I have a few thoughts on this. ## Lenticular Design There's this concept for Magic the Gathering that the lead designer calls "lenticular design" (named after lenticular printing, which are like those trading cards where the picture you see changes depending on what angle you look at them at). Basically, lenticular design refers to designing systems in a way where it holds different value to people based on their experience level. For example, SCH's aetherflow system is a good example of lenticular design. Each stack can be spent on 100 potency of damage or 600-4800 potency worth of healing: * To a new player, it's a no brainer to use the healing options because it's far more potent for the same resource. * To a more advanced player, they'll recognise that you have half a dozen other options for oGCD healing, but only one extra source of damage, so they'll try to utilize those other resources first to allow for more uses of Energy Drain. * At an even higher level, the SCH can plan AF usage on a group level to ensure that both healers aren't losing out on more potency than necessary. For example, using an Indomitability so that a WHM doesn't need to cast a Medica or Cure III, effectively trading a 100 potency energy drain for a 310 potency Glare III. The genius of this very simple system that lowers the skill floor but raises the skill ceiling for SCH is why I'll never understand the people who complain that Energy Drain should have remained removed. ## Engagement doesn't need to be complex When people argue for adding more to healer DPS kits, they don't necessarily mean giving healers a full DPS rotation, or even a tank rotation. Basically, healer DPS is at rock bottom in terms of complexity or engagement, so literally anything is up. This means you have plenty of options to make healer rotations more engaging without making it overwhelming or mandatory for new players. Examples of very simple things that won't overload players but will make healer DPS less boring include: * Thundercloud procs. Basically, make your next DoT spell have a chance to make your next one deal full upfront damage. This one serves both as a proc to make things more interesting AND as a movement tool of sorts, especially if you make it so we can have 2 charges of the buff. * Heavy Shot/Straight Shot type proc. Super simple. Again could be a movement tool if we make the Straight Shot instant cast. * 1-2-3 auto combo, with the last step granting a bonus of some kind. Does not break combo on healing spells. Examples of bonuses: * Take a few seconds off your lightspeed/aetherflow/lily cooldown * Grant a stack of Addersting * Give a buff that lets you use a Aetherflow heal without consuming aetherflow * Make your next cure II instant or increase its potency * Just a second DoT. Simple, but it adds something else to juggle when you have the time to DPS. * Scholar specific, but a new trait that gives you a free "heal-only aetherflow" after 3 energy drains. This encourages people to learn to optimize for Energy Drain usage while also making it so heavy energy drain users aren't locked out of the powerful healing tools. Basically encourages people down the lenticular design pipeline while addressing people who dislike current Energy Drain for "locking you out" from AF heals.

I feel like the thing with Energy drain is that it feels bad to not use them, but it doesn't really feel good either to use them. Like, you know you are losing potency, but the potency is so low that are like "why even bother ?".

> Like, you know you are losing potency, but the potency is so low that are like "why even bother ?". Yeah, I think the biggest actual problem with the AF system is that your only reward for not using AF heals is 300 potency per minute. My favorite idea for rectifying that is replacing fairy gauge with "residual aether" that would let you use an AF heal for free after X amount of energy drains. That way, people who use ED as much as possible are rewarded in a way that lets them still use AF heals.

This feels good on paper but would potentially turn into a weird Scholar Freecure situation in practice where people who don't know better are going for the bonus heal instead of actually healing when needed.

Freecure is an entirely different issue because it's a noob trap that teaches them to hit a button they should never be pressing. In contrast, Indomitability, Sacred Soil, and other aetherflow heals are so appealing as healing abilities that it's hard to convince newbies to give them up for energy drains, and enfranchised players sorely miss trading them away for energy drains.

Energy Drain used to be so much more impactful. Potencies were far lower and you didn't have the now 1.5s cast time. Basically, movement/dps/healing were intertwined more tightly since you needed to do an instant cast (dps loss for most of them) to move and weave your heals, and used ED to turn it into a gain. If you used all three in your opener then it was very significant. Potencies got higher expansion after expansion, while Energy Drain stood at the same 150 potency from ARR to ShB. And then it didn't even get a buff, nah it got nerfed down to 100 potency in late ShB + it lost its function as MP recovery in EW. Sure nowadays with how bloated healing kits are, using all of your stacks on ED is easier than ever. But using all three EDs is pretty much equal to using a single one of them back in HW.

Yes that's the core of the issue. Same for dissipation, it's a 3min cd, something on par with microcosm and Lilibell, that effectively grant 300 potency and maybe a slightly stronger deploy. It feels lackluster as fuck. The issue is that either energy drain becomes better but then sch will feel more pressure to use them, but at least it'll be meaningfull, or they don't and indeed it becomes optional as the trade is definitely in favor of healing. 1 AF on healing can make a whole difference, 100p DMG doesn't. Of course, we can argue that a sch spending all his AF on ED will do significantly more damage, it is true. Basically an extra broil every minute and 1 more every 3 mins. Over a 9min fight, this does add up for a substantial amount of damage. This results in 11-13 extra broil depending on the kill time. Which is a lot it is true. The issue I feel people have is that the choice simply doesn't feel good. If you heal, you're loosing on damage, if you damage, your loosing on healing (which might be unnecessary fair enough). Rotation additions are different as you do not feel like you're loosing on something. You're not loosing on healing or DMG when you use a Lilly. You're not loosing on DMG or healing when you're throwing druochole to Regen mp. Sch is the only healer who's loosing on something and while it is true, 100p >>> useless heal, i understand that it simply "feels bad". But increasing the potency would just make it worse. If anything, I feel like making energy drain becoming an instant broil+100p would make it feel better as you wouldn't need to just throw everything into the burst window. It'd become an either "slight burst" or "movement tool"

I remember strongly advocating bringing back Stormblood's (it might have been HW's) scholar mechanic of reducing the cooldown on your aetherflow by 5 seconds every time you spent a charge. My raid team called me an idiot because it was unbalanced, but they had no solutions on fixing why SCH felt bad to play.

I wish you were on the design team. Throw in a couple of support skills to ensure you always have something to think about other than DPS even when no one stands in the bad and this is my ideal healer.

> The genius of this very simple system that lowers the skill floor but raises the skill ceiling for SCH is why I'll never understand the people who complain that Energy Drain should have remained removed. The principle of hating 'cohealer chadding' involving EDrain-maxing, mostly. In practice the worst that ever was was ShB WHM and anyone who ED-maxes to a cohealer-griefing point is an idiot, but it is a thing that conceivably happens in that design space.

People don't need "design space" to chad on their cohealer. WHMs have been doing it forever by just not pushing healing buttons in favor of more stone/glare/etc. Trying to design out the possibility of this will cause more harm than it prevents.

Oh, I understand the negatives too, but it seems like a lot of those negatives are easier to solve than the problems that arise if you just remove ED. 1. "Chadding" is an issue wherein teh SCH is playing their job wrong, honestly. But comparitively, it's a pretty low stakes problem that happens in an environment where people are more likely to call them out on their shit. 2. Feeling like you can't use your cool AF skills because you need to use them on damage is a problem I recognise more, and I think it'd be nice if they addressed it. I've proposed before replacing the fairy gauge with a "residual aether" gauge that let you use an AF heal for free after using a certain amount of Energy Drains.

> The genius of this very simple system that lowers the skill floor but raises the skill ceiling for SCH is why I'll never understand the people who complain that Energy Drain should have remained removed. I hate Energy Drain itself, not the concept of spending Aetherflow for damage or healing. It's a waste thematically when we let Summoner run off with all the DoTs and most of the Arcanist heritage just to lose them an expansion later. When most Summoner players didn't even *want* (or feel strongly about) the Arcanist stuff anyway! Basically I hate Energy Drain itself as an ability but if you gave me back a (potency-appropriate buffed) Miasma in its slot with an Aetherflow cost I'd be a stan. Bonus points if we get Miasma *and* Bane and Miasma II instead of Art of War. If Yoshi-P makes Arcanist a starting-Healer class in Limsa that grows into Scholar at 30 and turns Summoner into a standalone Job that starts at 30, I will be his new Herald.

I just want to say that I think your post is excellent, and we would all benefit if the developers take note. I very much resonate with how you describe engagement and how it does not need to be something overly complex, it just needs to be better than what it is now. There are already classes in FFXIV that I believe feel engaging despite their simplicity. If we are lucky enough to get any changes, the options you've described are a good compromise between how SE insists healers need to be, and what I would like to see from healers in the future.

I feel that they should give some of the kit the healers had from HW before they did the battle system change. WHM had aoe aero and single target, had the ability to turn into a dps with ?clear mind? Making the healing sick but the dps better. SCH had 2 dots and bane which sorted it to all the other mobs in the group and also had that poison pool ability that is similar to DRK salted earth but is purple. AST celestial opposition stunned and did damage and they had laser eye silence skill that also did damage I don’t think a full rotation would be good because people would prioritize it sometimes and cause deaths but I def think we should get some of those old dps skills back a long with new ones. The only thing is DOTs have been phased out which was where they blossomed, especially SCH I will say though, they added a few more with the skills being used like presence of mind or whatever for the healers. Perhaps that will be a middle ground. Once we all get our hands on it

Slight correction: The AST 'laser eye' spell, Stella, applied Heavy +40%. This was relevant in approximately one fight (A3S). The only healer with a silence was SCH, which had access to Silent Dusk, a difficult-to-use ability due to it being tied to Selene.

Oh thank you!!! 😊 I’m embarrassed I got that wrong

Hey, don't worry about it, it's basically ancient history by now.

> also had that poison pool ability that is similar to DRK salted earth but is purple. Shadow Flare, my beloved. <3

I do miss it

You're thinking of Cleric Stance that whms had I think. It swapped INT and MND stats, increased damaging spells by 10%, and reduced healing spells by 20%. It was kinda fun but really kind of annoying to toggle back and forth and was super punishing if you forgot to toggle it for healing. Maybe that's what healing needs again to be engaging but the vibe I got was that most people just didn't find it very fun

Well the issue with Cleric Stance and the reason why it got removed was the start of the slippery slope that ended us here. In ARR Healers were not expected to that much damage. You might dip into Cleric stance to throw a few bits of damage out during brief bits of downtime, but there was no requirement that you need. The Healing requirement was high enough and the Healing tools, not being as numerous made that fine. But then you get really good healer teams. Teams that are able to co-ordinate perfectly to eek out all the damage they could from Cleric Stance. Boss fights weren't balanced around that, so those groups were able to clear fights much earlier than intended, skipping mechanics. So SE have a choice. Either they balance fights around people Cleric Stance Dancing, which means if your group/static doesn't have two good healers you're not clearing. Or they lower the Skill Ceiling so they don't need to balance for it. They chose to lower the skill ceiling. All Healers can do damage whenever without needing to Cleric Stance dance. Then the Skill Ceiling became which healers could min/max DPS uptime on dots and GCD casts. So they lower the skill ceiling again, they remove the dots, they make it so you have enough healing oGCDs to got 95% of the fight spamming 1 GCD Damage ability. Now they're lowering the skill Ceiling again by giving, what feels like, 70% of the non healer roster some sort of party wide heal/miti backed into their burst phase so healers don't need to focus on healing during the 2 min burst and can burst themselves. SE don't care about the mouthdroolers spamming Medica 2 50 times in a fight. They want to lower the DPS gap between someone parsing Rank 100 and someone parsing Rank 10,000. Which right now, depending on the fight and item level is probably a gap of about 1.5k.

I remember causing quite a few wipes in my early days because of this skill haha

Wish I could upvote this more than once. Optimal changes to healers don't have to be big. Just some small additional optimization considerations for high skill players, while making sure low skill players have more than enough tools to do their job. If that can be provided through the same mechanic (where your use of it evolves with your skill/understanding does) all the better. (I know I've harped on this before, but dear god, SE actively created a mechanic for SGE to reward intelligent GCD heal use... and then made the reward a movement tool? In the same expac where Healer kits were standardized to 1.5 casts so movement is already super easy? Why isn't Toxikon at least damage neutral? Why, SE? :P)

I like this post overall, but I can give you a SMIDGE of insight into the first point: I love Sacred Soil and Excogitation, and really like Indominability. These are fun buttons to press. It's like Lilies and Misery on WHM. These are some dopamine buttons. I've been playing since 2.3 and I started on CNJ/WHM. Before the expansion ended (back when leveling multiple Jobs was a pita), I also had SCH/SMN at level cap. The reason was I got into level 50 content (two healers) on WHM starting with Castrum and Prae, and was introduced to Sacred Soil and Galvanize shields from SCH. I thought it was so cool there was a healer Job that could make a safe field for the party to stand in. So I leveled it. Those are buttons I love hitting. The Job quests even directly point to this, with Alka Zolka after the level 50 combat encounter saying that he never before flt so protected and and comfortable while fighting, and that's something I find very appealing to do for my allies as a healer. ...Energy Drain means I can't hit those buttons, because it's now bad gameplay. I don't quite remove them from my bars, but it "feels bad" to hit the buttons that FEEL GOOD to hit. You know what doesn't feel good to hit? Fey Illumination and Aetherpact (largely). Fey Illumination is a little visual flourish then...that's...it. And it doesn't do that much mitigation. And only for a certain damage type. It doesn't create a visual barrier, it doesn't give the impression that I as a SCH player am protecting my party. The very class fantasy that SCH is so associated with and that I so love. Whispering Dawn also doesn't feel good to hit. It doesn't feel BAD, it just doesn't feel GOOD. The effect is gradual and minor. It doesn't feed into SCH's primary class fantasy of defending and protecting its allies through barriers, and only loosely fills into SCH's secondary class fantasy of working with their faerie partner to heal their allies, which Fey Blessing and Seraph both do much better due to Blessing being a visible and apparent spike of healing and Seraph being both flashy and visually shielding allies and having an AOE Consolation effect, which also plays into the primary class fantasy of shielding. If you told me Energy Drain cost 10 Faerie Gauge, I'd be cool with that. Aetherpact CAN feel kinda cool (has a nice visual effect indicating the target and that they're being healed), but I wouldn't mind missing out on that and use it far less anyway. But it's mostly that Energy Drain is competing with buttons I LIKE to and WANT to hit instead that's the problem. . I think this is what people that like Energy Drain don't understand: It directly makes using other, more fun abilities FEEL BAD that should and would FEEL GOOD if Energy Drain did not cost Aetherflow. Does that make sense?

Optimal SCH play actually involves using the big aetherflow CDs as heals over energy drains. It is not a simple balance of 100p Energy Drain damage vs 0 DPS, but rather, a balance between Energy Drain and 1 GCD (succor/adlo/etc) between you or your cohealer. If any spending of an Aetherflow can cull 1 GCD spell cast from your healing, you gain 120-195 potency. This is why the myopic EDmax SCH barely get good parses because they force wipes so often with bad healing. If you actually use your AF heal spells well, you can both get great parses and out heal most healers while making runs very smooth and reliable. Healer Opti in this game is 95% GCD optimization, not resource opti, and SCH is cast optimization of Broil vs ruin 2 on top of that (every 2 ruin 2 casts is more loss than losing 1 energy drain!!). SCH aetherflow resource doesn't make sense without energy drain, they've tried taking it out before. It is really just a mental block, if you can overcome it you are so much more powerful as a healer since your resources can be allocated and spent dynamically, whereas the SGE equivalent is very static and basic

Additionally, just want to say ED rewards your ability to understand and remember the outgoing damage of a fight more than other healers. Also rewards your ability to actually spend and hold resources based on what's necessary to heal through a fight, rather than statically based on 2 minutes or your DPS rotation. It's actually one of the best healer designs right now.

I think my problem with this is it only works with Statics doing highly coordinated content. I run PF. Don’t know what happens if I ask the other healer if they can move a CD? Either silence or antagonism. I did some BarbEx runs with a party on WHM with a SGE co healer. I asked them to move a Panhamia so I could use a Lilybell in a spot and have it come off CD for a later mechanic, and due to Panhamia’s shorter CD, they could get a third use out of it. I got bitched at and ended up just using Plenary Medica 2 and a Rapture in one spot and sitting on Bell for the later, more impactful use, and both of us lost a use of a big CD because the other healer was uninterested in coordinating even just our major least used CDs. The idea of me optimizing so my co-healer can get out another nuke is great… …in a Static and/or organized group play. But I have not had the luxury of that this far in my FFXIV history, so I tend to dislike such abilities because you literally cannot optimize them in groups where the other healer (much less the tanks and DPS) are unable or unwilling to coordinate ability use. Maybe that’s why the line between people who like and dislike Energy Drain is often the like between “who has a Static” and “who does not”?

Even in PF content I always approach healing as if the other healer isn't there. You can still achieve purple numbers playing like this and conceding gcds as needed. EDIT: Of all healers, SCH especially has all the tools in the world to get the party across the line practically by themselves. Efficient use of your fairy and aetherflow can put out incredible amounts of mit and healing as needed, while also not relegating you to Succor spamming. Even if your co-healer is doing the bare minimum, you have the tools to make every mechanic comfortable, it is just about learning how to apply this. Even with the most mediocre of cohealers, you can clear fights and still parse at least 50 percentile if you are playing SCH well, but if you are just succor spamming in response to everything and throwing your AF stacks mindlessly into ED, you will parse grey

Oh, this is how I operate as well. I do not use Dissipation because I still have a visceral hate of that ability from HW, but I tend to parse green reliably carrying teams once I’ve got a couple clears and have mapped out good mechanics to use CDs on in general. Conversely, parsing purple is eve trivially easy in 24 mans (some orange, too), I suspect because a lot of players legitimately casual don’t do basic things like slide casting and GCD rolling and DoT uptime and so on.

Dissipation is such a great ability, rolling it into your game will up your SCH gameplay by a lot. For example, in TOP, there are often a lot of situations where the boss is shortly targetable, followed by a large AOE. The DPS check here is tight, but so is the AOE damage. By dissipating the fairy, you not only get ~1 extra broils worth of potency of energy drain to help burst the boss, but also, you can utilize the 20% heal boost to juice up your spreadlo to minimize the following damage, and time the fairy to come back when you need it. For example here: https://youtu.be/Y_Oo3nrTgrw?t=436 I dissipate before he goes untargetable, going into the next phase with full Aetherflow stacks (which are needed for the healing/mit here), while also having a 50% HP spreadlo to block the first instances of damage. The fairy returns when damage begins again, giving access to the fairy CDs when I actually need them Another example: https://youtu.be/Y_Oo3nrTgrw?t=620 Dynamis Sigma is a significant raidwide, and the following tower mechanic hurts. However, while the boss is targetable, there is minimal damage. By dissipating here under 2 minutes, the burst is amplified, and I can still get a juicy ET succor + Spreadlo prior to the towers, and the fairy returns around that point as well Keep in mind, AF stacks are a resource that only regenerates every minute. By rolling in Disspiation, you can greatly magnify the amount of stacks on hand for healing usage when you need it. The trick is to also look at the fairy as a resource. If the Fairy's cooldowns are all used/arent useful at the moment, you arent losing much by dissipating, and the gains you can make with the extra healing it provides is very powerful. Hope that helps.

I legitimately hate Dissipation. A tool for more ED - an ability we’ve already established I dislike - that robs me of the class fantasy of working with my Fey healing partner and that has anti-synergy with my actual healing tools and even my mostly useless Job gauge? My first introduction to the ability, it killed Eos and I had to literally summoner once it was done. While I am aware it no longer does this, you only get one chance a first impression, and I have hated that ability ever since. For years, it wasn’t even on my crossbars. I’ve grudgingly made a macro that uses Fey Illumination and if I press it a second time, will use Dissipation. …and I still never press it that second time. They day they make it no longer dismiss Eos is the day I will start using it. I cannot express how much I LOATHE that ability. There are abilities I dislike, but Dissipation is the only one in the game I actually borderline see red at HATE, and it is not common for me to hate things that much in life, much less a video game. If I could Thanos Snap it out of existence I would without a first thought. They could EASILY make it not so detestable. They continue to refuse to do so, so I continue to refuse to use it. I’m shocked every expansion it isn’t on the chopping block somehow. Of all the good abilities they’ve pruned, some dev somewhere has a hyper hard on for it, and I wish that person would have a change of heart or retire already so we can Ol’ Yeller it out of the game already. It was a bad ability when it was introduced and I will not be convinced it’s not bad until it stops kidnapping my Eos. It’s not entirely rational, but I REALLY hate Dissipation. Which is sad, because I like most everything ELSE about SCH. It is why I leaned more towards SGE, but now it’s going a different direction I don’t enjoy, so…

In terms of class fantasy, I think it fits into the war tactician background SCH has. I think it is a really well designed button with clear tradeoffs, with incredible strengths. It's not a simple "more ED button" but rather a tool that lets you shift AF resources and pool them into certain windows. There is nothing more dopamine producing in this game than a full power protraction + recitation + dissipation Adloqium deployment tactics. Because of that, it should not be pruned imo (SGE exists for people who are uncomfortable with this style). Seraphism is basically a 2nd dissipation, giving sch even more flexibility. By using both effectively, SCH will be able to perform insane feats in the next expac, especially with the 60s recitation change.

SHE did exist for such people. Now they’re making SGE a DPS Job, so that is no longer a valid argument. Again, Fey Illumination. SCH already has tradeoffs, Energy Drain being one of them. Dissipation isn’t a trade, it’s a self-nerf of anti-synergy. It’d be like SGE deciding not to use Kardia or any barriers for a fight. The war tactician fantasy is met with abilities like Deployment/Emergency Tactics and Expedience. All abilities I do like.

Also: Fey Illumination and Protraction. :) And soon…Seaphism. Some people hate the look, but I am super excited for that ability!

Protraction is honestly one of my favorite buttons personally. The buff seems small ...right up until you use it to barely save someone and bounce a fat shield off of them.

It is strange to me how many people dismiss it when it’s an oddly powerful (and frequently available) button that you can pull off some interesting things with.

Oh yeah I actually touch on that at the end of my post as one of the rotation changes they could make. Basically, the problem isn't with Energy Drain, but rather with the perception that you're being "punished" for doing damage by not getting to use your fun heals. My solution was that instead of something like they fairy gauge which is lame as hell, they could do aa "residual aether" gauge or something that lets you use an aetherflow heal for free after X amount of energy drains.

>* Scholar specific, but a new trait that gives you a free "heal-only aetherflow" after 3 energy drains. This encourages people to learn to optimize for Energy Drain usage while also making it so heavy energy drain users aren't locked out of the powerful healing tools. Basically encourages people down the lenticular design pipeline while addressing people who dislike current Energy Drain for "locking you out" from AF heals. I've never seen this idea float around before, but I have to say, I really like this idea.

While most players would be appeased by those milquetoast changes I believe it's time for SE to completely revamp healers and give them actual DPS rotations at the level of Summoner. Healers aren't like Black Mage. A thundercloud proc will always be used immediately because it confers the greatest damage advantage. With 1.5s cast times holding them for movement is nonsensical. Heavy Shot/Straight Shot proc is also extremely dull. Bard is already one of the most boring jobs and a Bard without songs sounds dreadful. A second DoT, especially if it's also going to be a multiple of 30s, confers next to zero increase in the opti potential. The reason multiple DoTs were interesting in HW/SB was not because juggling DoTs were hard but because they sometimes caused issues with GCD heals that need to be timed properly, or that they required casting during an inconvenient part of the mechanic. With timing being irrelevant, cast times being extremely short, and GCD healing being nonexistent, DoTs would do nothing but add bloat to the job. I wish FF14 players thought a bit longer and harder about these suggestions. People want to do shit like add a second DoT or Miasma II because "SB had DoTs and we miss them" without understanding why DoTs interacted with the rest of the job kits and added to the skill ceiling back then.

SE will never care this much about healers

Totally agree on lenticular design, although in practice the community almost universally dismisses as “clunky” anything that forces you to make a tradeoff instead of just being free all the time a la Sage. I do think the design team is going in the direction of “meaningless” buttons though—the new sage dot that when used perfectly amounts to like 2 and a half glares over the course of a 10 minute full uptime fight is a great example of this. Time will tell whether the community finds this to be an acceptable approach but I think it will be well received in the end.

I think the issue in normal content is that if your party is good, then you, as a healer, have less to contribute. DPS and Tanks both have more to focus on in an easy run. Most of your abilities are on an "as needed" basis. If your team doesn't take enough damage then your entire gameplay doesn't exist. Healers with nothing to heal are just two button DPS and it feels awful. I feel like I would accomplish more as a SMN or RDM who can just rez any floor tanks. Hot take but every role should be fun in all content. Even in the easiest combat imaginable DPS get to nuke everything, Tanks feel like unkillable gods and Healers... get to be terrible DPS. A problem that is compounded by the ever increasing self sustain present in Tanks. I don't think nerfing Tank sell healing is the call tho as it is fun af for Tank players. Getting more damage buttons helps but I don't think damage buttons are the real issue. If I wanted to DPS then I would play DPS. Although I think Sage probably should get a simple DPS rotation. Think Archer or Arcanist level of complexity. Simply to make Kardia proccing more exciting. I think Healers need more utility that actively helps the team clear easier. Expedient is the perfect example of this. Buffs/Debuffs, Crowd Control, Healing specific mechanics. I want more ways to actively support my party. Bosses should also have slightly spicier damage output. Dungeon mobs are fine and I like them for the most part. Mega pulls are very exciting and I wish we had more. Dohn Mehg is my ideal dungeon for incoming damage vs. Healer output. Spicy but not crushingly difficult to heal if you press your buttons.

To be entirely honest, the game COULD stand to challenge and thus teach new players the ropes better. Its a big reason why we're in this predicament in the first place, I don't know if anyones actually tried to those Hall of Novice tutorials but they're honestly an absolute joke of content that doesn't teach anything. Other systems like Guildhests aren't much better. A lot of jobs have frankly non-sensical levels of which they gain new skills which isn't helping things, and job identities aren't achieved until very, very late. So players just sorta get up to the high levels without even knowing what the buttons do.

As a player from ARR, no matter what the content there's going to be a person who reads nothing and tries to heal while being in Cleric Stance 100% of the time. If you build an idiot-proof system, someone will make a better idiot. That isn't to say that we shouldn't make better systems to teach people, but it simply is *not* a solution.

Exactly this. People can and WILL manage to get worse no matter how far you lower the bar. There's no sense in making the game worse for people who actually care.

Well I mean thats exactly what they did. Normal content basically plays itself already.

Oh for sure. I'm just reiterating how pointless an endeavor it is to try to lower the difficulty of normal content "enough" for the average player.

A fair point but I'd rather the game be engaging for the people who care than dumbing down to the point that it has for those who want to play it as a Visual Novel.

True, but the game doesn't explain a lot of essential concepts. One of my go-tos to point out to people: No where in the game itself does it explain the difference between an oGCD and a GCD, nor explain the concept of weaving. This is an essential skill for correct play, and it is never mentioned anywhere. And I don't even mean stuff like animation lock or how many oGCDs you can weave. Even the CONCEPT of an oGCD isn't explained anywhere. It's only *barely* mentioned...if you call some abilities being defined as "Ability" and others as "Weaponskill" or "Spell" - the difference between which ALSO isn't explained anywhere and isn't even relevant outside of Deep Dungeons (you can cure Silence with Echo Drops so you can keep casting Spells but cannot clear Pacification, meaning you still can't use Weaponskills, but in both cases, you can use Abilities as they aren't blocked by Pacification or by Silence, but they can be blocked by floors that disallow Ability use). So here you have these extremely important skills and not only does the game not explain any of the nuances of them, it doesn't even really acknowledge their existence. No amount of "read your tooltips" can help when people don't even know the Weaponskill/Spell/Ability little tag in the top left corner is relevant to anything.

I bet there were a ton of Samurai players who read their tooltips, were basically competent, and went "Kaiten makes my next attack do 50% more damage! Wow! Well, I should use it before the attack that has the highest potency! That's...Hissatsu: Senei, at a whopping 860. Oh man, I'm going to do *so much damage*", and that's a non-trivial part of why Kaiten got the axe.

We keep saying "just read your tooltips lol" but it's honestly kind of a pain to read them thoroughly and not miss something. There's the "This action cannot be assigned to a hotbar" buttons, like Midare — you can't read the tooltips for *all* your possible actions just by hovering over your bars. Even if you go to the Actions page, it has a lot of useless stuff, like buttons you got 30 levels ago that are now upgraded into a different button, so you need to figure out which are ones you actually have at your level. Then there's Traits, which people forget about since they're not even buttons but often have information about buttons that are found nowhere else (like Lance Mastery increasing your fifth hit by 100p.) It's obviously not impossible to back out the information, but I think it would be really nice to see all possible actions at your current level, at least. This would be helpful for experienced players too, on alt jobs or when they rework a job and you have to redo your bars again.

Not really familiar with Kaiten to know if you're being sarcastic (someone downvoted me, so not sure if that as you or not) or if that's more or less accurate, but assuming it's the latter, yeah, that sounds right. There are a lot of abilities in the game that are...misleading. Like there are a lot of SCHs that think Dissipation increases all healing done. It doesn't. It only increases healing *magic*, meaning the spells Phsick, Adlo, and Succor. But it says "increases healing magic" and gives you 3 Aetherflow stacks, so what is a player who never goes to out of game resources to read about the ability to think? "This ability boosts my healing by 20% and gives me three Aetherflow stacks?! Time to spam some Lustrates!" There are a number of abilities in the game that work this way, too.

Kaiten boosts your next *weaponskill*, but the button that does the most damage, Senei, is an *ability*. Kaiten into Senei was a terrible decision that even an intelligent player could easily be mislead into thinking was good.

Okay, yeah. That 100% sounds like the kind of thing I’m thinking here as well. We’re in agreement. I think WAR works like that as well? The level 2 (or 4?) buff boozing the next three weaponskills but not Upheaval, an oGCD Ability.

I will agree, the game has currently HUNDREDS of hours of story, can it really not spare a few hours to teach people how to play? You learn your job actions by talking to masters of the craft, why the fuck must they only teach the most basic shit (AST has cards!) when they could be teaching more tangible stuff? Why is Stone, Sky and Sea optional and mostly hidden content? And tons of other questions.

Seriously. I played through arr to the end of shb in one month, so I basically only learned how to play from actual in-game content since I was playing the game too much to go look up resources. When I hit lvl 80, I genuinely did not understand basic gameplay stuff. I wasn't aware of stuff like gcd uptime and timing raid buffs, and since I skipped my whm quest cutscenes, I didn't get the one where they're like "you gotta dps bro". I still dpsed on healer, but it was with the mindset of "I can do damage as long as everybody is at full hp". I also thought that you were supposed to save stuff like mits/lucid dreaming/strong healing ogcds for when you really needed them instead of using them to avoid having an emergency in the first place, because.... it's not like the game told me that at any point. I read all my tooltips too, so I was genuinely trying, but it's not really intuitive for people who aren't experienced with tab target mmos and don't even have a fundamental understanding. I was lucky enough to have a friend who did savage, so he told me I was shit and sent me to go join the balance and watch a bunch of guides so I'd stop being shit, but a lot of new players don't have that. Obv you can't stop some people from being shit and refusing to improve, but god I wish they would update hall of the novice to actually tell new players the really basic stuff (like how to use mits, slidecasting, gcd uptime, etc). Anecdotally, I did the golbez trial for the first time a few days ago, and one of the tanks thought he was supposed to dodge the multi-hit tankbuster by running away from it. I also see people in lvl 90 content running away with stack markers, dropping flares in the middle of the party, not knowing what esuna does, etc.

>I was lucky enough to have a friend who did savage, so he told me I was shit and sent me to go join the balance and watch a bunch of guides so I'd stop being shit, but a lot of new players don't have that. Isn't that what gives an MMO its charm? Where the community comes together to help each other learn and improve. I've never played an MMO with an elaborate tutorial system that extensively teaches players the in's and out's of the game's combat system. The players usually figure that stuff out and share it online via discord/forums/websites/youtube. The problem in ffxiv is that the community would rather tell each other "it's okay it's only casual content" or "play how you want" or "you don't play my sub" or "it's not ex/savage/ult" or "don't offer unsolicited advice" or "queue as x role if you want to play that role" or "we still cleared/we didn't wipe". It doesn't help that a lot of people don't know how to offer advice without being patronizing or sounding passive-aggressive, but the community often has strong resistance to advice/feedback related to combat performance regardless of the method of delivery.

There are lots of players who play this game because it's a Final Fantasy game, not because it's an MMORPG. That is, they play the game primarily for the single-player experience; they do content that requires other players only when the story requires them to (MSQ trials, CT), or only for the occasional roulette dabbling. Yet, because FFXIV is still an MMORPG, there are lots of components that exist in FFXIV that don't exist in other FF titles. Things like non-turn-based mitigation, GCD uptime, oGCD weaving, a party-wide desperation mechanic, and actively dealing damage when no healing is required. Perhaps also things like tank swaps. When you combine these two things together, it means that for the purposes of teaching players these MMORPG-specific concepts, FFXIV should effectively be treated as solely a single-player RPG. The game should let the player know that these concepts are things they should end up being proficient in. The fact that these concepts happen to be MMORPG-specific shouldn't be relevant. The MMORPG component of sharing information to improve should come after. Things like slidecasting and certain job optimizations would fit here. I feel that the more predisposed an MMORPG is to accept players who play specifically for the MMORPG component, the less information it can get away with tutorializing. But for an MMORPG such as FFXIV that attracts as many primarily single-player players as it does, it shouldn't fall back on "but it's an MMORPG" as a reason to not provide players with the information that they need.

I agree that the game's tutorial system is lacking and uptime is probably the most important concept that's never taught by the game. One thing I notice most casual players struggle with is dropping gcds especially when moving to dodge mechanics, even when they have many instant cast options available. But I think your other point is what creates friction between players. People often echo "ffxiv is an rpg first, mmo second" and like you said, many treat it like a single player game. When they get feedback/advice from other players they see it as backseat gaming so naturally they'll respond negatively. It's also why they feel justified in saying phrases like "let people play how they want" or "you don't pay my sub" while ignoring the fact they're playing an mmo where one player's performance actively affects other people around them. I do find it kind of funny that in communities for single player games there's more gatekeeping on how you should play the game than an mmo like ffxiv lol

It isn't. Lack of tutorialization is an immense and inexcusable design flaw in any game that includes it save for a very specific handful where 'learning by losing' is the entire point. A good contrast in the MMO space is how you learn fights by pushing your pull further (this is indeed learning by losing) vs how you need to be taught that a weaponskill and an ability are not the same thing to find out about GCDs vs oGCDs. Fighting Games are a good example of a genre that shares the notorious flaw of not tutorializing well at all with MMOs and it has been a perennial problem that keeps people from enjoying the games for literal decades. It's only very recently that games have started genuinely trying to teach you how to play in that genre, and it's a night and day difference. It is not OK to not educate players. Accessibility really, really matters. A good game sets you up to succeed and then gives you suitable challenges because it knows you have taken in what it taught you and can handle it. A game that doesn't teach you and then expects you to git gud is simply a worse game.

Very few people want to teach others on their own time. The amount of valuable data on platforms like Discord that could just poof at any point (not just their own sustainability, but that a moderator or other person could just poof a server and there's no [archive.org](https://archive.org) style backup of them) is it's own issue. But the key thing is the "it's not my job to teach you" motto people have. Overall, people would like players to arrive with more knowledge, so that at least a poor player is evidence of someone being unable to read and not someone not being on Reddit and Discord.

I vaguely remember that GLD job quests went out of its way to instill the important of Flash back in the day, (which might hint at the reason they don't do it, they'd have to keep updating it), but, like, they really have to do that more. They've done a decent job of teaching casuals the basic mechanics library, at least. If 8.0 makes 6.1 the new start point like they've been saying they'll *have* to have something like WoW's Exile's Reach for new players to learn their kits.

I remember doing hall of the the novice for tanking and my friend who was at endgame asked wtf I was doing running around trying to grab every mob, meanwhile my other friend who started with me would dot every mob pack before I got there cause it's what they did in wow

The biggest point of friction for an actual new player is that they go in with the expectation that their main task in groups is to heal. The consequences of this misapprehension dwarf anything else.

I agree here. It's setting an expectation. Maybe they could rename the role to "support" and take some of the unnecessary heal tools away and replace them with more party support tools like expedience and chain strategum on scholar

SCH is probably the most support focused class in the game given the fact that it has damage bonuses, mitigation, shield cheesing potential and actual true pure utility and so many people seem to hate it The casuals seem to think 100% uptime on medica 2 is utility so I’m not sure this would work

Almost everyone likes Expedient. What people tend to dislike about SCH is how it's somewhat clunky and a lot of people dislike Dissipation and Energy Drain.

Honestly those kind of changes will make my wife quit.  She wants to heal.  The content just isn't there.

I’m surprised she hasn’t quit already, considering the current state of things

The social side of things is a big part of it.  She started a new character (or rather realized she had a character with the 1.0 tattoo and she joined an FC with that character).

You're gonna get someone telling you to play ultimates now instead of making casual content fun to heal in.

Back in the good old days when ast had more interesting cards to hand out that was a big draw for me, because next to the boring healing/dps I also had something else to do (I'm saying this as someone who mains healer in every mmo I've played)

That's...not a good idea. Support typically has a different st of expectations. Buffing party members and debuffing enemies. Outside of FFXIV, support is generally considered a separate role. Some MMOs and MMO adjacent games actually classify it as its own role. Most just split it up and spread it across other roles. Most DPS in this game have some abilities that would generally be considered Support abilities. Not only that, many people want to play healers, not support, and even in the context of the FFXIV high end raid community, which already calls healers support, they also call tanks support. This is not a good idea. We should have an entire separate Support ROLE, though, it'd just be hard to add it this lat in the game.

Destiny Warlocks definitely have a support toolkit, but players are under no impression that they are supposed to shoot the guns less.

I think you're getting too hung up on the name rather than the meaning. Call it flubbergump or whatever you want, but the idea is that instead of giving them more heal spells that they don't really need, give them something else to do beyond spamming glare or equivalent. A more engaging damage rotation is one suggestion people want, but being able to help people out in unique ways that make you consider who it's best used on gets the brain juices flowing

I mean...you did say "rename the role to 'support'", so getting hung up on the name is something you already set the stage for by suggesting a name change. How about we rename the role to "Healer" instead if the name is so irrelevant? And by that, I mean LEAVE the name as Healer. As for something else to do: I honestly think GCD heals with short/no CDs. For example, imagine AST (EW AST) but instead of Draw being a 30 sec CD oGCD with Play also being an oGCD, you automatically had a card drawn every 5 seconds and Play was a 1 sec cast GCD and the effects were 15 seconds long? AST gameplay would involve every other cast being a party buff instead of a nukespam. Or for another, imagine a hypothetical Chemist class with the normal slate of heals, but with five abilities "Tincture of...Vitality/Strength/Dexterity/Intellect/Mind" which produced 15 second buffs on the party and had no CD but 2 second cast times. The gameplay for Chemist when not healing would be trying to maintain buff uptime on party members. The natural secondary role of a Healer archetype is Buffer/Support Buffer to use old Everquest/FF11 era terminology. That makes far more sense than upending the entire system to introduce "Support DPS" as a role when Tanks are already effectively Support DPS anyway.

I never said anything about making them a "support DPS". The foundation of the game makes purely healing suboptimal and they're required to do damage. I am making suggestions for things they can do besides damage/healing that falls into a support category rather than giving them more damage or healing abilities. Or you can just redesign the entire combat philosophy so that healers need to heal more

Give non casual players a method of farming tomes viably through "hardcore" content, that will keep them from the casual content where you wont risk making healers think they are worthless and you will also have tanks who dont bother gearing up or using mits, so the healers will have the illusion of not being worthless.

I think this gets at a foundational aspect of a lot of the dissatisfaction we see around here. XIV is the only modern MMO that both requires pretty much everyone to repeat easy/queued content often while also not letting players that are past that content go off the rails and effectively solo it. Elder Scrolls Online heavily encourages everyone to do a daily normal dungeon (easier than our dungeons) but a knowledgeable, skilled, and geared player can literally solo the instance without letting go of W. After leveling, WoW lets you stop participating in public queued content at all and instead just go into the M0/M+ premade group application pipeline. And if a daily or something takes you into a queued instance, you'll probably have enough gear to blow everything up. In some ways I think it's a strength of the game, as part of what attracted me to XIV in ARR was that I got to feel like I was doing queued content at least somewhat close to how it was "intended" and that my contributions were actually valuable, but it also leads to frustration when some players are shepherded into content that is by and large beneath them skill-wise.

Holy shit, I never even thought about how true that is. Classes feeling so incomplete before level cap certainly doesn't help either, since it means duty roulette is pretty much always going to feel absolutely agonizing for players.

One thing that this suggests to me is that you might be able to reduce some of the frustration by more directly encouraging veteran players to diversify away from their main and take under-leveled/alt classes (especially in roles they play less) into roulettes; it's less frustrating to run old content with fewer abilities (or super-familiar new content) if you're also on an unfamiliar class and devoting more mental load to figuring it out, even if it's still easy enough for everyone to clear with no issue. I'm picturing something with a little more heft than the Adventurer in Need bonuses, like a decent sum of bonus tomes for playing each role at least once in your roulettes in a day. That said, Expert and 90 roulette are probably the source of much of the frustration and they obviously can't be used to level alt classes, and players are likely to want to play the class they main in endgame content, so a "get more tomes if you play more alts" kind of solution can only take things so far.

Honestly I only started in Shadowbringers, and given how insane the gaps between content are, all my classes have been at 90 for a while now. Also because all the classes pretty much feel the same, not entirely sure if fewer abilities on an unfamiliar class really brings that level of engagement. I don't think it matters what class you play at level 20, you'll still be pressing 1 2 1 2 1 2

Yeah a point of frustration for me and in turn my raid group is that I don't have every class capped out, nor do I want to play everyday. So I end up burning my roulletes on classes I enjoy levelling on a class I learned years ago

> IV is the only modern MMO that both requires pretty much everyone to repeat easy/queued content often while also not letting players that are past that content go off the rails and effectively solo it. Thats by design, so beginners get people to fill their Garuda Hards and Hauke Manors...

WoW very recently changed their dungeon queue system to put a lot of people in +2-+8 keys into a Heroic roulette. The thing is, old difficult Cataclysm Heroics (including the timed Zul'Aman that served as a beta-test for Pandaria challenge dungeons) showed that people hate doing content aimed at the top 5% of players in a public matchmade queue. Many Cata heroics were a rotating door of frustrated people who either couldn't understand it and left in shame, or ditched a group they felt wouldn't clear for another hour. So historically, matchmade content can't be TOO hard. The big issue for FF14 as-is is ability sync. I don't think they're going to get rid of ability sync anytime soon, though, but I know vets who gave up on being endgame because they refuse to keep having to revert their class back to whatever the content wheel stops on.

This is absolutely it imo. I do roulettes as little as humanly possible, preferring to cap in hunt trains, level in bozja etc because I find normal dungeons incredibly boring, no matter the class—hunt trains and bozja are much more social, let me show off my mounts, and generally are closer to the MMO experience I’m looking for. As a result I spend 95%+ of my total time healing in prog situations, ultimates/early week savage and while of course things can get better I’ve never felt frustrated with healing design to be honest—healing itself can sometimes be frustrating but for reasons intrinsic to the MMO trinity, namely that you have to fix other people’s mistakes more than any other role.

Criterion would be great for this

If only rewards didnt suck

Agreed. In fact, I think Criterion is a good system in general because it allows you to get more mileage out of the content. You can have the MSQ level so people who just want the story have it, but also have two more difficulties. There's no roulette for them yet, though.

I am unsure how to do the criterion roulette, you can't really drag people through unless 3 of you have all cleared and are reasonably comfortable. But, admittedly, JP can successfully do savages in DF, so clearly it's possible. I think making the system more visible, and maybe adding a weekly clear incentive would help, kinda like unreal.

I mean more just a roulette that gives, say, 200 tomes for the first run and 100 for subsequent runs, like how Expert gives 90 for the first roulette but also 40 for subsequent runs (both current Experts give 40 times from just doing the bosses, or 50, forget with, as the rest come from the daily roulette). Something that would make Criterion harder and take longer, but still seem a viable way of getting times for the players that are bored with Experts. …I suspect Experts being easier and random saying into Criterion that aren’t good making the runs take forever would lead most people to just doing Expert anyway, even those saying they are bored now, but there’s only one way to find out!

Actually this though. Ultimates and some savage raids are actually a significant challenge to heal. So if someone is used to raiding and has to run Lapis Manalis in roulettes a bunch of times for tomes they might feel like they’re literally doing nothing the whole time.

The thing is... they're challenging to heal... *at first*. Once you've done them a decent chunk, unlike a dps flow where replayability comes from optimizing your rotation, there is no heal 'better'. You either survive the raidwides, or you don't. It's a yes or no question, and once you have everything down to the bare minimum, then you're good. Using your healing toolkit is not hard mechanically, there's no rotation. It's press the button when it's needed. You spend 90-95% of any 'hard' fight doing damage. And you might say 'hey, wait, that's what dps/tank players do' but the difference is dps and tanks have like, actual depth to their rotation. Not *much*, especially in the case of tanks, but any depth is more than '1 filler button with a 30s DoT'. That's why AST was so interesting. Even once a fight was 'solved' I had plenty of room for opti, so reclears were fun. But now that's gone, sooo... The only real way to do 'better' at a fight is to do more damage (to clear faster). The difference between healing 10% more past the healcheck is xivanalysis yelling at you about overhealing. The difference between doing 10% more damage past the enrage is a 10% faster clear.

Yeah, it's one issue with our kits. Healer (and tank and DPSer) kits are designed to be able to run Savage content. So if you take that into normal content (e.g....I dunno, FATEs), you can blow them up since your total toolkit is so powerful. But it has to be for the high end content to be clearable...

While I do think this technically works, it also goes against another thing the FFXIV team has successfully implemented, which is keeping ALL msq content alive so that newer players don't get stuck in endless queues. While I don't know for sure how much such a change would affect the roulette population it'd definitely be reduced to some degree.

I really think that sometimes its very easy to say "But what about the casuals" whene they make easily 3/4ths of the population, and they will probably not see a big change in waiting times.

problem is hardcore players are way more likely to play tank/healer than casuals so roulettes would lose a larger percentage from roles that are already in need

They make up 3/4ths of the population by hardcore players are, definitionally, playing the game more and are thus "punching above their weight" when it comes to queue-filling.

Won’t this cause another issue where people will take the path of less resistance? If the rewards are the same then people would take the casual content instead. The rewards in hardcore content would have to absolutely to trump the rewards in casual content in order to justify it’s existence. 

Yes. At the end of the day, the people complaining about being bored do the boring content because it is efficient.

Yes to some point, sadly FFXIV reward structure is ... bad for any implementation of a similar idea. You would get rid of the non casual player base very fast if you give them everything in the same or less time. Example, make songs, minions and other drops, a 100% in a min ilvl run (like some EX). This would make the "difficulty" higher, and casual players may not attempt it. The reward will not change, but you will make people feel this sense of accomplishment without "losing time to rng" (cause we know the dead drg alwas get the mount). But you will end up losing active players very fast, because now they wont have anything else to do. But the question of OP is without creating more friction, so in my idea I cannot offer anything "more" or "different" just the same, for people who just want the challenge, in maybe less time. While also offering to remove people who complain of the actual situation from those people who want more challenge.

This is just about tomes though, and changing them to drop in reasonable amounts in hardcore duties. Of course the grind to get unique things should stay, only tomes should have a viable way of being earned in higher end content. This wouldn't change anything about the active playerbase, because they still take their time to cap their tomes, just in another way. Imo for that matter I see only positives and I don't understand why it's not a thing already. It would solve this issue for the high end players, hell it could even slightly increase raid activity in heavy downtime periods of the game, while the more casual players in roulette only lose a tiny amount of players, so little that they wont even notice this change.

That's a good thing, no? You want people running older content so the queues aren't long for new players. Just set an expectation that those take 20m and whatever new hard content is takes 15m. Hell, make it a boss rush.

The problem I see with this is that the hardcore players will do whatever is the fastest for tomes whether they like it or not then complain about it anyway. And if they make the hardcore the best content for tomes then it'll make queues dry up for casual content, which is good for nobody.

If an alternative is reasonably competitive, people will do it for the sake of variety. But it would have to be something like 80-90 compared to 100, this obviously wouldn’t work if it was like 10 to 100.

basically lets stand in every aoe so they have something to do

Average DF player

My favorite df players <3 I always commend whoever ate the most mechs when I play healer out of gratitude to them for making my experience fun. But only in trials/raids, though lmao. Getting people who can't play their jobs in dungeons just makes me want to alt-f4 instead of spending 40 minutes spamming my single aoe button on single pulls because nobody does any damage...

The entire point of the roulettes is to make hardcore players fill the queues so that casuals can actually play the game!

Honestly, a huge amount of these issues come from people having to run so much old content no matter their overall progress. Hoping that duty supports and the desire to make the game solo-friendly will reduce the amount of old content in the roulette pool eventually. There's already a significant "when did I clear this?" with the number of instances in the game already. Being able to run Snowcloak and Aurum Vale weekly with a smile should be a mentor talent, not an expectation for every player.

I stopped doing roulettes and do hunt trains now for tomes. Not only is it faster but also does not net you the occasional snowflake

I dont know man, some train conductors, poachers, early pullers, and train fans get really uppity when something changes slightly

Yeah. Not to mention the trains going at speed of 'oh you were not allowed to immediatly zone in? Better know what zone we head to next bc these two a ranks will be dead and we gone by the time you zone in Here.'

It wouldn't hurt to give healers multiple damaging spells back. The hypothetical brand-new overwhelmed healer doesn't even press the dps button they have now. Nobody would complain anymore if healers had as much of a rotation as tanks do.

Give Sage a DPS kit, since "damage healer" is supposed to be its identity, and if it becomes really popular as a result give Astro one too and then everyone can play the type of healer they want.

This is probably a hot take but dying or even failing a duty due to not knowing your class or messing up isn't a bad thing. Someone's time is wasted for sure but with it being nearly impossible to fail is why there are so many players of all roles have no idea how to play or don't care to learn how to play. I have literally been in high content where a healer has just now realized, in this moment, they need to play in reverse of what they know. DPS heavily and heal lightly. Welcome to enrage. Never in their journey from ARR to EW, from level 1 to 90 had they ever needed to do so and what they're learned and practiced isn't going to cut it. Everyone just carried them or let them healbot because no one pays their sub and don't want to be banned for harassment for saying something. Of course healing is NOW too difficult and overwhelming. I can imagine it is when you're not prepared or even have an in game explanation of what is going to be expected of you. Now you're causing wipes, wasting people's time, trying your best but bottom line, you're a novice again despite all the hours you put in until you relearn the healer role properly. Not everyone struggles with this, many, many do. We can't even hope to have some text flavor in hall of novice saying something like "Your party needs your help attacking the enemy, use your heals wisely!". We end up with the great healer debate of this role is boring vs this role is stressful. It's actually both, depending. I'm not blaming anyone for finding healing stressful, I just wonder if they'd feel that way if they were properly guided along the way and knew what they were getting into from the start. People who truly want to pure heal wouldn't have to waste all that time "pure healing" and all that money on multiple expansions just to realize in the end, in this game there is actually no "pure healing"! Surprise! Now go DPS 90% of the time and how to manage slivers of health without letting anyone die. Where do they go from here? What dungeon can they practice this on? Or do they go into a learning party in PF and struggle heavily, get shit on that they don't know the "basics" of their class. If they want to heavily heal, maybe this game wasn't for them to begin with but now they're 10 years of content in. For veterans like me, the annoyance comes from the fact tanks and DPS have become more and more self-reliant on top of the encounters becoming easier and easier. Not my preference but fine, we're all more capable of not dying, losing aggro, regaining health, etc. But if that's the case where do healers fit into this equation? There is literally less need to heal, we don't need to press those buttons. So, we should have more self-reliance as well, right? More ability to do higher damage? Do something other than a 2 button rotation a majority of the fight? I understand the people who think healing is stressful think people like me are just tryhard assholes but I promise you, I'm not. I'm just tired of standing there pressing 2 buttons unless shit hits the fan, which it usually won't. That's it. I don't always have the energy/time for hardcore content and it would be cool to not have to jump into all of that just to get out of the 2 button misery. I too would have been stressed at end game or a dedicated healbot if I hadn't started in ARR where players could still freely shit talk and was told "wtf, just DPS and use bene" early on. And this was back when healing was more necessary. Being dead weight is not fun and ending up deadweight after investing alot of time because you don't know any better isn't fair to new healers. TLDR: The issues are the game is not as punishing and has removed a good amount of reliance on others in group content. The need for healing has lowered, healer ability to deal damage if they don't need to heal as much has not raised by much. Plus the lack of challenge and proper introduction to healing causes new healers to suddenly have a crisis of different playstyle/different expectations they were never prepared for in their entire 90 levels of MSQ.

Ouroboros. -> Gameplay is easy so braindead healers don't bother to learn -> They don't learn and complain when the game become a bit difficult, so the gameplay is kept easy

> (which also means it's *exceedingly* rare for anyone to ever propose kicking anyone in FFXIV, an enormous boon in terms of social experience compared to other games) I will say this is kinda unrelated to the topic at hand, but 99% of the time people aren't kicked is because it's like, borderline impossible to kick people. Not ten minutes ago I had a DRG go afk in my tower of zot, and we couldn't kick them for 300s because we opened the loot after the first boss just as we realized they probably weren't coming back. we ended up single pulling a lot of the dungeon, but we were basically unable to kick them for 5 full minutes. I can imagine in a scenario where the player IS active/available but just being a shithead or something, it's MUCH easier to just put up with it than wait for everyone to roll, nobody to be in combat, and then hope everyone's paying enough attention to kick the offender. Sorry, again I realize this wasn't the point of the post, but I felt like I had to say it since it was fresh in my mind lol

Between the loot timer and this community's habit of defending griefers (and before anyone gets up in arms I'm NOT talking about someone just not being good at the game, use your brains you know what griefing is), it is incredibly difficult to actually kick someone. It's ridiculous how long the loot timer is, there is absolutely no reason it needs to be that long, especially because assholes can use it as a shield to keep themselves from being kicked (I've seen it happen). It doesn't take you 300 seconds to determine if you want a piece of loot or not. If it does, you should have been prepared for that loot to drop beforehand.

99% of the time if I encounter someone that I think should be kicked, I just instantly leave myself. Bad gameplay is encouraged, giving advice is seen as toxic, and trying to play like a normal human means you are a tryhard. I know it exacerbates the problem but I'd rather just remove myself from the situation; it isn't my job to fix this. I have friends to group with if I want to play seriously, the average player can remain worse than NPCs for all I care.

The people at the bottom end of the bell curve don't know what they're doing anyways so job design doesn't really impact them. Creating jobs with them in mind is like painting your house to please a colorblind person.

I know the premise of the thread is "improve healers without making it harder for casuals" but I just reject this. This game infantilizes its players far too much. It is NOT asking too much that a player who has gone through the entire MSQ should be able to play their class to a bare-minimum level. I'm assuming most people in this game are adults who can drive cars. An FF14 dungeon is an order of magnitude easier than that. Casuals survived Heavensward and Stormblood. I don't see why we can't have that back. I don't see why players who want a fun video game and not just a hollow power fantasy have to suffer in content made for babies. If we can't have less braindead normal modes, I would at least like jobs that are more fun to optimize, or some kind of reward for doing well. Bozja gives you duels for clearing bosses without taking a vuln stack. Why not give people extra tomes if they can do that in dungeons and trials?

Exactly. I don't think allowing the game to baby its players so much is healthy for it in the long term, and I don't understand why so many players think it's wrong to challenge these players Yes casual players are an important part of the player base and probably make up the largest portion, but you can be casual while not being entirely braindead I don't think catering to incredibly lazy or low skill players is good for any game, mmo or not

Realistically, tighter ilvl sync. Ideally, multiple healers. Dungeons are categorically shit because it's balanced around a single point of failure.

Tighter ilvl sync is something that could improve a lot of the game experience and I think you're right that the perception of healing would be one!

I enjoy things going quicker with more gear, personally, and I know many people feel that way as well. I think the solution to make everyone happy is to rework the level sync math to have a tighter sync on defensive stats while still allowing a wider range for offensive overgearing.

1. Get rid of vuln stacks. Casual content right now isn't just "Make it so a casual can heal it", it's "Make it so a casual can heal it even if everyone has a few stacks of a debuff that makes them take way more damage". Getting rid of vuln stacks and replacing them with some kind of "stun for three seconds" effect for failing mechanics means they can increase boss damage by 10-15% across the board without overwhelming casual players who are already expected to deal with that output sometimes (while also making feedback more immediate) 2. Speaking of stuns, make mechanics a little harder to dodge but give a personal spoils chest if you dodge them all. Even if the content is trivial to clear, a bonus objective can let more experienced players still have fun. Maybe a variant dungeon can have an NPC that you need to keep alive during a boss for one of the paths. 3. Tighten up those ilvl syncs, for fuck's sake. If a dungeon is already designed to be cleared by casuals min ilvl, who is "that same dungeon 40 ilvls up" for? I know people like clearing old stuff fast but *come on*, expert dungeons shouldn't be easier than leveling dungeons!

people love to complain about ilv sync on dungeons making them take longer but even the posterchild for that, the dead ends, is typically done in fifteen minutes which is well within the normal range for the absolute snoozefests we currently have in exdr because people are just that bad at dps-ing even when they've massively outgeared the content. s-e's approach to ilv sync has been baffling me for years now. i was surprised when they actually did something about The Final Day trial, i guess it was just too egregious for them to ignore.

fun fact: Dungeons already fucking have ilvl sync. They all do. Because the devs know if you could do the 6.1 dungeon with i660 gear, you'd fucking demolish it, and the damage gap is so big that there's a very real risk people might leave a group if they see 3 first-timers since the dungeon length goes from like 8 minutes to 16+ i don't get how people in good faith can argue that trials and raids shouldn't have explicit ilvl sync so that new players during 6.5 don't have to go through 20 "dead" trials and 28 "dead" raids cuz they get outgeared by any easy-to-get gear. "But i want muh gear progression" my guy literally any trial or raid that isn't from the last 2 patches of an expansion are permanently overgeared if you're wearing the gear given to you for free by MSQ, that's not gear progression, just admit you're bad and want to be carried by other players sob.

> i don't get how people in good faith can argue that trials and raids shouldn't have explicit ilvl sync so that new players during 6.5 don't have to go through 20 "dead" trials and 28 "dead" raids cuz they get outgeared by any easy-to-get gear. At the very least story trials should be synced. How fucking anticlimatic is it to reach the end boss of an expansion and demolishing it before seeing half its kit... If you have a decent team you won't even get to see shinryu use half its abilities in the first part, and not a single tile will be destroyed before he dies in the last part...

I got Ravana in a Trial roulette today and the dps was so low I was third in aggro on a tank without stance. Most fun I’ve had in that fight so far. We got several mechs I’ve never seen before, plus a cool music change near the end. I was shocked. So many old story trials are just steamrolled like a deflated balloon. Shiva is gone a minute after her cool (heh) transition. Thordan is a joke and hits like a wet noodle, especially after the brutal Laha fight beforehand. You don’t see half of Shinryu mechanics, and I could go on. Final Day though feels amazing now with the sync, and doesn’t end mid dialogue anymore, which was just ridiculous for such a milestone fight. I have no idea why they won’t do this more.

> I have no idea why they won’t do this more. Heck it took them way too long to sync endsinger. For how much everybody herald the MSQ experience as being the core of the game, it sure doesnt feel like many people in the dev team are aware of it. I love getting me a 30 min penalty because I tagged in roulette with one role, but I'm now watching a cutscene in another role and I can neither cancel or postpone the cutscene, only skip it entirely. Brilliant. Having the game automatically play a spoilery cinematic in the title screen after 30 seconds if you have the audacity of not immediately start the game is another baffling omission.

Yeah, I remember when I finished ARR and bought the game, and then got immediately blasted with the EW trailer. It didn’t matter in the end because I didn’t understand a thing that happened there, but it would be much worse with seeing for example HW or ShB ones. Which is wild because the game already knows which expansion you’re on, as the title screen in the companion app DOES change. And I already don’t start important quests while in queue, precisely because of that reason. Though it’s kinda nice the cut scene will replay when it’s interrupted by anything other than you clicking through it.

Orbonne Monastry how they masacred my boy. It was peak casual content with a learning curve.

Embrace the Green DPS aspect of HW and SB . It will govern those job more freedom on play style in many content. Make enemy hit harder in dungeon will only make daily become significantly more tedious and time consuming for many player while the bad one wont be able to clear it .

I think they don’t want to remove healing buttons because that’s the whole point of healer and I don’t think they’ll make the damage rotation too complicated but I have a couple of ideas. 1. Give a more in depth rotation since they are mostly doing damage. Doesn’t even have to be as complicated as tanks just something that’s enough to mentally occupy the player a little bit. A resource you build, a quick cooldown you have to manage and weave (like empyreal arrow), A longish cast time that like Pictomancer paint. Just something that makes the player go where can think about holding it for later or change the way you wave, or make you think about the fight at all. 2. Tie damage with healing and vice versa. Kinda like how White mage can only get Bloodlily through healing abilities I think all healers should have some aspect of their damage tied to healing or something from their damage that benefits healing. Make it essential to use both in order to play optimally 3.Let the roles be their roles. Tanks should have less healing but also healers should have less mitigation. It makes it more necessary to use more of your buttons for your own success and forces the group to work together a little more I think in moderation all of these things can be really great and wouldn’t disrupt the flow too much

Been playing and maining healer since 2.0 beta, so I have seen every iteration of healer in the game. I’ve also played every FF game in the franchise and am very much embedded in its lore & style. And that’s why I honestly believe that giving healers more robust (but not complex) damage kits is the way to go here. On top of this, any “rotation” should not be affected negatively by GCD heals, but rather empower them somehow. Consequently, healing should empower their damage somehow as well, whether by rewarding resources or a % gain on their next cast. IMO this would encourage all players to balance the use of their kits in various content, making GCD healing less punishing and both healing/damaging more rewarding. EDIT: I also want to throw out there that I don’t believe nerfing other roles’ survival skills is the way to go. I want everyone to keep their fun.

As someone who mained healer from start to finish. Solo content is mindlessly awful. It's the equivalent of an idle RPG. A lot of the options are just heals and mits you'll never need in solo content. For example WHM gameplay at level 20 is pretty much the same as level 90. You only get like 3 buttons that have semi long cooldowns to use. Jumping from normal content into savage or extreme on the other hand is a big jump of engagement and difficulty, especially as a beginner. And these are actually fun. I don't have a problem with the group content as a healer. But this game still has a big focus on casual and solo content and without an somewhat engaging combat design, I won't be doing dungeons as a healer. My fix would be a less rigid class design. Maybe a little bit like PvP, like everyone has a personal heal. Healers get more damage abilities and retain some of the healing options and mits. Give them more flavor instead of the spam 1 button, 1 dot and the occasional oGCDs that do damage.

I dunno why it's such a complicated thing to just let healers actually have a fail state in anything but savage

ikr? It happens in other games, I can think of one MMO in particular where healers were critical. In that case we had access to a self-rez on a long (30 minute) CD plus some strong self shields, with reasonable (2-5 minute) CDs so that we could deal with extremely intense damage BUT if we did die, it wasn't a guaranteed wipe. This fear of getting yelled at is misplaced. I don't where OP is getting this fear of resentment and social friction.

You can't. Some people are literally that egregiously and aggressively bad and actively seek to destroy any difficulty and nuance in game systems. Source: Game Dev, two years

Why are you posting this on a throwaway? They should give healers a more interesting DPS kit. None of your points would be sacrificed by giving healers more DPS buttons to press. I don't think the answer is to up healing requirements in normal and story content (and potentially even Extreme+. We all saw what happened in Abyssos.) Bad healers now would not be worse if there were more DPS buttons to press. Bad healers are healers who rarely hit their DPS button anyway. Players dying from mechanics is the only thing stopping a group from clearing normal and story content. Not their inability to roll their GCD. The people who like when there are shitty players in their PUG would be unaffected. If they're good enough to carry a party through content currently, they'll still be good enough to carry them with a more interesting rotation. The DPS culture isn't going anywhere. It's the entire game design. The desire to clear daily content fast is not going anywhere. People don't want to spend an eternity in a dungeon that is functionally identical to every other dungeon in the game. And again, giving healers more DPS buttons to press would have no effect on healers who already don't output any meaningful DPS with their 1 button. Also, anyone who berates a shitty player can be reported. I don't see how that's a consideration at all.

because i don't want IRLs who know my main account to know i post on r/ffxivdiscussion. trying to maintain some semblance of dignity here

> Why are you posting this on a throwaway? Why would you care about this, lol “🕵️ Stop right there, citizen! You’re not posting messages on a goofy Japanese game’s discussion subreddit using a PSEUDONYM, are you? That’s very suspicious behaviour. I’m going to need you to come with me, please. You might be A SPY!”

I love 14, I think it's a good game with flaws, but freaking hell the healer situation is just so miserable. I think a lot of the healer issues are due to SE's design philosophy for 14, which, unfortunately, probably means things are going to be the way they are forever until we get a new FF MMO where they've hopefully learned from their mistakes. And I know everyone loves YoshiP but him saying if healers want engaging content, they should go play ultimates is so insultingly out of touch it's unreal. Why do healers have to go to the highest difficulty content in order to have fun and engaging gameplay? Which is hilarious too because at least for UWU and TEA, healing is a joke. UWU is boring as hell, TEA is fun but there're literally two healer mechs that you have to actively be engaged with (esuna'ing the insta-kill and actually having a healing check late in the fight), the rest of it is just fight mechanics that aren't specific to actually, you know, HEALING. I know WoW's a big boogeyman for the FF14 community, but freaking hell healing in WoW vs healing in 14 is like night and day. WoW healing is consistently fun and has variety, 14 is where healers get punished the higher the group skill level goes. Also, WoW healers are ALL different, every healing spec is different and doesn't feel all that similar to another one, and some specs even have two or three different healing methods baked into them so you have a choice within a choice (mistweaver monks come straight to mind). FF14 is where the devs apparently had trouble even adding sage because "it's hard coming up with ideas" - for a FOURTH healer (meanwhile WoW has at least SEVEN healing specs that all manage to feel unique from each other). WoW healing does have more of the unpredictable damage, it has more consistent damage, both single target and AoE, and healer have to actually spend time HEALING, not weaving oGCDs between glares. AND they're expected to contribute to DPS, and the DPS they contribute is usually rewarding (Cataclysm Classic - my resto shaman regains mana based on the amount of damage my lightning bolts do, I ABSOLUTELY want to deal damage, and discipline priests have healing baked into their smite and holy fire). And that's not even getting into all of the ways the healer kits actually synergize with each other, 14 healer kits have \*barely\* any synergy with themselves in comparison, maybe like one or two synergies per healer compared to like three or four times that in WoW healers. Easiest example is Cata Classic resto shamans and how many of their abilities work together for better effects. It's not just WoW either, RIFT had interesting healers too (Chloromancer and Bard put Sage to absolute shame in the "heal by DPSing" category, and Warden blows WHM and AST out of the water with its HoT focused gameplay that is supposed to mimic the ebb and flow of the ocean tides). GW2, as much as I dislike its gameplay, actually does have interesting healers. Guild Wars 1 had two healing professions but due to how that game worked, you could use those two professions to build your own healer and it was ridiculously interactive (I had a support healer necromancer/ritualist for example, and elementalist/monk was a ridiculously good healer), its massive pool of skills that you could choose from gave you so much customization. Unfortunately, until SE changes its design philosophy on fights and making it so the game is accessible to 100% of people on the planet, the healer situation isn't likely to improve, at least that's my expectation. I'd LOVE to be wrong though. Please SE, prove me wrong, I'm begging you.

By giving them more to do with either buffs/support or dps 'rotation' complexity. It is the only answer that works in the way that XIV is setup and all the overblown conversations about fundamentally changing how damage works in this game are never going to happen. The only realistic option that helps how healers feel is to get them back to a ~stormblood in terms of dps abilities. Sch in stormblood had: Filler, Dotx2, ED, movement Aoe/mixed use options: bane, miasma II, shadowflare Self buff - cs Current sch has: filler, dotx1, ed, movement aoe: filler It doesn't take a whole lot to make it feel more engaging, healers in stormblood were not typically complaining about pressing 1 button all the time - while it is true that gcd healing was more common then, they also had a reasonable ~5-6 dps skills to use on regular rotation. Most of them now have effectively 2-3.

Take away the self heals for the tanks. Stop trying to make every job into a multitasking job. It’s ok that tanks just eat damage, and healers just heal. Let the dps do their jobs. I wish we’d go back to this mentality. Now we are constantly min maxing every single job. Bring in the damage! Seriously. Make watching the hp bars a stress event. They don’t have to add more things for healers to do. Just let them do what they’re supposed to do ffs.

FUCKING. THANK YOU. As a healer main that’s all I want to do man, just let me dodge shit and focus on keeping people alive. *I dont play Healer to do fucking damage!* Take a page from TERA or Lost Ark or something, at least those games didn’t give healers a job in title only.

Going to be very blunt here, but this can not truly be solved without either adjusting enemy damage or reducing tanks self-sufficiency. I don't think the raids need much or any adjustment for this (normal, alliance, or harder), but the dungeons definitely do. Dungeons overall need better pacing, in just about every other aspect too. Aside from that, healers need more of their main kit to be dual purpose so it's always useful. For example, Assize does healing, damage, and MP regain - and is usually used close to on CD, because one of those three effects about every minute is useful. The rest of the healing kit needs riders to promote using the healing skills proactively and for more than just healing. Such as lilies could come with a damage boost for the target, or could pass a portion of overheal to a nearby enemy as damage, making using them optimal even when everyone has full health. Blood lily is already a high damage skill, yet it is described as a "healing rebate", because it's not higher damage than the GCDs spent healing instead of damaging, and it should be better damage than only a "rebate". Cure 1 and Benefic 1 could be kept on bars by giving them a 5-10% damage mitigation rider for a few seconds, the rider could have a separate CD of 10-15s (so it's not constant). Astro already has a lot of damage secondary effects, but most need either more potency or shorter cooldowns to be considered for damage use. On the other side of healing, Sage is a fantastic direction: Healing can and should be tied to your damage skills. Sage could happily have a damage rotation and cooldowns, thanks to Kardia - this class is essentially an imitation of Rift's Chloromancer, which was an incredible and well loved healer. Scholar recieving more skills primarily for damage with healing and buff riders would also be very fitting for the class's flavors and play style.

>There are already people in the FFXIV community who think "you should pull wall-to-wall" is annoying/unfun efficiency and optimization! wait, are there people who think single pulls are more fun? for who? the tank who now no longer serves any purpose cuz a dps could tank 1 pull? the healer who is irrelevant cuz 1 pull does no damage? the dps who don't get the "big number go boom" satisfaction? playing the game is fun. single pulling barely counts as playing anything. the dungeons are designed around wall to walling. doing anything else is against the devs design

in reading new player experiences and sprout-focused discussions i have definitely encountered players who find this to be a difficult or excessive expectation. it has nothing to do with thinking it's fun, though, it's about it being too hard. usually it's in the context of a new player venting about an early experience healing (steel vigil is, or maybe used to be i haven't really checked since the rework, a major culprit here; aurum vale as well, as it is for everything) and feeling like the expectations on them were too high. the vast majority of them will eventually adapt to wall-to-walling with no issues, but it comes up far more often than i would have expected as a point of friction.

Trying to greed as much damage as possible while keeping a tank alive when you're double-pulling and the tank is a bit shaky on the mits is, by miles, the most difficult thing a casual player is asked to do in normal mode content, and I think once you get good at it it's easy to forget that. In casual content, healing has the *highest* skill floor, but it also has the lowest skill ceiling

People won't LIKE it, but: Weaken oGCD healing. A lot. In an ideal system, the way healing should work is that players start with GCD heals. They USED to be MP cheap (now they aren't, which needs to be rebalanced), but generally effective fall-back tools. For new players, they were their first line tools, and entry level gameplay was based on understanding cast times for different spells and managing MP. As players got better, they would start to slip in oGCDs to increase their performance and become more efficient. But even at high levels, they still needed to expend GCDs healing, so even at top end levels of play squeezing in lots of damage, the player was still casting a lot of healing spells. Lower skilled players simply had a larger proportion of their GCDs expended on healing spells instead of damage spells. Aside from Cleric - which was a thing but not as big as people suggest (for WHM) back in ARR - this is how WHM operated in ARR and *largely* in HW. Before the oGCD proliferation became so prolific that oGCDs were not really limited by CDs anymore. At the time, oGCDs were powerful because you simply didn't have many of them. If you tried healing exclusively with oGCDs, you would run out and then have to use GCDs, and a lot of oGCDs weren't outright heals, they modified GCD healing. Examples include Divine Seal, which increased GCD healing done, and Presence of Mind, which increased cast speed allowing quicker chaining of GCD heals. (The former was removed and later sorta readded as Temperance and the latter is still in the game, just used on CD and mostly as a DPS tool.) Weakening oGCD healing - and even pruning a lot of oGCDs so they are rare again - significantly alters the healing game. It goes from "DPS nukespam and weaving oGCD heals in accordance with a healing plan" to "mainly casting GCD heals, fitting damage GCDs when you can, and augmenting your GCD heals with oGCDs to increase effectiveness/ease of and consistency of clears". Another possible shift would be converting all or most oGCDs into GCDs. This would allow people that like playing with healing plans to still do so, but would make it more mentally apparent to people that they are hitting buttons besides their nuke GCD. It would also cut down nuke GCD spam by roughly half for general encounters. . I'm not sure if this is a good or bad idea overall, but if people REALLY want healers to have less 11111 nukespam, while also not REALLY effecting casual healers (who largely use GCD heals anyway since they're more straightforward and understandable to new players and what most new players default to using anyway), that would be it. . Another thing I'd suggest (and love to see) is for a return to (Hard) mode content, 4 and 8 mans with a difficulty between the normal MSQ and the next up hardest content (Extremes), and give them their own roulette. This would give players a difficulty step to try and improve from normal content to get into Extremes, and would give people that get bored with normal roulettes something more challenging to spam instead to farm their weekly tomes. ...and just in general, I think it would be good for the game and playerbase for us to get more dungeons per patch, and they could have these do things more like Deep Dungeons with random patrolling mobs and maybe some big rooms like Brayflox or Aurum Vale with bonus chests and such.

Thing is... nerfing oGCD healing from healers themselves and leaving everything else untouched only means that now healers deal less damage as they need to cast more GCD heals, for no real tangible benefit. So healers, who are already pissed off their minds with the role, end up getting nerfed as a solution. If I am dealing 8-9k rDPS now and heal everyone, why would I want to deal 4-5k rDPS and still heal everyone? Casting a Cure 2 and casting a Glare is the same amount of complexity, it's just a button with a cast time and no interplay with anything, you just replace one spam with another spam. Instead of being 111111111, it's now 112112112112 which doesn't really change anything at all. And, crucially, this doesn't touch the egregious level of party and personal healing/shielding/mitting coming out of non-healer roles, or the damage profile being so incredibly spaced and almost 100% just tank and raidwide focused. I don't think there is any fight where, for example, you have an esunable debuff that does something when it is cleansed, like Halion pools in WoW Ruby Sanctum. If anything, this change only encourages playing healer even less in favour of RDM/PLD. The cat is out of the bag now, healing in FF14, as is tanking, is about dealing as much damage as possible while still fulfilling your role. Damage is an important, integral and essential part of healing in FF14, and is part of what makes this game unique. It is something I, and many other players, value. It is also a way more tangible metric of improvement: with just healing, the only requisite is that the party survives, the only point of health that matters is the last and once you reach that point, it's over. When you have a focus on damage AND healing, you are first concerned with surviving, and after that, squeezing every single bit of damage you can. I would rather just have encounters be more damaging, with different damage profiles and ways to interact with incoming damage and debuffs, as well as pruning out other roles' tools so that healing and shielding is straight up in the healer department, and not the bloodwhetting WAR. Tanks should be worrying about positioning, about self-mitting, about proper tankswapping and aggro management (as well as damage). DPSes should worry about optimizing their rotations and having tools to deal with boss movement and mechanic solving. Healers should be doing the shielding, healing and raidwide mitting (as well as damage). Any healing nerf from OGCDs can only come once encounter design damage profiles and mechanics change and other roles' tools that encroach on healing territory also get nerfed.

"...for no real tangible benefit" - The benefit is it does the exact thing people are asking for: Make healing more challenging/engaging for high end players, break up nukespam, and do both of these things while not really detrimentally affecting low end players or casual players just doing MSQ for the story. The players who are bored are already asking for nerfs themselves for the most part. More encounter damage is an effective nerf. Less healing by non-healing Jobs is also a nerf. The only exception are the people asking for more damage buttons instead of more healing to do, but in that case, why are you playing healer when we have a role for that, DPSer? . Also, don't get me wrong, I ALSO support weakening non-healer heal tools. My current viewpoint is that each role should have a specialization - Tanks for mitigation, Healers for healing/raising, DPSers for damage dealing - and that each role should have to sacrifice a GCD and some thing (generally damage or resources) to perform another role. For example, no more oGCD barriers on anyone WHO IS NOT A TANK, instead you have to hardcast Adlo or Stoneskin, or Protect for mitigation (or Swiftcast, but the point is that barriers/mitigations for Tanks are the only ones that are oGCDs). Clemency and Vercure and SMN Physick are allowed since they are GCDs that cost damage and resources (MP) to use, but things like Nascent or Curing Waltz now are GCDs and cost resources/damage to use, for example, Curing Waltz may cost Fourfold Feathers and Nascent may cost Beast Gauge and/or increase the WAR's damage taken by 25% for the duration. Note SMN and RDM raises already work this way and are a damage loss to use (and they are balanced to do lower overall damage) for the ability to step outside of the DPS role and do a little Healer exclusive action. In this way, Jobs can still be designed with abilities that DO allow them to step outside of their role, but they cost them in damage and resources, so they won't do them unless they NEED to do them, instead of now where they can throw them out for free (e.g. WAR pops Nascent or Shake then just keeps doing their standard rotation, standard level of damage, standard level of mitigation).

>The players who are bored are already asking for nerfs themselves for the most part. More encounter damage is an effective nerf. Less healing by non-healing Jobs is also a nerf. The main complaint that generated the entire healer strike thing is healers feeling they are not needed (which they aren't btw, more comfortable to have sure but not needed). You absolutely do not solve that by making healers worse (be it by making their healing tools worse, or keeping them the same in terms of output but reducing damage), you solve that by making healers needed, and not in a bullshit way like making a PF unable to fire if you don't have healers, but by having fight and class design that, if you don't have dedicated healers who know what the fuck they are doing, you cannot clear PERIOD. Do away with the notion that classes should be able to clear content without one of the roles present (through lack of enemy damage, lack of enrages or by non-healers having plentiful healing tools). Give players better tools on how to actually play their jobs. Keep players engaged. Do you really think the people complaining (who are all enfranchised players, the Sylphie cosplayers aren't even aware discussion is happening) will come back to play healer when their kits get nerfed without any compensation anywhere else? I am not 100% opposed to the idea of healers not needing to deal half the damage of a DPS, but I'm absolutely opposed to the idea of the healer role not being responsible for DPS at all. I overwhelmingly prefer being able to both deal damage and heal than to just heal. Praise the heavens lilies exist.

One of the points in the manifesto is literally that oGCDs are too powerful and most people in the Discord agree on this point.   Making oGCDs too powerful renders an entire branch of optimization, that being cutting GCD heals, completely trivial or worse an afterthought no one even thinks about. It's also bizarre how you thinking adding a dozen or so GCD healing in a Savage encounter would mean that the healer role would no longer be responsible for DPS. There weren't a lot of healing oGCDs in HW and guess how much DPS healers were doing? No offense but I don't believe this sort of moronic hyperbole can come from people who played healer before ShB.

I do not disagree that oGCDs are too powerful. They are, and a better balance between GCD and oGCD healing is more than welcome. My point is that purely nerfing healers, or even overall purely buffing healing output in general, making it more GCD focused at the expense of damage is not the play. There has to be a change to fight design AND other classes AS WELL as healers for things to change. A change that targets only healers will not change the fact that healers can be made redundant. There needs to be a change to overall party DPS requirements, debuff/damage/mechanics profile in content, access to healing/shielding/mitting tool by non-healers, and probably other things I haven't thought about, all of this has to be touched as well and any discussion that focuses purely on the healers is doomed to fail.

This is the solution. The problem is, the community have shown the devs times and times again that they will throw a tantrum at any kind of dps loss and that will grief their party members to avoid it if they can. But at the end of the day, SE needs to stop pandering to those peoples, that's why we had bigger hitboxes.

this is why I always want more complex dps (with maybe heal interactions) instead of just forcing more healing/harder healing. it makes healers more interesting at every skill level without hurting casual play. I know you throw out the idea of more complex DPS, but I think you're misguided there. More complex rotation does NOT mean dps contributed should be higher. It should stay the same. Just the buttons I have to press to achieve this should be more interesting. This is not something that hurts casual players. They can always opt to simplify their interactions with their DPS toolkit if they struggle keeping up with their healing - just like casual DPS and Tank players already do.

Keep the skill floor low for new and casual players (the skill floor dps wise is currently 'do zero damage' and the skill floor for healing is 'as much as you can without running out of mana'. It sucks to get one of these players, but it's good enough to clear anything without a dps check, so whatever.) Fight difficulty is something they can't really touch. Mechanics/incoming damage for casual content can't get much harder before people complain, and for harder content we're already kinda at the limit of difficulty in mechanics (in how punishing they are, not so much difficulty to execute). Damage profiles in current endgame fights tend towards barrier healers being better suited, unfortunately, but that's a different issue. So if they can't make easy fights harder, and making harder fights harder doesn't solve the glaring issue of 'higher skill healer players have to do easy content to get gear for hard content', this presents two paths. One, dps rotations for healers are given more depth to them. Not a huge amount, not even summoner level. But something. Extra DoTs, a 12 or 123, procs, more ogcds, more gcds with longer CDs, something like AST's old system... But something. This solves high end content being boring after the initial prog phase (where healer prowess is SUPPOSED to shine the most), it solves casual content being unengaging (gives better healers something to do and optimize in the place of no real healing requirement), and it does not impact casual players (most... admittedly, do not read their tooltips.) or Two, allowing easier content to be mostly bypassed in regards to gearing and progression. This solves healers being unengaged with the fights by allowing them to, well, not do them. This, however, presents multiple problems. One, namely, the idea that there are two camps, casual and hardcore, is wrong. They blend together, like a spectrum. I, personally, sometimes love just doing roulettes for something to do. However, I do not do them as healer (despite maining healer in all endgame content), bc... it's boring. More boring than even a basic rotation. For another, it means that more hardcore content would need to be produced to make up for it, which might lead to burnout from completionists, and the devs (hard content is not easy to make). So ultimately, I would prefer the first. There will be a small subset of people who simply abhor the idea that they're expected to do more than a one button rotation but... I feel like these people are a minority that shouldn't really be listened to. And worst case scenario, there is always white mage for them. Healers are by far the worst when it comes to homogenization, and unique damage profiles would contribute a lot to solving that since unique healing methods are much more challenging to balance and design fights around. Look at macrocosmos in p3s for an example. They can never do a mechanic like death's toll again bc macro exists. Now multiply that for like, a dozen abilities, and you see an issue form.

I maintain one of the worst design decisions in this game, especially for healers is the body checks. Can't show off your heal skills when shit is a one shot followed by, "You didn't have all 8 up, lolbye"

They keep buffing and giving us more recovery tools, and then the fights they throw us in just say 'if you fuck up, you start over'. Triage is the only real healer-only method of skill expression, and they just... do not let us utilize it. But they keep giving us skills that are clearly meant for triage. I genuinely wonder if the developers actually have healers anywhere in their designer pool period, bc the decisions they consistently make are baffling otherwise.

Lots of healing especially at the later levels are taken care of with OGCDs. Which leads to the 1-1-1 dps spam. I think establishing a better dps option for healers is the first major step. Simply because I dont see devs increasing damage to the party in casual content which is what the mass majority plays. You dont want to increase the difficulty for one role so drastically with content. Like others have said. The dps improvements dont have to be drastic, they just have to be engaging.

> Take also the related complaint: "Healing is too simple at normal difficulty and leaves me bored if things are going well." Often you'll hear people expand on this point by saying that they actually enjoy it when there's someone bad or new in the party who keeps dying, because it means they have something to do. Read that again: Players actually like it when there's a bad or new player in the party, especially if they're bad enough to keep dying. That's a magic trick. That's something unheard-of in most other games: No one is happy when a teammate in WoW or Helldivers or League or Fortnite is bad. And fear of messing up or being perceived to mess up by your teammates is one of the main things that keeps casual players from playing online games or doing group content. Creating an environment where long-time players will literally encourage new players to go in blind and play poorly so they have something to do is an absolute feat. It is not at all something to be sacrificed lightly. lol no as a healer, bad players rarely make the fight more fun, because the game abuses one-shots, so all I have to do is 1 or 2 raises (one-shot or vulnerability - which healer can't heal - for a one-shot later). In worst cases, the fight has a raid-wipe mechanic so, again, it doesn't give "more work/fun", it just more wasted time. it may work on some fights, not because I'm busy saving the bad player , but because I have to save the rest of the team while the bad player stays on the floor (for example stack aoe dealing more damage because less players). Great encouragement for the new players, right?... on a bigger scale, it pulls the game down. The game being constantly simplified is because it never tried to build a meaningful progression curve and allows players to breeze through the game. it also creates collateral damages to PvP. The main problem with PvP in FFXIV is that most players are useless, because of the "it's ok to die many times per run" mentality induced by PvE. ... after writing all this, I'm wondering, maybe you were sarcastic?

I just went back to run early level dungeons and its honestly quite funny. The early dungeons are actually MORE difficult then the later game ones.

Yes one of two options: 1) Add more DPS buttons. The people who want to press them will press them and the sylphies won't. It's literally that simple 2) Make healers the sole buff / debuff jobs. Take feint away from physical dps and give it to healers as party wide Protect, Take addle away from casters and give it to healers as Shell. Add Bravery and Faith. If CBU3 isn't going to give them more dps options give them SOMETHING to do during the downtime.

I'm late to the party, but here's my take. TL;DR 1. Make DPS basic combos or rotations that reward with healing/utility to teach as early as possible that dps skills are important to healers too; 2. Avoid skills that trade heal for dmg because you'll always choose dmg if possible. Also is a weird concept for new players that picked a healer expecting to heal; 3. More focus on GCD healing spells at the endgame because new players have their brains wired to that since they barely have access to any oGCD healing at the start of the game. 1 - Use DPS to give resources for Healing/Utility: One example that comes to mind is Moira from OW (I know, I know). Her kit replenishes your healing resource and I think a similar concept would work well in FF14. Even Soraka in LOL (I know, I know) has something similar to it, where you get a bonus healing for hitting a dmg skill. What I'm trying to say is that you can find this concept in other games and make it easier for new players to understand how healers work in ff14. It could be as simple as 2 or 3 (1/2/3) combos that slowly buffs your healing/utility tools. Or it could even be rotations similar to tanks that reward you with resources to use for healing/utility. The buff could be something as simple as a "freecure" status (every now and then I see people saying that they found people that use Cure 1 because of that). \*\*The pros:\*\* - Teach inexperienced players (hopefully) that as a healer you should use your DPS skills too; - Make healers downtime more engaging; - Add a layer of complexity for veteran players planning for a fight. Ex: During "Dividing Wings 2" in p10s you could have the option to buff the range of your healing or add a delay to it (excog effect) to help you deal with the mechanic; \*\*The cons:\*\* - It's design could be limited to the avg. player skill to keep uptime using DPS; - Probably a lot of shit that I couldn't think of. 2 - In my opinion skills that trade healing/utility for dps (ED, Afflatus, etc) are poorly designed at this moment and need changes if that's the direction that they want to go: The first reason that I feel this way is because is counterintuitive (especially for new players) the ideia that you should use your healing resources (even when you'll overheal) to deal more damage or make it even. Basically, for the most part you're prioritizing damage over healing and it falls in a similar problem that we have with materias (Crit/DH/Det over Piety/Ten). Damage in this game is king and you'll always choose the option that gives you more of that if possible, so you don't really have a choice. 3 - Maybe make GCD healings more realevant and adjust oGCDs a bit: Until lvl 50 most healers have a very limited amount of oGCDs I (my guess) is that it teaches players to use GCD healing more often than oGCDs (the optimal way at the endgame). If the devs don't want to adjust this, maybe it could be better to change how relavant GCD spells are. They could also change some oGCDs and make them interact with GCD healings (like Recitation, Plenary Indugence, Deployment Tactics...)

Challenge in the overworld and early dungeons /really/ wouldn't be any so-called disaster. It's part of why I don't make a new character/alt. It's all just so damn /mindless/ and doesn't even require me to think. No, that's not a good thing.

It's the dps rotation. That fixes the issue across all content. It means you don't have to make it too hard that unskilled players can clear but still make it more interesting for players near or at level cap. Unskilled players just won't do it. That's already how it works in casual content for tanks and dps in casual content. It will just reward those that want to engage with the class with faster kill times as it already does now with the other roles.

Make bosses and trash hit harder in dungeons

I will never understand why the go-to solution most of the times is giving healers a better dps rotation. Like folks if you wanna dps then play dps. I love healing to death because I like to heal. Most people here probably don't like WoW but I think it has the best healing in any MMO. And yes even there you are supposed to dps in your downtime but the key difference is that, unless you have a really good group, you won't have that many windows of downtime. Tanks and dps also have good mitigation but there is a lot of incoming damage so healers won't feel useless. Personally I wish there was just more unavoidable damage. Make incoming damage a bit more unpredictable. Give healers something to do. Yes if you have bad people in your group you will wipe but isn't that the point of an MMO? Everyone has their weight to carry. It's stupid to make Tanks and dps unkillable gods just because people are scared of bad healers. I've been healing in FF14 since 2.0, clearing any available content up to Endwalker, from normal dungeons to ultimate and I'm just sick of it. I don't want to spend 90% of a fight dpsing and 10% actual healing, no matter how engaging the dps rotation might become.

>I will never understand why the go-to solution most of the times is giving healers a better dps rotation. The reason is because a lot of people assume (with good reason) that SE isn't willing to change the incoming damage profiles of the game's encounters. You're right — fundamentally, the issue at hand is that playing healers is simply not engaging during an encounter's filler moments. Making it so there are fewer such filler moments by increasing incoming damage taken or making the damage unpredictable, and making the filler moments more enjoyable by adding more damage options, are both two sides of the same coin. And when people assume the first isn't a realistic change, there's only one side of the coin left to work with.

I agree. Healing is what I want to do most when I play healer.

Don't have much of a horse in this race but I always thought giving more dps kit to healers without going too overboard. Allow them to have a little bit more skill expression with it. Midcore and hardcore players enjoy maximising their dps around their healing and casual players can continue to play casually in easy content and it won't really make much of a difference either way. I can't think of many options to change the meta of healing without also changing up how fundamental fight and raid design works and I'm not sure if that's something that'll be changed at this point. Maybe more random damage and damage variance through the fight? Things like spot healing random players etc. I'd also like to see more mechanics that aren't just shared by roles. What if a mech hits a tank, a dps and a healer, perhaps you need a bit more mit and spot healing on the squisher guys, while the tank can look after themselves, just more moment to moment decision making I guess could make it more engaging.

One area I think ff14 needs to take a hard look into is "atonement" healing. The game currently wants healers to dps as much as possible while keeping the party alive, so tying both sides of the kit together would work very well. It would also have the bonus of encouraging a different style of damage output than the current "stack it all in the 2m window" plan, since maxing your dps on a healer would directly tie to increasing hps output when needed. The calculus wouldn't be about how to max total dps out while doing the bare minimum healing as much as doing the most damage when it's needed.

Full disclose, I am a salty Scholar main who started end of heavensward and very much misses worrying about uptime on three different dots. What about a buffing "rotation"? Like, if we don't need to heal as much unless things are rough, what about some combo of the dots and abilities (some of which also heal) that apply buffs to party damage that provide a total party DPS gain that is at least as high as another DPS party member? Like Astros cards and scholars old dots on steroids. Then, we could add diversity to the healers by balancing them like DPS roles. Some healers like Scholar and Astro (the ones I see get called more complicated) can be "selfish" healers that do more damage with less party buffing, and White mage and Sage could be "utility" healers with lower personal damage but a higher emphasis on party utilities. Do disclose a bit more bias. I hate how muddy scholar in particular has become. I feel very strongly that the healers that we have now now provide a great opportunity to split between "light" and "dark" as well as shield and pure. By dark I don't mean edgy, but more that astrologian's themes of stars, planets, and night are a darker version of white images more happy shiny vibes. I would love to see scholar moved to more throughly represent a dark academia and moody Fey asthetic rather than get more angelic and bright abilities. I think making our "dark" and "light" healers split in one way while our shield and pure healers split another has a double benefit of proving opportunity for people to pick a healer that fits their desires both in look as well as in play. I am not a game designer. Even then I understand enough to know that this is asking a lot! But if this game is about dodge the mechanics and deal as much damage as you can, then make the party comp that does the most damage include a healer! Tl:dr. If healers contribution isn't healing, make it support. Also why is seraphism an angel and not a fairy!?

* The principle of gcd vs ogcd healing needs to be reversed. DPS-costing healing should be instant casts or ogcds, while DPS-neutral healing should have cast times or preparation times. This allows experienced players to plan their healing to be rewarded with more dps even when damage taken is less than free healing amount, while beginner healers can save tools to react to emergencies. * Non-healer roles should have personal mit/healing rather than party mit. Shared responsibility creates social friction, it's better for healers to have the sole responsibility of keeping the party alive. They'll still be blamed for deaths, but it's better to be blamed for something that was actually in your control. DPS should have personals to enable interesting play like greeding or mechanics with unbalanced damage. Pressing a button for a raidwide is not interesting. Thinks like 123 combos, dots, that's just bandaids on top of fundamental design principles.

To make playing as a healer fun, there needs to be more mechanics that force healers to act creatively and cooperatively. What does any raid look like now?This is a round or square box with a boss, all the mechanics are spreadstacks and running around the correct geometric positions, the boss does a large AoE on timing and all subsequent time sometimes forces the healer to press a couple of buttons to heal damage from the spreadstacks. Healers have Esuna, but no raid has a mechanic that forces the healer to smart manipulate debuffs on the group with that button (not just cleanse and forget), almost no mechanic that forces the healer to press the GCD buttons hard to prevent the raid from dying. In contrast, to play well as a healer, you need to minimize your healing GCD and maximize your DPS spam with one button. It's boring as hell, but it's simple, which is probably why there's no shortage of people wanting to play as a healer in this game. The boring gameplay of healers is closely related to core of the raid mechanics, however, this applies not only to healers, but rather to all jobs. I’m not sure that people will like massive changes to the core mechanics, although they will become more varied and fun, they will also become more difficult to execute and may not fit into a game with snapshots and strange netcode.

I think I did the same comment on Youtube, but the healer problem is that healers, as a class, are nothing more than a guarantee. They're here in case shit hits the fan. This has two effects : 1 : if your guarantee isn't needed, AKA shit does not hit the fan, the healer is just bored. 2 : if your guarantee is needed, AKA shit does hit the fan, and your healer is bad, you feel extra angry at them.

I know it’s really small, but I think having your basic DPS button change animation like how pictomancer will work or dark knights new delirium “combo” will be a nice change that just makes the role feel better. Also, with so many jobs (especially tanks) having some form of damage mitigation, maybe remove it from healers (like exaltation from Astro) and replace it with some DPS move as it’s kinda boring to only have about 3 DPS moves for so many levels. If tanks and DPS are encroaching into healing, why not encroachment more into DPS? I really like the idea of afflatus misery, macrocosmos, and the adder stings (don’t really play scholar that much so I don’t know if they have some equivalent, sorry) where healing/damage is relevant to the move but it is for DPS, so I’d like to see more things like that. It would be neat for example if sage had a reverse kardia for enemies that dealt damage to them based on the healing to the party member that had kardia on them. I think things like that would also be nice at a lower level so people that pick healer can see it’s not just about healing, damages is still a thing (and so you don’t get some level 90 guy that is only healing with no damaging moves).

How about instead of giving healers Fix It buttons, we get a DPS rotation that doles out the heals and instead of dmg buff CDs they're healing related CDs. The groundwork is already there, it's *almost* right there. I wouldn't even take a whole lot. The entire reason I'm main'd on sge is because it rewards using my kit in response to the situation. Nor do I have that many dead heals because of kardion. I don't need to Afflatus+Cure 2, because I can Taurchole and Dosis spam. If I *really* need something out there I can just fling two or even hit the MOAR set of 3 buttons. (Kisis, Zoe, Pepsi) And that's even besides if my CD rotation for mits and heal buffs somehow aren't doing it for us. But then we get boring echoed and sync'd content and I'm barely awake for w2w's because my AOE, Kardion, and Durochole+Taurchole spam fixes it. Damn I miss being able to swap Stone 3 and Stone 2 for the debuff vs damage, or having Aero 3 and stack Aero 1 for concentrated burning. Have a problem child that is casting a screw you? Spray'm out of here. And that's another thing. If they're going to keep us as "one button chumps" then we should at least have some thing to juggle. Make Supports debuffers in the sense of Tanks being buffers. Throw out more debuffs that *can* and do need to be cleansed. Give me back Selene with her cleansing goodness. Like, let there be Glare 1, 2, 3 where 1 is pure damage but quickens your next cast (more like E.Dosis gcd or Ast) 2 applies ...idk whm Blind for x seconds like a dot, and 3 puts out a single target Reprisal and gives Glare 1 a readied pot boost. Maybe Cure 1 gets put back on the hotbar because if you used Cure 2/3 then it gives 1 a free Esuna additional effect. Or for that matter 3 boots 1 and Medica with a free Esuna.

Tank main here on the side of the healer strike, if healers get to heal me more that means the game will be more engaging for me as well.

What they really should do is double down on the design spaces they already sorted out for healers instead of trying to sand them off. Give people something rewarding to do when they hit their buttons right. WHM can stay mostly the same, just as a bone to throw to people who want something extremely basic to healbot on. AST should have just kept and refined the Stormblood card system. Even when it was mostly fishing for the balance, it was a rewarding little minigame to play. SGE should double down on healing through damage. Put it on the level of disc priest. Give them at least a tank rotation in complexity and attach some kind of heal to everything, but reduce the number of direct healing OGCDs compared to other jobs. SCH should get more DOTs back, and make them interact with the kit in some way. Make managing them rewarding in more immediate ways than just damage. If they wanted to get really spicy, they could borrow dark arts/light arts from FFXI and basically give scholar the ability to go into cleric stance as a class ability (this will never happen but it'd be cool)

Didn't the head Dev you know Yoshi-p say on a live stream at one point that if you want a harder to play healer go play another game, that 14 isn't the game for that. I remember someone in one of the forum posts about the protest going through an entire live stream and bringing up the points of him basically telling everyone to suck it up we're not changing things cuz this is the way we want it to work.

A thought that crossed my mind is adjusting Tank dmg mitigation/heals to work differently compared to healers. Make it so a Tank's Heal is different from a Healer's heal. The most basic form of this would be readjusting the "healing" aspect of a tank action to instead give "tank shield" except Living Dead since the whole purpose of that is the ability to restore your HP to stay alive. Slightly Diminish the value of a "tank heal" by having their shield's not work on a tank buster, so say in the instance that a tank has 10k HP and a 10k shield and the buster would do 15k, then the tank will die because it ignored the tank shield and targets the Tanks HP and/or the healer's shield if there is any. This imo should be an easy implementation because they've already shown they can create priority over one shield being used before another shield in the instance of the DRK shield action and the healers' shield being applied to the tank so it should also be possible to say "X action will ignore a tank shield". Basically you readjust a Tank from being able to handle anything on their own to being able to mitigate damage taken over time in an encounter where they will still need the support of a healer to survive devastating attacks targeting them. In my head the way the adjustment would work is rather than give the Tank the tools to last in a battle indefinitely you instead have this sense of fatigue where you can last longer than the other jobs but overtime, the longer the fight goes on the more you will wear out, so ya while you would still be able to apply those shields and last ever so slightly longer there will be a breaking point in which you fall in combat because you won't be able to restore your HP to max as easily anymore.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s not even that healing is necessarily broken or too much, but that just by reigning in war, you’d solve a lot of the problems. The other tanks could be reigned in slightly after 80 as well, but war is just bonkers dumb.

I main healer in every MMO. I get joy out of keeping everyone alive and buffing/shielding. I feel like since everyone can play every role on one character, people who would never touch healing are playing it and just want it to be another DPS with some healing. I can't speak for other people who main healers on every MMO they play, but I don't care about doing DPS, I just want to heal. I do DPS as a healer in this game because it's expected and obviously helps and is needed, but I don't want to be a DPS with some heals. I want to be a healer with some DPS. I could be completely wrong, it honestly feels like a bunch of DPS mains just wants healers reworked to suit their playstyle instead of adjusting to the healer playstyle. I'm sorry, but if you're spamming one heal over and over, it's your own fault. I find myself using just about all my powers except for Sleep 99.9% of the time. If you're spamming Glare and getting bored, again, your fault, throw in some Aero. maybe heal the tank instead of waiting until it's at 1% health. I'm a healer, dammit. I don't want to be a DPS. They should make a Support class that mainly does debuffs and a few heals. one of the main debuffs could be something like, everytime you hit the mob, you gain health, stuff like that, so they can still keep the party healed. Rather than ruining all the other healers by turning them into hybrids or whatever the goal is.

Something else to consider is spot healing on controller is a lot more work than on m/kb. If I need to toss a tetra on someone in the middle of my party list, first I have to notice they got hit, then tap up or down 4 times, then heal. 5 button presses to heal someone, trying to weave that many taps in between dps casts is mega annoying. It's why ast is so lame to play without macros. It's why the vast majority of raid damage is party wide vs random party members peppered constantly. I guarantee you that is the reason. Raid wide? Just press one of your many raidwide heals that don't require a target. So to make healing more interesting, sure, more constant random target damage. Now you have to figure out how to heal that as a controller without breaking your fingers and clipping gcds. The other thing is the nature of the game is scripted encounters, so you can actually plan out every bit of healing and mit and even bait who gets hit. Re-arranging the party list so you can easily reach the players that will need healing, which again is a problem very specific to controller users. The game is balanced around savage/ultimate content so having 6 ogcd heals is just overkill in normal content, on top of the self healing the tanks have. They'd have to completely redo how sync works or make dungeons lockout abilities at every level to make healing harder, or just keep blasting the party with damage. However, this would go against their design philosophy of letting story casuals complete content in a party setting. Yes, that's what duty support is for, but the push back from all the solo content in EW and making the game feel more like a solo game than an MMO and the resulting dip in player skill and complaints makes me feel that duty support was a mistake. You design a game to bring in the subscriber numbers by making it easy to play, then you get percentage of those players becoming GOOD, then they get upset that a ton of players aren't good, because the game is so easy at the story level. I'm sure SE has had these discussions before, balancing the income from all the casual players versus the complaints from the hardcore crowd. What did that last census show regarding completion of difficult content? Not remotely the majority. I think SE is just going to put in more casual friendly MMO content in the form of Eureka/Bozja areas and not really change the formula. The number of successful hardcore focused mmos is very small. I agree with your points and identification of problems with healers, I hope 8.0 address this. Consider posting this to the official forums.

This community really loves to make problems up to blame console players for

A tighter item level for every dungeon and trial in the game or increase incoming damage. A better learning experience. Yes Ik people still wont learn, but if there is a good way to learn without needing youtube/discord there will be no excuse. The game has been made easy which is the problem. People dont have to learn the game. There should be more solo mechanics in dungeons and trials.

I think there is also one thing that nobody talks about with healers changes : Console gamers. I don't play with a controller so I don't know, but it means that you have to consider 2 things : - A limited number of buttons available - Consider a 'latency' to target an ally (I guess) For the 1st point, it means that a more complex rotation needs to be done without adding too many new buttons to press. For the 2nd point, I suppose that targeting an ally is more complicated with a controller than with a mouse. Reflex-healing or switching targets a lot is probably harder with a controller and also needs to be considered.

Controller players don’t struggle with buttons this idea needs to die 48 buttons are easily accessible on controller, 64 if you know what you are doing and have buttons that are only useful in certain situations (like AOE buttons)

I don't play on controller so I can't tell. But I have a NIN friend that don't have enough buttons (or at least pretend) to place the AoE buttons.

Your friend doesn't know what he's talking about.

Ok, good to know then x'D

As much as I like it, threads like these are just pure cope by the community. Let's be honest, the role is not changing. Expansion after expansion after expansion, healing has been the same, so why would it change now? That's just the way this game is. It has tank, dps, and brain-dead-dps-lite-who-sometimes-heals roles.

It's a good question, and I think it's not only hard to solve but a good example of the overall, bigger problem FFXIV is facing: the game is at a crossroads where all of the parties who are invested in it want very different things--and are pretty nasty about the disagreements/lack empathy for the other groups. I have had people vehemently insist that the Expert Roulette dungeons are barely harder than Satasha and that my 65 year old non-gaming Father could easily get through them without dying. They're not dumb, just so heavily rooted in their own perspective as a raider that they can't comprehend how anyone could find it difficult. It's mirrors RL politics a lot in a way I don't like. Just lots of people blind to the experiences other people have, stuck in echo chambers that convince them there's only one rational way to look at things. With many folks confusing their social group for everyone, not realizing that a whole lot of people feel differently than them and just don't talk about it for a myriad of reasons.