I spent last week blasting the “traditional” healing style, talking about a variety of things it does wrong and not a lot of time talking about how to make it better. Today I’d like to talk about that latter part.

Before I get into that, I want to talk about a concept called “player fantasy”, which is extremely important for the discussion here. Player Fantasy is largely what it sounds like– the fantasy that players have about themselves. When Halo drops you into a battlefield as Master Chief, it is fulfilling the player fantasy of the unstoppable futuristic military hero. When Beyond Good and Evil drops you into the shoes of Jade, it is fulfilling the fantasy of the spy, the reporter, the explorer, the powerful woman, the capable investigator, etc. Games that are predicated on playing a character (so, generally not puzzle games) tend to draw broader audiences based on how many player fantasies they address and fulfill. MMOs specifically tend to cater to a very broad range of player fantasies– this is why one of the things that people will praise/criticize about MMOs right off the bat is the number of classes they have/lack. One of the best new additions to the new D&D is the very wide breadth of player fantasies covered in the basic player’s handbook, accomplishable without complicated multiclassing.

So, back to healers. My critique focused on the healer glass ceiling– their value to the party drops off sharply at the point where they’re no longer restoring lost health, and at that point the gap between a barely passable (but still passable) healer and an exemplary one is functionally nonexistent. In the current paradigm, healers are only capable of showcasing exemplary skill when another party member fails at their job and something in the group goes wrong; they are effectively invisible otherwise.

I consider any situation that makes a player effectively invisible to their party members a bad situation. It means that they are largely incapable of praise except in the event of someone else’s failure, and responsible for blame if things do go wrong. This is blatantly apparent in the behavior of players towards their healers, especially in random matchmade groups.

I suggest that the traditional healers gain the ability to showcase their skills in a standard group, when things are going well. At this point, I bring in player fantasy. The immediate answer is “well, healers can just DPS if they don’t need to be healing”, but the problem with this is that a devoted healer’s DPS is going to be terrible, for balance reasons, and that DPS is counter to the “support the party” player fantasy of the traditional healer. A great many players playing healers find damaging enemies directly at odds with their feelings about their group role, which is a big reason why healers like Rift’s Chloromancer tend to be rare and not played as often, and why if they come out mathematically ahead in a patch cycle, they come under harsh criticism.

Instead, any skill increase should directly focus on the supporting aspects of the traditional healer. I’ll use the FFXIV White Mage as an example. Here is a peek at the White Mage’s abilities:

Cure – basic single-target heal, has a small chance to make Cure 2 free

Cure 2 – more powerful but less efficient single-target heal, has a chance to halve the cost of Cure 3

Cure 3 – powerful heal (but not as powerful as Cure 2) that heals in a small aoe around the target, also very expensive

Regen – instant cast, powerful heal-over-time

Stoneskin – powerful “bubble” shield with a long cast time

Shroud of Saints – threat reduction and mana regeneration

Benediction – instant cast, full heal on a long cooldown

Presence of Mind – short-duration buff that vastly increases casting speed

Medica – point-blank AoE heal

Medica 2 – point-blank AoE heal that also has a heal-over-time component, more overall healing than Medica 1, slightly less up-front

What I see here are a whole bunch of fairly redundant abilities with, at best, cornercase use cases based solely on raw number crunching. If everyone in the group is at full health, few if any of these spells are useful and the White Mage turns to their relatively meager DPS additions, or just stands around and waits to be needed.

I’d want to alter these to something more active. Three direct heals with the same speed and varying sizes is excessive, even with the small adds they provide. Medica is made nearly obsolete by Medica 2 except in extreme group damage situations where the inefficiency of wasting the heal-over-time is a concern. Cure is the bread-and-butter spell, cast the vast majority of the time unless a low-chance proc occurs.

By comparison, Bendiction, Stoneskin, Regen, and Shroud of Saints are interesting spells. One is a powerful “oh shit” button, another is a proactive damage preventative, another is highly efficient and very useful for both additional healing and fire-and-forget heals over a period of time, and the last is a powerful utility button whose dual-purpose fits nicely into a healer’s needs.

What is entirely lacking in these abilities is any sort of function other than “low health/not low health” that is noticeable for anyone other than the healer. Tanks notice their incoming damage, DPS notices their outgoing damage, mostly neither notices the healer’s work unless something goes wrong and they die (blame point for healer). There is no point where they can go “oh man awesome!” due to a healer’s actions (praise point for healers). The only possible praise point for a healer is when someone does not die who, by all rights, should have, at which point praising the healer for keeping them alive is equivalent to them admitting that they failed. In the eyes of the party, there is no healer success without blame, which is a huge problem.

I propose tying healer support functions to the outputs that the other party members notice. An ability like WoW’s Bloodlust (massive groupwide damage output buff) should be the sole purview of healers. Short-duration performance spikes should be directly attributable to the healer, but ideally easy to use.

Here’s an alternate presentation of those abilities that I’d like better:

Cure, when cast on a target with one of your HOTs, has an increased potency, provides a temporary buff that boosts Cure 2. Can consume its own buff to provide a short-duration damage buff to the target, if the target is overhealed
Cure 2 remains largely the same, will consume the above buff to refresh the duration of Regen,  provides a temporary buff that boosts Cure 3
Cure 3, also remains largely the same, consumes the Cure 2 buff to reduce mana cost and makes your next Stoneskin free and instant
Stoneskin, largely unchanged, restores mana over time when it expires
Medica, as it is now, gains a trait to add the HoT (previously provided by Medica 2) at later levels
Medica 2, now instant cast with a higher cost, consumes Medica’s HoT for potency boost proportional to the remaining duration of the HoT, if targets are overhealed they get a damage boost

Most of the abilities are fundamentally unchanged, but there’s an escalation that both benefits the White Mage and their party, providing resource efficiency for the White Mage and noticeable offensive buffs for the rest of the party (provided they’ve kept themselves healthy enough to receive them).

This is a quick, flash-in-the-pan design, but the overall philosophy is to provide more opportunities for healers to add more noticeable benefits to their party without either significantly raising the basic skill level necessary to succeed at a base level or breaking the player fantasy of the devoted healer. A passable healer should not need to use all of the functionality just to achieve basic competence, much like DPS classes may not be juggling every cooldown and perfectly executing every combo and maintaining every debuff to be competent at a basic level, but a truly exemplary healer, like a truly exemplary DPS, can shine.