Healer kit adjustment idea, 40% dps to 60% heals/utility

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Originally Posted by Aravell

If there's one thing this thread shows clearly, it's that the people who want a more interesting damage kit and the people who want more healing to be done are both greatly unsatisfied. Who is the modern healer even designed for anyway?

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In XIV, healing is an obligation not actual gameplay. (●´⌓`●)

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Originally Posted by Teno

We need more damage actions, healers are green dps, and if people can't understand that (from how the game is structured at its core) they're in the wrong game.

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I wouldn't call healers with DPS skills green dps though. I have never played a game where healing/support characters did not have damage abilities and were not expected to contribute. Even single player games.
Having a party member that is expected not to do damage is the odd request, not the other way around. Although I must admit there is always a small minority that expects a healing only character in such games.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

I'm curious: How would you answer these questions that I posed previously?

1. What fraction of every minute do you expect a healer to keep the GCD rolling?

2. Of the GCDs that healer is casting, what fraction is required by mechanics, and what fraction is available to help the party recover from mistakes?

Because it's worth noting that if you're spending 19 out of 20 GCDs (95%) on healing that's required by mechanics, that leaves you a mere 1 out of 20 GCDs to help the party recover from mistakes -- which means the entire party has to play to a certain degree of perfection.

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I like the way you framed these questions, because it helped me to realize ways in which I could communicate my thoughts better. When I say I want 80-95% of my time to be healing, I should clarify that I am talking about time spent casting; that does not take into account time that needs to be spent moving to get in the right location. Worth clarifying that. Because of that, I don't have an answer to the first question, because I think that's highly dependent upon the movement requirements of any specific fight.

Before entering the second question, I want to clarify my range of 80-95%. Fights have tempos that vary, parts where things get more or less intense, and that was what the 95% was supposed to be: those temporary moments where the intensity is raised and there is less wiggle-room. If your survive those periods, then any bodies that got left behind in the scramble can then be recovered afterwards when the pressure drops back to normal. It was not meant to suggest that healers should be working at 95% of perfection for the full duration of a fight; in fact, these numbers are intended to represented the percentage of cast time that a casual player is spending casting healing spells; more skilled players would presumably have less time healing and more DPSing.

I'll spell out what that means a bit more using myself as a case study. When I'm doing current normal raid content, fights generally end with my having only cast Cure 2, Medica 2, Regen, and Assize. Which is to say, I am in no way making optimal use of my kit, particularly the oGCD parts. Even playing in this sub-optimal way, roughly 75% of my cast time is Glare if nobody is making mistakes.

So with all of that clarification out of the way, let's get to your second question: the fraction required by mechanics would be the 80-95%, and that leftover 20-5% would be the fraction for helping party members recover from mistakes. If you're not helping party members recover, that becomes DPS time instead.

I guess it's also worth saying that I'm not married to these exact numbers; they're just an estimated attempt to communicate the vibe of what I'm experiencing. So to escape that potential distraction, maybe it would be better to say this: right now it feels like the majority of my cast time as a healer is spent with no healing to do, so instead it's DPS time (unless my fellow players are gracious enough to make mistakes). Personally, I would like that to be flipped: I want the majority of my cast time to be devoted to healing, with a minority of my time devoted set aside for recovering from mistakes and DPS.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Before entering the second question, I want to clarify my range of 80-95%. Fights have tempos that vary, parts where things get more or less intense, and that was what the 95% was supposed to be: those temporary moments where the intensity is raised and there is less wiggle-room.
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So with all of that clarification out of the way, let's get to your second question: the fraction required by mechanics would be the 80-95%, and that leftover 20-5% would be the fraction for helping party members recover from mistakes. If you're not helping party members recover, that becomes DPS time instead.

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In week 1, Styx and Harrowing Hell in Savage were this: a mechanic that requires you to spend 80-95% of your time casting on healing, in order to keep up with the healing required. I appreciate the explanation of your position, that you'd want the 'peaks' to be at that value, not the average, but I don't know if you've considered what those numbers would actually translate to in practice: Literal Savage-Week-1 HPS checks, in EX roulette. Now I'm all for that personally because I've done said HPS checks on week 1, but I'm not sure the playerbase at large would be.

One could argue 'the average player would be able to keep up by just spamming Succor/Medica1'. I would respond to that with 'the average player would run out of MP because they cannot even remember to press Lucid each minute'. At the moment we're at like 80% cast times spent on DPS and 20% on healing, rather than invert it all at once (Abyssos showed us that sudden jumps in HPS required do not go down well), I think you'd have more success with easing it towards a more 50/50 level between healing casts and DPS casts. This doesn't factor in OGCDs as 'casts' though. So whichever healer has 'more coverage via OGCDs' probably just ends up being locked meta in that situation.

Medica and such, I find unfulfilling. I know my job is to heal as needed, but I'd like for that to be done via an interesting method. Star is interesting because it has a timing aspect. HOTs are interesting because you have to decide if they'll tick enough in time, or if you have to use a burst heal move to make up the difference. Lilies are interesting because they are damage neutral GCDs and instantcast, allowing mobility and keeping up 'damage' even while forced to move. Medica 1 is not interesting. Cure 3 is barely interesting, only the range and MP costs save it, and even then SE keeps buffing the range on it. If we can have a damage move (Misery) accessed by using our healing tools (Lilies), I don't see why we can't have a healing move (Cure4 or whatever) accessed by dealing damage (charge a gauge by using damage spells), that would be 'interesting' to me. Then that healing move (Cure4) can be damage neutral as well, creating a cycle/gameplay loop

edit: here's a quickmaths: take the lower end of your bracket, 80% of your casting time (GCDs) is spent on healing. We get 24 GCDs a minute (at 2.50 speed). 80% of that is 19.something. You'd have just 4 GCDs a minute, on average, spare for recovery or DPS, and there's no guarantee those would be 'available' at the time you need them to be to actually do recovery-things

From what I understand of WoW healing (and any WoW players can correct me if I'm wrong), a major difference they have is that there are constantly mechanics happening that are dealing damage not to the entire party, but to a handful of different players at different moments. Something like 'deals damage to 5 random players' happening regularly across the entire fight along with other, more detailed mechanics at intervals. Meanwhile, the healers themselves have far more limited ways of healing everyone at once. Thus, why there's more focus on healing is because healers are very regularly spot healing individual players with single target effects and setting themselves up to be able to handle more pressing mechanics when they go out.

Meanwhile, FFXIV hands out AoE healing like Halloween candy. So much so that many players don't even use single target healing at all, especially now that tanks handle their own healing for the most part.

Something that would take a WoW healer 5 casts to achieve, a FFXIV healer can do in 1 weave, not even a cast. This creates an environment where in order to pressure all that free AoE healing, you'd need to up the frequency of damage exponentially to get a skilled healer to burn through them all and start casting heals as well. But we can't necessarily just shift to a more single-target healing focused gameplay model because so many harder fights have heal checks that assume you can heal everyone to full HP in a matter of seconds. Imagine Harrowing Hell, but with highly limited and unsustainable AoE healing.

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Originally Posted by Teno

I don't know what content you run that healers can't keep up with one gcd among 20 every 20s. And if it's savage/ultimate, the problem is not the healer, it's the player.



We need more damage actions, healers are green dps, and if people can't understand that (from how the game is structured at its core) they're in the wrong game.

And there's no need to write entire books that provide 0 meaningful information (and only superficial data) to the issues being mentioned. What matters most is gameplay that matches the game and it's not there (aside from pvp) right now.

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Wow a mouthful. Well I’m gonna keep this short and straight to the point. I said what I said and I’m not changing on it. Goodnight.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

In week 1, Styx and Harrowing Hell in Savage were this: a mechanic that requires you to spend 80-95% of your time casting on healing, in order to keep up with the healing required. I appreciate the explanation of your position, that you'd want the 'peaks' to be at that value, not the average, but I don't know if you've considered what those numbers would actually translate to in practice: Literal Savage-Week-1 HPS checks, in EX roulette. Now I'm all for that personally because I've done said HPS checks on week 1, but I'm not sure the playerbase at large would be.

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Just to make sure all of the pertinent details of my post are being taken into account, I want to clarify two things: first, that I don't want to get too caught up on the specific numbers I mentioned in my initial post, so "80-95% of cast time healing" should be replaced with "most of cast time healing". Second, that for this example we are literally only casting Cure 2, Medica 2, Regen, and Assize to do the needed healing, meaning any player actually tapping into a modicum of the breadth of their healing potential is going to spend less time healing. With those details taken into account, I don't think I'm proposing anything that my fellow casual players (even those who are very unskilled) would be unable to keep up with in casual content.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

At the moment we're at like 80% cast times spent on DPS and 20% on healing, rather than invert it all at once (Abyssos showed us that sudden jumps in HPS required do not go down well), I think you'd have more success with easing it towards a more 50/50 level between healing casts and DPS casts.

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Something is better than nothing; I would gladly take it. ^^

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

I know my job is to heal as needed, but I'd like for that to be done via an interesting method.

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Certainly valid and agreed. In my opinion, a lot of the fun I've had with healing in the past has come from keeping the tank constantly healed (before that responsibility disappeared) while managing MP, healing burst damage that is done to individual non-tank party members, and individually clearing status effects off party members with Esuna. I'm in no way intending to propose that fights change into Medica spam; rather, fights should output a variety of problems that healers can use a variety of tools and techniques to solve.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

If we can have a damage move (Misery) accessed by using our healing tools (Lilies), I don't see why we can't have a healing move (Cure4 or whatever) accessed by dealing damage (charge a gauge by using damage spells), that would be 'interesting' to me. Then that healing move (Cure4) can be damage neutral as well, creating a cycle/gameplay loop

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On a personal note, I'm grinning ear-to-ear to see your post have so much support when it contains this idea. I made a thread proposing this kind of thing and the response was pretty negative! But yeah, I like this idea: make the damage I'm dealing tie back into my healing gameplay, so that damage serves a healing purpose.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Just to make sure all of the pertinent details of my post are being taken into account, I want to clarify two things: first, that I don't want to get too caught up on the specific numbers I mentioned in my initial post, so "80-95% of cast time healing" should be replaced with "most of cast time healing". Second, that for this example we are literally only casting Cure 2, Medica 2, Regen, and Assize to do the needed healing, meaning any player actually tapping into a modicum of the breadth of their healing potential is going to spend less time healing. With those details taken into account, I don't think I'm proposing anything that my fellow casual players (even those who are very unskilled) would be unable to keep up with in casual content.

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Oh I see, so if we took, let's say, an AST with their 4 different 60s OGCDs as the example, they'd be able to use those OGCDs and lower that 80% down to something closer to say, 60%? Which seems a lot more manageable, I'd agree. I guess the issue then, is that this would specifically screw over WHM and their relative lack of OGCDs (but what's new there?)

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

On a personal note, I'm grinning ear-to-ear to see your post have so much support when it contains this idea. I made a thread proposing this kind of thing and the response was pretty negative! But yeah, I like this idea: make the damage I'm dealing tie back into my healing gameplay, so that damage serves a healing purpose.

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I dunno why, it's the whole foundation of what SGE was 'meant to be' in most people's minds, but I don't think it's necessarily 'SGE only' as a design element. I think WHM, for example, could benefit greatly from such a mechanic, since if the healing move was damage neutral in the same way Misery is, it allows a new identity for the job to form: use your healing tools in the right order, and you can dump absolutely disgusting amounts of compiled damage inside the burst window. When I first proposed the idea, I also got an earful about it, and how I was 'forcing people to DPS to get access to the new healing move', which, yeh kinda the point? But at the same time, being told that did make me think about how we have certain times where we literally cannot do damage, because we are healing so hard (Harrowing Hell/Styx), and I agreed that it would suck for the player to be unable to generate gauge during that moment. In fact, that moment would be the most important time to get access to that healing move, so I went back and added gauge gain rates to all of the non-Lily heals at a much faster rate (eg a Medica2 would give 15 over it's full duration, whereas spamming Glare would give 1 per cast).

I wonder if the reason you got such a negative reaction was the method by which you proposed making the damage skill feed back into the healing. Pneuma, for example, is not interesting to me, because the two are linked, you don't get to choose when to deal damage and when to heal with it, you just use it, and it is equal to a Dosis there and then. But this Cure4 thing I described, you'd be able to pool it, you'd be able to shift the refund into damage buffs with skilled play, you'd be able to spend the gauge at a differing time from when you did the damage. Just the implementation of a 0-100 gauge on WHM would open design paths for the dev team. A CD that adds gauge, a CD that doubles gauge gain rate for a time, a new attack that has a CD attached, but generates a much larger amount of gauge compared to Glare, etc

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

When I first proposed the idea, I also got an earful about it, and how I was 'forcing people to DPS to get access to the new healing move', which, yeh kinda the point?

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Tbf, that's more a matter of bottling more interesting and contextual-value actions (that one would almost always want to have responsive) behind banal filler. It's much like not wanting Pneuma to be a burst heal first and foremost because that means having to hold onto your laser cannon for until (A) after sufficient damage has been dealt and potentially also (B) after one's better potency-per-second-of-recharge oGCD heals are all used up.

Moreover, if the damage and healing were to be entwined in that way, making the healing less responsive / more dependent on prior attacks, we'd usually expect that relationship to be more mechanically and thematically relevant. A 1.x style stat- and life-stealing Thaumaturge (more akin to a Shadow Priest than merely a stepping stone for Black Mage) would provide appropriate thematic context for that, sure, but White Mage?

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Just the implementation of a 0-100 gauge on WHM would open design paths for the dev team. A CD that adds gauge, a CD that doubles gauge gain rate for a time, a new attack that has a CD attached, but generates a much larger amount of gauge compared to Glare, etc

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It could, but the more value you attach to it, the more value with which WHM uniquely starts the fight with, in effect, its skills on cooldown. Unless, of course, like MP, it starts from 100(%).

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

A 1.x style stat- and life-stealing Thaumaturge would provide appropriate thematic context for that, sure, but White Mage?

It could, but the more value you attach to it, the more value with which WHM uniquely starts the fight with, in effect, its skills on cooldown. Unless, of course, like MP, it starts from 100(%).

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Yes, White Mage. My reasoning would be that, given WHM has always struggled to have an actual identity beyond 'it heals hard', this would give it an actual solid one: it can bank damage by using various damage-neutral GCD healing skills, and then unload all of that banked damage at once for massive burst in the raidbuff window. Effectively making it the 'king of ADPS', like how DRK currently functions. Whether it thematically suits WHM is down to personal preference, I'd think. I'd also have liked for it to be a Necromancer healer or something that had a system like this, but we aren't getting Necromancer for various reasons, so WHM's the next best choice imo. Again, I would not mind having healing generate the gauge too, so that people can get access to the healing skill even in high pressure moments like HH. I'd just have worries about making it feel like doing those GCD heals is too enticing because of the gauge gain rate. With full damage uptime, I'd mathed it out that you'd get 60 gauge a minute. I'd also made it so that Medica 2 gives 15 per full duration, so equal gauge gain, but using only 4 GCDs instead of 24. The idea was to create something that would both reward the player for doing damage, incentivise those that don't do damage to at least try to dip their toes in with small steps like 'keep up your DOT', and create some freeform decisionmaking on how/when to spend that gauge so that optimizers can find some enjoyment with it

Wouldn't mind seeing WHM start with 100 gauge either, your opening salvo would be like, precast Glare, spend, spend (POM), Tornado (Assize), <Quake, Quake, Flood, Flood>, Tornado, Glare and continue as usual (with the bit in <> being rearrangeable for mobility purposes, but who needs mobility in the first 20s of the fight). That's assuming you don't need/want the healing from the gauge and can afford to dump it early like that, if you need to save the gauge then you'd drop one or both 'spends' and the Tornado/Quake/Flood would be reverted to their regular Dia/Glare/Banish forms, and the net loss of damage would be 'the amount of damage gained by casting Glare in raidbuffs, minus the damage that Glare does without any raidbuffs' (because that 'spend' is replaced by a Glare), so absolutely miniscule (but still high enough for optimizers to care about). Additionally, WHM does not start with Lilies, whereas SCH can instantly get 3 Aetherflow (plus 3 more with Dissipation), AST can start with 3 cards for a full Astrodyne in the opener, and SGE starts with 3 of both Adderblobs. Having WHM start with 100 of this hypothetical gauge wouldn't uniquely benefit it, if anything it'd even the playing field. I can understand why Lilies start at 0, because Misery pushes 3 bonus Glares of damage into raidbuffs. But the damage gain of optimizing this hypothetical gauge would be so low, I don't see the harm in letting the WHM start with 100. Or just 50 if it's that big a deal