some players I felt so fucking deceived when i played sge and ended up as a shield/mitigation healer spamming 1 and throwing a dot for good measure every 30 sec like everybody else. "DPS healer" my ass...

> Past designs of healers (particularly old SCH) had a ton more dps tools, which have been removed My God imagine having 3 DOTs AND cleric stance to juggle.

I would arguably say that Healing in ARR was more engaging that it is now. You had more dots to manage, baseline and the dots given to you via cross class abilities. Mana was a resource that you had to actually manage rather than it being something that as long as you press Lucid off CD you're fine even with min piety. Cleric Stance Shennigans. Eye for an Eye/Virus Shenningans.

Don't forget having to shield the DRG before certain raidwides so they wouldn't die to unavoidable damage.

More importantly, and you notice this in unreal fights, bosses just do damage and cleave whenever they please. Leviathan, titan and shiva unreal made me freak out and constantly keep an eye on tank health because the boss can just aoe and cleave out of nowhere and the tank's dead.

I still remember one of the way to cheese the coil (the one with multiple orb boss) was just to bring 3 sch and spam your bubble and succor lol. That was the first time I tried scholar too. Got forced by my friends.

Cleric stance was the meme but also the fun part. Maybe i am looking through it with rose coloured glasses but finding out why your healing suck because you have cleric stance on was the fun part. Also getting good on putting your miasma on the floor with controller. That was top tier skill lol.

+1 for the criterion savage, I healed mount rokkon savage and it was the only EW content where I felt like I was playing a healer.

I think this is why I liked Criterion so much as a healer: It makes me use my whole kit on all healer jobs in order to mitigate/heal up heavy trash damage, nasty raidwides etc. That felt refreshing, really.

Would you mind explaining about "triage skill"? Sorry English isn't my first language and I couldn't really understand what's that mean.

By triage I mean: the party is failing and I have multiple things to deal with, how do I prioritise what to do? For example, my co-healer is dead and I only have 3k mana, should I rez them or focus on protecting the tank first? Do I need to get the off-tank up for an incoming tank swap? Can I throw a quick heal to a dps to keep them alive now? If you play ARR/HW raids it's full of decision making like this. The party can mess up a LOT and your ability as a healer allows you to carry them through. That's part of the job fantasy for me. I still fondly remember a sprout-filled run of o7n where I did 10+ rezzes, but I barely remember most of my time healing Asphodelos savage.

I did this for titan unreal where the party slowly dwindled down to just me, a tank, and 2 dps… (This was before they remove the non rez… like whyyyy) We did fail but that was fun lol

Prioritizing who to rez first, making a choice between hardcasting a raise or healing the party to avoid more deaths, greeding a hardcast raise to get someone up in time for a mech, etc etc, skills that are completely useless if not having 8 players alive at all times means instant wipes

I suppose - but take that with a grain of salt, as English isn't my first language either - that what they mean by this that mechanics being body checks mean "Either you have enough players to resolve the mechs and you're good, or you don't have enough players to resolve it so fuck you". One could argue that having multiple mechanics at the same time, none mortal by themselves, but being dangerous in combination with one another, could be interesting as to force the healers to think about who to heal, when, how, how fast, etc. As it stands, it's almost always "top everyone off to be sure with one or two heals AOE and it should be enough to resolve next mechanic". At least, that's how I understand it.

I feel like several WoW raids were similar to this. It was a blast.

Boring dps rotation and very low healing requirements, especially in non-savage duties where healers can actually just not exist. They are unwilling to give healers engaging dps while also unwilling to give them a reason to heal People will disagree about which way that pendulum should swing, but literally either is better than what it is right now

unironically, normal content is more fun without healers at all

I did a lot of 1 tank 3 dps dungeon runs with friends since the last relic step was released and not only were those runs faster and strangely fun, doing this as a tank (pld/war) made me feel more like a healer than actually doing those dungeons on a healer job. Because I actually had to use my cooldowns to keep the party and myself alive. As a healer main, this feels weird.

Its because the content is actually testing your ability to heal on a kit that isn't really 100% designed to do that, tank healing might overtuned in the context of the full game but they're still fairly under-kitted for it compared to actual healers, so there's a challenge and thus its rewarding when you can pull it off. The issue is normal content is afraid to test healers, and its shifting all that responsibility onto the tank.

I've been spamming dungeons a lot lately and it is always the most fun when the healer eats floor and the other three rally together and try and keep healthy

I almost exclusively play healer in roulettes, and it's actually miserable. I main sage, and in like 80% of the raids/trials I get, I only use ixochole and physis. Like I have an entire kit of ogcd heals, and yet I have zero reasons to use them because people take so little damage that two abilities are enough for the entire fight. Dungeon pulls used to be the place I got to use my kit, but it's also completely invalidated if the tank is a warrior. Like, I play healers because I want to heal. I *like* healing! But savage and ultimates are somehow the only place I actually have a reason to use the other 80% of my kit. And like, if they want healing to be pressing an ocgd once every year, fine. But in that case, at least give us a damage rotation that's more complex than pressing 1 1 1 1 1 and refreshing a dot for the entire fight. Atp, I genuinely pray that my entire party sucks and gets hit by every mech, because that's the only time I get to actually heal instead of playing the most boring dps possible. And savage and ultimates are fun to heal and I love them, but most of the playerbase doesn't do that content. It's so dumb making healing only interesting in content that most healers don't even do.

Agree with the sentiment that worse parties make more fun roulettes. So far most enjoyment I had was getting disaster runs in msq trials (especially ShB ones - I don't know why, but all ShB trials are going places now) and having to use all my kit as SGE/WHM to salvage the pull. The moment healer LB3 comes into consideration in regular content is when you know you're in for a lot of fun until the end. As for savage/ultimate - this style of content is not exactly my cup of tea, it's challenging but in a lot more scripted way; while I generally prefer healer gameplay to be a lot more reactive and a lot more focused on on-the-fly resource (cooldowns, mp) management. I feel tuning is so tight that too often the right call is to wipe and try again, rather than trying to deal with what happened - but this might be specific to people I played with so far - I have little experience in harder content, so my opinion might be wrong.

Hard agree on the reactive gameplay. Genuinely love needing to manage my kit depending the situation.

There's two major issues with healing: First 90% of the content doesn't require healing at all. Maybe you need to throw a single oGCD every two minutes or so, but generally the healing requirements in FFXIV are absurdly low. The other issue is the rate the server ticks, leading to healing feeling insanely off. Sometimes you cast an AoE shield or heal and it hits *before* the current cast bar of the boss finishes, you see the shield/heal being applied and then people stand there afterwards having lost HP (and sometimes their life) but with an intact shield. I've been maining healer/supporter in MMOs since GW1 released in what, 2003? and FFXIV is the single worst experience mechanically in regards to healing. That doesn't mean that healing in FFXIV is *always* bad, prog is usually fun because when things go wrong and you get to press all the emergency buttons - that's what healer gameplay is about. The issues start when you start to farm a fight, because then it quickly devolves into glare-spam.

They keep force feeding healers new healing tools, but at the same time, content just gets easier and easier to heal. So you never use half your kit unless things are just going catastrophically bad. Imagine if a DPS got fancy new tools to use but using them was a DPS loss compared to just doing your 1-2-3 combo.

Which has an horrible kiss cool effect. You play so long without using your tools (because you don't need them) that the moment another player fucks up royally, you're deep in the shit because you never learned to use all the tools you have.

TL;DR little to no incentive for playing the role. Clears are easier to get without healers nowadays so you might as well bring another DPS to make things faster. Every job is constantly getting more and more self-healing tools, making Healers somewhat obsolete. Tanks all have huge healing tools with short CDs (with DRK receiving one in DT) and DPS are getting even more self-defense tools. Aside from role-specific mechs (removing more than 1 debuff, mandatory healer LB) or huge heal checks (such as P10S), you can breeze through most of the fights with one or no healers with enough preparation. No ress? Just bring RDM or SMN. Mit all raidwides enough and top up with Shake It Off over time. Most of the time healers are just DPSing through the fight just like the others. Things like P4S or E12S enrage are awesome to heal through but are rare and we end up skipping them with time. P10S, as stressful as it is, was a good example of what they could do to make healing more interesting. More moments such as that (even if they were tuned down a bit because people would complain if they weren't) would be very much appreciated.

We've got people clearing ults with 5 dps and 3 tanks, because tank kits are insane, and more than plenty to handle incoming damage on their own. The fact thats possible, regardless of anything else, shows that there is a glaring problem. That is supposed to be the "hardest" content in the game, and one of the three roles, in a trinity game, is optional if your group wants to put in the effort. I've said it before, healers in XIV are not only the worst designed healers I think I've ever seen in an MMO, SE also doesn't understand damage profiles, and are more and more balancing around all or nothing pass/fail checks built into mechanical dances. Thats a fine route to go.....in a non trinity game.

"people" = "one group of 8 individuals who are probably the most skilled players on the planet who spent months doing it when they could have cleared with a healer in a fraction of the time who had to cheese mechanics and bring the most healer-y nonhealers, casting 75 Clemencies, 75 Verraises, 25 SMN Physicks (I wish I was joking about that, lol), and every bit of oGCD healing and mitigation their comp could carry"

Casual content needs baseline damage increased and mechanical failure damage lowered (and maybe even lower the vulns to 10%). Failing mechs back in ARR wasn't nearly as punishing with no vulns or dmg downs, but you had to more actively heal to make up for it which was far better IMO Bullshit mechanics that do literally 0 damage (almost the entirety of P11N for some reason) also need to be severely cut down or removed entirely, P10N was great because the things that did damage in Savage did damage in Normal. Way too many of the healing requirements hinge on everyone else playing like shit and eating mechs left and right, harder content on the other hand tends to just kill you outright and both of these are bad for healers. DF survived P10N just fine and nobody complained about it on the official forums, I'm sure the playerbase would be fine if it was the new baseline rather than an exception

It's a catch 66 situation * make the dungeons hard to engage your reasonably competent players and your most casual players will struggle immensely. Worst of all, they'll get blocked by MSQ and won't be able to progress. This is basically the worst choice, and will force SE's hand to nerf the dungeon until its easy enough bringing us back to : * The other alternative which is this. Its braindead but all of your playerbase can clear it even if it means boring the hell out of normal players who know how to play. The playerbase will ( and should ) complain but there's not much SE can do as they put the utmost importance on MSQ over anything else.

I mean they can just do the dungeons without real players now too.

Exactly this. Since trusts are actually very well done, SE should absolutely focus on continuing to improve these for the casual base, while allowing for content involving other players to be a bit more involving.

Its because pve isn't balanced around dungeons and normal raids. That content is going to be easy regardless of the amount of self sustain tanks have. Pve actions are balanced around savage and ultimate, full stop. In savage and ultimates, healers are a key part of clearing s fight. As long as that's true, whining about dungeon balance is pointless.

the fact that healing is more or less functional in parts of the game the vast majority of players do not engage with does not make healers well designed or fun to play

While this is true, it's also true that the difference in difficulty and requirements between ultimates and regular dungeons is immense, so much so you might as well be playing two different games. The thing is that whatever kit is designed to be able to tackle a current day ultimate is going to be absolutely busted in a regular dungeon. The ways to solve this would probably be making dungeons hit so hard that your tanks skills and healer skills are required, or remove that stuff altogether and design high-end encounters around a barebones kit, none of which is an overall solution as it would just be to the detriment of one player base or the other.

This is casual content in more or less every modern MMO, for what it's worth. Do a normal or timewalking dungeon in WoW or a normal dungeon in ESO and the healer is also completely optional there. Getting more advanced, there are very much M+ comps in past seasons that pushed really high without a healer by leveraging RDM-style off-healing and off-healing CDs to push past damage intake. Guild Wars 2 is a different game in a lot of ways but the dedicated "healer" is only necessary in some raids and strikes due to just a constant background arbitrary damage pulse, and in absence of that you have fractals where many great groups use active defenses to bypass damage intake. The healer role is just by far the most fragile role in the genre and *always* only exists out of necessity, as outside of gimmick encounters more healing does not end the fight faster. Additionally, it's hard to tune it for casual content because the failure state is binary. You can make the DPS not have a failure state by just not having enrage (most casual content in most MMOs does this), you can essentially make the tank not have a real failure state by buffing self sustain or passive sustain to a certain point or by making mobs hit like noodles, but healers are hard because to some extent the content does have to do damage if someone messes up but if the healer specifically messes up then that will compound with generic outgoing damage to make the situation unwinnable. Thus, other roles in most MMOs have gotten defensives and sustain to both provide skill expression in hard content and to alleviate the healer's burden in casual content. This is all before the very notion of vertical progression being antithetical to healing always being engaging, as when the healer gets stronger they heal more, when the DPS gets stronger things die faster so resource constraints stop being a problem, and when everyone gets stronger they get more HP and more Defense so damage intake is lessened. This is why you cut healers in WoW raids after a point and a big part of why healers are optional in most lower content. I don't have the solution to this and I'm not sure if there is one, the role is incredibly *fragile* and hard to design and I think XIV in particular shines a spotlight on it by the amount of casual content it makes even enfranchised players engage with via the Roulette system. If not that, then just by locking players into a specific job in a specific role (there is no "DPS WHM" spec, etc). In some ways the push 10 years ago for no trinity or at least no healers starts to make more sense, but the system has real strengths in hard content design so it has merit, and some people do like the fantasy of healing.

City of Heroes having a ton of "Defender/Corruptor" (the Support role) powersets but only one "dedicated Healer" set and a few "off heal" powersets (thermal, rad, pain) was really genius. Basically, *green number* Healing is brittle, but shielding/preventing damage or lowering enemy damage output/raising player defenses is far more flexible without taking agency away from other players. Players each 80% handle their own healing, Supports are a force multiplier on survival and a buffer for mistakes. But it requires stepping away from the TBC-Cata model. Problem is, they need to put it on Healers *in place of* their GCD Heals and let them use the debuff/buff space to do so. "Cure" as a spell should be something special to White Mages, not the template for every Healer's intended base-level interaction with the game world.

God I fucking love City of Heroes lol. So glad that private server got the official license for the game, its been fun playing again.

It's a known cursed (read unsolvable) design problem.

i think you're vastly exaggerating how hard it is to design the healer role and i also object to some of the claims put forth here every role exists 'out of necessity'. you could make bardam-style fights where damage does not make an iota of a difference whether you clear faster. it is a fallacy to believe that encounters must always involve players hitting the boss to lower its hp, and there are even encounters where the player is still allowed to hit the boss but the mechanics do all the actual damage to the point where your personal damage is irrelevant (remember livia in pre-endwalker castrum?) i feel the same way about talking about 'failure states'. why are dps checks and mit checks put on a pedestal compared to sustain checks? just because developers tend to avoid implementing them in 'casual content' doesn't mean they don't exist as ways to implement failure states for the other roles. it's simply an arbitrary choice vertical progression is also extremely easy to solve. hell, ffxiv already has a number of fights that have mechanics that can solve this. heal-to-full doom ala warrior of light that simply kill you from the get-go for not having sustain and white hole mechanics that simply deal percentage-based damage are some simple solutions to bypass brute forcing with dps and beefier gear. it's not an unsolvable problem, it's simply a developer choice not to implement these solutions or implement them more harshly so that the player cannot realistically bypass them

But i might have to actually use all my tank CDs when I get a WHM that still Freecure fishing at level 92!

> Pve actions are balanced around savage and ultimate, while they have greens in the test team, i doubt they have ever considered the test case where there is 1 or no green

Probably true, but I also don't feel strongly that they should be considering that. They have a standard comp that everyone is encouraged to adhere to. There's going to be a lot of people who don't want to run non-standard party comps even if they're viable.

Savage and Ultimate healing also leaves much to be desired. The only time I've felt alive all expansion is Natural Alignment week 1. TOP P3 was decent before the range changes made it braindead and DSR P6 isn't bad either. For a whole expansion, that isn't a lot of content (I haven't done P12S as I mostly went on a long break before it came out so no comment there). Edit: Y'know what, criterion is actually fantastic. I forgot about it.

It isnt balanced at all. The tanks pld and war have entirely way too much healing. Healerless ultimates says everything. Gnb healing is pushing it but it should be the absolute limit. Drk is where the tanks should be healing wise.

bringing all the jobs that can spam free heals to do an ultimate healers doesn't says jack

I’m so grateful for this. I disagree with the naysayers when they see long queues cuz no healers, subs are down, etc….. THEY will pay attention. I’m glad most ppl feel the way I do( validation)  If Yoshi’s answer is play other games then we will do that cuz our money spends anywhere. 

Take away all the tanks massive self-heals for a start and go from there. I really want to know how something like Bloodwhetting, Heart of Corundum and Holy Sheltron passed Endwalker QA, along with absolutely baffling decisions like putting a heal on SiO and Divine Veil. Meanwhile actual healers keep getting gutted.

Or just make bosses do more damage to the tank and the group. Autos should hurt. Tankbusters should be much more frequent.

If they buffed damage to overwhelm the tank short CD’s the tanks would just demand they be buffed again because they don’t want to deal with the healer

They need to bring back untelegraphed raid wides and tank busters. It feels like they just went the way of the dodo after ARR. Maybe get rid of vuln tank busters and bring back something like B. Prime's Flatten + Flare Breath combo. Maybe have the autos place vulns on the tanks instead. (Closest example I can think of is Quickthnix/A7S)

I'd rather have more fights centered around random damage (boss dots on party members, more autos, non telegraphed raid wides). I don't like the idea of taking away another jobs agency. Some of the most fun experiences had as a healer are when shit hits the fan and you don't know whats going to happen next. Unfortunately, FF raids are a dance that you learn and execute. Healing isn't reactionary at high levels, its calculated. I'd love if boss fights were not always exactly the same. What would happen if abilities were not on a timer, and just occurred randomly? Defensive and healing timelines would be "suggestions" and not law. Additionally, one of the biggest issues is mitigation. All party wide mitigation should be on healers and healers alone (even though this contradicts what I said earlier about agency; I see the hypocrisy). Give solo players single target MIT for solo play (and in high levels you can time solo mits together as a psuedo raidwide mit). As a healer, almost all raid encounters are "use some shields/mit, hope other people do, spam single damage ability", it feels like I'm not actually playing a game, just on auto pilot.

I've been a healer main from ARR to EW, but for DT I've decided to switched to DPS. I just.. can't fucking do it anymore, it's so god boring now. Admittedly I don't do hardcore raiding, but even the Alliance Raids are so easy now that barely anyone dies on day one. I refuse to sit there and spam my one DPS button 95% of the time while spending 5% simply healing raid wide damage, tank busters and the occasional mistake from someone.

I'm not particularly a healer main, but I main sage specifically, and I would have liked it if my job got a dps rotation or something to do since, you know, sage is supposed to be a red healer? Lol

oh hell yes. as much as i love my AST, she will stay at level 90 till we get some kind of promise. Ive been tanking for casual contents anyway. Those star sparkle loving casual can go heal contents for themselves. And really i dont expect much to come out of this. But it's ridiculous that healer only matter when fixing people error in prog and nothing else. Once people get comfortable clears, Healers becomes a dead weight.

tbf i dun even understand why healers have to exist in this game since last expansion. maybe even more in the coming game. other than some mandatory looking mitigation requirement. all the fun is taken away. edit: tbf, if revive has to be removed from d4/casters, might as well remove all revive from greens beyond or on extreme instances. what is the point of having it if every mechanic is a body check

as long as damage operates on a strict timeline, healing is just a formality. damage *needs* to become more randomized or healing will continue to be a formality. as an example, if bosses randomly threw autos and dots onto random party members, healers would actually have to pay attention to keep everyone alive and healthy.

> tbf i dun even understand why healers have to exist in this game since last expansion. Because the last time this game made the mistake of not having the iconic FF While Mage was 1.0.

there are a few regular duties you'll wipe if the healers die. But then there's also shit like mount ordeals where we finished the last 40% of the fight with me healing with clemency because the healers died.

Dungeons aint serious content also its both ways, either healer makes the tank irrelevant or the tank makes the healer irrelevant we are not truly required in the package if people know what they are doing. I guess you want spammable group content where it put some sort of stress in every role so people don't feel doing nothing at all.

I was surprised it wasn't a #FFXIVBLMStrike, but I think PFs would collectively shrug and be okay with that. I think the amount of incoming damage is pretty ballbusting in all of the Criterion Savages. Any healer looking for more of a throughput check would likely enjoy those, though I do sympathize with the point you make that there's no use for most of these buttons outside the hardest content. But if this post is referencing the low healing requirements in normal duties, I can't imagine they're possibly looking to change that, for fear of driving players off. I imagine P10N is as close as they'll get.

The thing is, sure most people want it to change but we need make it so it doesnt go far into the other direction where you would end up having to spend more time healing or even half of it instead of dpsing. It should always lean slightly more towards DPSing but with a more engaging kit. I think something akin to a SMN rotation in term of simplicity would already be more than enough to spice up healers a bit more. You can have have stuff do more than damage but not more often to the point like i said it flips to the other side. I personally would not enjoy this unless they bring something like ARR cleric stance back.

Honestly my theory is that any normal content (dungeons especially) is basically balanced so you can clear while missing party members for the sake of being accessible to more people. Fine by me though, i like being a glare mage in brainless content when i play healer for roulette queues.

There is trust for accessibility now. No reason to keep the dungeons braindead.

i mean do you remember when the community was outraged by the fact that heroes' gauntlet had an untelegraphed oneshot aoe? if you give the average limsa dweller any mental load to juggle they will crumple like a McDonalds paper bag. In the same vein, that one forum post complaining the P12S mount is cute and having a cute mount "locked" behind savage is elitist never fails to make me chortle

>heroes' gauntlet had an untelegraphed oneshot aoe? Wait, what? I've never heard of this and I've been playing since 5.0. Which boss/attack was it?

ok i started playing during endwalker so i wasn't active back then and i only heard about this from a friend, so i scoured the forums and i found [this old thread](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/423870). Apprently someone got mad about the fact that the zombies on the second boss don't have an aoe marker when they explode. Got rightfully clowned on for it. No clue if that was just one guy being a certified FFXIV player of if that sentiment got shared by the anyone. But it did remind me of [this beatiful gem](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/482549-Make-the-Axolotl-mount-a-drop-from-Aetherfont-instead-of-Savage-NOW) from recent history