Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

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Originally Posted by Allyissa

You know I wish healing was more like the chaotic duty M7N. Picking your spots to dps is a challenge. I have seen healers who pretty much just dps fail at healing because they are not used to it. I know it will get easier to an extent with gear and more people knowing how to do it, but it is still a wake up call. Most healers have a problem power healing.

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It's gotten a lot easier after launch week, but I like Brute Bomber (in both forms), he hits how a Normal Raid should hit. Even his Brutal Impact raidwides later on in the fights will kill pretty much every non-tank if there's no Healing or Mitigation.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

It's gotten a lot easier after launch week, but I like Brute Bomber (in both forms), he hits how a Normal Raid should hit. Even his Brutal Impact raidwides later on in the fights will kill pretty much every non-tank if there's no Healing or Mitigation.

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brute bong should be the base of all content but what would help tho is rather simple balance fight around the job not the job around the fight

We don't because our toolkit is already saturated with heals and that they don't want to make the role scary or intimidating by adding too many DPS skills.

What I fail to understand is how having 1 or 2 extra DPS skill would make it intimidating but having 20+ healing skill wouldn't.

The button bloat concern is real tho, which is why adding extra dps skill should be done with care as to avoid button bloat.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

We don't because our toolkit is already saturated with heals and that they don't want to make the role scary or intimidating by adding too many DPS skills.

What I fail to understand is how having 1 or 2 extra DPS skill would make it intimidating but having 20+ healing skill wouldn't.

The button bloat concern is real tho, which is why adding extra dps skill should be done with care as to avoid button bloat.

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It's also just a consequence of the toolkit being horrifically overpowered, and fight design needing to be massively overtuned to challenge the horrifically overpowered toolkits. Which in turn gets to a point where healers need to have simple rotations, because anything more than simple and most healers start failing the binary pass-fail mechanics that the fight design has turned into from a healer and tank perspective. Fight and job design go hand in hand, and unfortunately the devs have chosen the worst possible fight design for both healers and tanks, and are now starting to choose the worst possible fight design for their game, but especially for how casters have been designed up to this point.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

It's also just a consequence of the toolkit being horrifically overpowered, and fight design needing to be massively overtuned to challenge the horrifically overpowered toolkits. Which in turn gets to a point where healers need to have simple rotations, because anything more than simple and most healers start failing the binary pass-fail mechanics that the fight design has turned into from a healer and tank perspective. Fight and job design go hand in hand, and unfortunately the devs have chosen the worst possible fight design for both healers and tanks, and are now starting to choose the worst possible fight design for their game, but especially for how casters have been designed up to this point.

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On the other hand... Some healer do struggle even in dungeons.
So on one hand we're totally busted, on the other... apparently it's not enough to some players?

Since the idea of making DPS and healing kits interact came up repeatedly, one idea for Scholar:

* Always have two fairies out, both Eos and Selene.
* Eos is the healing fairy. She is fueled by the Scholar doing damage. For each GCD damage ability used, Eos will cast a heal, direct, AoE or HoT based on the damage used.
* Selene is the damage fairy. She is fueld by the Scholar healing. Unlike Eos she does not reflect the type of ability used, but oGCD heal/support abilities add DoT ticks to her next nuke, and GCD healing/shielding causes her to cast nukes (AoE happens automatically if there's other targets nearby).

No real gameplay added, but conceptually kinda cool IMO, plus it'd bring Selene back in a more specific role.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

On the other hand... Some healer do struggle even in dungeons.
So on one hand we're totally busted, on the other... apparently it's not enough to some players?

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"Bad players are bad, therefore the role is badly designed."

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

"Bad players are bad, therefore the role is badly designed."

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I think it's more that if your DPS is bad, in most encounters it just means the fight takes longer.

If your healer is bad - and tanks are not self-sufficient - then you wipe. This would be fair design only if the DPS being bad also wipes you, meaning even trashmobs come with an enrage timer basically. Which would be okay for me, so long as it's relaxed enough?

I think in this particular case though, FFXIV's strict avoidance of true hybridization of roles rears its ugly head, though: If no class was really only ever one job only, then your one healer dying in a dungeon fight wouldn't be an issue anyways: Maybe the Paladin is half-healer anyways, so is the Red Mage, who can also rezz. Maybe the tank dies and the Monk or the Sage can take over for that, etc etc.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

I think in this particular case though, FFXIV's strict avoidance of true hybridization of roles rears its ugly head, though: If no class was really only ever one job only, then your one healer dying in a dungeon fight wouldn't be an issue anyways: Maybe the Paladin is half-healer anyways, so is the Red Mage, who can also rezz. Maybe the tank dies and the Monk or the Sage can take over for that, etc etc.

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Hearkens back to ARR in a way with how the pre job stone classes worked. I enjoyed trying to play DPS and healer at the same time, so I wouldn't be totally opposed to something like that returning. That kind of utility should be costly for a non healer though. Significant MP use and maybe long cast times as well.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

I think it's more that if your DPS is bad, in most encounters it just means the fight takes longer.

If your healer is bad - and tanks are not self-sufficient - then you wipe. This would be fair design only if the DPS being bad also wipes you, meaning even trashmobs come with an enrage timer basically. Which would be okay for me, so long as it's relaxed enough?

I think in this particular case though, FFXIV's strict avoidance of true hybridization of roles rears its ugly head, though: If no class was really only ever one job only, then your one healer dying in a dungeon fight wouldn't be an issue anyways: Maybe the Paladin is half-healer anyways, so is the Red Mage, who can also rezz. Maybe the tank dies and the Monk or the Sage can take over for that, etc etc.

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I was more commenting on the idea that the overloaded healing kit not being enough for bad players who don't know how to utilize it.

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Originally Posted by Jidka

Hello guys.

As a WHM player, I'm wondering why most of our DPS comes from spells ?

I means, if ~40% of our DPS came from spells and ~60% from short CD abilities (4 or 5 sec cooldown), we would prioritize healing spells over healing abilities when healing are required.

That way, it would be the occasion to bring back earth/wind/water to WHM while keeping light spells we have now. And we would have a more complex DPS rotation.

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According to SE they want everybody to play healers & they don't want to pressure people into DPSing because they choose a healer, therefor they should only heal. From what I have read from many players is that they don't want to dps they just want to heal. The players that don't heal, don't want healers to dps because they might miss a heal. So thank the lazy butt player base who moaned and whined about having to dps and saying that healers were to hard to play. But on the bright side you can do most casual content w/o heals, just bring a WAR and dps to get though it much quicker. Dont forget to bring a rezzer.

I am not a raider, my friends are not raiders. I used to main scholar but normally I'm on summoner and we do rouletts w/o any healers. Even with a wipe its still faster then bringing a healer. So thanks SE way to make part of that trinity useless for most content. But hey at least they are respecting our time & encourage us to play other games.

Told on another thread, but relates to this one.

I wish healer design was more similar to how Blue Mage healers function. Of course, BLU healing is kinda barebones, but the principle is there: They heal with Global Cooldowns, and damage comes mostly from an array of OGCDs and filler spells when healing is not needed. Everything costing MP.

Imagining the main healing jobs following those guidelines:
- Spammable damage GCD
- Spammable cheap, but weaker, healing actions
- Cooldown-based efficient healing actions
- Damage based oGCDs
- A couple of healing 'emergency' oGCDs

We could even think how MP could matter again for healers, if everything had a MP cost, and MP replenishment was a mechanic to deal with something more interesting than Lucid Dreaming. DPS actions, for example.

I sometimes watch my partner playing Healer on WoW and tbh it is much more thrilling healing the party. It comes down to that players are getting random attacks from adds and bosses, not only the tank takes the damage. Plus the adds and bosses hit much more than ffxiv. Also Mana managment makes the healer consider which prio on healing to hold.

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Originally Posted by orestaklos

I sometimes watch my partner playing Healer on WoW and tbh it is much more thrilling healing the party. It comes down to that players are getting random attacks from adds and bosses, not only the tank takes the damage. Plus the adds and bosses hit much more than ffxiv. Also Mana managment makes the healer consider which prio on healing to hold.

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That's really the biggest thing, the random unpredictable damage spikes/output.

FFXIV could patch over its current issues, by making most~all bosses do any or all or a combination of:

1. Fire random shots into the raid every autoattack, hitting 1-2 people for 25%-40% of their health.
2. 360° cleave on autoattacks, hitting all melee characters.
3. Shoot random lines or circle AoEs, hitting everyone for 10%-20% of their health.
4. Crit on their autoattacks or "pierce", ignoring damage reductions for one autoattack.

All of these would most importantly making healing unpredictable. Meaning the usual "Use one of these oGCDs after every major mech" no longer works, damage is not even, it needs per-case handling. It also happens constantly, - hopefully - running our CD-based oGCDs out and then we have to heal with GCDs.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

That's really the biggest thing, the random unpredictable damage spikes/output.

FFXIV could patch over its current issues, by making most~all bosses do any or all or a combination of:

1. Fire random shots into the raid every autoattack, hitting 1-2 people for 25%-40% of their health.
2. 360° cleave on autoattacks, hitting all melee characters.
3. Shoot random lines or circle AoEs, hitting everyone for 10%-20% of their health.
4. Crit on their autoattacks or "pierce", ignoring damage reductions for one autoattack.

All of these would most importantly making healing unpredictable. Meaning the usual "Use one of these oGCDs after every major mech" no longer works, damage is not even, it needs per-case handling. It also happens constantly, - hopefully - running our CD-based oGCDs out and then we have to heal with GCDs.

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#1 sounds awkward as heck, so I'd only ever want to see it on fitting bosses (i.e., used sparingly). #2 would just mean that you shouldn't bring (any more than a single) melee to the fight, so iit should only come with commensurate risk added for ranged as well to balance it out. #3 is fine but only if staggered from less random nukes. #4's crit is fine, but removing tank agency by having it ignore tanks' primary role-specific skill-expressor is not.

All this being said, all it takes to deplete oGCDs is to increase relative healing requirements, not necessarily to randomize damage. The (somewhat-)unique affordance of randomization is to oblige healers to leave oGCDs on reserve for emergent high intensities (especially if not forcibly spaced away from the already scheduled damage intake).

I'm speaking from a DPS standpoint, but one thing that I've seen in a lot of dungeons is healers healing a lot more than DPSing. And I've also seen tanks take a ton of damage even through mitigation on large pulls with good gear.

I think the devs want healers to heal more than dps. So I think they buffed trash damage.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

We could even think how MP could matter again for healers, if everything had a MP cost, and MP replenishment was a mechanic to deal with something more interesting than Lucid Dreaming. DPS actions, for example.

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I'd maybe invert that, even. With how everything in FFXIV including tanks and healers is always first and foremost DPS, maybe tie the damage output of healers to healing?

That is, our efficient healers regenerate mana instead of costing it. And just casting our DPS endlessly + using our healing oGCDs would run us out of mana, thus we want to cover some healing by the efficient heals that in turn give mana back to continue casting damage abilities. I'm onboard with making oGCDs cost mana though, and that's an "in general" thing, tbh.

MP is ultimately just a shared cooldown system.

Consider for instance if we had no spammable heals, just the CDs. Tuned accordingly (and likely with a much smaller range between max and min ilvl for the comment) every heal would matter such that you have to be careful and deliberate with your resources. Now, consider if we had no healing CDs, only MP costs across or otherwise spammable heals, and were tuned accordingly. Again, we'd have to be deliberate with our AoEs and Cure IIs.

It's less an issue by which GCD heals should give mana and oGCDs should spend it as simply that there isn't enough damage to go around for both, let alone for the capped-per-minute-healing of oGCDs to be leveraged uniquely for burst rather than general healing. Giving an MP cost to oGCDs commensurate to their burst would go some way to making some loss of offensive uptime unavoidable and therefore allowing individual attacks to be tuned higher, but the biggest problem is ultimately just that there isn't enough damage to interact with our spammable heals that often, simply because doing so sacrifices damage unnecessarily, even if we removed all MP costs.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

I'd maybe invert that, even. With how everything in FFXIV including tanks and healers is always first and foremost DPS, maybe tie the damage output of healers to healing?

That is, our efficient healers regenerate mana instead of costing it. And just casting our DPS endlessly + using our healing oGCDs would run us out of mana, thus we want to cover some healing by the efficient heals that in turn give mana back to continue casting damage abilities. I'm onboard with making oGCDs cost mana though, and that's an "in general" thing, tbh.

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This is sort of like SGE then? You recover MP with your healing actions. This system has never felt good to me and you can end up in the situation where you're low on MP because there is nothing to heal and you have to use your heals not for healing, but just to gain MP. It also feels like the game is trying to hard to hold your hand too "You're a healer, so make sure you press those heal buttons". In my mind the motivation to heal should be that healing is needed, and that's it.

On the topic of MP I've been taking SCH into roulettes recently and I've found the level 50 AoW situation to be sort of interesting. AoW does the same damage as Ruin at 50 and is instant cast, its only short comings being range and MP cost. It ends up creating a MP tradeoff, at least on paper - the difference isn't that big and it's ARR content, where you can use an instant cast high MP damage or slower casting ranged low MP damage. Expanding that idea into a real mechanic instead of an accidental oversight could lead to a system with fun MP management.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

This is sort of like SGE then? You recover MP with your healing actions. This system has never felt good to me and you can end up in the situation where you're low on MP because there is nothing to heal and you have to use your heals not for healing, but just to gain MP. It also feels like the game is trying to hard to hold your hand too "You're a healer, so make sure you press those heal buttons". In my mind the motivation to heal should be that healing is needed, and that's it.

On the topic of MP I've been taking SCH into roulettes recently and I've found the level 50 AoW situation to be sort of interesting. AoW does the same damage as Ruin at 50 and is instant cast, its only short comings being range and MP cost. It ends up creating a MP tradeoff, at least on paper - the difference isn't that big and it's ARR content, where you can use an instant cast high MP damage or slower casting ranged low MP damage. Expanding that idea into a real mechanic instead of an accidental oversight could lead to a system with fun MP management.

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The children yearn for miasma 2

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

MP is ultimately just a shared cooldown system.

Consider for instance if we had no spammable heals, just the CDs. Tuned accordingly (and likely with a much smaller range between max and min ilvl for the comment) every heal would matter such that you have to be careful and deliberate with your resources. Now, consider if we had no healing CDs, only MP costs across or otherwise spammable heals, and were tuned accordingly. Again, we'd have to be deliberate with our AoEs and Cure IIs.

It's less an issue by which GCD heals should give mana and oGCDs should spend it as simply that there isn't enough damage to go around for both, let alone for the capped-per-minute-healing of oGCDs to be leveraged uniquely for burst rather than general healing. Giving an MP cost to oGCDs commensurate to their burst would go some way to making some loss of offensive uptime unavoidable and therefore allowing individual attacks to be tuned higher, but the biggest problem is ultimately just that there isn't enough damage to interact with our spammable heals that often, simply because doing so sacrifices damage unnecessarily, even if we removed all MP costs.

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Indeed, but I feel that's right that we can't think about changing healer paradigm without changing the encounter damage profile.

If they didn't do this in the "expansion that would focus on improving encounters", I don't have faith they will in 8.0. In fact, it's baffling that - in a game with combat being so formulaic - they don't consider encounter design AND job design two things that must be improved upon simultaneously.

We don't have more damage buttons or things to heal because square Enix hates healers and physical ranged and want both roles to die.