So, I've healed in a lot of MMOs, and it can be both a fun and rewarding role. When your party or raid is in a tough spot and you deftly weave together lifegiving abilities to get them across the finish line you get an amazing rush! This kind of healing is prevalent when first learning content: you're undergeared, everyone is standing in fire, and the healer is a wall between defeat and victory.
The flip side of this is that healing can often be downright tedious when there's not enough incoming damage to go around. This happens a lot during trash pulls, when your party knows an encounter expertly, and/or when you massively outgear the content. Then you're either sniping healing from each other or spamming an under-developed damage toolbox to contribute a bit.
What's odd is that FFXIV seems to like to tune content so that healers barely get to heal. I healed at level 70 and found that the only time that I felt like a full-time healer was when I was doing extreme primals with pick up groups where everyone just barely met the ilvl requirements (I never got into Savage raiding). 4-man content and non-extreme bosses was mostly spamming stone/holy with a healing spell or DoT spell thrown in every once in a while.
This is bad design, as you take a class with a ton of interesting tools and make them slaves to a filler nuke button for most of the time. Instead of hitting all my buttons and overcoming a challenge I'm spamming stone stone stone stone stone aero stone stone oGCD heal stone stone oGCD heal stone etc.
People will say that balancing healing and damage is difficult in its own right. I would agree if we were healing 85% of the time and figuring out where to weave in damage oGCDs to maximize party progress, but the nuke nuke nuke nuke heal nuke meta is simplifying these healing classes until they're trivial.
Coming back for ShadowBringers, it looks like nothing has changed. I talk to friends at endgame and the only "heal-heavy" content is savage raids, but even those are innovating to squeeze out healing casts for DPS casts. Despite really enjoying the WHM class design I don't know if I can take another expansion of spamming one nuke spell and am leaning more on SMN as I go through the new content.
Why does FFXIV hate healing? Not having enough to do is really stressful.
Edit: To make this more constructive, one of the things that Square could do to reduce traditional healing in FFXIV while keeping healers engaged is to introduce the idea of damage->healing healers.
In some MMO classes you heal by doing damage, and a portion of that damage is translated into healing. E.g. 50% of your damage heals the primary healing target and 25% of your damage value is applied as an AoE party heal.
I've also seen games where doing damage fills up a resource that can be spent on healing. So instead of hitting a button to get Aetherflow or waiting around for Lillies you could say get a Lilly for every XX damage done or X damage spells cast. One class that comes to mind is the Warrior Priest from Warhammer Online. So healers still get to heal and have dedicated supplemental buttons to keep people alive, but most of their time is spent maintaining a more normal damage rotation.
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The flip side of this is that healing can often be downright tedious when there's not enough incoming damage to go around. This happens a lot during trash pulls, when your party knows an encounter expertly, and/or when you massively outgear the content. Then you're either sniping healing from each other or spamming an under-developed damage toolbox to contribute a bit.
What's odd is that FFXIV seems to like to tune content so that healers barely get to heal. I healed at level 70 and found that the only time that I felt like a full-time healer was when I was doing extreme primals with pick up groups where everyone just barely met the ilvl requirements (I never got into Savage raiding). 4-man content and non-extreme bosses was mostly spamming stone/holy with a healing spell or DoT spell thrown in every once in a while.
This is bad design, as you take a class with a ton of interesting tools and make them slaves to a filler nuke button for most of the time. Instead of hitting all my buttons and overcoming a challenge I'm spamming stone stone stone stone stone aero stone stone oGCD heal stone stone oGCD heal stone etc.
People will say that balancing healing and damage is difficult in its own right. I would agree if we were healing 85% of the time and figuring out where to weave in damage oGCDs to maximize party progress, but the nuke nuke nuke nuke heal nuke meta is simplifying these healing classes until they're trivial.
Coming back for ShadowBringers, it looks like nothing has changed. I talk to friends at endgame and the only "heal-heavy" content is savage raids, but even those are innovating to squeeze out healing casts for DPS casts. Despite really enjoying the WHM class design I don't know if I can take another expansion of spamming one nuke spell and am leaning more on SMN as I go through the new content.
Why does FFXIV hate healing? Not having enough to do is really stressful.
Edit: To make this more constructive, one of the things that Square could do to reduce traditional healing in FFXIV while keeping healers engaged is to introduce the idea of damage->healing healers.
In some MMO classes you heal by doing damage, and a portion of that damage is translated into healing. E.g. 50% of your damage heals the primary healing target and 25% of your damage value is applied as an AoE party heal.
I've also seen games where doing damage fills up a resource that can be spent on healing. So instead of hitting a button to get Aetherflow or waiting around for Lillies you could say get a Lilly for every XX damage done or X damage spells cast. One class that comes to mind is the Warrior Priest from Warhammer Online. So healers still get to heal and have dedicated supplemental buttons to keep people alive, but most of their time is spent maintaining a more normal damage rotation.
Continue reading...