15harry150: Not only they do not heal, the DPS aspect is SO BORING. I wouldn't mind if there was a rewarding 'combo' that gave a nice healer pay off. Instead it's apply 1 dot spam 1 spell.

zankies8735: For those curious, even as you move into extreme, savage and ultimate content, the issue in healers kits become more apparent.

Enrage forces all classes to maximize damage and due to healers having the barest damage kits, are expected to use most if not all their GCDs on their basic attack.

You can use FF logs to see many statistics- here is an interesting one: The average healer spends 50-70% of their GCDs on a single button: Broil (or the equivalent).

I do agree, right now healers need some sort of foundational rework.

Its not something you brought up but, for those interested in the lore...

When you go through healer class quests between 1-70, many times you feel like you should have learned a skill or ability. In the past you did, but now many of these quests fall flat. Astro and SCH have it bad in that perspective.

Lower level content does not need to be boring or slow. Tanks and DPS can use all their abilities just fine, and i think having a healing combo to get better heals out would be an awesome step forward. (Just please SQEX, make healers more than one button rotations)

silentpoet9292: I've recently cleared UCOB as a healer, it was my first time tackling long difficult content as a healer (dps/tank main) and I completely agree with you, most of the fun you get as a healer is when you prog, once you're in cleanup phase or your party is consistent you're just a dmg bot with 0 healing parse because you're just a safety net. And they skew the game towards only aoe healing, single target in previous raids was more important, but in dawntrail you can get away with it !

kuronaialtani: One really interesting point I hadn't thought about until someone brought it up is that kardia, sage's arguably main selling point, is worthless unless you are dealing damage. You don't give the target a shield when you heal, or any other token buff save soteria for extra potency and now a party-wide form in philosophia at 100. You HAVE to be hitting something for kardia to heal, and even then, it's a flat potency like sch embrace or a regen that can crit. If you could get different effects out of kardia for different gcd heals, say an overshield, it would give more reason to swap between party members as needed.

SmartBatto: I gave your video a full watch; You're missing a big issue with dungeon content, Most Tanks tend to do wall to wall pulls.

This is where the healing comes into play as your tank gets pummeled. WHM is the ONLY healer to have a Stun in their kit.

The way this video comes off is primarily that you haven't had tanks do wall to walls and that you've only played WHM. I say this because if you've did have a tank that W2W pulled and played another healer, this wouldn't be as arbitrary of a video- that and all the game content from Mistwalk in the video from what I can tell is single pulls.

Time for a little backstory into the game.

It was Heavensward. 3.X; DRK, MCH, and AST were released and both BRD and MCH had cast bars. Tanks from all around would queue into dungeons and find themselves dying, the reason for this is lack of healing- don't get me wrong this isn't just about healers not healing- a lot of mechanics were bad. BRDs and MCHs all over were complaining that they were having to equip a debuff that added the castbar in order to do full damage, if they didn't have Wanderer's Minuet/Guass Barrel Sung/Equiped they would only do 20% of their damage. DPS would complain about not getting balances in Raids for higher damage. Heavensward is really when the game became simpler simply because of how bad mechanically Heavensward was. Since if Tanks were dying in basic dungeons due to too much damage output and not enough healing, the devs adjusted the abilities so Healers only had a few abilities instead of having Aero's Stone's and cross classing thunder, raging strikes etc- they now have Stone/Dia, Holy, and the OGCD's. The Biggest reason for this was Cleric Stance. It would switch your Mind and Int, making any healer into a damage dealer- at the cost of a cooldown in arr and then in- with a reduced time in Heavensward,- eventually just getting baked into the healer's kit as permanent Potency in Stormblood. Tanks AND Healers were stance dancing. and it wasn't fun for anyone.

Because of all the issue in heavensward, they aren't really going to adjust too much of the healers kits anymore BECAUSE Healers not healing has been a constant. In Shadowbringers, AST's were card fishing for their final seals, WHM's would let tanks take more damage to fuel the blood lilly (Hence the Blood for the Bloodlilly Memes) Sage wasn't a thing yet, and Scholar probably had it the worse. Their pets would have health bars and in order to make the most of the fae magic, would have to keep them close to the action, but they would constantly die- That's half their healing. and because of how they are in general, people would set the fae and forget them, which more often than not in big pulls kill the fairy before it got to do anything so the SCH had to keep it beside itself, but that contradicted Art of War, So SCH was screwed. In Endwalker, they lobotomized the pets and made them invulnerable. But the key takeaway here is that:

Healing WAS Harder, but it NEVER WORKED.

And yes, I know this about SCH because one Chewed my butt out about it- Since I was in the back of a boss room in The Twinning and they were complaining about how hard healing was then (Shadowbringers.) Saying their heals weren't reaching me and that I needed to stay up close (Which in the fight I couldn't quite move because AoE Puddles had me trapped, but I digress).

People even Joked that Healers were just a Green DPS because of how much more people would rather DPS than Heal.

Asking for healing to be harder or make abilities cost more will not help in the slightest because when a Tank does wall to wall, the healer then has to burn through everything. If you feel like it needs more, that's fine; but what you're experiencing if your tanks do wall to wall pulls and still finding it too easy is Healer Burnout.

While your Opinions are Valid, They've had BOTH of your ideas in the past, and found that players were just ignoring their role or mechanics in favor of what you described in your video and had more complaints because of it.

kiretan8599: bruh you dont even have any healing parses in savage or ultimate...

arohk4415: DPS'ing as much as possible as a healer is the only way to optimize healing, everyone can keep the party alife by spamming heals, but can you do it with as little healing as possible? Do i need to aoe heal the party up right away, or do i wait 10 seconds for Assise to come back up?

Garrett938: People complaining here healing needs a dps rotation.. while me playing as an AST utilizing all my tools trying to keep our tank alive already feels so loaded. I feel like playing on a piano everytime I use AST for savage or ultimate

memecrusader5824: Just make "low-end content" do damage.

bryson8918: while you're not necessarily wrong, I think you'd feel a bit differently if you healed some savage, ultimates, criterions, and q40

FusaFox: Mouseover healing needs to be properly implemented too. It's a massive QoL that would make healing less clunky. Let me hover someone's name in the party list to target them for healing without having to actually

exasealcn: I think XIV's healer really shines if you put on your minmax hat. If you force yourself to maximize damage uptime then you naturally use more of your kit, even in regular dungeons. If you play healer and only reacts using GCD healing then its bound to be boring. But XIV gives you the freedom to choose your playstyle. If you don't like sweaty gaming then spaming GCD heals and keeping everyone topped to max HP works in low-end content (sometime high-ends aswell). But you can also heal with only your oGCD, which is WAY more fun.

curumon: maybe you dont feel punished for it but the tank which you healed was probably screaming for his life and deemed you afterwards as either a horrible healer or scary healer. (what is a scary healer? a healer which only heals in the last second, often leading to death of the tank). i mean, you wrote already that you dont play much healer ... so you have no experience whatsoever. i feel sorry for the tanks which you heal. it must be stressfull for them. lol, had to repost this comment cause i had heal and . and it all together and it was thinking its a link xD.

loobs7321: My problem with playing healers in mmos is that I only want to be healing on them. This isn't a case for 14 as a whole, because you're still expected to dps, which is fine itself, but again, I'm not playing a dps. I'd just play a dps if I wanted to dps.

Itama22: I would argue it would be healthier for the game if square cuts the expectation of healers to participate in the group damage of a fight and merely see it as a bonus and design fights in a way, that there would be more and faster paced group damage but allow healers to fully focus on their healing kit, maybe even further reduce their CDs, so they have lots of tools available and make healing itself more interactive instead of relying to push a single dps button and mixing it up with a dot every 30 seconds so we do to not fall asleep.

asrea9704: heal on patch savage or ultimates lol yes the game is easy mode for children outside of that kind of content so yes you have literally no responsibility when you do it. want a challenge that makes you understand your class do challenging content.

kita6502: I personally feel like they are going in a good direction but just need that push.

Even though earlier content can still feel lame.

A lot of the dt Fights have gotten more fun to heal and ive seen legit due to incoming damage.

But overall i think a big issue is that a lot of healers new damaging buttons only come up on 2 min

Sage has psyche & phlegma you press on cooldown for example and phlegma requires you to get close. Since they want then to have the dps healer identity i feel like they should have some sort of gain on pneuma or better yet have some sort of burst. They can make phlegma on a 20 second skill or have it boost psyche. In fact i actually have more fun in dgns with sage just because they buttons for an aoe damage gain.

Scholar has energy drain . Personally imo they should make it a secondary dps gauge for energy drain. That way you are weaving energy drain more often and its not just an opener optimization then a skill you just use to empty. The new dot they got is cool but it takes too long to get chain stratagem

White mage now gets 3 glare iv with presence of mind. Imo here they just have to make the cooldown 1 min instead of 2.

Lastly with astrologian they're whole thing is buffing and not damage. But they can lean into buffing more. Their burst is already pretty busy as is. But maybe when they draw from deck they can get a combo button that powers up based on how many cards were not used.

BlackRabbitDigitalP: I love my White Mage precisely because it doesn't feel I have to do Nasa calculations when in a party.. I do not want more complexity personally, it doesn't make the game more fun for me.

KlausVolfield: This playstyle and how healers evolved from ARR and beyond is almost a direct result of parsing, a focus in optimizing damage and competitive damage ranking to the point a good healer is measured on the damage they do and not how well they heal, so that created this.

Most ultimate clearing healers would rather wipe entire runs or let the tanks in PF die if they don't have perfect execution, over pressing a GCD heal. They have become glorified turrets that dispense some shit every 60 seconds

nobodyspecial690: I think Guild Wars has the perfect answer to this dilemna because no, healing is never fun an interesting as a main mechanic, damage spells that heal or spells that apply heal as a byproduct can be fun and xiv is on the cusp of having the answer with abilities like second wind but requiring a healer to keep you alive makes a very dull job for the healer every job should have some sustainability skill that works into their kit be it a flat heal or a leech off of damage. A healer should be a "support mage" a magic ranged who has utility functions but otherwise is focused on doing magic damage, in fact opening up the idea of 'healers' and 'tanks' being support roles and changing the trinity to "Offensive, Defensive, Support" opens up a lot more job variation with melee supports and ranged defensive. Combat needs an overhaul from the ground up to be a modern mmo and to consider what people play each job for that should be the job identity not the history of the job in the franchises with different battle systems and styles throw in all the flair you want but design the job to be unique and fun first and foremost.

Rabfour: I will never go healer UNTIL I bring tanks to 100! (currently finishing mdps then moving on to tanks)

matheusmikoaski5281: In a full party the two healers can easily heal the whole group from 0 to 100 in 2GCDs, that's 2.8s counting the reaction time. They heal too much! So much so that the only way to kill players is by one shotting them and never through attrition. Players either pass with flying colors, or they are dead with nothing in between for the healers to actually heal.

amethist6774: i think about all the times i've been healing and realising how much people suck at dodging...

a good amount of times i've struggled to keep a party afloat because for every person i got up, another went down, and it's even worse when it's the other healer going down.

if you make healing harder, comebacks won't be possible anymore, it'll be "welp, half the party's dead, let's reset."

and i'm not even talking about high end content, i don't think i'm the best healer, but i don't think i'm bad either. i've carried teams more times than i could count.

also, i've seen what a bad healer looks like, healing harder means those healers will suck even more.

earlier this week, i had one of my usual teammates tell me that there's no reasons for white mages to keep casting holy because of stun immunity, and i had to explain to him that holy deals damage too.

making healing harder will most probably make most of my team drop out of healing, and depending on how much, maybe me as well, i don't really wanna spend too much effort healing because the boss did a raidwide that dealt 40%HP on everyone but the tank.

weakening sage healing will make it an actual wet noodle healer, unless you buff his mits to make up for it.

anyways i'm not saying it's not a good idea, but i just can't imagine the good sides of harder or weaker healing.

Rah_X: I think we need to remove tanks’ ability to heal. Tanks should just have defensive abilities and be actual tanks rather than sub-DPS jobs. Healers could have fun DPS rotations; I agree with that. Casting Dosis as Sage all the time is kind of lame. Phlegma and all the other cd skills should be oGCDs with shorter cooldowns, or are spendable like Gunbreaker charges. Dosis could turn into another spell and then into another spell again, like it does in PvP, to have a 1-2-3 combo and then a charge system for other skills. I think that’d be cool. Also, the damage Sage DoTs do should heal via Kardia; that would also be great. Kardia should have another form where you can apply it to the whole group, either for a a few seconds or permanent but weaker. I think that’s also a pretty cool idea.

NGvisatorGaming: Game sux >:( /j

FR though, there is alot to be said about how healing is in FFXIV, and you generally are spot on and its been this way since ShB (So 6 years now) Although we used to have 3M burst rotations instead of 2M. Regarding changing healing to be more engaging, as much as this conversation has been gone over many many many times, I believe its too late to really change it. If the Devs were to find ways to make healing more engaging the players who learned the most generic of healing would simply give up and complain cuz "The game is now catering to hardcores" (You would not believe the amount of times I've seen such statement for various things). Let alone, majority players rarely read their buttons or experiment. Although I agree with the sentiments of many before yourself I just find it unrealistic as the devs seem p set in their ways. The only stop-gap I can really think of is much CLEARER explanations of difficulty tiers in FFXIV raiding in order to get those new healers in to harder content (Normal>Extreme/chaotic>savage>ultimate) sadly the game presents such poor information that it hurts those aspiring to learn more and be more focused.

crunkulouss: i really need people like you (who don't play healers outside of lower end content) to know that each and every job is designed around the higher end content. tanks have their mits work the way they do because of savage/ultimate. healers have their kits the way they do because of savage/ultimate. if you are not actively participating in savage or ultimate ON CONTENT on healer then you should not have any opinion on how healers work outside of that content. does that mean healers are going to be boring and can overheal an insane amount in normal dungeons? yes absolutely. there will never be any healing/mit checks in normal content as demanding as ultimates, and their kit gets full use in that content and even then it can still not be enough. if you miss a single mit or heal in phase 6 of TOP you will wipe and have to start over. the game will always cater to the upper end content because the classes need to perform at a certain level to keep up with the content. if we changed how healing works in the game and tried to move backwards to older ultimates things might get super sketchy and might not even be possible with certain party comps. you should just run TOP as a scholar or white mage then come back and see if the things you say really hold weight because as it stands i don't think they do.

Lets break down the damage rotation point you mentioned from an ultimate content perspective. Combination healing and damage skills are not great because they will always be used in the 2 minute buff window. if there's no damage going out in the 2 minute window then it will be wasted unless its damage neutral (like pneuma) then its not even worth using unless there's specific mechanics that really need that healing push. so spending the combination spells will always fall in the 2 minute window and not be worth the use outside of buff windows. also its called toxicon not dyskrasia thats the wrong ability.

I do agree however that more difficult healing checks should be put in lower level content but the developers are definitely too afraid and baby the casual audience too much. you can overmit with feint, addle, reprisal, and healer mits and take 0 damage from a stack even in the most current dungeons and not drop a single gcd for shielding.

Dec 23 2025

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