Does adding more offensive options for healers really raise no skill floor?Quote:
Originally Posted by GrimGale
More dps options for healers does not mean healers can exceed the maximum dps contribution set by the developers. By giving healers more dps options, SE has to lower the potency of our current offensive spells in order to maintain the current proportion of dps contribution from healers. If the current healers have no problem reaching the maxium dps contribution, they might difficulties meeting the same standard with those new,yet lowered, offensive tools.
I know many top tier healers around here may have no problem contributing the same proportion of dps, but mediocre healers, the majority of the raiding player base, may no longer be able to dish out steady dps due to complexity.
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10-17-2021, 12:01 AMAword3213
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10-17-2021, 12:16 AMrewdHard content should be, by definition, hard. If a healer player can't keep up with a 123 DPS combo, then they should get better at it. DPS and tanks get better at their rotations in order to clear Extreme and Savage, why should healers be simplified?Quote:
Originally Posted by Aword3213
Normal mode content doesn't require healers to DPS, so a healbot WHM that ignores Glare will still be able to clear any normal content by ignoring Glare 1, Glare 2 and Glare 3. If they want to do hard content, they need to get better or just forget about hard content, which is supposed to challenge you. -
10-17-2021, 12:19 AMRaminax
On the other hand, I think that the community might be more sympathetic to "low" DPS if they increase complexity and/or depth. So, people that are either struggling, don't care or are just plain mediocre would probably benefit from community perception being skewed towards "Oh, don't be so harsh on them, it's not easy juggling two DoTs and a cooldown when healing as well!".
Might end up being beneficial for said group as well, really. Obviously, potencies and balancing can be a bit iffy, but if someone feels they can only maybe squeeze in 20 GCDs per fight on damaging spells, those 20 GCDs will be far more impactful if they're spent on the occasional DoT or cooldown like Phlegma/Assize with 30 second breaks to assess the current situation, rather than spamming (usually) unimpressive filler spells like Glare for a minute straight.
Of course, I might just be underestimating how mean the community is, but I've never had a static group for raiding, and the amount of times I've seen a supposed Sylphie/Casual/Bad being called out in-game can be counted on one hand. Are other peoples' experiences truly so different that this kind of, well, fearmongering is justified? -
10-17-2021, 12:25 AMAword3213Though I agree with you, it's not relevant to my question.Quote:
Originally Posted by rewd
If adding more dps option does impact the skill floor in some way, it's a path that will surely be avoided by the developers. Besides, I don't think it's fair to compare healers with tanks and dps. Healers have to fix other players mistake. It's a responsibity shared by healers and none other. -
10-17-2021, 01:26 AMGrimGaleI think better healers should be able to exceed said maximum. Of course you should be rewarded for pushing that heal-damage (Or in AST case buff management) balance to the very edge if you're experienced. We should see more experienced healers perform better than less experienced ones. I don't think devs should cap healer damage to the same level as the bare minimum by removing skills and skill expression from more experienced healers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aword3213
Of course there is going to be a cap for healer damage at some point. There is a cap on DPS job damage after all. But the potential breath of DPS contribution between the floor and the ceiling should be wide enough to encourage much more growth. -
10-17-2021, 01:33 AMRisvertasashiIf you dig into FF logs, you'll find healers already have the widest variance (that is, the biggest gap between skill floor and skill ceiling) of DPS compared to any role/other classes.Quote:
Originally Posted by GrimGale
So, this is already the case. -
10-17-2021, 01:39 AMrewdIt's completely relevant to your question, but your argument is flawed on a fundamental level. You divide the raiding community into two groups, but you actually need three groups:Quote:
Originally Posted by Aword3213
- the top tier healers;
- the good healers (the majority);
- the mediocre healers.
The mediocre healers can only clear Savage if they are carried (by their co-healer, by better gear, by echo etc.). The good healers are your average healers, they are good enough to clear Savage. They are (should be) the target group for healer design and balance.
Good healers know that damage comes in bursts, so they are left spamming one button for long periods of time. If there is a 30s window with no damage and if you find Glare spamming manageable but suddenly Glare1+Glare2+Glare3 is too hard, then sorry, you don't belong in hard content and an entire role shouldn't be balanced around you. You can, though, try to get better and try again once you are comfortable. That's the purpose of harder (and optional) content.
It's completely fair to compare healers to tanks and DPS. Healing is not as hard as the community thinks (mostly non-healers). For example, you talked about having to fix other people's mistakes, but in raids, usually, mistakes mean death, multiple deaths or a direct wipe. You very rarely fix mistakes. You wipe, you take note of the fact that "Supermegaiper bonebreaker of the doom" is a tankbuster so you go -> Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil, Ruin II+ Excog, Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil and you take note of the fact that "Gigantic flood of gigantic darkness of the death" is a raidwide, so you go -> Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil, Ruin II + Recitation +Indom, Broil, Broil, Broil, Broil.
It's boring and trivial.
Then you notice that after that raidwide there are 30 seconds of nothing. Why shouldn't healers get more buttons to use in that window? What makes standing still and do 11111 fundamentally harder than 123123? And mind you, healers shouldn't be design around Savage. Healers need to be fun from level 1 to max level. If they don't want to pressure casual healers, then don't. Keep normal content braindead so a Cure II bot that ignores Glare can clear content even when that Glare becomes Glare1+Glare2+Glare3. -
10-17-2021, 01:39 AMAFuzzyMu11inThis. I have learned through leveling paladin and now whm that a lot of players reach level 50/60/70/80 and still have zero clue on their abilities, jobs, anything. These are the people who are going to be on your party to clear content.Quote:
Originally Posted by HappyHubris
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10-17-2021, 01:40 AMSilver-StriderIt's a shared responsibility given that almost every class has a means of easing the burden of healers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aword3213
I think there is only 4 classes that offer nothing in terms of group mitigation/healing in some form or another, which are SAM, BLM, NIN and DRG and even they have Feint and Addle available to them.
All Ranged DPS have 1 raid wide mitigation skill, BRD has a Single Target Healing buff and an Esuna, DNC has healing buffs and extra heals, MNK has Mantra for extra raid wide healing, SMN has a Regen and Excog from Phoenix, RDM has actual heals, and its new skill that buffs healing and mitigation, RPR has a regen, Tanks just made out like bandits and got tons of extra healing added to their toolkit (barring DRK but at least he still offers some more mitigation via shielding).
The burden of healing has been so exorbitantly mitigated that, if played right, you're spending more than half of your time as a Healer DPSing because you simply don't have to heal. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised to see more videos like the E4S clear with no healers become common place in EW after everything is said and done. -
10-17-2021, 01:42 AMAword3213What if current top tier healers already exceeded maximum?Quote:
Originally Posted by GrimGale
But to say there's no skill ceilling regarding current healers is hyperbole. The difference between top tier healers and low teir healers is based on the number of offensive GCDs cast, and how much they heal while dealing damage. Healers at the lower end may have high HPS, but low damage contribution. Mediocre healers may be able to deal high dps, but at the cost of low healing output. Top tier healers can excel at both healing and damage. The skill floor and skill ceiling do exist. Maybe not in the way you like it, but they exist.Quote:
If course you should be rewarded for pushing that heal-damage (Or in AST case buff management) balance to the very edge if you're experienced. We should see more experienced healers perform better than less experienced ones. I don't think devs should cap healer damage to the same level as the bare minimum by removing skills and skill expression from more experienced healers.
Of course there is going to be a cap for healer damage at some point. There is a cap on DPS job damage after all. But the potential breath of DPS contribution between the floor and the ceiling should be wide enough to encourage much more growth.
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10-17-2021, 01:42 AMAFuzzyMu11inWhat you are ignoring is what happens when glare 1/2/3 becomes optimized, when healers are expected to keep up that rotation constantly, while dealing with party mistakes, when people start screeching even harder about healer dps checks etcQuote:
Originally Posted by rewd
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10-17-2021, 01:46 AMRisvertasashiThis is vastly understating the time spent DPSing on healers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Silver-Strider
I just checked an old log of mine. In Shiva (the last savage I played as healer), I spent around 20 GCDs healing and over 200 DPSing. And that was with a fairly weak cohealer - much more optimization should be possible.
And even if you look up ultimate logs, it's much more than 50% of GCDs DPSing... -
10-17-2021, 02:04 AMrewdIf you need to GCD heal, you are not DPSing, so 111 or 123 doesn't matter.Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
If you don't need to heal, 123123 is not harder than 111111 (or hard enough that it is not manageable).
If there are party mistakes (that actually don't kill you), then you are either in prog (and a healer dropping a Glare2 doesn't matter) or you are farming/doing whatever and if you hit enrage, the problem is that you made a mistake, not that the healer had to stop DPSing for a couple of seconds.
Raids are very rigid and choreographed dances. In those rare moments when you actually get the chance to fix a mistake, you'll fix it by doing Glare, Glare, Glare, oGCD, Glare, Glare. With more DPS buttons, it'd be Glare 1, Glare2, oGCD, Glare 3, Glare 1 etc. or something like that. -
10-17-2021, 02:30 AMRein_eon_OsborneThe more they dumb down the 1 button spam ad nauseam style, the more people will screech over healer's dps because it takes almost 0 effort to spam just that one button. I mean it's easy right? What could've possibly prevented them to keep mindlessly press 1 button?!Quote:
Originally Posted by rewd
....Fun aside, to think that they are somebody who had once claimed to have touched Extreme & Savage contents. Now it all make sense why people are screeching for their healer DPS.
Dumb it down further and the world will only try to find ways to out-idiot things. -
10-17-2021, 03:11 AMSilver-StriderYes, I know its a gross misrepresentation of how much Healer Downtime there is but its just so frustrating that we're keeping that same amount of downtime with just more tools to heal with instead of something to kill the monotony of pressing a single button for another 10 minutes in each encounter, possibly forever. Why is it that every role has at least a 1-2-3 rotation minimal while healers are regulated to 1 button push? The excuse is "we don't want healers to feel pressured to DPS" and yet they reduced the GCD of our attacks to 1.5, they state the reason WHM doesn't have raid utility is because they're the most damaging healer, they align PoM to work within DPS raid windows and they gave AST a new skill that will solely be used to try and maximize DPS because if it was intended to be only a healing tool, it wouldn't have the damage increase portion of it included.Quote:
Originally Posted by Risvertasashi
Their actions do not follow their words and it just upsets me to no end. -
10-17-2021, 03:21 AMAword3213It may be boring, but definitely not as trivial as you make it out to be. If dealing damage as a healer is that easy, then all those "good healers" in your example should have the same parsing, but in truth, they don't. As for the difficulty of healing, please bear in mind this game is designed to be controller friendly. What you decribed about raiding scenes are precise, but healers still have to do plenty of target switching. I know it's fairly easy to most of you, but iirc developers did emphasize on healing difficulties using controllers somewhere during LL. Healing in this game may be by no means difficult to most of you, but it may not be the case the some people. Aside from that, let's not pretend healing checks don't exist. Take Diamond Dust from E12S for example. Healers will often be the result of wipe due to bad healing plans even when other teammates performs flawlessly. That why I said it's unfair to compare them.Quote:
Originally Posted by rewd
All jobs are boring in level 1. All contents are boring in early levels. Is BLM fun during Haukke Manor? Is DRG fun in Keeper of the Lake? What do you even mean by healers need to be fun from level 1?Quote:
Healers need to be fun from level 1 to max level. If they don't want to pressure casual healers, then don't. Keep normal content braindead so a Cure II bot that ignores Glare can clear content even when that Glare becomes Glare1+Glare2+Glare3.
Besides, your reply still haven't solved the dilemma of raising skill ceiling by adding more dps options. Please note I'm not the one denying this kind of suggestions, but the developers. As stated during media tour, adding more dps options is certainly not the path devs are willing to take. In my opinion, developers would rather raise the skill ceiling in terms of healing than in terms of dpsing. They may consider adding rotations some day, but not today. They can definitely throw contents hard enough for players to complain, such as Second Coil Savage, Gordias Savage, and Orbonne Monastry. I'm pretty sure they can design a healer as complex as possible. They are capable of it, but they won't do it. They said they are building the healers on ShB iteration. Perhaps when they finally approve the capability of the majority of healers, they will take your suggestions to heart. The problem is, many claimed adding more dps options wouldn't affect skill ceiling. But in truth, who knows?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBaVuXgVUAA7HOf.jpg -
10-17-2021, 03:31 AMNizziWhat you're doing right now is called "fearmongering". I've done Extreme and Savage on healers. I've had to stop Broilbotting to deal with situations. Nobody has gotten on to me because I didn't optimally use Energy Drain for maximum DPS, even though for "optimal play" it's what you're supposed to, nor have they gotten onto me for dropping my DoT or doing poor DPS, or even causing wipes.Quote:
Originally Posted by AFuzzyMu11in
I don't necessarily want a rotation like tanks/DPS in a traditional "1-2-3" combo, but lets say for example we had that. They've made the change in Endwalker that doing your ranged attack on melee/tanks won't break your combo anymore, right? Why couldn't this be the case for healers? -
10-17-2021, 05:08 AMAword3213I doubt giving healers 123 rotations solves the problem. People will still complain healers being boring. Just look at DRK threads.Quote:
Originally Posted by rewd
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10-17-2021, 05:29 AMSemirhage
I agree. The problems healer jobs have are endemic. They're not solvable with the addition of a skill or three. WHM and SCH in particular need overhauls. Their design issues aren't a small rotation away from perfection.
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10-17-2021, 06:08 AMrewdI'm not saying a 123 combo would fix healers, that would be silly. I'm replying to those, including Yoshida, who think that adding a single DPS button would mean the end of the world (which is silly too).Quote:
Originally Posted by Aword3213
As for me, I don't necessarily even want more DPS skills. I'd like more emphasis on buffs and debuffs, a more balanced healing kit (less oGCDs) and more interesting interactions within kits instead of the "press this to win" model which is what current AST is built on. Then we might add some DPS skills, if needed. -
10-17-2021, 08:12 AMSemirhageTo elaborate here, my essay titled Why White Mage is Horribly Designed:Quote:
Originally Posted by Semirhage
Game design is a complex process involving a lot of variables. I'll choose one aspect to focus on here. A well-designed class rewards the user for playing well. There are tons of other aspects like meaningful choice, variety in ability usage, not hampering skillful play with clunk, etc, but I'll stick with one for now.
To illustrate this, I want to look at a job that is pretty much universally considered well-designed: Black Mage. Polyglot is great. It doesn't require a lot of attention past the first cast of Enochian, but it rewards you for at bare minimum maintaining your general casting flow (and base fire/ice job mechanic) with a damage spike. Firestarter is a reward for using Fire to keep your Astral Fire timer going. It essentially gives you a stronger, instant, free version of itself. Thundercloud rewards you for maintaining your DoT uptime with a nice burst of damage, that further rewards you with even more damage if you're savvy enough to time its use well. Moreover, these systems are attached to sensible parts of the kit. You don't see a core maintenance buff granted for spamming Scathe or Blizzard 1; the other key part of that description is that these rewards are goodies you get not just for playing, but for playing well.
Now, how does White Mage reward skillful play? That's a harder question to answer, because healing fundamentally isn't a constant net positive the way damage is; rewarding healing with even more healing is a half-reward at best, considering how infrequent incoming damage is in most content. A safety net for screwing up is not exactly a reward, especially when said safety net becomes less and less useful the more skilled your team gets. It's not nothing, but it's not the same type of mechanic as a reward for playing well like a self-buff or a damage bonus or whatever else (that remains useful the more adept at playing you get) you could think of.
Now, before I get into the meat of my point about the White Mage kit, I want to address the elephant-sized flower in the room. Lilies *appear* to be a reward for playing well. This is a smokescreen. Misery only appears to be a reward, when it actually fits more definitionally in the "safety net for screwups" category. First of all, it's attached to your middling-efficiency heals. This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but as I'll outline in the next paragraph, your high-efficiency heals don't have a reward system attached to them, which makes their guidance toward skilled play...muddy at best. It's also a partial refund on taking losses. It doesn't -gain- you anything, merely mitigates a loss. Which, to me, doesn't scream "reward", not nearly with the clarity that any Black Mage subsystem would. Worse still, it's such a gain on multiple targets that it actually encourages bad play in dungeons. In order to make it a reward on trash packs, you're encouraged by mathematical efficiency to blow lilies as soon as they come up, whether they'd be a good resource use or not, just to get a blood lily. I get what they were going for with this design, but the gameplay it rewards and encourages is...weird.
So what happens when you cast Regen? And by that I mean, what happens outside its basic stated function? Nothing! What happens when you cast Glare? Nothing! What happens when you cast Dia? Nothing! What happens when you cast Medica? Nothing! What about Tetragrammaton? Nothing! Temperance? Benison? Thin Air? Holy? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! There is no self-buff for keeping your casts going. There's no proc that gives you the thumbs-up for using a key component of your kit at the opportune moment. The kit itself doesn't give a crap whether you spam Cure, refresh Dia every 3 seconds, keep your Glare uptime at maximum efficiency, jump in place, watch Netflix, nothing. Nothing lights up to tell you you're doing well.
When I say White Mage's kit is designed like crap, Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is the easiest identifiable surface source of boredom. The kit doesn't have any synergy or reward system. It doesn't do anything. Giving it a 3 part combo wouldn't solve this problem. -
10-17-2021, 08:28 AMCrimsonGunneri agree with you there about white mage is horribly designed right now, the concept and idea of liles is a good direction but it was not handled properly. there is so much potential in that system that if the synergy with dps and healer was there the kit would reward you for proper managing heals and dps alike but sadly as you said it is a smoke screen as well as the skills the lilies supply themselves. i mean afflataus skills are carbon copies of cure and medica right now only instant and free mana, which i think i would have prefer if i just cast those instead of having bloated buttons that do the same. it isn't a bad idea to spend liles as soon as they came up the problem is the system itself wont reward you since if you spam lilies,as Semirhage said, would give you nothing in fact even worse then nothing you basically go negative if u do that cause u need gcd to dps if no healing is needed and we dont have exactly ogcd to spend them on so a big minus from doing that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Semirhage
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10-18-2021, 10:50 AMTruen
I'm convinced Yoshi should step away and let someone else take lead at this point; he's out of ideas and he's all but telling people that now.
I'm personally SICK AND TIRED of spamming 1-button endlessly too. It's created some pretty hard feelings towards the Square Enix dev team at this point.