Should healers just be healing? That’s a long-running discussion that won’t be solved any time soon, even within the friendly Final Fantasy XIV community. You can look at the forums or FFXIV subreddit to find heated arguments about a healer’s place in any party or raid.
As part of the recent Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker media tour, producer and creative director Naoki Yoshida talked briefly about the team’s philosophy with regard to healers. The answer came in the middle of a lengthy interview with Mizzteq of MTQcapture.
Editor’s note: Some of the following quotes have been edited slightly for clarity and length.
“We have been trying to make it so that healers are required to perform more heals. The content damage that you are receiving becomes a little more intense, so that healers are a bit more busy,” said Yoshida in the interview, via a live translator. “We are trying to make it so that healers are working a bit harder to do more heals in a battle encounter for sure, and that is kind of the trend that we are trending towards.”
Yoshida did acknowledge that the team doesn’t want to make encounters so difficult that healers are white-knuckling their way through each and every fight. That would be counter to the general push for accessibility in FFXIV. “If we make it too intense, the number of people who can clear the content will be very limited. We don’t want to have a situation where somebody is just healing the whole time or have to have to manage MP constantly,” said Yoshida.
Yoshida pointed to the new Sage job in Endwalker as a potential direction for those healers who would like to deal more damage overall. Though the Sage isn’t actually that far off from the current healers in terms of overall kit and play, it’s at least a little more aggressive. It has a “gap closer” like melee classes and some of its abilities require extreme proximity to an enemy. Hopefully healing lasers will make some supports feel like they’re standing right alongside the DPS.
The director admits that it’s hard to provide a perfect answer to the question of what healers should be doing, as different players want different things. “I think the demands, or what a healer desires in the different encounters, differ per the individual,” he said. “So I know there are healers who really want to concentrate on just healing, and they really don’t want to spend their time attacking or dealing damage. So I think it is a very tough question to provide a perfect answer.” He also pointed to how healing changes significantly over the course of any expansion, as players level up, making exact tuning and tweaking a difficult process.
You’ll be able to dive into the new flavor of healing, the Sage, very soon! Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is coming to PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 on Nov. 23, 2021. Early Access begins on November 19 for those that pre-ordered, however. Be sure to check out all of our preview coverage related to Final Fantasy XIV in the run-up to the launch of The Linkshell, our Final Fantasy XIV vertical coming soon! A small bit of that coverage can be found in the links below.
You can also check out the rest of our coverage of the media tour:
- Tank Changes and All New Job Actions to Level 90
- Healer Changes and All New Job Actions to Level 90
- Melee DPS Changes and All New Job Actions to Level 90
- Ranged/Magic DPS Changes and All New Job Actions to Level 90
- Tour of the New Zones — A Walkthrough of Old Sharlayan, Garlemald, and Thavnair
- An Interview with Director Naoki Yoshida on the Last Decade of FFXIV
