Making Duties Fit for Healers

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

I always felt like fixing healers should be simple: more consistent party wide damage, faster auto attacks on bosses, more use of the infirmary debuff( not removeable, reduces hp recovered) The problem is they probably don't want to do this because if the actual healing portion of the job is hard then less people will play the role, because lets be honest at this point in the game doing the base level healing is pretty brain dead(imo it's been pretty brain dead since HW came out).

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On a macro level, though, this also means that progging new content becomes a lot more time consuming because mistakes made through learning cause significantly greater consequences. That's the main reason why the design team doesn't want to push healing requirements higher. Progging can be fun, but if the damage is too high, you won't really be able to learn as well when your party's wiping much faster because the consistent damage is 3 times heavier on top of the mistakes they're making.

TC brings up a good point about how counterintuitive OGCD healing is in contrast to the playstyle the designers want healers to have, and I'd argue regens are the same. You get an immense amount of long-term potency over 15+ seconds that can do all the work for you in most situations. These resources should be far more restrictive, because they only really thrive in gameplay that has aggressive levels of healing requirements. We can have the ability to power heal for the sake of big dungeon pulls, but that should come at a great cost so it can't be used to abuse the shallow levels of damage dealt in most boss content without unnecessarily costing you DPS.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

On a macro level, though, this also means that progging new content becomes a lot more time consuming because mistakes made through learning cause significantly greater consequences. That's the main reason why the design team doesn't want to push healing requirements higher. Progging can be fun, but if the damage is too high, you won't really be able to learn as well when your party's wiping much faster because the consistent damage is 3 times heavier on top of the mistakes they're making.

TC brings up a good point about how counterintuitive OGCD healing is in contrast to the playstyle the designers want healers to have, and I'd argue regens are the same. You get an immense amount of long-term potency over 15+ seconds that can do all the work for you in most situations. These resources should be far more restrictive, because they only really thrive in gameplay that has aggressive levels of healing requirements. We can have the ability to power heal for the sake of big dungeon pulls, but that should come at a great cost so it can't be used to abuse the shallow levels of damage dealt in most boss content without unnecessarily costing you DPS.

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If your talking about progging savage content, that is a horrible basis to use for fundamental game balance because much less then half the population even attempts that content. So not to be rude but I really don't care if it makes savage harder for players and I would guess most of the player base doesn't care either based on savage clear rates. If you just mean new content in general I don't see what the issue is with content actually being hard. I think it's safe to say at this point the only way to make healing more challenging is to make gameplay more challenging because they need players to take more damage to keep healers healing instead of dpsing. If they could think of more mechanic based ways of making fights more difficult for healers they would have done it by now. They either need to accept healing is more and more boring and keep content easy or make content harder and keep healers engaged. It's so odd to have to argue that its a good thing people takes more damage so that HEALers have to heal, it would be like saying monsters should have less hp because it makes dps more challenging when they have to actually utilize cooldowns and proper rotations.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

If your talking about progging savage content, that is a horrible basis to use for fundamental game balance because much less then half the population even attempts that content. So not to be rude but I really don't care if it makes savage harder for players and I would guess most of the player base doesn't care either based on savage clear rates. If you just mean new content in general I don't see what the issue is with content actually being hard. I think it's safe to say at this point the only way to make healing more challenging is to make gameplay more challenging because they need players to take more damage to keep healers healing instead of dpsing. If they could think of more mechanic based ways of making fights more difficult for healers they would have done it by now. They either need to accept healing is more and more boring and keep content easy or make content harder and keep healers engaged. It's so odd to have to argue that its a good thing people takes more damage so that HEALers have to heal, it would be like saying monsters should have less hp because it makes dps more challenging when they have to actually utilize cooldowns and proper rotations.

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The GCD healing toolkits are just as boring and spammy as the damage kits are. Shifting fight design back toward spamming more healing spells doesn't make healers less boring. It just makes them boring in a different way. What happens when you have to heal so much your oGCDs are on cooldown? Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

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You know, that's exactly how duties are made for DPS. Or rather, higher HP so that DPS need to do their rotation properly. Healers get squat on that end. Only some raid-wide AOEs and the occasional tank buster for the most part. The rest of our healing is often in the form of fixing other people's mistakes, which is my original issue.

Healers adjust is an old meme, but still one that I still occasionally see people taking seriously, and this is exactly the reason why.

Simply changing content difficulty itself isn't the answer, as all it does is shift who gets left out. As things stand, at least there's a challenge for healers in prog, just that it's not in doing the job they signed up for. If you increase the difficulty of savage, it ends up excluding the casual-hardcore group (or midcore or what have you).

What needs to be done I believe is two-fold. The first is making people more responsible for themselves. If someone messes up a mechanic, the penalty isn't massive damage, but instead a debuff that they can't ignore. Pure damage is only penalizing the healer. Instant death on the other hand is too severe for most mistakes and actively works against learning.

The other is more proper healer mechanics that force us to use our kits. As terrible as our kits are, there's still plenty of room to play with it. Make the act of timing and targeting interesting if we only have one viable heal spell when our oGCDs are gone. Like rapid fire ahk morns alternating between the MT and OT, for a total of double each of their HP over 20s. Make positional healing something we actually have to do! Like, AOE healing but only for a part of the raid, because half the raid has zombify or something and the other has living dead.

For as long as our kit sucks, the encounters themselves can make up for it. It's not like there's a guarantee that our kits are going to become something we'll actually like in EW. And if they do, then it'll be a bonus!

Add more survivable mistakes and/or frequent-but-randomized damage to fights while replacing a bunch of flat heal oGCDs with multiplicative cooldowns of varying length and details. The is a known solution, other games have had good healing systems in the past. Hell, I'd even argue that syncing down in XIV can be a more interesting healing experience if you're doing old content that's actually hard. Max level healers just have too many redundant (and simplistic) tools relative to the problems they're presented in encounters.

Or just embrace where the game's gone and give healers a real DPS rotation while weaving in oGCDs and the occasional heal spell during the big scripted damage.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

The GCD healing toolkits are just as boring and spammy as the damage kits are. Shifting fight design back toward spamming more healing spells doesn't make healers less boring. It just makes them boring in a different way. What happens when you have to heal so much your oGCDs are on cooldown? Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2.

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One way to solve this would be to make actual healing combos where your basic heal (Cure 1&2, Medica 1&2) branches off into different heals that are either more powerful or provide other beneficial effects.

But yes, just leaving GCD heals as they are and then simply forcing people to spam them isn't exactly any more engaging than spamming Glare/Broil/Malefic.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The problem with debuffs I feel is most of them just get blanket ignored..

Oh hey your paralysed for a whole 4 seconds. Well by the time I finish this broil cast and cast esuna it'll have worn off anyway so fk it just cast another broil.. waste of time even trying to cleanse.

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And SE has a solution for this in their toolbox but they refuse to use it.

The Normal debuff is Vulnerability UP. This does nothing but make the healers job harder.

Lately SE has been choosing to put a Damage Done DOWN debuff on players who miss / ignore mechanics.

If SE put the Damage Down penalty on every missed mechanic, players would be more likely to do them. Miss a mechanic? YOU are responsible for YOUR mess up. Not another player.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

If SE put the Damage Down penalty on every missed mechanic, players would be more likely to do them. Miss a mechanic? YOU are responsible for YOUR mess up. Not another player.

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That would be a viable option, I just hope they never do another fight like E6S in that case. The amount of mechanics you had to ignore as a tank, or melee in general, to not get trash uptime was ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

I always felt like fixing healers should be simple: more consistent party wide damage, faster auto attacks on bosses, more use of the infirmary debuff( not removeable, reduces hp recovered) The problem is they probably don't want to do this because if the actual healing portion of the job is hard then less people will play the role, because lets be honest at this point in the game doing the base level healing is pretty brain dead(imo it's been pretty brain dead since HW came out).

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It's really not that simple with the current game design. We have a very rigid party composition of 2 healers per 8 players with mechanics enforcing that rule by targeting both healers for stacks and such quite often. Other games are flexible. The difference between a well optimized group of great players in BiS and an average one starting prog at min ilv is massive. So no matter how much you bump up healing needed, we'll dps more and more as we get better.

More frequent damage intake is still a good idea, it's silly how rarely we need to heal at times, but as well as that I'd rather just see them embrace the fact that healers dps. Because we do and always will. FF14 is not other games and this idea that "healers should only heal" is an outdated concept the community has stubbornly clung to when in reality MMO's are not bound to set rules. If the devs accept that we're Battle Clerics, they can start looking at how to make that style of gameplay engaging. I personally find a healer that can dish out serious damage when needed far more interesting than the helpless curebot-slave fantasy

Dunno but I feel that part of the healing issue is also due to the fact that healers always have instant cast, oGCD, strong healing tools available at most of the times.

I find hilarious to play WHM in a 50 roulette where I don't have healing oGCDs at all and actually have to share my GCDs between heals and dps. Essentially oGCD actions /insta cast non MP consuming heals trivialized healer MP AND healing requirements.