Healers in FFXIV: Time for Change

While I was originally planning on posting this on Life in Eorzea I figured I would post it on here seeing the other website is “technically” shut down and this rant might find more people on social media. You may have heard on Final Fantasy XIV’s official forums regarding a #FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE and while I figure nothing will come from it I thought it might be interesting to read an opinion of a healer main who has played this game way before A Realm Reborn was even a thing. This rant is from a White Mage’s point of view but I have played all healers enough to be able to tell you it is common with them all.

Tank’s Self-Healing

Seeing this is a big topic right now with Dawntrail we will start with this and that is tanks in Final Fantasy XIV have so much self-healing that it is kinda funny how little healing you have to do in dungeons. I will be the first to understand that healing within Final Fantasy XIV is balanced more around savage raiding compared to dungeons but dungeons are the bulk of the content and when you enter the dungeon and just spam Glare or Holy it gets boring fast.

This could be fixed by cutting down the amount of healing that tanks have and getting away from the hand-holding that Yoshida seems to think the community requires there is no point in failure in dungeons in case the healer dies and it is a wipe but guess what they could just allow using a Phoenix Down within duties which means if a healer dies you would be able to just revive them. Simple, right?

Healer’s OGCDs

This one is interesting but I do feel healers generally have way too many OGCDs and you don’t need to use your GCDs to heal as much. Generally, whenever I am healing anything I will rarely even cast Cure II and instead will just toss a tetra and just carry on knowing that by the time something else happens it will be back up or something else will be. When I play as a healer my enjoyment comes from a mixture of watching those HP bars go up and down and how much can I get away with DPS while keeping everyone alive.

Little to do during “downtime”

This issue is the one I think is the biggest but also the easiest to solve. When there is no healing going on you will start using your DPS skills and as of Endwalker it is just a DoT and a filler and while you will find many will suggest adding more complex DPS rotations – I disagree. I would rather see healers focus more on buffing and debuffing things rather than just DPSing more. I would rather spend my downtime applying buffs such as faith and increasing the DPS of the party and keep our simple DPS rotation for story content or even when the buffing and such is done. This already makes healers feel more like healers and would give us something to do during downtime and provide something for us to manage – something every other role has for the players that just spam Cure and nothing else – at least they can still do the content.

Overall

My problem with healing is ultimately I do not feel like a healer but rather just a DPS that has faster queues and will toss out a heal sometimes. This is different when in content such as savage raids but that isn’t the norm – dungeons and whatever else in roulettes is. While naturally, it may be harder to balance by just giving healers buffs and having to heal more it would make the role feel more like a healer compared to just the green icon that we get in Party Finder.

Sadly none of this will happen and while I do predict in an expansion or two we will see the healer role phased out with all jobs having a form of self-healing with the current healers just having some AoE versions of heals, I do feel it is time for myself to stop playing Final Fantasy XIV and do feel I should have stopped with Endwalker after the final boss of the expansion which felt like a solid farewell.