To YoshiP, here's what too stress-free: Healer edition

Bloodwhetting just also presents the problem of it is mathematically impossible to balance

Tank potency is roughly half of healer potency so each hit of bloodwhetting heals about 200 potency per enemy. So once you hit 5 enemies (an average double pull is 8-10) you are healing for the same amount as the strongest unconditional healer CD (lilybell expiring with all 5 stacks in tact). Now double that because as I said an average pack size is closer to 10 than 5. So you are healing for two full expirations of lilybell PER GCD for 4 GCD’s then you can have it up again 17 seconds later.

WAR is quite literally impossible to kill whole bloodwhetting is up outside of a oneshot and if damage was scaled high enough to actually challenge bloodwhetting’s healing potential then said content becomes completely unclearable on any tank that isn’t WAR

Shake It Off is the kind of button that I wish one of the healers would have---a layered utility with tradeoffs. I've said it in another thread, but if it's up to me, the button would look like this instead:

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You want to have a partywide shield of 21% of WAR’s max HP? You have to consume Vengeance.
You want to have the 300p upfront heal? You have to consume Bloodwhetting.
You want to have the 500p HoT? You have to consume ToB.
Just SIO? Partywide 300p shield. Nothing else.

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Now why can't healer have anything that look similar to that? lel...

But of course lmao, today's iteration is literally free button.

The removal of resource management and battle scarcity is what harmed healers the most, beyond just encounters in general. Nothing else matters to crank up difficulty, so the only way to do so is to introduce punishing body checks and headache inducing mechanics, which I've seen in criterion the most. It's actually telling that I recently got through the only complicated mechanic of Statice (which almost feels ultimate levels of obnoxiousness mechanically) first try because the mechanic incidentally had no body checks (unlike savage/ultimates). Because if you remove body checks, there is literally little else preventing you to limp through encounters those days.

It's the same for healing. It's the last remnant of classic/old school RPG elements with the trinity, that isn't directly tied to solving encounter mechanics, but keeping the party alive. However since everything else has been stripped over time, that element has lost a lot of water for the very reason that there is no MP considerations anymore, no more resources to manage (everybody has thousands of free healing tools those days), and no more inter party synergy.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Additionally, if we still want there to be a base level of safety when playing as healer, we can make very basic core abilities, like Glare, Cure/Cure II, and Medica, have no MP cost.

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I love your post! But I disagree with this one point. MP should be allowed to go to zero if we aren't careful, similar to how our HP is allowed to go to zero if we aren't careful. Infinite resources removes the challenge.

I will only respond to healer section because that's what l care about. This is probably unreasonable because it is too late to make the game that way. Maybe they can use gw2's approach. Healer is responsible to provide raid buff. In that game, healer's buff can triple the damage from a dps. I actually raid In that game because being a healer Makes me feel important. So besides adding more random damage for healer to heal, maybe shift the mitigations and dps buff to healer instead. Like give addle to healer with only like 45s cd? So ypu will be evaluated for your performance regarding utility instead of dps. But l don't think this will happen.

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Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer

I love your post! But I disagree with this one point. MP should be allowed to go to zero if we aren't careful, similar to how our HP is allowed to go to zero if we aren't careful. Infinite resources removes the challenge.

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But here’s my logic: why is it that healers and casters should be allowed to brick—or in other words, be locked out of performing any actions, where physical jobs can never brick? What value does that bring to a job? And why is that value lost if you were to have very basic set of free actions? Like if Lily heals instead had a larger mp cost, like 1000 and 2000 for solace and rapture respectively, then the idea Is that you use them to heal without losing DPS, whereas Cure II and Medica could have no MP costs, but instead cost you damage.

It brings resource management, and resource scarcity. Maybe if they hadn't removed TP you wouldn't have that discrepancy between physical and magical. It didn't seem to be a problem in the past to have some roles being more immune to MP drainage than others.

Or maybe everybody should actually use their MP bar for something, if not for casting. There is probably a lot of solutions to be found to have a manner of balance or fairness somewhere which I don't have right now, but I do know for sure that the more infinite you make resources, the more the only difficulty you end up having as a challenge can only be baked into encounter design itself, which is in my opinion a very crappy slippery slope leading to more and more body checks, punishing scripted encounters, and a dramatic loss of variety.

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Originally Posted by Valence

It brings resource management, and resource scarcity. Maybe if they hadn't removed TP you wouldn't have that discrepancy between physical and magical. It didn't seem to be a problem in the past to have some roles being more immune to MP drainage than others.

Or maybe everybody should actually use their MP bar for something, if not for casting. There is probably a lot of solutions to be found to have a manner of balance or fairness somewhere which I don't have right now, but I do know for sure that the more infinite you make resources, the more the only difficulty you end up having as a challenge can only be baked into encounter design itself, which is in my opinion a very crappy slippery slope leading to more and more body checks, punishing scripted encounters, and a dramatic loss of variety.

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I would rather have difficulty be in the encounter design than be in constantly looking at a resource bar, which I have experienced elsewhere (and they ending up rolling back since it was too strict) - especially if that penalizes only a few jobs. Square has taken the decision of introducing body checks, and simplifying jobs- they could have made other decisions to make encounters more interesting.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Like if Lily heals instead had a larger mp cost, like 1000 and 2000 for solace and rapture respectively, then the idea Is that you use them to heal without losing DPS, whereas Cure II and Medica could have no MP costs, but instead cost you damage.

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"Cost[s] you damage" is a terrible feedback mechanism for a healer.

There is no in-game DPS meter. There is very little content and conditions to run it under where optimal damage is required. For everything else, you'll never feel that alleged loss of damage or be able to tie the enrage back to some choice you made N minutes ago.

Unlike a damage dealer, I can easily say to myself, "my primary job is to keep the party alive, and I decided to play it safe, so what does it matter if a big damage number didn't pop up?" The MP cost on basic heals is what makes "playing it safe" all the time like that unworkable, and I'd call that a feature, not a bug.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

As it stands right now, I can literally count the number of times I have to heal in a dungeon on one hand and possibly one finger if that. As a WHM, all I get to do now is DPS, I don't really get to heal because healing isn't needed and don't get me started about WAR healing... if I get a dungeon with a WAR, I know I'm not doing anything but DPS. I really want to heal; I love healing and the only time I feel like a healer anymore is when I get an ARR dungeon that is off the MSQ that was not modified.

In my opinion, I would like to see healers get all damage mitigation buffs, DPS increasing buffs and the only source of heals so no more personal self sustains. If they do that, healers should be needed much more as healers and when were not healing, were busy tossing out buffs and debuffs with DPS being a filler.

Tanks tank, healers heal and DPS DPSses. Simple logic, maybe its time to go look at other games and heck, even fantasy / isakai anime for good ideas.

Edit: I forgot to mention, please rework healer LBs, there really useless besides the LB3, most of our base spells are stronger than our LB1s or LB2s.

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This is how ARR healing worked:
Tank runs off without tank stance
You follow with cleric stance off
Monsters actually do like 20% and 50% damage to the tank, and 90% damage to DPS who step in bad. There was no reason to ever use cleric stance, and you never had to in regular duties, ever. You just had people on the forum complain about it from their misconception of how this game isn't like the other popular MMO. It became a signal that you're playing with bad healer if you ever saw cleric stance on, just like you had to wait for Protect and Stoneskin.

Then in 4.0 it became:
Let tank double pull everything
Smash party heals, then fire AOE. Repeat until everything dead.

There is no skill or strategy in how healing works anymore. People complain if you do DPS, and people complain if you don't DPS. People complain if you smash all the HoT's, people complain if you cast ANYTHING. At least in 2.0 content had some aspect of skill besides combat choreography. Now you can just punch every party heal with no penalty to enmity, no penalty to overhealing, no penalty to MP use. Nothing. Press DPS button until Tank has an owie, then heal them once and go back to DPS less your party complain you aren't pulling your weight.

And it's been this way ever since. Unless Yoshi-P wants to nerf the self-heals of tanks and DPS to make it so healers actually have to do their job, that is not going to change, because people are used to how the game works at present.


A lot of this problem stems from how overworld PvE content, solo content, party content and PvP content can't scale the same. When you are not in a party, if this was back in 2.0, the entire point of cleric stance was so you weren't spending 15 minutes trying to kill boss, while a DPS could come in and kill it in 90 seconds. But because you had to keep switching, between self-healing, because healers are squishy when up against a boss, it just took forever or until you ran out of MP and and to start over. Cleric stance was the single-worst skill in the box. Yet, now without it, everyone expects the healer to DPS since they are no longer penalized in time to use it.

But nothing was ever done to give the healer more things to do with that extra time. We simply lost all utility. If we had things like Protect and StoneSkin back, every fight in the game would have to be retuned. I'm not saying I want those back, but that was literately the "other things healer should be doing"