Why Refunding Damage for Healing is Bad.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

It also speaks that from someone who remembers that time the biggest concern wasn’t the existence of cleric stance it was that it had no cast time but a recast time

People didn’t like that it could be turned off then accidentally back on again given how bad the servers were back then. That was a way more common complaint than it actually existing

But apparently me remembering ARR is meaningless

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If anything to be fair I do remember people complaining about it because they just didn't like it as a system. A lot of people cheered when Stormblood removed it and allowed healers to do damage more freely.
But that's the thing, people didn't greed with this. If anything, it was quite the contrary. Most casuals didn't even use it in dailies because too punishing so you ended up with healers not doing much damage in dungeons, and in savage it generated that weird practice of having a main healer and an off healers for a big chunk of the more casual statics that didn't imagine stance dancing with it.

Either way that's why while I don't hate having some refunds, all of those refunds creeping into the healing game on top of all of its issues is literally making the role even more braindead because no matter what you do, you don't have failure states anymore.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Either way that's why while I don't hate having some refunds, all of those refunds creeping into the healing game on top of all of its issues is literally making the role even more braindead because no matter what you do, you don't have failure states anymore.

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I kinda disagree with this, but for a different reason: I already think there isn't any failure state in regards to dealing damage as a healer right now. The difference between dealing good damage and not doing so is never of material value as DPS requirements have gotten rather low in favor of 8-people-ballet do-it-or-wipe mechanics being chained together coupled with healer damage itself being too low (which isn't a bad thing). This results in it frankly not mattering at all if a healer deals 100% damage, 80% damage or 60% damage. The total difference is too small to truly care.

It shouldn't be, but that's just what it is, and that's for savage. Good luck having healer damage matter as a failure state in say, dungeons or normal raids!

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Originally Posted by Valence

Either way that's why while I don't hate having some refunds, all of those refunds creeping into the healing game on top of all of its issues is literally making the role even more braindead because no matter what you do, you don't have failure states anymore.

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In a sense, the change that made Lily healing damage neutral in SHB was the source of this issue. Optimizing as a Healer has always been a game of 'mitigate how much damage you lose, from having to cast Healing GCDs'. In that sense, the SHB WHM that lost 100p per Lily Heal used, made sense, because 100p is less than the 300p you'd lose by casting Medica. It was analogous to the 100p you lost from using an Aetherflow on a Healing/Mit action as SCH, instead of using it on Energy Drain.

Damage-neutrality has to be used sparingly as a design element. Making everything damage-neutral, as they seem to be intending with EC/Evolved Mode, runs the risk of making everything incredibly boring.

On the plus side, it's gonna be really interesting to watch the fires burn, as players who throw out 3 Healing GCDs (each of which are 90% Overheal) per 20s, out-parse 'actually trying to optimize' Healers who use Healing GCDs sparingly, all because 'the 3x empowered Holy Sanctuary Crit a lot that run lmao'. Will FFLogs update their formulae, to consider how much Overheal the Healer player had as a factor in the parse? Will they start ranking us on a combination of HPS and DPS?

edit: Just realised after posting this... We currently throw out Lilies in downtime when we can't hit the boss, to prepare a damage neutral Misery, effectively making each Lily spent during the downtime, the 'same damage' as a Glare. But Lilies have a 20s CD, something like EC/Evolved's High Cure doesn't. Instead of weighing up if we need the Lily for actual Healing, we'll just be able to, every downtime, press 3 High Cures on players who are not at 100% HP, and get a fully empowered Holy Sanctuary. Every downtime. This doesn't bode well for Ultimates and their DPS checks, I fear, what with all the 'Trio' style downtimes they love to use

speaking of which, could they be trying to make evolved WHM a sort of main healer? With Sanctity not building up without actually doing some healing it'd seem like they wouldn't want their co-healer to do too much of it.

If the others do have to sacrifice damage to heal as much while having a significantly higher max dps than WHM everyone would rather have the WHM be healing, right?

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

speaking of which, could they be trying to make evolved WHM a sort of main healer? With Sanctity not building up without actually doing some healing it'd seem like they wouldn't want their co-healer to do too much of it.

If the others do have to sacrifice damage to heal as much while having a significantly higher max dps than WHM everyone would rather have the WHM be healing, right?

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I think that was kinda the intention in SB with WHM and saying it was a 'pure healer', but it didn't really work out that way in practice, as AST had to have enough throughput to clear content too

If it's their intention to make Pure Healers feel work, they A: need to stop giving so much Pure Healing capability to the Barrier Healers, and B: need to make a way for Pure Healing to be a better solution than a Barrier Healer, because as it stands, SE's idea of a Heal Check tends to turn out to be a Mit Check more often than not. SCH SGE can handle any throughput demand we've seen thus far in the game, and in some cases, are the better option because they have more access to Mitigations

Like, give us Heal Absorb effects that work like anti-shields, protecting our 'missing HP' from healing in inverse way to how shields protect our 'actual HP' from incoming damage. Mitigation has its place, because it reduces the incoming damage, to buy time for the Heal Absorb to be healed through. Barriers block incoming damage, buying more time. Pure Healing, however, is the way to more quickly deal with the Heal Absorb and get back to 'actually healing'

If we’re talking about healing spells natively being DPS neutral, than yes it creates an apathetic loop devoid of skill expression, but if DPS neutral healing is something you earn by the decisions you make with your kit and your resources, than I disagree that that’s an issue.

In my white mage redesign for example, I reverted the system back to the lilies and blood lily, and Holy III became a cooldown that granted Sanctity. Sanctity was spent on one of two DPS options with different supportive qualities, and spending those would allow Cure, Medica, and a GCD Aquaveil to nourish the blood lily. As well as Esuna III under Assize’s effect. But I also allowed Holy III to be castable off-cooldown at double its MP cost so if you want every GCD heal to be DPS neutral than you can burn your MP to do so, and I think that’s a choice that feels interesting.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

I think that was kinda the intention in SB with WHM and saying it was a 'pure healer', but it didn't really work out that way in practice, as AST had to have enough throughput to clear content too

If it's their intention to make Pure Healers feel work, they A: need to stop giving so much Pure Healing capability to the Barrier Healers, and B: need to make a way for Pure Healing to be a better solution than a Barrier Healer, because as it stands, SE's idea of a Heal Check tends to turn out to be a Mit Check more often than not. SCH SGE can handle any throughput demand we've seen thus far in the game, and in some cases, are the better option because they have more access to Mitigations

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I don't think the important part is "if they can heal well enough to meet heal checks" though, it's whether they could do that with as little dps loss as an evolved WHM could. I doubt SB lilies really could've done that, especially with the other two having raid buffs to cover some of their output.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Why are people still begging on encounter design to fix the issues

Not only have they failed to fix it for years but there is also years and years of built up legacy content that DONT do this

I’m sure the 8.0 savage tier will be FANTASSSSSSTIC while you get CT in your roulette again and run around spamming glare with no CD

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I think if we balance the game around Legacy content, I think it's a bad Idea, I'd personally want Current content to be a main focus and if that means jobs or things feel weird in lower content I'm fine with that, I always think content should evolve and not be held back by legacy content. If in lower level content healers can get away with one button spam its not ideal, but to me whats important is if they do that in CURRENT content.

But I also agree that SE has shown that they're very unlikely to actually improve on encounter design fixing issues with healer in particular so us bagging on it isn't really a great idea, I though I do think at the end of the day SE are gonna go ahead with poor choices such as these changes to White mage and healers regardless, I fear as a community anything we say will just be ignored.

SE's solution to "glare spam is boring" is "hey look glare 2!!! glare also instant cast now poggers!! everything is damage mutual so you can't mess up healer even if it was already uber easy to not!!" So to assume they'd actually listen to anything anyone says to improve healer gameplay is funny; because to them healing is too hard or something which is what these changes indicate

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

If we’re talking about healing spells natively being DPS neutral, than yes it creates an apathetic loop devoid of skill expression, but if DPS neutral healing is something you earn by the decisions you make with your kit and your resources, than I disagree that that’s an issue.

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I think if they made something like Holy sanctuary on a much longer cooldown (such as 90s with two charges) I could see a world in where you'd have a system where you'd still have to be careful about over healing, but as it stands it being on 30s (with two charges) means you can mindlessy spam out heals whenever, this game isn't gonna have damage output remotely high frequent enough to where you will need to heal more then once in a 10s period consistently that theirs no risk vs reward.

I think right now the new system is White mages current system but amped up to 11, which is a major problem as white mage already can just kind of burn lillies a lot of the time.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

but as it stands it being on 30s (with two charges) means you can mindlessy spam out heals whenever

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As I mentioned above, it will be fun to see the fallout from FFLogs, and people who swear by it, when it turns out 'Overheal Oscar' out-parses the heavily-optimized runs, solely because Oscar's Holy Sanctuary casts (all of which are max empowered by Healing) Crit/DH like crazy

Feel like I saw it being a 20s CD for HS, not 30s, but A: I might be wrong and B: blah blah numbers subject to change

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I think if they made something like Holy sanctuary on a much longer cooldown (such as 90s with two charges) I could see a world in where you'd have a system where you'd still have to be careful about over healing, but as it stands it being on 30s (with two charges) means you can mindlessy spam out heals whenever, this game isn't gonna have damage output remotely high frequent enough to where you will need to heal more then once in a 10s period consistently that theirs no risk vs reward.

I think right now the new system is White mages current system but amped up to 11, which is a major problem as white mage already can just kind of burn lillies a lot of the time.

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See, holy sanctuary is one of the dumbest things ever added to FFXIV because they literally just spent white mage’s development budget creating a system that it already had. What was the point of creating sanctity and holy sanctuary when the blood lily does the same thing? You would have the exact same situation if you made cure and medica nourish the blood lily, make misery castable at any stage of the blood lily with the appropriate potency, and give it a 25 second cooldown with 2 charges. Why are we spending animation budget painting the same picture?

What I think they want from the system is for white mage to feel like cure and medica can be used often as white mage’s main source of healing rather than resources you only try to use three times a minute, or more in your example. Which is fine, just keep the lily system as-is but applicable to cure and medica and give the player a way to trade another resource for more lilies, like in my example that resource is MP. Also giving the player more tools to use lilies on is something I think the job also needs promptly.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

As I mentioned above, it will be fun to see the fallout from FFLogs, and people who swear by it, when it turns out 'Overheal Oscar' out-parses the heavily-optimized runs, solely because Oscar's Holy Sanctuary casts (all of which are max empowered by Healing) Crit/DH like crazy

Feel like I saw it being a 20s CD for HS, not 30s, but A: I might be wrong and B: blah blah numbers subject to change

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From what I gathered fflogs's owner has said they would probably stop working on the site if evolved stays as it's been shown. They're not interested in it.

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Originally Posted by Valence

From what I gathered fflogs's owner has said they would probably stop working on the site if evolved stays as it's been shown. They're not interested in it.

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I saw that too, yeh

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

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I don’t really think refunding damage for healing is a bad design. I think it’s a necessary design in how this game functions. I’m not sure how many times it has to be iterated and reiterated, but in FFXIV you spend more than half of your time attacking as a healer. Until that changes fundamentally, anything opposing that isn’t really an argument worth having.

And currently, there is no realistic amount of reorganizing this system for the whole game in a single expansion. The math just doesn’t work out. Currently we average about 250 attacks to 50 heals per instance. Even if they replaced every Dia we used to cast with a cast of a necessary heal (35 Dias), that is still 165 attacks to 85 heals. There would have to be a significant overhaul of healing and damage across every piece of content over several expansions to make something other than damage to healing the more optimal design option in this game.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

See, holy sanctuary is one of the dumbest things ever added to FFXIV because they literally just spent white mage’s development budget creating a system that it already had.

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What bothers me more is what people have kept saying here in this thread (above): Holy Sanctuary is being framed as something different and completely unique from Afflatus Misery. This has already happened several times before with healers, especially WHM, and it’s happening again. Shroud of Saints to Lucid Dreaming. Divine Seal to Largesse to Temperance. Take away and give back with a new name like we don’t know any better. It feels as if they hope you don’t see that this should have just been a trait upgrade, and not marketed in the demo as something fresh and exciting like a capstone.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Snip.

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Yikes.

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Originally Posted by BlueMageQuina

I don’t really think refunding damage for healing is a bad design. I think it’s a necessary design in how this game functions. I’m not sure how many times it has to be iterated and reiterated, but in FFXIV you spend more than half of your time attacking as a healer. Until that changes fundamentally, anything opposing that isn’t really an argument worth having.

And currently, there is no realistic amount of reorganizing this system for the whole game in a single expansion. The math just doesn’t work out. Currently we average about 250 attacks to 50 heals per instance. Even if they replaced every Dia we used to cast with a cast of a necessary heal (35 Dias), that is still 165 attacks to 85 heals. There would have to be a significant overhaul of healing and damage across every piece of content over several expansions to make something other than damage to healing the more optimal design option in this game.

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I don't get what your point is here as its clearly not a necessary design. Healing being refunded into damage has never been necessary, It was somewhat necessary for white mage as they didn't have a lot of OGCDS unlike every other healer.

I think the fundamental difference between now and new healers is that they have been given Even more free heals, as you pointed out White mage's whole design with lilies has generally been since shadowbringers to refund your healing with lillies for damage, I actually don't think this is a bad thing inherently, but the rate you get your refund aka 3 heals free for every 30s is way too much for the games damage profile that refunding heals for damage becomes something you dont need to think about.

Problem is now Healers are going to be even more boring to play as the skill in harder content and fights like M11S was balancing between making sure you use your resources correctly or having to fall back to your gcd heals so people survive; all of that is gone now, all healing is trivial refunded heck theirs no point of any sort of resources outside your gcd heals other then active mitigation skills.

Sure the damage profiles will not change, but making it even harder to the point of it basically being impossible to mess up with over healing just feels kind of ridiculous, Like healers weren't easy enough? are we serious... I just don't get how any of this is necessary design.

my main point being none of this was necessary, it all negatively effects healers I think for the most part when people play with the refund healing healers they're going to realise how it's even worse to play now. I guess time will tell but I'm here to make my concerns known not to necessarily debate if people will find a refund system fun or not.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I don't get what your point is here as its clearly not a necessary design. Healing being refunded into damage has never been necessary, It was somewhat necessary for white mage as they didn't have a lot of OGCDS unlike every other healer.

I think the fundamental difference between now and new healers is that they have been given Even more free heals, as you pointed out White mage's whole design with lilies has generally been since shadowbringers to refund your healing with lillies

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My point there was that because of how the battle system works—where we spent most of our GCDs attacking in ARR, and HW, and SB, and then we got Misery in ShB and continued attacking in ShB, and EW, and DT—that it was always going to be the inevitable outcome that healer(s) would be refunded damage for healing. It was “necessary” because of the corner design has pushed healing into. It’s the logical consequence of the battle system as it is currently implemented. I think you were getting caught up on my use of “necessary”—by necessary, I meant unavoidable, inevitable, inexorable. If you spend <75% of your time attacking as a healer for 12 years, then refunding damage from your healing becomes the logical direction—the inevitable direction—where the design will lead you.

That is all I was a saying: it’s a logical step with how they designed the game.

My second point was that it would take a lot of effort to restructure the battle system in a meaningful way where this consequence wasn’t inevitable. By this consequence, I don’t mean Misery existing, but Misery as a damage refund being doubled down on through making Sanctuary. Afflatus Misery was a consequence of healer design and Holy Sanctuary is a further consequence that the design hasn’t really changed.

I do agree with you though. I think every heal going toward Sanctuary is a bit much. Using it at different levels of refund. Yes, I think that’s okay. Every GCD contributing rather than just your job gauge… no, thanks, I agree it’s too easy.

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Originally Posted by BlueMageQuina

My point there was that because of how the battle system works—where we spent most of our GCDs attacking in ARR, and HW, and SB, and then we got Misery in ShB and continued attacking in ShB, and EW, and DT—that it was always going to be the inevitable outcome that healer(s) would be refunded damage for healing. It was “necessary” because of the corner design has pushed healing into. It’s the logical consequence of the battle system as it is currently implemented. I think you were getting caught up on my use of “necessary”—by necessary, I meant unavoidable, inevitable, inexorable. If you spend <75% of your time attacking as a healer for 12 years, then refunding damage from your healing becomes the logical direction—the inevitable direction—where the design will lead you.

That is all I was a saying: it’s a logical step with how they designed the game.

My second point was that it would take a lot of effort to restructure the battle system in a meaningful way where this consequence wasn’t inevitable. By this consequence, I don’t mean Misery existing, but Misery as a damage refund being doubled down on through making Sanctuary. Afflatus Misery was a consequence of healer design and Holy Sanctuary is a further consequence that the design hasn’t really changed.

I do agree with you though. I think every heal going toward Sanctuary is a bit much. Using it at different levels of refund. Yes, I think that’s okay. Every GCD contributing rather than just your job gauge… no, thanks, I agree it’s too easy.

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A think a small/simple solution is to at least double the length of Sanctuary (Triple even), That way you can keep the healing refund for damage without making everything just DPS neutral.

Though yeah I agree that theirs so many issues with encounter design and also healer design that theirs no way they'd adress it all, I think right now I just want cast times to make a return on glare/glare2 (or even have glare 2 be instant cast like a budget red mage) because positioning is very fun with casters, I am really tired of them changing that, but most importantly they need to make sanctuary something you need to actually consider carefully where you dont over cap on GCD heals too much or you will lose out on damage.

I get what your saying though I think it's a issue with the game design, I do think we can tune the game but at somepoint it becomes impossible. I'm mostly just against making healers even more bland to play, I think refunding healing for damage is a big concern for me if its done in a way where you can face roll it (sort of like mp management currently)

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Originally Posted by Valence

From what I gathered fflogs's owner has said they would probably stop working on the site if evolved stays as it's been shown. They're not interested in it.

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Oh I just ate the popcorn, darn! Gotta buy more.

Sidenote: I would prefer if they did a bar that has a bigger resource meter (say, 1000), and you fill it based on how much healing you actually cause (direct or HoT). And then use that. "But what if people don't take damage?" - well, supposedly HS is damage-neutral, so obviously if you're just nuking it's easier to just spam the filler. Rather this'd allow big clutch-heal moments to then come back as giant single hits of damage, which would just feel nice. Although the name is pretty terrible. Afflatus Misery, pls? :<