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I really liked the suggestion of the momentum healer using gcd combos to gain healing procs. Sage is already the most fun healer to me because of it healing off doing damage. So extra complexity for the damage rotation on top of that would be chef's kiss
i really liked the "kickweaving" monk in world of warcraft, where you basically gave kardia to the whole raid and healed by dealing dmg. i think the worst problem i have with healing at the moment is that i have nothing to do in burst phases… i main sage and the "hard" thing to optimize is to have both phlegma stacks and psyche ready during burst :/ let me play too!
I still think that healing design needs to be focused the same way tank is.
You get a normal DPS kit with a normal rotation, bur you have major utility (mostly oGCD cooldowns) for healing the raid. It's already kind of how healers WANT to play (go away Medica 2!).
We joke about the Glare Mage, sure… but that's kinda what healers want to do.
Healers are just far too monotonous outside of (w1) prog and opti. I was a healer main for years and I feel like that role gave me boreout – burnout via sheer boredom.
Most these suggestions are braindead takes lol. Ast is too much work for too little bang, but then suggest a dmg rotation that leads into a healing rotation…? They really think casual players are going to be able to handle that, let alone have that actually feel good to play?
Dude wants less homogenizing but then wants a dash for sch and ast? Ast of all things with their 2 stacks of light speed lol.
Sorry, the top raiders are so disconnected from reality that it's mind boggling. Healers, encounters, and self sustain need a desperate rework but the vast majority of these suggestions are not it.
As much as “Stand and let thing resolve” gets memed on by the xiv community, the fact that positioning based mechanics make up the vast majority of raid fights is bad design.
Players need more reason to use buttons that are often left off of hotbars. Tanks and melee should have to stun adds or bosses for certain attacks. Tanks and ranged should have more excuses to interrupt casts. Ranged should have more uses for their slows and binds. Healers and mages should be able to use their sleep outside of world content. Etc etc.
We have all these cool buttons that go completely unused.
I am definitely biased but i think the current lv70 kits hit the best balance of heals, each one feels impactful and you don't have so many you forget they exist.
All the while Gcd heals are still needed, making the path to optimisation planning out those ogcds well, coordinating with your co-healer even. (except WHM, but.. WHM.)
Though i would like something more than spamming 1 button over prolonged periods of not healing, and the mp system feels really bad because the only way to conserve mp when really low is to do literally nothing, and it hurts my soul.
I haven't healed this raid tier, or really any. Favoring tanks and dps in that area. I have in the past but it's been quite a long time. the main thing that keeps me from it is the dps rotation and lack of engagement with it.
Once you have a fight down outside prog, the vast majority of your time is spent dpsing. When such a large portion of the fight is dedicated to a particular skillset, but you are ultimately spamming 1 button for all of that time? It's not really my cup of tea. if perhaps there was some engagement in the dps rotation then I'd likely enjoy it far more. I did like cleric stance, I did like scholar with all of it's dots and bane in dungeons, and I like to engage with the dps rotation of any spec I'm on. Healer however just bores me to death in the places that I play it. You are either playing whack a mole with people standing in stuff, or taking a nap between major cd's of which most are off globals. Ultimately punished as a role when the group skill goes up, and punished if the group skill is too low. theirs no upside to the role outside progging fights with a group of people you know and that's it.
My main is Sage and i wish it had a proper dps combo since its gimmick is to heal by doing damage, I wish they went further with that theme but alas we got another bland healer
WoW Discipline Priest. XIV is literally perfectly designed for that kind of healer. They have a VERY strong degree of control over our numbers and the boss's output numbers, to make it work without being drastically broken or completely garbage.
Do that and you can give healers a PROPER DPS ROTATION without sacrificing the bottom bare minimum healing required in pug content. Turn the oGCD buttons into supportive healing buttons that drain and restore MP with cooldowns, giving them a pseudo-oGCD rotation that is required to be managed, even potentially on the fly, to handle increased damage output in EX+s.
Just don't do something stupid like Assize or Earthly Star again with that idea. Yes, they're satisfying to push and neat and all, but if you make a heal button do damage, you've… made another damage button. The community is not going to care if it does healing. Any healing done when it comes off cooldown will be a bonus, NOT a feature. Credit where it's due. ES has a window to pop it, to kind of do both, but it's still a "push it NOW or your DPS tanks" button before anything else.
20:30 this idea is so incredible I just spent 30 minutes thinking about it, trying to figure out how I would implement such a thing as a new healer job.
At the end of the day, it would be too different from existing healers (and have some associated kinks) so square enix would never implement such a thing, but it is still super fun to theorize.
Here's what I came up with:
This healer would have several damage GCD buttons. When you use them, you gain some gauge, which you can use on oGCD heals.
There should be 3-4 GCD damage buttons, and each has its associated gauge (maybe like based on elements or something). Each oGCD heal requires a different one of the gauges in order to use, with some gauge overlap (some of them also have a cooldown).
The idea is to mimic SCH's Aetherflow / SGE's Addersgall, where you get to choose how to spend your limited healing resources, but with the additional twist of having to prep your tools beforehand by choosing which GCD's you use. This also adds some button variety to low healing phases, with you going "OK need to prep my gauges for the next phase let me cycle through my GCDs".
I think all the GCDs should have equal PPS, but you can still do fun things with it:
– A completely DPS neutral instant cast, but the gauge it gives is not very useful, only used for a single target heal in the vein of lustrate/tetra/dignity. You can be the most mobile healer in the game, at the cost of your healing ability
– The opposite. A 2.3 second DPS cast that gives gauge used for a sacred soil level skill
– Different heal oGCD have different gauge costs. You can use the single target heal after every damage GCD and it can be spammed with enough gauge built, but the most powerful oGCDs take 4-5 GCDs to build up enough gauge and empty most of it
– A 1 minute damaging oGCD that requires gauge. Using it is optimal for parsing but since it is not spammable it removes the "every aetherflow spent on healing is lost damage" problem SCH has
– An oGCD that fills all gauges by 50, 3 minute cooldown
– Capstone ability that requires 25 of all guages to use
Of course, since your healing ability is entirely dependent on hitting the enemy, the job requires a downtime skill, an instant cast GCD that does no damage but refills all gauges by a bit.
The interesting thing is, this can be the job's equivalent to GCD healing on other jobs – when you're learning a fight you use it a lot to get a lot of healing done, safety heal all mechanics, recover mistakes etc, then as you get better at the fight you can start cutting uses of this GCD in favor of more damage GCDs.
Only problem is it's hard to figure out the numbers on this – if the MP cost is too low, the job becomes broken in prog, if it's too high it doesn't work as a downtime tool. If it gives too much gauge then being able to fully restore all resources in 10 seconds of downtime is broken, if it's too little then it feels terrible to press in uptime, you don't get enough bang for your buck.
Due to this it might be for the best to still have GCD healing tools, and just have this downtime tool as an alternate "you can use this to sacrifice damage for healing" button in addition to the GCD heals
There's more discussion I think to be had on the barrier healer roles, SCH and SGE, at least in savage. Boss damage output increased this tier, while overall DPS checks have dropped considerably. This puts much less pressure on healers to "make up" the rest of the damage total and so we can be much more flexible on which mitigation abilities to apply depending on which mechanics are stressing your group. For SCH, a timely expedient is great on Mario Kart, and heavy movement phases, and sometimes you have to place fairy in spots where parties have to spread out.
Ill give some takes as a healer main for sometime since shb.
I personally think a damage rotation may not go well for healer, but i think fight design should consider the tools that healers have atm, most of which some are just really busted. While i agree the basic 1,2,3 may help the role, it may either fall to the trap where we get more greedy green dps or the job may feel very overwhelming. Fight design should change a little to cater to the healing kit we have now so healers wont get bored. The TEA example is where i see this really shine as p1 healing can be pretty tight, p2 i actually see good reason to use my arrow card and even synastry of all skills, p3 j waves hit like a truck. I acknowledge not all encounters can be like this, but hope that fights can somewhat be designed with their current healing kit in mind.
That said nice video!
i want to see healer combo rotations, and monk like interconnectivity in terms of damage and healing, like monk's single-target and aoe skill combos
As a player who went from hyper casual pure healer to dishing purple-orange numbers in savage, Stormblood SCH lives in my head rent free as the pinnacle of healer gameplay.
I agree that fight design should be more engaging; built towards making sure your healers are paying attention, not getting overwhelmed with a flood of personal mechanics AND damage, and encouraging the ability to save a run if the fight design allows it (m2s stacks from hearts, for example).
However, I’ll never forget the enjoyment I felt from how engaging SCH’s dps priority felt, maintaining dots and supplementing Energy Drain as able. SCH used to have a very high skill ceiling with a medium skill floor that definitely underwent some remodeling and modernized gutting. Coming from someone who raids in organized static settings, where lots of things can be consistently planned out in advance, having that extra “mini game” of maintaining dots with my rolling GCD while also keeping everyone alive was the most engaged I ever felt playing healer in FFXIV.
I enjoy progging fights as a healer, but as was said multiple times in the video you are at the mercy of the fight designers in regards to whether the encounters will be fun to heal or not. Considering the fairly large investment in getting BIS for one job, I'm going to prioritize DPS as I know my experience across the encounters will remain mostly stable. Not to mention said gear can be used to make other non-Savage content go faster, like EX trial spam. So the solution to get me to heal is to improve the encounter design or just give away healer gear for free.
Something i really want on scholar is something else that uses our faerie gauge. Give us an AoE spender for it, or let us use it to buff the actual fairy spells. Give us a damage spell that uses it. The amount of time im sitting at max gauge currently is stupid, ive rarely got need of fae pact.
Interesting ideas from high end healer players
I think healer is the biggest mess overall in all FFXIV history :
– In ARR, the WHM was the only healer and the SCH was a dps with a healer pet.
– In HW, the AST was garbage until they double cards potency and then make WHM irrevelant.
– In SB, they want the SCH to actually be a healer, but messing up the Lilly system for WHM and AST was still very dominant.
– In ShB they make all healer able to do everything, while at the same time reduce their offense tool kit to the lowest existing.
– In EW, they decide to split healer, but not to much because to me, they wanted to keep a door to go back if needed.
– In DT, nothing change because fight design was focused, but they at least give healer some offensive ability.
So, the role need a solid direction on what they want to do, what they can do and what they cannot do.
-> I think the split is a good idea, but need to be push further in order to be really impactful. Pure heal ability are to strong on SCH and SGE while WHM still struggle with mitig. I can hear why some ask the WHM to be granted a mitig, but I really think the correct way to do is to get rid of collective Unconscious.
-> Rethink offensive kit to better mix heal and offense, a bit like WHM.
-> Change Piety a bit like Ten : better heal than det but lower dommage than det. I don't think tie MP management to a sub stat to be a great idea from the start.
-> Change MP recovery tool : having to push lucid dreaming nearly on CD is not very fun. It also impair a lot when to just get rezzed and lack of MP to do your job. If Lucid dreaming can become a 3min CD with 3k MP recovery instant it would be cool i think, if job specific tools are balanced accordingly.
-> Do something about battle rez. I think more job must be able to do so. Maybe something a bit like Blue Mage for other role ? My prefered idea is to give a battle rez as role action to tank, but with long CD and a dommage down debuff associed with. So tank could go rez if thinks would get very wrong or cursed, but they have a very low priority on this.
-> Lessen the number of healing ogcd but make them all impactful. I think about deployment tactics here : this ability in order to be effective need a gcd cast, and preferably with another ogcd paired with. It just crawl the actions bars. I also think about WHM thin air, which is just some free rez, but MP management is not a problem, but battle rez only on healer is.
-> Rework abilities like assize and earthly stars : abilities which both heal and do dommage are contracdictoy : we want to keep healing when needed when we want to use offensive abilities on CD, moreother on assize which is also linked to MP recovery.
-> Rework SCH from the ground : to many actions, to many meaningless actions, to many incomptable actions and ED.
I could go on a lot, but I put my biggest and overall thought. Other are more specific. But yeah, healer, like ranged, is not a easy problem with easy solution.
Shrimple solution to make healing more engaging: solo heal with 5 or 6dps (so no leaning on more than 2 tanks!)
The simple fact that healing is always a damage loss in xiv just kills me as a healer. It's why I struggle to play scholar despite it having a lot of my favorite things in a job. Seraphism? It's an AoE regen. Does it buff your shields? I mean technically but you can't recitation them, and they are still gcds, so what's the point? Aether flow? 300 potency is mighty tempting, but are you going to grief your party for it? Especially when you look at sage who basically has these same tools for free, and phlegma, and psyche to keep their damage just a hair more interesting, and why would I ever choose scholar? Because it is stronger at healing is a fine enough answer, but one I'm not particularly fond of when the margins are so thin on either side.
not enough talk about scholar!! xD
I honestly kind of disagree with Komachi here. Mostly on the mingling Healing and DPS rotations.
The idea of having a Healing and DPS rotation themselves is fine, I'm all for it (Twelve know that Sage is the only healer with any semblance of a DPS rotation), but I don't like the idea of mixing them together. it would just add unneeded complexity that would likely further push new players away from trying healing jobs.
astro might be strong right now, but way less engaging than any previous iteration; arguably one of the things that made it one of the more interesting healers to play was that each pull was dynamic in terms of your card play. Now you just throw 2 cards at pretty much the same two targets every 2 minutes and even in current savage you just dump or overwrite the rest, either not really requiring much thought. As much as I'd love the card rework to be reverted, I realize it's probably not realistic and I would at least like to see the cards aside from the damage buffs to be turned into something more engaging
"I've always wanted a momentum healer, a healer that builds off of combos…"
I remember before Shadowbringers came out, there was a leak of the jobs we'd get in the expansion. I don't recall the exact contents of the leaks, but a good number of em were real. Others were… half-right, and I remember one of them was "dancer will be healer." To be honest, this really piqued my interesting because I often associate healer jobs with mage-like characters, so the idea of healing through dances sounded pretty cool. We ultimately did end up getting some healing with dancer, but as everyone knows now the job ended up being a ranged DPS. Anyways, that's pretty much what that phrase reminded me of.
Remove a lot of their ogcd heals and replace them with ogcd utility, force gcd healing and make casting a gcd feel relevant
It would be more engaging and fun to play as a healer if every healer have some "do this and you get this"-combo like said Astro with Neutral Sect – Horoscope – AoEHeal -> Helios Horoscope + Suntouched. It feels like you do something more rather than just spamming something. Astro is the best example. "Think ahead and get rewareded" (Earthly Star, Makrokosmos, Card System) is something that goes into the right direction. I wish the other healers has some sort of this combination healing too and more engaging attacks.
What I'm most frustrated with is the interaction with the faerie from scholar. The faerie gauge could be so much better like if you heal a target a second gauge will be filled. You have to use this gauge to tether with the enemy and drain HP (like a dot). If it's empty you have to fill it up again. Summon Seraph instead you can decide to damage all enemies nearby or heal everyone nearby with a 100 potency heal ('cause everyone will be healed) like aetherpact. In Dissipation mode you can gather something that's converted from healing or mp usage into a massive shield or damage.
For the other two healers (whm and sage) I don't have much of examples 'cause I dont play them recently.
But yea… more (combo) interaction with the skills itselfs would be amazing…
Probably a minority opinion here but it's a hill I'm gonna die on: I want ARR Cleric Stance back. I loved stance dancing. It made knowing when to DPS and when to heal take real thought. Big risk, big reward. Also miss having more CC, esuna stuff, and healer mechanics.
As ast main, lily gage is zzz. I hate having to level whm. I couldn't disagree with Kionu more how ast plays. I miss the RnG.
We already have a Totem healer! It's Scholar!
Now as the sole AST of my FC…time to ..well I dont have a dash….SPRINT AWAY!
I love the idea of all healers having more of a synergy of their damage and their healing like WHM and its Lilies, especially since SCH currently has anti-synergy where they actively want to try to get around having to use their basic healing tools so they can eek out an extra 300 potency every minute (Energy Drain and Aetherflow). Even just making Energy Drain have 3 charges with a 20s recharge timer, and each charge giving 7-8% mana, giving 1 Aetherflow, and otherwise being identical to how it is now (and removing Aetherflow, though I would miss Aetherflow for nostalgia reasons) would be a great step in the right direction imo.
i'd like it if every Healer had that kind of dot thing SCH used to have and SGE has now
I don't know about you guys, but I'm still on the Healer Strike right now, as are many others.
I'd even consider the healer strike to include everyone who used to main healer, but then swapped off the role because of how bad it is.
Every now and then, I'll think "eh, I'm probably just being dramatic, it's not that bad. I used to love healer" then trying it in one extreme trial or expert roulette, then going "Yep. it's that bad. Back to my main."
It's a bit melodramatic, but for good reason. These issues have been brought up over and over ever since Shadowbringers launched, but they've been completely ignored. That's why we needed to make a big show of our dissatisfaction in hopes of getting at least a bit of change.
I think that the fact that Square has remained completely silent about this for now is maybe a good sign. Before, we got told "play ultimates" or "maybe give it a try", but this time it's just nothing. That tells me that they're keeping quiet to not set bad expectations of upcoming changes that they started planning once they saw the massive backlash during the Dawntrail media tour.
I love the points Kionu and Komachi made about damage and healing weaving into each other! We really need more of the damage and healing components feeling more like part of the same, interconnected kit. It would make healing more interesting, possibly more intuitive, and would allow the design team to create more fights that require GCD healing. The current binary status quo of GCD healing being a outright damage loss has always left a sour taste in my mouth.
I think there are two problems to the healer role that play a crucial role in making the role unpopular throughout all levels of play.
1. Healing is only a desirable role to play within instanced group content that is designed with the presence of healers in mind. It is slower and less enjoyable than any other role (even tanks) when it comes to MSQ, Fates, Zones like Bozja, or general questing. Playing a healer is usually done in addition to other roles and for a specific purpose, rather than for the general game. That’s not very attractive.
2. Healing has both too much and too little responsibility in group content. The ‚too much‘ comes from the idea that healers have to heal the normal, intended damage, react to mistakes and do recovery, and do mechanics with everybody else at the same time. In these situations, healers can decide whether the pull continues or not. This intimidates newer healers and healers who might try harder content but are scared into sticking with normal difficulty. The ‚too little‘ comes from the fact that, in hard content, mistakes often end fatally, which means that the only reaction and recovery that healers have is the raise-button. Despite the fact that they have this large kit that is meant for reaction and recovery. This makes the role frustrating in a lot of harder content.
At the same time, the really intense moments where a healer has to keep track of everything are a central part of what makes the role unique and interesting. Keeping this core appeal to the role while reducing its intimidating nature is a very narrow path. As brought up in the video, the most promising approach would be to have mechanics where mistakes become more bearable through healing and that aren’t outright fatal. (Such an approach will inevitable lead into a discussion about difficulty.)
Put together, these two points affect healer-gameplay in any type of content. A lot of it has to do with encounter-design, including the design of quests, Fates, etc. I can imagine that some changes to certain healers kit may make it more enjoyable to execute what they are currently doing, but I think the central tension is between the design of healers and the design of encounters.
A fundamental redesign of the healing-role could attempt to address these frustrations, but I’m concerned on two fronts: First, such a radical redesign can easily backfire and is difficult to get right. Second, a serious redesign of the role would likely require redesigns of many old encounters to make them compatible with the new healers. The game has grown to a point where I see this as a major obstacle to a change as fundamental as a redesign of healing. If we see fundamental changes to the role, I expect those to come in small steps, across many expansions, which means that we are talking about very long-term developments.
BLU mage unironically has the best gameplay of any healer and its not close, If I could i would rather play Aetheric Mimicry Healer BLU than any of the 4 mainline jobs