I hate to, but I think I put down healing for now. Please make it engaging again, SE.

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Originally Posted by Punslinger

If I'm actively rooting for the rest of the party to be incompetent, just so I can be engaged when playing my job, something has gone terribly wrong with the design process.

The need to recover from party mistakes doesn't preclude healers from having a DPS rotation, just as RDM's Vercure and Verraise don't preclude it from having a DPS rotation. In the worst-case scenario, a healer would just stop DPSing and switch to spamming their heals. In the best-case scenario, a healer would still have an engaging rotation to execute. Healing shouldn't be a role that's only fun if everybody else screws up.

And, as always, there is also the MSQ. It is painfully, dreadfully boring to level a healer through the MSQ. Tanks don't have that problem. DPSers don't have that problem. But outside of parties, 90% of a healer's kit is useless.

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Mmmh, if only we had a flexible rotation that involves pressing several different buttons every 18-30 seconds that do damage over time, so we're not using the same spell again and again all while allowing us to step out of our rotation and heal without breaking combos...

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Originally Posted by Gemina

The lack of randomness in high end duties is a big reason why I spend the majority of time in PUGs for alliance raids and occasionally EX fights. Having to be reactive as a healer is not a bad thing, and those with quicker reaction times are going to be a greater asset than the opposite when things don't go according to the 'script'.

- Scripted Doom mechanic: healer plans for it and no player is ever in danger (unless healer misses the debuff)
- Random Doom mechanic: inflicted player(s) are in immediate danger, and the healer must react.

I honestly don't get why such a simple formula is so difficult for the devs to grasp. Or they are just scared to make healers true healers.

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A nerf to healing has already happened. If you look at a SB video, you'll see crit Indom healing for ~24k. If you try it in-game right now, you'll see crit Indom healing for ~24k. The difference is of HP pools at 50k+ (SB) vs 90k+ (SHB). Unfortunately, this makes little difference in trivial content (dungeons, ex trials).

The nature of healing in general is that you don't heal when you don't have to. The nature of scripted encounters is that they're very predictable in terms of healing.

It's not difficult to grasp - it's foolish to think that designers don't consider such aspects. They are simply too afraid to move away from scripted encounters.

And for good reason. If we take the tether pairs in Titania as an example - they target dps - nondps pairs. So you simply send dps north and nondps south to trivialize it. Now imagine if the pairs were truly random and you had to look around carefully and adjust every time. This change alone would halve the encounter clear rate. We may not care about this, but SE does.

Designing encounters is a whole lot more difficult than this forum would have you believe.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

I honestly don't get why such a simple formula is so difficult for the devs to grasp. Or they are just scared to make healers true healers.

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What you're asking is for content to be challenging enough to make healing the largest portion of our activity. BUT: how does one define "challenging" for the general population? If you base that definition on the "average" healer, those with faster reflexes who are adept at choosing the best heal for each situation and quick at targeting/casting, are going to be bored and need something more to do. And perhaps more importantly in a game like this, those who are a little slower than average are sometimes going to find such content overwhelming -- and the other 3 or 7 people in the party will suffer for it.

So really, it's impossible for Squeenix to create content which requires healers to spend most of their time healing. Even the "average" player is going to eventually gear up and learn encounters to the point where they too are looking for more to do similar to the above-avg crowd, yet there will always be that subset of healers struggling.

Bottom line is: each healer class needs non-heal abilities to occupy their time. And those abilities need to be engaging, interesting, and have enough impact that they don't feel like they're just pressing buttons as busy-work. That's why so many former AST mains are playing other jobs, despite astrologian having been given an adequate patch bump in healing power; its card/dps feels like playing poker with only pennies and nickels in the pot.

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Originally Posted by LariaKirin

A nerf to healing has already happened. If you look at a SB video, you'll see crit Indom healing for ~24k. If you try it in-game right now, you'll see crit Indom healing for ~24k. The difference is of HP pools at 50k+ (SB) vs 90k+ (SHB). Unfortunately, this makes little difference in trivial content (dungeons, ex trials).

The nature of healing in general is that you don't heal when you don't have to. The nature of scripted encounters is that they're very predictable in terms of healing.

It's not difficult to grasp - it's foolish to think that designers don't consider such aspects. They are simply too afraid to move away from scripted encounters.

And for good reason. If we take the tether pairs in Titania as an example - they target dps - nondps pairs. So you simply send dps north and nondps south to trivialize it. Now imagine if the pairs were truly random and you had to look around carefully and adjust every time. This change alone would halve the encounter clear rate. We may not care about this, but SE does.

Designing encounters is a whole lot more difficult than this forum would have you believe.

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The nature of healing isn't "you don't heal when you don't have to." That's just common sense. Optimal healing is doing as little as necessary in order to maximize DPS windows. This isn't the nature of healing either. The nature of healing is knowing that doing your best to keep the party up is in your best interest even when it comes to DPS because should anyone fall, that particular branch of DPS output falls off.

I am not suggesting that an entire encounter be randomized. However, healers right now can witness raid wide damage that brings most players down to 50-ish% and can comfortable still DPS because they know that nothing threatening is coming that can wipe the raid. Healing will NEVER be engaging like this. Not to me anyway. The only way this is achieved is by forcing me to react. Now if a boss does an AoE that brings everyone down, and the healer knows if another one of those fires off we're done, then they have go to their resources to patch players back up.

This is why I mentioned the doom mechanic, which is already in the game. The mamajool boss in Wanderer's Palace HM does it, and so does Doomgaze (sp?), the first boss in Dun Scaith. These are concepts that force the healer to stop what they are doing and heal/cleanse.

On the contrary, I think making healing more engaging is far easier than you're leading on. I have the confidence in our community. I am not sure why you and the devs feel different.

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Originally Posted by Side-Eye

What you're asking is for content to be challenging enough to make healing the largest portion of our activity.

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Incorrect. I am asking for healing to be challenging enough that I don't get to DPS for 90% of the encounter. Players getting frustrated that they only have two buttons to push is a natural circumstance when encounter design allows for such large DPS windows.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

The nature of healing isn't "you don't heal when you don't have to." That's just common sense. Optimal healing is doing as little as necessary in order to maximize DPS windows. This isn't the nature of healing either. The nature of healing is knowing that doing your best to keep the party up is in your best interest even when it comes to DPS because should anyone fall, that particular branch of DPS output falls off.

I am not suggesting that an entire encounter be randomized. However, healers right now can witness raid wide damage that brings most players down to 50-ish% and can comfortable still DPS because they know that nothing threatening is coming that can wipe the raid. Healing will NEVER be engaging like this. Not to me anyway. The only way this is achieved is by forcing me to react. Now if a boss does an AoE that brings everyone down, and the healer knows if another one of those fires off we're done, then they have go to their resources to patch players back up.

This is why I mentioned the doom mechanic, which is already in the game. The mamajool boss in Wanderer's Palace HM does it, and so does Doomgaze (sp?), the first boss in Dun Scaith. These are concepts that force the healer to stop what they are doing and heal/cleanse.

On the contrary, I think making healing more engaging is far easier than you're leading on. I have the confidence in our community. I am not sure why you and the devs feel different.

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there is also cid with his party wide doom effect.randomize damage would indeed increase healing times or not but SE can slightly shorter healing downtime intervals, that could also increase healing uptime.
but the end result is that healers need something to do during downtimes either DPS/buffing people/debuffing anything really that will break pressing malefic/glare/broil all the time.
WHM got it with assize or misery every once in a while but the other 2 not so much.
to me ,the nature of healing is "restore hp to a safe spot" and the "you don't heal when you don't have to." isn't just common sense because once it reaches it there is nothing to heal and nothing get healed but this is just my view on it.

to me ,things to do don't mean breaking gameplay all together ,it simply meaning both healing and supporting your party will be engaging no matter which moment comes.
as for what you said about "The nature of healing is knowing that doing your best to keep the party up is in your best interest even when it comes to DPS" ,to me it isn't the nature of healing but its the basic nature of the healer player(at least it how it should be for us that play healers)

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Originally Posted by Gemina

I am not suggesting that an entire encounter be randomized. However, healers right now can witness raid wide damage that brings most players down to 50-ish% and can comfortable still DPS because they know that nothing threatening is coming that can wipe the raid. Healing will NEVER be engaging like this. Not to me anyway. The only way this is achieved is by forcing me to react. Now if a boss does an AoE that brings everyone down, and the healer knows if another one of those fires off we're done, then they have go to their resources to patch players back up.

This is why I mentioned the doom mechanic, which is already in the game. The mamajool boss in Wanderer's Palace HM does it, and so does Doomgaze (sp?), the first boss in Dun Scaith. These are concepts that force the healer to stop what they are doing and heal/cleanse.

On the contrary, I think making healing more engaging is far easier than you're leading on. I have the confidence in our community. I am not sure why you and the devs feel different.

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If you read my other posts you'll find that I agree with you - encounters could use more randomness.

My point there is that you have to be careful when introducing randomness, because it can immediately change things from easy to very hard. The Titania example is not even related to healing, it's merely an example to make this point obvious. Do you disagree that a change like this would suddenly make Titania a much harder fight and have a big impact on clear rate?

I know that Doom exists - but both of your examples are of scripted Doom. The two bosses have a cast bar or an animation telling you they're casting their Doom mechanic.

You say it's far easier than I think, but these are just empty words until you give a more thought out description of how your random Doom mechanic would work.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Incorrect. I am asking for healing to be challenging enough that I don't get to DPS for 90% of the encounter. Players getting frustrated that they only have two buttons to push is a natural circumstance when encounter design allows for such large DPS windows.

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A moment, good person. Do you want to fear for your tank's life aswell as your own? Do you want to not have the time to cast even one Stone because the tank's hp can drop at incredible speeds fighting just one mob and it's chance to crit? Do you want to see an overeager dps run head and cut a corner ahead of the tank only to be smeared on the floor by a patroling manticore? Open a gold chest desperatly hoping for a useful pomander only to get a mimic, step on a luring trap seeing four red lines target you and clench your closing muscles as you hide in a corner, hoping the patrols don't find you so you can ressurect rest of the party knowing that if you die too, you all go the whole way back to the start where you were five hours ago? Dare you enter the Deep Dungeons?

Coming straight out of a recent Heaven-on-High run, it really still is one of it the highlights for me in this game in terms of healing. And while you need to spend 2-4 hours getting to floors 151+ in PotD and 71+ in HoH, it's been very worth as no two runs have ever been the same with tons of near misses and wipes, memories still vivid today. And it's a great breath of fresh air from getting Anyder, Steps of Faith and Satasha again for Roulettes, where after running so many times and I can feel the thousand little hands choregraphing the whole thing from start to finish. Comparing to PotD in 2016, with 3.0 Scholar was even more of a riot there for how much application I had for the tools and Selene (still shame on you SE).

To get over the "3 hours in less than dangerous floors to get where shit gets real"-requirement would love to see random versions of old dungeons. I'd call it "The Soused's Song": "After brewing business booms in Wright you find a soused patron claiming to be a great adventurer and wants to tell you of his exploits. Problem is he can't remember the name of places he's been. So you tell him the name of a dungeon you've been to and he recounts his timethere. Being incredibly drunk his story twists, turns, ebbs and flows each time, prepare for a new experience each time." Enemy placement, traps, bosses hypertuned mobs, enemy type, patrols, buffs, debuffs, coffers and loot all randomized. No particular reward for getting through, only what you can find and succesfully bringing to the exit. Some good unpredictability and danger with fear of losing both items and time and soon as you enter a train of chimeras start patroling toward you.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Incorrect. I am asking for healing to be challenging enough that I don't get to DPS for 90% of the encounter. Players getting frustrated that they only have two buttons to push is a natural circumstance when encounter design allows for such large DPS windows.

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Encounters are, for the large part, designed to give EVERY player some responsibility for his/her character's health -- with mechanics and scripts. Obviously there are also parts of each encounter in which healers must react to unavoidable damage. And devs have to walk a line between challenging healers with those parts, and not overwhelming the folks who aren't as good (or as hardcore) in min-maxing their performance. However, it is also obvious that devs want players to feel rewarded when they learn mechanics and can avoid some of the pitfalls; your notion of making encounters more random takes away a big chunk of that reward.

I don't think you'll find many of us who will back down from arguing that we need more comprehensive non-heal abilities, because we aren't expecting SE to suddenly change the nature of its design parameters. We know we're probably never going to spend 90% of our time healing, and even if we did, we'd want that remaining 10% to be more than spamming one nuke and one dot.

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Originally Posted by LariaKirin

The nature of healing in general is that you don't heal when you don't have to. The nature of scripted encounters is that they're very predictable in terms of healing.

And for good reason. If we take the tether pairs in Titania as an example - they target dps - nondps pairs. So you simply send dps north and nondps south to trivialize it. Now imagine if the pairs were truly random and you had to look around carefully and adjust every time. This change alone would halve the encounter clear rate. We may not care about this, but SE does.

Designing encounters is a whole lot more difficult than this forum would have you believe.

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The encounters are designed in a way to prevent players from catching up to their mistakes. A huge chunk of the mechanics involve instant death in some way. That's what makes encounters complicated. The problem is no amount of healing can solve those prevalent mechanics nor is it meant to. The mistake is bound to either kill the player or simply kill the party. So from time to time SE puts some scripted "heal checks" where healers need to keep the party from dying from unavoidable damage.

Those moments are an exception rather than a rule.