Healing in FFXIV has BIG Problems feat. Misshapen Chair video 

This. I had someone explain to me "well, healers dps and have a handful of healing spells". Like, dude, I understand that healers HAVE to constantly dps, but 95% of a healer's hotbar is a giant healing toolbox, not the other way around.

This. As a WHM I don’t use half of my healing kit. Not because I don’t know how. Because I don’t need to. Cure II, Regen, Medica II, Lily on a one and lily on a bunch. Haven’t memorized how to spell Aflatus shmatus whateverus. Half the time I don’t even need to use lily healing but I want that blood lily so I can at least pretend I have 5 damaging spells.

No, the point of healers is to heal and smooth over runs. Optimized healing is where you cut back on healing

@@elgatochurro The problem with this is that healer DPS absolutely matter now when hitting enrage timers in savage. They need to do as much dps as they can and the only way to do that is to heal as little as possible too.

Sage is the best, most fun healer hands down. "busy" from another perspective is just engaging and to me its super fun. Going back to WHM after maining Sage for the last few months feels like a huge nerf.

@@l-dog I get that, it's the only healer I play regularly, but I don't need to drop more than a handful of damage gcds to heal properly, so it's still 99 percent dosis with the added fun of weaving, but I do get where you're coming from

Sage only feels busy because they somehow decided to make you press 2 buttons instead of 1 to apply your dot. So every time you have to weave a heal after a dot, it’s 3 buttons instead of 2 lmao

@@davidbai3543 That's just incorrect and sounds like you haven't played the class beyond it's level 70.

Sage cannot global heal very well in times where it needs it

Yeah, well, most jobs aren't much more interesting than that in casual content.

@@thalesn ??? Huh?

@@thalesn Lol. Do you even play the game?

@@thalesn please tell me you are joking. "Most jobs"? Im sorry beside healer, idk any class can spam 1 button to do as their main source of dmg

@@akiramurakami3177 Well smn now for anything below when they get favors. I wish that was given way early and just have it get upgraded with traits.

Yeah it's a big problem of people in PF not knowing what their mitigation buttons are or where to use them. It's not uncommon to run people who straight up don't use them or have them mapped. For tanks it's especially rough because tanks can't smoothbrain invuln all the tbs and actually have to use their mitigation which a lot refuse to for some reason? But what people don't understand is healers are actually kind of overall limited in pure mitigation so they do need the party to help out where they can.

@@24hr-Gaming That last point is kind of why I want ranged phyiscal dps to also have more mitigation buttons. I know BRD, DNC, and MCH has there party wide mitigation, but it is kinda weird (for me at least) to for the “utility” jobs to have only 1 form of mitigation. For me it sucks not being able to use Troubadour more on my BRD or Shield Samba on DNC since helping the whole party gives me a bit more serotonin in fights. (Which is why I main BRD/DNC for those sweet sweet party buffs). Hell, I’ll take a reduced cooldown for more uses

As a healer I agree The number of tanks that don't mitigate properly or dps that don't play the mechanics make my life well interesting. Working to keep them alive definitely keeps me healing, but I can't always heal fast enough and then I get tunnel vision on the hp bars and miss mechanics

@@24hr-Gaming our static had a Blackmage step in as a sub and he didn't even had Addle on his hotbar. As we asked him to pls use it he wondered why he'd should use a skill that reduced his damage

yeah i always try to use my debuff/buff as a dps, but some times i don't understand if what i'm doing it's really having some impact on the fight or not (in savage and extreme ofc)

in a static sure, go into PF for some real fun (sometime it can actually be fun, other times it's a horrible mess)

what? why would you get tilted xD i always *beg* for my static to fck up because finally there is something to do besides following the mit sheet and pressing 1/2 :D

Unless the game forces people to take damage and adds heal to the main mechanics. MapleStory 2 was a game that this did and it was awesome as a healer to have a heal check time that was crucial.

That can really be said for almost every job in FFXIV. Just follow your rotations for optimal play.

that depends from person to person. for some, consistent execution of muscle memory is engaging. Some do have procs instead, mainly DNC and (to lesser degrees) BRD/RDM. that being said, engagement is important. healers are engaging in high damage areas. But that means your reward for mastering healer is less fun, which is as ironic as it is stupid. more engaging damage options would go a very long way.

@@hellfrozenphoenix13 It’s also not even really high damage anymore. At best it’s spike damage which is just as much a tank/DPS mit check as it is a heal check. Makes playing WHM feel like ass because there’s no real use for high healing THROUGHPUT. You get a few instances a tier and the rest are just mit checks. I know Ultima Unreal was a big joke mechs-wise, I won’t argue that, but it was probably the most fun I’ve had in a long while specifically BECAUSE the sheer throughput I had on WHM could save a run.

Honestly if they were to remove buttons and have the gameplay be very priority and proc based it would become too close to wow gameplay in my opinion and I like that ffxiv is different. Like "The Best Bilbo" said i find consistent execution of muscle memory engaging while just pressing a button when it light up (proc) pretty boring.

Yeah, there's totally not a bunch of games, activities, and professions people engage with and even dedicate their whole lives to due to how engaging it is to exercise their muscle memory and perfectly execute a set of optimal motions... right? Really now, why do people playing this game keep insisting that the concept of something being "engaging" is objectively defined by their own entirely subjective personal preferences?

i have pretty much the same idea. if they want healers to be accessible to entry level they can leave whm as it is and add a few ogcd heal and dps buttons. make other healers more interesting dps wise. we can do so much when it comes to job theme and rotation. the only healer that's busy enough rn to be entertaining is ast and even then it's not really that hard if ur group is consistent. but i doubt that SE take away from this entire issue of lacking healers in pf is probably would be "fights are too hard nerf em and make healing easier" and not "make healers have rotation while enforcing other party members to use mit properly"

Yes, If you want HARDER content... play HARDER content... However every expansion demands more out of everyone, especially healers. Healing isnt about a DPS rotations, its about easing mistakes the team amkes. You're simply playing with the wrong mindset... how high have you even healed up to?

​@@elgatochurro Team will eventually not make those mistakes and the healer will be back to 1 button spamming. Everyone plays differently so I wont argue about the "wrong mindset". And even if it was, I just don't think it justifies having 90% of the content be 1 button spam for healers. Just seems like bad and or lazy design.

@@noshyre7194 oh no... Efficiency... How terrible... Would a boring 3 sequence of buttons be better that you can fail at? More extra buttons for the same of buttons? Because I know what I love more than spamming glare is the 1 2 3 of my tank rotation. Very engaging I assure you and totally not "lazy".

@@elgatochurro Oh so you agree that even the 123 combat is not engaging and lazy?

There's a healer drought? Roulettes is almost nothing but tank needed for almost everything for me, maybe it's datacenter related, but on crystal there's no shortage of healers at all.

@@Llynethil people play healers for fast roulette queues, it proves absolutely nothing. It's ROULETTES.

@@Akenaph Regular raids there is no problem finding healers neither, if there really was a drought like you said, roulettes would also be affected heavily, you can queue as tank for instaqueue aswell and it's even easier to play as a healer, and yet more people choose healer over tank anyway. There is no shortage of anything in FF14, you're just imagining things, you have 0 proof of that being the case yourself.

based on the comment im gonna assume you dont do any high end content. but the toolkits are fine. they are not at all redundant in savage and especially ultimate. (which is pretty much the only thing that matters) every single spell and skill need to be utilized and they all have their place. if medica and c2 consume lilies then what are you gonna use when you NEED ogcd lilies???

There is no healer drought there hasnt been one for years now

I stopped playing towards the end of Heavensward and was maining Astro. I had no idea what had changed with the job then I came back to FFXIV like a month ago and I couldn't believe how they had massacred my boy...

Astro would be getting a rework in Dawntrail (next expansion) so look forward to it

They have struggled to balance AST since it got introduced. Originally undertuned, then became the meta choice with the balance card buff, then nerfed, then reached a stable state in SB for a while, then got its entire card mechanic reworked and now it’s botched.

in fairness to that, all of the healers below lvl 30 play the same at the moment, put dot on spam 1 dmg button heal if needed to

@@luisdunfordgavira it still kind of sucks in a way that, if you know you want to play Sage for instance, you have to play something else until you unlock it. They should kind of do something about that. I understand they can’t do a whole 1-70 questline just like that or adjust drops but there are generic items that fit all DoM jobs. And you could stipulate that you can only level in like dungeons and with regular quests 🤷‍♂️

With Soteria, Kardia SMACKS. You don't realize it until you don't have a sage in the party, but Kardia does A LOT.

​@@adognamedsally it does a bit, but so does Fairy heals. hoenstky, i agree they feel a bit similar output wise outside of CDs, and then the fairy just does more area focused, Kardia mire solo focused. i like SGE, but it could use some bonus complexity in areas. for a Battle Medic, its battle options are pretty limited and restrictive.

@@hellfrozenphoenix13 I think the fairy is generally worse than Kardia, because healing anyone other than the tank is not great, unless that heal with save you from using a Whispering Dawn or Indom. Plus, you totally can move Kardia to someone to heal them if you know the tank won't be taking a lot of damage in the near-term. Smart use of Kardia can free up a bunch of CDs. They are similar to SCH, but (and this seems to be an opinion unique to me) they feel different in gameplay. Even though most of their abilities DO the same thing as SCH abilities, SGE feels different and the times when I use those abilities is also different.

kardia does in some places come up and in savage I kinda think about it at points as a subtle help on keeping the tanks alive, but it's absolutely a very minor part of the job and not what you focus the gameplay on, it is reflavoured fairy you can actually control rather than healing whoever it fucking feels like.

@@adognamedsally who cares bro xD Soteria is one of the most boring skills i've ever seen. Sure its great healing but so are the other 20 random healing oGCD's every class is bloated with and are not used in 98% of content in the game

I'm a whm casual player, and whm is my only lvl 90.. and even I can say I fall more so into your two points here, than being bored with the lack of dps rotation, or bored of not having to constantly heal. Maybe its more about healer anxiety than boredom, as we and the devs know ffxiv is more of a casual player base. I can feel the expectation on healers to carry the party a lot. I was recently in a normal raid where no one was trying to follow mechanics or use mits, The other healer and I were being blamed for wipes, and the party voted abandon. I queue up for the raid again and we clear first try. The point is its not always the healers fault. And the party can always do better to help the healer. If no one knows the mechanics, there are going to be wipes until we all figure them out together. Let's normalize healers managing expectations of the party and evouraging everyone to have a sense of self-responsibility.

But ALSO, AFTER we get everyone's expectations on healers managed, then the devs should absolutely give us some more interesting dps rotation because yeah, it's boring lol. But that's not the first priority imo

Yep this right here. As a WHM main I actually like how easy it is for me to toss in damage. And I've yet to have a perfect party where people properly mitigate every attack and i have to chase the healing. And if I fail they blame me. It's a paranoia thing for me.

Same. I don't mind the 1 button damage, but for me I'll only really like healing trials and raids where there's a co-healer and never current extremes because I struggle enough to stay alive as a dps so I don't want to troll PF as a healer. For me it's definitely the anxiety and worry that if I'm the only healer I have to do everything perfectly otherwise it's basically a guaranteed wipe unless there's a RDM/SUM to res me. It would be nice to have some additional dps options obviously, but it's not why I don't PF as healer

I agree as a healer mean I've been going back and forth if I should hang up my healing code and just focus on being a dancer because of everything you mentioned I started as a healer to be honest because I healed in world of Warcraft and I was used to it and it was fun until you get to the higher levels and you see the tanks in the DPS doing whatever they want and not helping the healer and it just gets tired and after a while. 100% I agree with you that it's a thankless job that's why I'm pretty much going to hang up my healing coat I may do it once in awhile but I'm probably going to focus on dancing because healing is just so stressful right now that it's not even worth it and exhausting mentally.

What do you mean by only 2 dps buttons? By all technicality, WHM has 5 dps buttons.

@@Reinhard96 Glare and Dia are used on a regular basis, Assize is just weaved in on CD without a modicum of thought, Holy will never be used in a boss fight, and Afflatus Misery is so conditional that you can go through a full boss battle without ever procing it. Let's be real, your damage options and job depth as healer really don't feel much different at 90 than they do at 50, 60, etc

@@Reinhard96 even if I'm really generous with assize, which you'll only use in 45 second intervals, holy doesnt get used outside of trash pulls, and misery pretty much only exists to get back glare damage lost from gcd healing

@@Reinhard96 going by technicalities to give 5 dps buttons, 3 every healer has being the aoe, dot, and basic damage, 1 requires you to gcd heal, and 1 is an ogcd every 45 seconds.

@@blueray222 i mean, if you never use misery under buffs you are just bad :D its the games fault for being designed around speed clears. healers should never ask for more dps buttons because they are... HEALERS. Problem is that even ultimates boil down to "follow the mitigation spreadsheet, press glare on CD, keep dot up". If the fights would be designed more dynamic, healers would not scream for more dmg buttons because they are bored and wanna look at more pretty stuff

This is why healing is much more exciting in casual content when people are more likely to mess up mechanics

Nothing relaxing about mashing 1 button. It's fucking boring.

Triage is the fun part of healing, but our non-cd spells are so weak compared to hp pools that once I'm out of cooldowns I just end up more frustrated than anything. This heal size change I noticed when I started SHB and it drove me away from healing as my main that xpac, for the first time in any mmo. Gave healing another try in EW and still have this issue. It feels awful to press a single target lily, have it do maybe 20k to a 60k hp player who just took a 60% HP damage mechanic that gave them a vuln, and they can just die to another mechanic (at least the squishier jobs, tanks never care about vulns) if I don't use an ocgd cd on top. And if that's on CD, someone can just die with nothing I can do. Part of why I play healers is I hate avoidable deaths. Like when someone messes up certain mechanics that don't instantly oneshot them, but are clearly meant to kill them because they do 70%+ HP and apply a dot for up to 20% hp a tick, I just get annoyed at the mechanic and say (if I can) "fuck you I'll save them anyways", but sometimes that's just difficult because so much of our kit's power is in CDs.

I agree 100% I loved the challenge of keeping everyone alive when the newest patch dropped and no one knew what was going on. I was even making use of Rescue for a change.

This is what makes healing fun! When things go wrong it's fun and otherwise it's chill. Personally if I wanted to do a complex rote rotation I would play a dps.

its annoying to be honest

@@rares4894 You wanna talk annoying, let's talk about that goddamn loporrit humming lmao It's like those meme videos where it's like "1 hour of silence occasionally broken by _____"

Not so- If you pulled the packs in the initial manner as they are shown, the healer would have to do next to nothing. BUT that's boring- if anything people notice their healer when they actually do difficult-ish things such as a full pull with no CD cause you panik/fat fingered the invuln last pull. xD It's not that healers don't want to be challenged, but when the standard is set high, it becomes a barrier for beginner/limited players. That's why the healers are so simplified now, and will probably stay as such to maintain accessibility.

I wish understand this logic. It's okay to critique how someone is playing their job. Obviously we need healers, but just afk healing is not the way and thanking every healers for existing is cringe. There's no barrier to just picking up the class/job lol

@@robertcortes5361 Yeah I mean, I wrote this comment when I first started playing. I don't commend anyone anymore because 90% of the people playing this game don't know how to

Exactly this. The people who are suggesting fights to require more healing to make healers “feel more engaged” and “want to play healer more” are very obviously not healer mains. Healing in an unoptimized group is VERY punishing right now. We just don’t want to deal with it.

@@hatlebee FACTS

either that or requiring more healing, so that healers spend more time healing than pressing glare lmao

@@Carsu12 this is why we can’t have more damage options honestly. People don’t even heal properly as is. I would be down for this if people did their job

@@cynthiahembree3957 There will always be bad players. That's unavoidable no matter how simple you make a game. At a certain point, trying to babyproof each job in order to compensate for those players just serves to punish the rest of the player base for something they're not responsible for.

Remember T13? When Flatten required like 4 GCD heals? And when Earthshakers required 2-3 GCDs? I think that fight is really engaging as a healer, even now. Perhaps they thought it was too punishing, but I really want them to do more of that. What do you think of all the DoTs in the current tier? I feel like it's them trying to move more in that direction, forcing healers to spend more actions on people who are taking damage.

@@cynthiahembree3957 People don't even use their healing ogcds. It's not a problem of damage bad but somehow these people filter into high end content without knowing what most of their kit does. That's not a problem with the kit, that's a problem with the game never showing the player that they should use their kit. That being said if they're going to make people do 2 min burst they could at least give healers a shiny do dmg in 2 min burst button. Phlegma x2 or a maybe Lord of Crowns is so boring.

What about P7 with the Condensed Aero into Light of Life/Spark of Life combos? That is a healer mechanic right there. Purgation is another big healer mech. All of the tankbusters have DoTs this tier. No matter how much mit I throw at them (like 50%), the DoT still ticks for like 1/4 of my hp pool. Another healer mechanic. Even last tier, Firestorms of Asphodelos, Death's Toll and Curtain Call were huge healer mechanics, even if the other turns were kinda meh.

@@adognamedsally I don´t consider a Tankbuster a healer mechanic especially if those heavily rely on your Tank like in p5s. If the tank does a decent job there is not much I need to do , seen this with good tanks and bad ones Everything that just has to be mitigated neither , counting in Purgation , looking on your Debuff and your group how to position. It´s just basic things you do have to do , nothing fancy. I give you an example of what I would call a healer mechanic. How hard would it be to impliment in p6s for example that you as a healer has to keep an eye out on the debuffs and remove them so people shoot them out or in based on their debuff but would die if they don´t get removed ? Why for HPS checks we don´t have constant ticking damage on the group outside of based setlines for dmg incoming ? If you once see fights , you exactly know the patterns when to heal. That is just not fun and engaging in any way or shape. Furthermore , if we haven´t have the opportunity to rezz at our hearts content , this would put much more emphasis on good healing and using utility more careful either.

@@adognamedsally that's all predictable damage. In WoW you have constant ticking damage on the whole raid forcing you to spam heals for maximum hps

Maybe to sum my thoughts up and I do think this is very fitting : If a Game makes you feel bad because you rather push one healing more to be certain to survive a mechanic or having to rezz someone than pressing one more Glare and punishes you with not hitting the enrage timer , it just hasn´t understood the role of a Healer at all.

@@shakeweller Exactly what I mean.

They can’t. They literally can’t. As soon as that becomes the case, there would be no reason to play anything else. If the Sage’s healing was enough to keep the party alive, then they just are a higher DPS WHM, SCH, or AST.

@@TheSpicyLeg They literally could... Right now no healers really lose dps uptime to heal so saying that being able to heal through doing dmg makes them stronger is just incorrect. It would just mean sage casts less oGCD heals...right now blood lilies literally work on this principle of healing to do damage and are they OP? Think about how cool it would be if there was a way to spread your kardia to all players for 20 seconds, or have your kardia convert healing into a shield for 20 seconds. There are lots of things that could be done. They would do the same damage and healing as now, it wouldn't change at all...

@@drob8220 Oh, my, no. During prog you’re GCD healing quite a bit. Yet even were that not the case, being able to damage and heal simultaneously is still preferable to doing one or the other. Not to mention, the sage wouldn’t have to retarget like other healers do, which while a relatively minor concern, still adds up. There is no way around this problem. Either they have to make the ‘healer’ more like a DPS, or threaten the party more often so as to require healing. The problem with making a healer more like a DPS is why bother to have healers to begin with. As it is now, unless a party members makes a mistake, healing is preplanned. In other words, there is no reactivity. Remember why they removed Protect? People were casting it once at the start, and that’s it. Healing now is cast X at these time intervals.

@@TheSpicyLeg Give the option. I mean cleric stance was literally that option in the past. The problem is the better you get on healer the more boring it gets which is the opposite of everything else in the game. Sage having a dps rotation for heals while mitigating with ogcds with stacks being used for brute force healing like teurochole or the aoe heal would be completely fine. Atleast it’d play different and have its own form of engagement. And considering how sch is the the other shield healer and you’re allowed to push yourself with the balance of using stacks for damage or heals; it’d follow the trend of the shield healer teetering the line of using their resources between healing and more damage. So when you do get good enough you can use your resources less on healing and more on dpsing while keeping the party alive. I believe right now Sage has the lowest dps right now, which is hilarious considering how it was being sold to us. Not everyone would want a dps rotation on a healer either so I doubt no one would play the others because of it. Just balance the damage so they’re not ridiculously higher than the next, but surely make them the strongest.

Give sage a way to dump the blue useless stacks on dmg and add some ogcd dmg buttons and it would be way more fun during downtime.

exactly my thoughts, legion disc priest was so good. i tried out shadowlands disc priest and tbh it still felt better than ffxiv healers. playing sage in ffxiv was the closest but still not enjoyable enough which is ofc fine since theres plenty people enjoying ffxiv healers and i can dps but theres a reason these discussions happen. i think one big difference that makes ffxiv healers boring is also that the healing intensity is very low unless you are in savage, if u pick healer u probably want to heal and personally all dungeons, araids and trials on normal mode have been too easy

That's what's irritating about healing. When everything is going perfectly, all I have to do is spam one or two spells, and weave the occasional OGCD. It's extremely boring. It becomes far more engaging when things go wrong, because then I can actually use my full kit. That's honestly a problem, I feel. A class shouldn't be boring more than half the time. I do want an expanded dps rotation for healers, to keep me entertained when busting out all the stops to heal isn't necessary. Also for solo content. Healers are subpar for MSQ and other solo content just because all they have for offensive options are maybe 3-4 spells. Every class should be *fun* for every piece of content in the game, imo. Healers just aren't.

As a healer main I 100% agree with you and I simply don't understand why others don't seem get that. I love the balance of knowing when I healed/mitigated enough and trying to maximize my damage at the same time. This raid tier I also ran into one of those 2 types of other healers you mentioned almost all the time in PF. Getting paired with someone who can truly balance both is really, really rare.

I love your point about the parses. I've found parsing and analysing my logs to make healing much more enjoyable. Sure the dps rotation is still basic af but learning how to optimize my GCD uptime, and minimizing gcd heals by using my ogcd cooldowns adds a decent layer of complexity. Imo, healer is already the most difficult class if you account for the variability you get in prog parties as well

@@TheSuperRatt In savage, you do have the ability to use your full kit. I'm using every single mitigation tool, every healing buff, etc. even when things aren't going poorly. Then, once things do go poorly, you have decisions to make when it comes to using some of your ogcds early OR sacrificing gcds, etc. Only In a well oiled static will yo consistently not necessarily need to use all your tools because everyone is mitigating properly, but outside of that, you're most likely using everything. And if you feel like you're not needing to use everything, then that's most likely because your co-healer is healing way too much, using gcd aoe heals on everything, etc. I'd also argue that as a result of using your entire kit, the cadence of a healer isn't that much different from that of other jobs, at least for me right now as a SGE. Most jobs ultimately boil down to phases of 1-2-3 and then burst phases. During SGE/healer "burst phases" (i.e., when there's a tankbuster + raidwide coming up), you need to weave in your healing buffs, ogcd tank heals, weave in kardia target because of tank swap, keep the tanks alive with ogcds/gcds as needed, mitigate for raidwide, spot heal/rez anyone that messed up. If anything, healers always have the potential for more variation whereas a fight on farm for a dps is LITERALLY the same thing every time no matter what. In addition, they've tended to make a lot of mechanics where the healers are the ones to solve positioning and the dps literally follow marker above the healers' heads. There's plenty for healers to do.

@Sonic Mobian Judging by the fact that you name off spells like aero and stone, I can see that you haven't fully leveled or have access to your full kit yet. Healing before cap is a completely different beast and definitely doesn't feel "good" as you have to make sacrifices to heal in most cases. But at cap, you'll have ogcd heals such as tetra, your lillies which end up dps-neutral, etc. Also, between slidecasting (look it up if you're unsure what that is) and the gcd between dps casts, there's plenty of time to both move and weave in heals without sacrificing damage. In your example, if someone is low I could, for example, go through this decision process of: 1) evaluate if they need a heal NOW and interrupt my cast vs. can it wait for my cast to finish, 2) I can then either weave an ogcd if one is available OR use a gcd such lilly/regen if moving or cure 2 if I don't need to move and have no other options, etc.

I don't know how it is in games you play, but lot of games are shifting to more active support because support role is boring as it is. FFXIV does it better than most games but it's still a lot of one button spamming. Probably my favorite healer role in any MMO is FoMarl from PSO1 where you could do god tier healing, really good damage and utility, really good buff and debuff and your weapon skills were so good you could solo content. My other favorite is actually Raganrok Online priest because you had really strong party buffs, a teleport, really strong anti-undead spells and if you really wanted to smack something you got out the battle mace and went battle priest. I think if I had to point out something wrong with FFXIV is that healers are not very flexible. Once you fully optimize your healing rotation there's nothing else to think about. Expert roulette I play on healer for instant queues and half the time I'm falling asleep because the dungeons are boring. But idk what kind of game where Cure 1 spamming is the norm. I'd fall asleep.

Since unavoidable damage in XIV is so infrequent and/or low, you spend a lot of time sitting at max HP. And if you're at max HP, what's the point of using any heals just because you're tired of mashing Broil? SCH and SGE have it a bit better because you can at least pre-apply shields, but it doesn't change the fact that healing requirements to keep everybody alive are so lax in most content in XIV that there's nothing left to do but fall back on damage skills to clear the fight quicker.

Yeah because they used to be very different but people would just pull for the balance (basically what we have now) so from what I understand it was really the illusion of choice

That shows a healthy maturity on your part, to be able to understand the merits of somebody's argument and even agree with them, even if you clash with them on a personal level, or find them too abrasive like Chair is. Separating personality from argument is becoming a lost art nowadays 😂

Old AST was terrible did you pull The Balance no? Oh well youre other cards are worthless or actively detrimental

yeah me too, i started to hate healing because i litterally fall asleep everytime, at least with sage it's LESS boring (but still boring), and this is very frustrating because i love healer classes/jobs in every game

@@emanueledimatteo2052 Me too, healer is my usual go-to class. But I must say I got major respect for raid healers in this game, that stuff is crazy

Dungeons are snoozefest on any job frankly.

Play astro. You won't fall asleep. Job is very busy and requires you to pay attention cause of cards.

@@slimfastsubaru2043 all your cards do the same thing and seals only affect astrodyne. 5% damage on the lowest dps in the game is pretty negligible if dps checks are not on the table most jobs in this game, regardless of role, have become a snoozefest and boss design is the only thing keeping half the raiders subbed.

Absolutely this. Before people have the ilvl and knowledge to smoothly run content, it makes it a lot more interesting (and stressful lol) keeping the tank/party alive. They've also definitely been working to make the newer savage and EX content require some more active healing overall I think. I don't really have all that much savage experience overall, but EX4 knuckle drum and P5S tankbusters definitely feel a lot harder to heal than most things from last tier.

i think the real issue people have is that there is no meaningful reward for healing efficiently other than having more time to spam 1 button

the mastery of the role reward you with disengaging spam. thats a flaw, and not a small one. and at that stage, all the healers aside from SGE feel the same. those are the real issues. Now, i agree that with fresh content, its more stressful. for like a month, maybe 2, its harder. then people learn and it becomes very plain again, where maximum use comes in the form of refresh dot, spam 1. im not going to ask for them to make the rotations as hard as normal DPS, but they should be engaging. SCH having a second dot, maybe one oGCD not tied to Aetherflow? much more engagement for low damage phases. AST getting a "build up then burst" style skill for spamming 1? fits their management style and breaks up the 1 with occasional 2 at least. SGE has the right ideas, just too long on CD imo. WHM should have dmaage options when building up blood lilly, because having your job gauge be potentially useless feels pretty bad. In other words, the reward for mastery for tanks is being much harder to kill and executing your damage as best as you can. the reward for mastery on DPS is killing things much faster and easier. the Mastery for healers is less healing and more spam. Mastering healers needs a small edge up on the reward side.

I mean how often is there fresh content to enjoy healing in? That only lasts like a week after the patch and then you go back to pressing one button again cause the majority of people know what to do for the next 4 months.

Big disagree, high end content is the only place I enjoy healing because I actually have to use all my tools and think, in normal content I am bored out of my mind because I have a swiss army knife for cuttting butter, even when people are constantly fucking up and taking tons more damage, it only kinda evens out how little damage is actually happening.

You can already do this using macros, either the macro will cast the heal directly on your target's target, say the boss is targeting your tanks so thats the t of your t, or by assigning parts slot, so the macro will whoever is number 2 on your party list, say theain tank is second om your party list, so the heal will go to them, even if you're already targeting the boss

@@AdachYanas This, or what I'm using is which targets whoever your mouse is currently hovering over (in party list or actual character model, both work). So you can always spot heal any party member without having to switch targets.

I mean... I use focus target for this just fine. There's a dedicated keybind for targeting your focus target, so just doing that and tabbing back to the boss is really seamless.

And now imagine being a healer where your co-healer decides to focus on damage. Not mitigating and healing as little as possible. And you STILL out damage them while also having to healer more because they don't. It would actually be better for there to a class that just passively heals everyone in the party instead of having someone who refuses to heal. Just so those players have something to play and not hold back the party. It can be the most boring thing ever, have the job have a single spell on the hotbar that does damage and everything else is a passive skill that helps the rest of your team survive

Ikr! I've been playing tank and it's amazing to me that I can mit a TB with ~50% mit and the DoT still nearly kills me every tick. I really want to do this tier on healer after playing Tank in it.

the issue is that doesnt affect the other content, and 14s uniquely powerful in that area. Old raids and content doesnt become obsolete, so design has to matter there as wellm I like that the new raids are engaging healer wise, but if i go back to, as a random example, a synced Coils of Bahamut? the design issues show.

See that's the issue. The fight design you spoke of have nothing to do with healing. You learn the fight and know where to heal and shield. Damage is predictable. The hand rarely changes anything up. Raid wide damage or tank busters are completely predictable meaning you'll be healing for those little bursts and then pressing your one dps button for the other 90% of the fight.

SCH/AST have more going on than RDM and WHM lol RDM is the most braindead job in the game

@@ziegfeld4131 That's the point. If I'm going to play a braindead job, I'm going to ditch any and all responsibility whatsoever and just go full monkey.

I loved setting up good spreads and playing them.

He's played like every class lmao he's on FF logs for all to see. Doesn't have much in current for healers, but definitely some in shb and sb, probably more before then. Probably doesn't heal as much in savage anymore because he thinks it's boring.

Most people who complain about healer classes being boring are always DPS mains. Meanwhile every healer main I've run into are still having fun, despite knowing the cons.

@@Miketation have you considered the possibility that those DPS mains used to be healer mains, and are now DPS mains because of the state of the healing role? and while im just one voice in a sea of whining bastards, i'm a healer main who is pretty fed up with how healing is seemingly turning into the 'bike with unremovable training wheels' role, so much so that i just cap tomes, clear the raid, log out. Chair might be abrasive with the way he worded his points, but people dont usually go making videos about things like this unless it's because they love it and want to see it improve. sure it's entirely possible he decided to make a video just to bitch about healing being shit, juuuust to farm the rageclicks for ad revenue, but i think it's more likely because it's a topic atm in the community, and it needs addressing because the lack of healers in PF is getting more and more apparent, and at this rate if nothing changes, PF will just outright die because noone's wanting to fill the role. FWIW i mostly agree with Chair, we cant add more healing required because casuals wont be able to keep up and it'd mean 10 years of content needs to be rebalanced, much easier to just add complexity to the DPS side of healers. What i dont agree with him on is leaving WHM as the 'glue eater' of the role, it'd paint a target on that job's back as 'this is the class the shitters play, kick on sight' like stormblood WHM but way way worse. ideally i'd rather see all of the healers get more complexity to their DPS rotation, and if the casuals dont want to engage with that complexity, then they dont have to, because EX roulette doesnt have an enrage timer. If they feel like 'oh im only competent enough to press 1 button for my dps rotation' then they can still press that 1 button and contribute 'some damage', heck if the dev team wanted they could make 'glare spam' be 80 or even 90% of the damage of doing the 'fully optimised rotation' with potency balancing. EG, if they were to make Glare 300 potency, and Dia 50 on cast + 30 potency per tick for 30s, that totals 350. 50 whole potency gain over 30s, so in a 10min fight you've gained 1000 potency, just over 3 whole Glares. pretty irrelevant when it comes to meeting the dps check, and so low that it's more likely you die to 'lmao crit variance' than missing those Dia's, but doing that change would mean people who want to optimise have something to optimise (keeping dot up, knowing when it's worth it to refresh vs not, etc) and the 'i dont know how to press more than 1 button' type healers can just ungabunga spam 1. i'm NOT suggesting that we actually reduce Dia and such down to this level, this is an example to show that if they added 2 or 3 more buttons, it's entirely possible to make them be balanced 'to reward the optimizers, and be mostly ignoreable by the shitters'. eg bring back fluid aura and make it a 15sec CD GCD with a potency of 330 compared to glare's 310, that is a total difference of 80 potency per minute for people to optimise.

I miss how Mistweavers were when they first came out, and that channeled healing spell that they had. That was so nice.

This! Used to play smn before endwalker because I loved the DoT management and the rotation. I found it fun. Now? I won’t touch it unless I want to take a nap.

@@tranquilelm5809 There was a similar aspect to Scholar before 5.0 too, with plenty of heals to spare as well as the fairy. Anyway, I understand the previous Summoner wasn't everyone's cup of tea especially with janky pet AI but the way it played more like a priority system was very charming and refreshing in the land of 1-2-3s.

@@Rewwgh absolutely agree. I used to play scholar back before heavensward and although i don’t remember much about how it played I do remember I really enjoyed having shadowflare

You wouldnt be forced to use it and it would be a massive boon for controller players

This. I love this. I’ve wanted a combo system for healers, like if you do this attack into this attack you’ll gain an X heal buff or you’ll grant an X shield. This gives healers more options and combos but rewards them with a support buff for doing said combos WHILE still doing damage to the boss (as we’re required to do anyways)

I'm not PERFECTLY aligned with you here, but I think I agree with most of this. Making everything about DPS in this game is what's killing this game and healing in it, not the other way around. But my personal view is we have 4 healers, why not do like tanks do and have 4 actual variations of them? There's no reason, with 4 healing Jobs, that they all have essentially the same DPS rotation. Like the guy in the video said, we can leave WHM as it is today, but why do the other three have a carbon copy of their DPS kit when no other role (Tanks, Melee, Ranged, Casters) has all members with essentially the same DPS rotation...? We could actually please everyone at once just flexing the healers we already have.

Healer becomes more of a healer the later you go, or if you want ask the tank to pull more packs in earlier dungeons so you have no choice but to spam all the heals

This is how I feel about it. I like "whack a mole extreme" as a healer, where I'm constantly engaged with my teams health bars during a fight. Not to say the FF design is "wrong", but it's just "dps with a couple healing spells" which isn't for me

It's more to do with damage being predictable and almost entirely managed by preplanned oGCD usage unless someone screws up. The better your groups, the most of a bore it is.

@Sonic Mobian I mean, good for you, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. Or rather, was created in Shadowbringers. Prior to that, those who wanted a basic healer had WHM, and everyone who wanted something more had AST and SCH. Now everyone's on a 1 button rotation and AST's card system is as thoughtless as anything else, and the amount of healing required in content doesn't make up for that exchange unless one of the tanks or dps is drunk. I haven't found healing this dull since RO, but even that had more impactful utility options.

One big difference is people have to level healers on their own here, whereas in wow every healer spec has a DPS spec to level and do solo content with.

the other najor thing is in WoW, healing was frequently needed and high damage intake is common, making healing required. i dont mind 14s focus in healer DPs, but i think that should come with a focus on making the damage part more fun. it wouldn't take a lot of additions to do it, as SCH can get a second dot to manage and possibly an OGCD not attached to Aetherflow. Astro can have a couple burst skills. WHM could have a high damage hit and some way to build it up. SGE is the closest to feel good, with CDs needing an adjustment if anything. in short: if you are going to focus on healer damage, then its needed to make it at least a little interactive. the 1 spam, 1 dot thing isnt fun and thisbis coming from a healer main. i like sage because i can get into its damage sometimes at least

How on earth does scholar confuse you but not sage? Their toolkits are practically identical. There I think six skills between the two that don’t have direct equivalents

Scholar actions are 90% same as the Sage. You can easily swap between them no problem.

So far scholar isnt a problem for me

@@RaddyC they are indentical, but not the same. Their use cases and how you manage them are different. For example, pet placement can make a huge difference for SCH, something SGe doesnt have ti do. SGE gains a steadiky regen resource whike SCH gets theirs in a burst. SCH shields tend to do more, but their direct healing is reliant on their Aetherflow in most cases. SGE is easier SCH, tbh, in terms if what they want to do. SCH has fringe things to learn and misusing some skills can be punishing, such as ths fairy munch, which can lead to confusion at first. That being said, i do think their similarities are a little too close together. I wouldn't mind them being more experiemental with it, but indont see it happening. But i digress, the main point is, despite similarities, SCH and SGE still play very differently.

1. Healers already do take the blame anyways a lot of the time 2. This is also already a thing, you can set minimum ilevels to join 3. Mana is only an issue most of the time if you're rezzing anyways and this just adds something which is the "healer thing" only they can do. 4. It's not about constant outgoing damage the whole fight, it's about having phases of some hard healing checks just like dps checks, losing tanks or dps can also be an insta-wipe anyways from mechanics, checks or tankbusters. As long as there's recovery periods where you can either push some dps if you didn't lose people or start the rezzes/healing it'll be fine. Keep in mind this isn't for lower level content(dungeons etc) and they could scale how difficult these parts are as you go up to extreme/savage/ultimate.