What do we want? More damage! When do we want it? Ow!
Final Fantasy 14, as I’ve previously discussed, is a little too straightforward when it comes to its casual fayre—though that’s not to say said content is « bad ». Dungeons are often pleasantly cinematic, with interesting mechanics and banger soundtracks. They’re just… pretty easy.
This has been, it would seem, upsetting healers tremendously—because when there’s not a lot of incoming damage, you’re not really using your full kit. It doesn’t help that said healers’ damage rotation is usually « push one button, and re-apply a DoT sometimes ». Having a couple of healers at max level at present, I can confirm this diagnosis. In fact, healers are the job I hop onto to turn my brain off—which is great for me, but not so great if it’s your main role.
Part of the issue is FF14 suffering from the success of its own design—the game, through its lengthy main story quest, does a very good job at not only building up a strong vocabulary of telegraphs, but it also teaches the player (at an arguably sluggish rate) to deal with them well. I’d argue that the median casual dungeon-runner in FF14 is more well-versed in its systems than, say, your average World of Warcraft player—not because of a skill issue, but because one went through college, and the other attended 30-minute seminars for a week.
The more pressing part of the problem, however, is that dungeons are often very forgiving in terms of damage. In fact, damage is often so predictable and unnoticed that, with a little bit of foresight, players can beat them without a healer at all—relying on their own potent damage mitigation tools and self-healing.
