Just some brainstorm ideas for healing

[Side-Eye]

On the one hand, that sounds like something you could build a new job around. On the other, I can't shake the thought of "Green DPS with non-shit heals".

On a side note: I'm gonna be really pissed if they build a new job with a "time mage" flavor, because that's what they stole from AST in 5.0.

[Crushnight]

On a side note: I'm gonna be really pissed if they build a new job with a "time mage" flavor, because that's what they stole from AST in 5.0.

"Pls look forward to it"

NO NO I WILL NOT IF THAT HAPPENS :/

[Volkaj]

Since this is a brainstorm thread...

How about a healer that would have GCD heals be more efficient than OGCD ones? For its entire kit?
It could be something like this (I know my skill names are bad):

Harm, 0 MP, 2.5s cast, 2.5s recast
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 100.
Additional Effect: Restores MP
Refresh Potency: 20

Heal, 100 MP, instant cast, 2.5s recast
Restores target's HP
Cure Potency: 300

Area Heal, 250 MP, instant cast, 2.5s recast
Restores own HP and the HP of all nearby party members.
Cure Potency: 200

Blast, 1000 MP, 3s CD
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 300.

Flash Heal, 1000 MP, 10s CD
Restores target's HP
Cure Potency: 600

Area Flash Heal, 1500 MP, 10s CD
Restores own HP and the HP of all nearby party members.
Cure Potency: 300

Of course this is just a lame proof of concept, but such a healer would only use its OGCD heals in emergencies, because GCD heals would be more efficient.
This one uses MP as a resource to add some decision-making, but it could be aetherflow, cards, lilies, etc. The idea would be that using an OGCD heal over a GCD would be a DPS loss.

Thoughts?

[Duelle]

So on the first part about MP refunds and the like - SCH already has this, except it's a cooldown instead of a proc. And that's the way it should probably be. RNG + highly scripted burst damage in fights don't work very well. You need to be able to reliably plan what to use at a given mechanic for a fight.

Indeed, but the proc mentioned affected MP rather than heal potency. Adding something like "heals cast has X% chance of making the next heal instant" doesn't affect overall healing so much as it does ease of use. The MP refund thing would be more notable in an environment where MP conservation is important.

Now let's talk about limiting resources. Yes, this would be one way to do it. Even better, it's proven to work in other games. But mostly older MMOs.

Now here's the problem. You move away from the ABC (always be casting) model, people will kick and scream like nothing this forum has seen yet. People won't accept it. SE knows this, and will never do it.

I wouldn't move away from that model. What I would do is create scenarios where the multiple healing spells in a healer's kit are useful. There should be situations where Benefic is useful and preferable over just spamming Benefic II, and by the same token careless use of Benefic II should drain your MP quickly. You'd still always be casting; you'd just be spending most of your time casting heals. Toss in cleanse/dispel duties if you feel the healers aren't doing enough.

[Risvertasashi]

You'd still always be casting; you'd just be spending most of your time casting heals.

Personally I'd welcome this, but it still has its own challenges. The game's designed around burst damage (and healing) rather than sustained, so SE would have to change that. The other thing is... a number of others on this forum have said that they don't want to see cure/benefic/physick spam, so... well, you know.

[Celaeno]

An idea could be making our DoT more important to maintain and have it be a source proc that improves Dmg from our next Offensive Spell, and have other effects to our healing spells like make Cure 2 Instant Cast, Medica 2's Regen Last 4 seconds longer, etc...

Another idea would be fusing our Low Level heal into our Upgraded version, Physick/Cure/Benefic become the 2 Version so that removes one button and add a proc onto the 2 version that boosts another heal/cd for the proc. Cure 1 only sits on my bar and is only ever used for low level dungeons where I can't use Cure 2 so it sits and wastes space. If they upped the Potency of Cure 1 to even be 100 less potency of Cure 2, made Cure 2 Instant and upped its cost to 1500 so it became the Oh Crap button GCD heal then having the procs on Cure 1 to make Cure 2 free would be great, same idea also applied to Physick and Benefic as well.

Having Esuna act as a Buff removal from enemies would be another idea that gives healers the chance to help the group by making enemies less likely to rip someone's head off with Haste / Dmg increase buffs or make Burns/Poisons do more so it becomes vital to remove those debuffs from friendlies ASAP so they don't die to those.

Those are the only Ideas I can think off currently.

[Rosa_Frandlia]

On a side note: I'm gonna be really pissed if they build a new job with a "time mage" flavor, because that's what they stole from AST in 5.0.

Sounds like WHM in SB with half its level 50 kit going to role actions. Cleric Stance (now gone), Ensua (okay, SCH and AST lost theirs too), Shroud of Saints (Lucid Dreaming), Protect (now gone too) and Divine Seal (Largess, now gone too) on top of completely losing stoneskin, stoneskin 2, and access to BLM skills like Ice 2 for a nice bind and move aoe around yourself if you grabbed aggro. Okay, all healers lost access to Ice 2 but it was worse for WHM as they couldn't even have all their old kit in role skills in SB when limited to just 5 of the 10 if you wanted that quickcast raise.

I see some saying too much button bloat on healers, but on a controller you don't even have two hotbars worth of skills anymore as whm. Even dancer's "small kit" has more buttons.

[Rilifane]

Wether people repeatedly press Glare/ Broil/ Malefic or Cure/ Physick/ Benefic doesn't make a difference. Both versions are boring.
Dps have rotations/ priorities, procs and timers to watch, resources to manage.
We have.. uhmm... that one button we press over and over, one 30sec dot to watch and otherwise we have specific mechanics when we press a specific button with 30sec or 60sec cooldown. Usually 60sec.

Healers are not engaged. Not one bit. Having to press more Cure/ Physick/ Benefic won't change that.
We need synergies, procs, timers, special resources. SCH and WHM have a secondary resource though there's little (in case of SCH) and none (in case of WHM) meaningful choice tied to it. The worst you can do is greed one ED too many and be out of AF stacks when that huge aoe you completely forgot about hits. Though with Recitation, Seraph, Dissipation and Whispering Dawn you still have options aside from Succor.

I would welcome more actual healing responsibility, but please, for the love of all that's holy, make it engaging. And simply having to occasionally trade one fire-and-forget-cast for another is not the way to go about it.
Other MMOs have shown that it's easily possible to make healing more engaging and upping the healing responsibility while still making it accessible.
There are only very few skills across all healer's toolkits that are not simply a fire and forget version of either "hugeass ST heal" or "hugeass aoe heal": Earthly Star, as you need to plan a bit to get the bigger heal at the right time/ place and Horoscope, as it requires an additional skill for more benefit plus must be triggered seperately and can be wasted by not triggering it manually at all.


I know they want WHM to be the straightforward healer but that apparently means that they shouldn't get any interesting mechanics at all. Because anything interesting would be too complicated and not straightforward and beginner-friendly enough.

I have seen so many mechanics in different games that made healing interesting and engaging but never so complicated as to drive new players away. You didn't need to master the timers and synergies to get through dungeons though with how the skills and passives were learned and the content steadily increased in difficulty, you had a smooth learning curve and a good grasp on it by the time you reached max level.

• Passives refunding a certain amount of mana if you overhealed - not enough to promote mindless overheal spam but enough to encourage to find the sweet spot where the heal would overheal just a tiny bit.
• A dps skill giving you a short-time buff to healing-relevant stats - not strong enough to keep up at all times but fantastic for hugeass dmg incoming preparation.
• Dps skills shorting the remaining CD on a good healing CD by a few sec.
• Healing skills stacking a buff that reduces mana cost and casttime of certain healing skills and consumed upon use of one of them.
• Passives giving a % bonus to healing, reducing mana costs or cast time if a certain buff is active on x amount of players.
• Dps skills stacking a buff that can be consumed for resources and enhanced healing or even transformed healing skills into something different. Cataclysm's Archangel disc imo had some of the most interesting mechanics and varied gameplay with a nice flow.
• Healing spells having an additional effect if a certain buff is on the target, target has is above/ below a HP treshold etc. like increased crit, increased healing, transforming overheal into a shield and so on.
• Backloaded/ frontloaded hots, hots that could be consumed for burst healing/ buffs/ resources, hots that are stronger if another one is also on the target (snapshotting possible).
• "Shields" that transformed the next hit taken into a dot effect that deals the same amount the original hit would've dealt. Obviously not working on certain boss mechanics to avoid cheesing kill-mechanics.
• AoE heals that healed for more the closer or farther you are from the targets.
• "Self-service" heals you can place on the ground which people trigger by clicking or walking over them.
• Ground-target hot bubbles on cd that healed for less per target the more people stand inside - less efficient in terms of healing per mana if placed so only the tank stands inside but strong single-target hot. Your choice wether you wanted strong single-target heal of even party/ raid heal.
• Buff that transfered a percentage of your own HP to the target with every tick. Great for additional tank healing (1% tank HP >> 1% healer HP) or to "even out" the HP pool before an aoe, even stronger paired with passives that also heal you for a small amount when using specific skills or free self-heal. Obviously a double-edged sword if you kind of forgot it and then a huge aoe hits...
• Totem that redistributed the health of everyone standing inside with every tick so that everyone has the same % of HP which is imo one of the most interesting things. It evened out healing rng through crits, made situational heals suddenly much stronger and efficient and signifcantly increased the value of self-heal as it made overhealing basically impossible.

You don't need to have 30 buttons to make something interesting. They just need to synergise, encourage to use your whole toolkit and alternate between skills. If a good skill is either spammable or on signifcant cooldown, it becomes boring because you either spam it because it's so good or only use for very specific situations.

[MerlinCross]

Sounds like WHM in SB with half its level 50 kit going to role actions. Cleric Stance (now gone), Ensua (okay, SCH and AST lost theirs too), Shroud of Saints (Lucid Dreaming), Protect (now gone too) and Divine Seal (Largess, now gone too) on top of completely losing stoneskin, stoneskin 2, and access to BLM skills like Ice 2 for a nice bind and move aoe around yourself if you grabbed aggro. Okay, all healers lost access to Ice 2 but it was worse for WHM as they couldn't even have all their old kit in role skills in SB when limited to just 5 of the 10 if you wanted that quickcast raise.

I see some saying too much button bloat on healers, but on a controller you don't even have two hotbars worth of skills anymore as whm. Even dancer's "small kit" has more buttons.

And yet we still kept Fluid Aura! NERFED TWICE FLUID AURA.

[Rinion]

I've seen making esuna/gaining dispel and making it useful appear a bit and that seems to be an interesting idea. There's obviously the more basic 'here's a dot on the entire party' -> spam esuna 4-8x. It's not really interesting, but it gives you something different to do for the next 8-16s. A couple (probably terrible) ideas that I had were basically trying to make the debuffs themselves more interesting/meaningful to the fight.

So 1 idea was to have maybe a debuff that causes a pulsing aoe around the person. You then might need to use this aoe to interact with the environment for part of the fight (thus having to actually think about the timing at least a little bit before using esuna). You could also use it kinda like virus in the guardian fight from sigmascape savage except it might clone the debuff so you esuna the first person after they've passed it, etc., etc., etc. But the point is to pass it to keep the debuff alive until slightly later into the fight or something (i'm not suggesting keeping virus for like minutes or anything, don't worry XD).
Another idea was a debuff that would basically be a large DOT on the party however maybe you don't take damage from other sources during that time. The idea would be for other mechanics to be happening at the same time and then you'd have to esuna based on what the mechanics are doing and who's dealing with them. Or you could fight through the stinging pain i guess but that's a numbers thing as to whether it'd be worth esunaing people to deal with the pain of the mechanics. This debuff is probably the worse of the two ideas here. The issue with simply adding debuffs in any of these ways is that it doesn't change the healer jobs themselves so dungeons and probably other content as well would still have the same issues we have now with healing.

This means that you'd have to change the classes themselves instead/ as well. Now, just to be clear, we don't need all the healers to be complex or whatever. It's good to have a variety of difficulty/complexity in the role as people do have varying skill levels or maybe they'd just prefer something simpler. I'd probably suggest white mage for the "simple healer" (sorry white mages) as that has typically been the easy/newbie friendly healer in the past. I'd also probably re-introduce aero 3 and OG fluid aura (like, did it ever need nerfing?) as people in general seem to be missing those. I'd probably give scholar some more DOT action (with timers that don't just sync up every 30s or minute). And for astro i'd prefer a revert of the card system, however i know that SE doesn't and that the current card system does keep people busy (even if it is a different type of busy to the old version).

I haven't really touched on healing itself as we have 5 billion healing spells/abilities. Although, i'd maybe suggest a bit of a cut back of the OGCDs so we have to rely on our GCDs at least a little more. Again, it wouldn't change much except maybe mixing it up every so often as I understand that SE wants to keep healing easy.

P.S. I'm not a game dev or anything so these ideas may or may not be terrible