The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

If we want to make the relationship between pure healer and barrier healer more distinct and meaningful, a hurdle you have to deal with is ensuring both feel good during 4-man content, especially if Criterion is going to be a thing.

The idea of having pure healers have the ability to burst heal while barrier healers can't, and barrier healers have the ability to mitigate but pure healers can't, and the two are meant to cover one another could work in theory. Having this relationship where pure healers are also meant to handle healing checks while barrier healers set up resources before damage could also work. But what you'd need to do for dungeons and easier content is create scenarios where both burst healing and mitigation purposes are needed, or at least make certain mechanics much smoother. Then, you'd need to give pure healers access to clutch mitigation tools that come at some type of opportunity cost, and vice versa for barrier healers and burst healing. This ensures both camps have the tools they need to cover those mechanics when healing solo, but are meant to avoid those clutch actions when together while the other healer covers that gap in their performance.

When I say opportunity cost, it should be a cost of DPS uptime. In other words, in order for SCH or SGE to burst heal, they have no choice but to stop attacking, and spend the next couple GCDs using their clutch burst button. The same is true inversely with pure healers and mitigation/barrier tools.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

So, like Resto Druid or Disc Priest, the reason it'd be 'an advantage' is the gameplay feel. Setting up your HOTs on Resto for the big raidwide damage HPS check thing, then hitting that Flourish to double their output and watching the HPS bars just shoot up (especially with how HOTs tick way more often in WOW anyway) is satisfying to see.

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Right, but again -- just very simply, unless playing with a static group of friends, parties don't take class/job/spec/profession X just because something about X especially appeals to its player, since each of the alternatives likewise comes with another player to whom the job is probably about equally attractive (assuming balance / no notoriously unfun-but-overpowered choice, etc.). Barriers and pure healers were never sold as a difference in gameplay (since a pure healer can feel as different from another pure healer as from a barrier healer) but rather in what they uniquely provide to the party.

As such, I feel like design has to accommodate both parts if we're looking for true job diversity, let alone in terms of alignments that would replace the Barrier/Pure dichotomy. I'd agree that the difference in means is ultimately more important, but if the means aren't allowed to differ enough to create unique features, too, that's a pretty tight constraint, which then holds back that mission; but if those features form and differentiate themselves only in unchecked/haphazard manner, we're very likely to simply end up with some being outright better than others, so we probably ought to in some cases jump ahead to a particular featural goal that the means seems to lend themselves towards and make sure that organic design still adds up to parity. That bridge between means and features shouldn't feel reductive, but the end result relevant to compositional choice (rather than just whom one most wants to main generally) needs attention, too.

I realize that may sound a little bit opposite to what I said to Renathras earlier, so let me point out the threshold I think is key. Organic design is good -- really good. Whatever the theme seems to want, it should expand into. But theme is also contextual, and composition is based out around features, not how it feels to arrive at them. That means we do need to make sure the end-results of those jobs will feel roughly balanced to those working alongside those jobs, as well, which may take some focusing a little bit more on certain branches of those themes and a little less on others with an aim at those end-goals. That does not mean we should template, or fixate on certain end-goals while still in the earlyish design process of maximizing the fun of a given theme gameplay-wise, but we do have to look at how these choices fit in among others.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

If we want to make the relationship between pure healer and barrier healer more distinct and meaningful, a hurdle you have to deal with is ensuring both feel good during 4-man content, especially if Criterion is going to be a thing.

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Are there really any novel challenges to pure/barrier balance likely to arise from 4-manning, though? I would think the only issue 4-manning has would be the undervaluing of AoE heals if AoEs were actually balanced for 8-mans (but, instead they're already balanced for 4-man and therefore just so overpowered in 8-mans as to essentially wipe out most spot-healing).

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The idea of having pure healers have the ability to burst heal while barrier healers can't, and barrier healers have the ability to mitigate but pure healers can't, and the two are meant to cover one another could work in theory.

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Which... sounds(?) fine, if only the situations actually allowed for it... and if it wouldn't have such an adverse effect on queues in the case that these things were actually needed (demanding sub-role matchmaking), rather than simply capable of smoothing things out. (Granted, come to think of it, multi-job queuing --or the ability to swap jobs out of combat even in instances if in certain conditions-- would fix that issue, among others, too.)

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When I say opportunity cost, it should be a cost of DPS uptime. In other words, in order for SCH or SGE to burst heal, they have no choice but to stop attacking, and spend the next couple GCDs using their clutch burst button. The same is true inversely with pure healers and mitigation/barrier tools.

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Sounds fine, even if a bit... lackluster, I guess? Granted, any argument against that would depend on a context in which the game isn't 99.9% centered on just total damage doable over {fight length}.

If I'm understanding right, your point is that (assuming we're on about PF randoms) 'people won't have a reason to take a Damage-to-heal healer like SGE over a more standard style healer like SCH, because there's someone who would prefer to play SCH in the queue'? But we don't take people in PF based on class outside of, as you say, terrible balance (cough MCH) or super-bull-unfun-but-necessary cheese choices (cough P3S AST), we just roll with whatever we get. Heck, even in week 1 prog groups I've been in often don't lock BLM out, they don't care enough about the additional Res. If you know your class, you get in, seems to be the way it goes. So, a more 'technical' healer like a SGE would not see trouble getting into parties.

As for statics, it depends on the level of skill of the static. You know the bell curve meme? I'd think the casual (left) side would say 'play what you want lmao', the middle 'think they're good but actually they're kinda not' Dunning-Kruger players would whine and complain to 'only play the meta' (as they do atm, so nothing is changing), and the super hardcore (right) would say 'play what you want lmao', cos they're skilled enough to make anything work. Heck, there was a week 1 clear of P8S with a MCH, despite both MCH being 'not great' at the time (it's had 3? rounds of buffs since then) AND Heph's HP was nerfed by like 2-3% since.

As for design, while 'organic design' (at least, what I think you're on about) is cool, you have to consider that certain things need to be set in stone designwise, else you end up with weird stuff like 'Fuma is better than Raiton' and 'Fuma-Katon-Doton TCJs are a DPS increase'. The 'features' of SGE, I'd argue, would be the lines on the slide at Fanfest, and Yoshi-P's description of it. Namely, 'Temporarily augments own skills' and 'can heal by dealing damage'. So that's what I used to make my list o' ideas. The 'how' of how it'd augment it's skills, or 'heal by doing damage' would be up to SE to create, but I think there's some versatility in how you'd choose to heal on it. Augments, Addersgall spenders, GCD healing if you're really on panic-mode.

And personally, I wish 'Pure vs Barrier' referred to what they provide, when I heard 'barrier' the first time I thought Virus, Disable, Eye4Eye, etc. But no, what we have is not a distinction in gameplay, nor in what they provide. Pures can provide mit and shields, Barriers can provide pure healing throughput. I guess what it refers to is 'what is available as a zero-CD GCD, shield or regen effect?' But even then, AST presses one button and can suddenly provide both, so who knows at this point? 's why I made that thread, to complain that the split doesn't work, and rather than spend MORE time trying to fix it, I'd rather they just throw it out as a failed experiment, as they did with MT/OT split. Give WHM Stoneskin/SS2, upgrade them to Afflatus Whatever, give AST Nocturnal Sect back, let them swap in combat

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

If I'm understanding right, your point is that (assuming we're on about PF randoms) 'people won't have a reason to take a Damage-to-heal healer like SGE over a more standard style healer like SCH, because there's someone who would prefer to play SCH in the queue'? But we don't take people in PF based on class outside of, as you say, terrible balance (cough MCH) or super-bull-unfun-but-necessary cheese choices (cough P3S AST), we just roll with whatever we get. Heck, even in week 1 prog groups I've been in often don't lock BLM out, they don't care enough about the additional Res. If you know your class, you get in, seems to be the way it goes. So, a more 'technical' healer like a SGE would not see trouble getting into parties.

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We don't presently care which healers we typically get... because they're all the same.

If we stop making them all basically the same, though, then there's a decent chance they'd each be better at different things, so it then becomes important to be sure that one's advantage doesn't apply to 95% of situations while the others' apply to at most some 20%. (See Warrior in the HW hen house.)

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You know the bell curve meme? I'd think the casual (left) side would say 'play what you want lmao', the middle 'think they're good but actually they're kinda not' Dunning-Kruger players would whine and complain to 'only play the meta' (as they do atm, so nothing is changing), and the super hardcore (right) would say 'play what you want lmao', cos they're skilled enough to make anything work.

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That seems to completely align with what I've seen from WoW, GW2, BDO, etc., too. Yeah, sounds right to me.

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features

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Just to be clear, when I see features as relevant to a party to inform the decision of whom to take, I'm talking about what they offer the party, not what gameplay fixtures the user acts through in order to do what they do for that party. Those features, then, would be things like different particular cheese strats unlocked, being able to compensate for poorer party DPS through a short but demanding DPS check, the new opportunities they offer to/within a fight.

That's not to say jobs must have those distinct features, though I suspect truly distinct means would almost certainly end up at that extreme, but simply that it can't be that just one job uniquely has them or that just one job uniquely doesn't.

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I guess what it refers to is 'what is available as a zero-CD GCD, shield or regen effect?

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Exactly; it seems to be who can spam what, not who can do what.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

And personally, I wish 'Pure vs Barrier' referred to what they provide, when I heard 'barrier' the first time I thought Virus, Disable, Eye4Eye, etc. But no, what we have is not a distinction in gameplay, nor in what they provide. Pures can provide mit and shields, Barriers can provide pure healing throughput. I guess what it refers to is 'what is available as a zero-CD GCD, shield or regen effect?' But even then, AST presses one button and can suddenly provide both, so who knows at this point? 's why I made that thread, to complain that the split doesn't work, and rather than spend MORE time trying to fix it, I'd rather they just throw it out as a failed experiment, as they did with MT/OT split. Give WHM Stoneskin/SS2, upgrade them to Afflatus Whatever, give AST Nocturnal Sect back, let them swap in combat

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The split is mostly which ones can cast and provide shields (Adlo, Succor, Seraph, Eukrasian Diagnosis, Eukrasian Prognosis, Haima, Panhaima, Holos now) and mitigation (...yeah, ALL those mitigation buttons) and who...can't. Pure healers each have one mitigation button (Temperance per 2 min and Collective Unconscious per 1 min) and have a 2 charge single target shield (Divine Benison / Celestial Intersection) and a single target mitigation effect (Aquaveil / Exaltation). They have no party shields and no high uptime mitigation potential, though AST's isn't terrible because it's up frequently (and it has buffs), which is why AST is still allowed to be in the meta.

The reason it doesn't work is because SCH and SGE's healing is on par with AST and WHM's. Not their spam GCD heals, but their oGCD heals are ridiculously powerful, and up very frequently. (Though their spam heals are not, when the shields are factored in, really weaker - e.g. Eukrasian Diagnosis' heal + shield is more potency than Cure 2's heal is.)

SGE and SCH have 4 oGCD heals that can be used frequently with AF/AG, including both single target and AOE that are about as powerful as Cure 2/Tetra/Solace and Medica/Assize, and the AOE one is only limited by a 30 sec CD. They also both have a mitigation on that same CD that also has a regen effect not too much weaker than Medica 2's. And this is all free for SCH and only costs SGE a 100 potency Energy Drain, as they're all oGCD. SGE is, in fact, encouraged to burn AG stacks to keep its MP pool up since each gives 7% MP on use. Meaning not only is there no loss, there's a gain.

SGE further has Physis, which is powerful. Holos is powerful. Haima and Panhaima are powerful. Pepsis can turn a meh GCD into a pretty nice heal. Zoe can turn a nice AOE heal from Pneuma into a damage neutral Cure 3 and some change or Eukrasian shields into something actually useful. Krasis (as I recently learned) can be super useful with Soteria but also for making big tank shields, and Eukrasia Dosis is not QUITE instant cast but responsive enough to whip out right before a tank buster, possibly using Pepsis on the back end to heal any damage with whatever's left of the shield. And SGE also heals its Kardia target for roughly 1/4th of a Cure 2/Tetra completely free in terms of GCD, damage lost, or MP cost of the heal.

In addition to the above on AF, SCH also has free healing with Eos, a powerful party HoT with Whispering Dawn, a meh but useful supplemental party heal with Fey Blessing, a healing power boost (and magic damage resist, which is what most raidwides are) in Fey Illumination, damage mitigation (and speed boost) in Expedience, further shields (that stack) with Serap and Consolation, boosted single target healing with Protraction, frankly ridiculous shielding with Protraction + Recitation + Adlo + Deployment Tactics (Recitation can also be used on Indom and Excogitation and does not compete with Energy Drain potency loss because it can't be used for that so there's no contest), directed nearly free (since you're spending AF and not overcapping it, nor are you using Faerie Gauge for anything else anyway) healing with Aetherpact, the ability to turn Adlo into a stronger Cure 2 or Succor into a stronger Medica once per 15 seconds (FIFTEEN! This ability is practically up again just after you use it!) with Emergency Tactics, the ability to boost healing even further (for the Adlo spread or for the Emergency Tactics) with Dissipation (which also grants yet more AF stacks), and on top of all that, brings Chain Strategem.

The Barrier healers can provide nearly the same raw healing as the Pure healers can. So it's not even a Pure / Barrier split. It's a Pure / Barrier + Pure split, as the Barrier side can provide the same healing as a Pure healer anyway for all practical intents and purposes.

Sure, WHM can spam Cure 3 (briefly), but outside of JUST that, every other healing tool WHM has, SCH and SGE can match, and with either short enough CDs they can use them frequently, longer CDs but enough abilities they can cycle through them and still have plenty to spare, or outright with their GCD heals being as strong as Medica and Cure 2 once we include the shield components (or outright stronger when we consider Emergency Tactics / Pepsis as short CDs that can be used to boost those shields into raw healing and will be up almost every time you need them anyway.)

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Either the Barrier Healers' heals are too strong, or the Pure Healers' heals are too weak (and as I said before, WHM's are too MP inefficient for protracted spamming anyway, somewhat negating their power). It's one thing to be able to heal 4 man content, but point for point, Barrier healers can output as much raw healing in many cases as Pure Healers (in short bursts - which is what encounter design demands) and then all those CDs are up again by the next time healing is needed.

Incidentally, you missed neutral sect, so this part "They have no party shields and no high uptime mitigation potential, though AST's isn't terrible because it's up frequently " , so I would say that "isn't terrible" doesn't apply in many cases.

Besides, nobody takes AST over WHM for mitigation of all things.
AST is meta if people go for strong comps because it has higher rDPS and synergizes better with the even heavier focus on 2min burst since EW. If you want more mitigation than SCH or SGE alone can bring, you have your 4 dps and 2 tanks for it.

Barrier healers provide the same and occasionally even more raw healing via oGCDs than pure healers while also having mitigation. Which is why SGE/ SCH was so busted right from the start and still is while WHM/ AST struggled until late into the tier when everyone was overgeared and tank/ dps mitigation was enough to survive reliably.
The only reason SGE/ SCH isn't more common is because papa Yoshi said that 2 shield healers bad.
It's surprisingly easy to coordinate since only GCD shields conflict and SGE has Prognosis for this if GCD heal spam is really necessary and ET Succor alone doesn't cover it and their combined healer dps is sometimes even ahead of AST/ SCH.

Consider, Medica 2 ticks are 150 now (god i remember when they were 50, and it lasted 30s...), Soil and Kerachole both tick for 100 per tick. 15s duration, 30s CD. For the (arguably) low cost of just two lost Energy Drains per minute, a SCH/SGE comp can have 100% uptime on '66% of the potency of Medica 2', but without having to spend 4 Glares worth of potency (or MP) on maintaining it. It's ridiculous how much HPS the 'barrier healers' have, and with the change that happened a while back on the naughty website, where Mit now counts as HPS, often I see logs where I (the WHM) am doing 2/3 or even HALF of the 'effective HPS' of the Barrier healer. Maybe that's me being trash and a bad cohealer, but I also have the same happen in reverse when I'm on SGE, they have 66%ish of the healing of me

And I think the issue is simple: Healing throughput only helps if there's healing to do, but Mit ALWAYS has some effect. And if the Mit is strong, the Healing required is lessened. Weird isnt it

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

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99% agreed, but...

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Healing throughput only helps if there's healing to do, but Mit ALWAYS has some effect. And if the Mit is strong, the Healing required is lessened.

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Ehh, if mitigation doesn't prevent a death or debuff, it does no more than healing. And if it's simply preventing damage that natural healing per 3 seconds would take of anyways, let alone doesn't get consumed over its duration [more a TBN-esque problem than one with these 30s healer barrier durations], that excess is likewise a waste.

The cap, really, is shared between both and probably therefore should be thought of per a shared term --say, sustain (how much HP restoration or preservation can be thrown at something in a given moment to actually extend their life), which wouldn't care of whether that includes a increase to maximum eHP unless the latter actually does something extra.

In either case, I think it comes down to what we've all said earlier: barrier healers just heal too much, to the point that there is no real/additional cost in throwing up GCD mitigation (be it percentile or flat) for things that don't need their max eHP increase.

And if we want more room to diversify forms of sustain, well... we probably need more damage intake (especially, in excess of our oGCD means of dealing with it), sadly.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

99% agreed, but...


Ehh, if mitigation doesn't prevent a death or debuff, it does no more than healing. And if it's simply preventing damage that natural healing per 3 seconds would take of anyways, let alone doesn't get consumed over its duration [more a TBN-esque problem than one with these 30s healer barrier durations], that excess is likewise a waste.

The cap, really, is shared between both and probably therefore should be thought of per a shared term --say, sustain (how much HP restoration or preservation can be thrown at something in a given moment to actually extend their life), which wouldn't care of whether that includes a increase to maximum eHP unless the latter actually does something extra.

In either case, I think it comes down to what we've all said earlier: barrier healers just heal too much, to the point that there is no real/additional cost in throwing up GCD mitigation (be it percentile or flat) for things that don't need their max eHP increase.

And if we want more room to diversify forms of sustain, well... we probably need more damage intake (especially, in excess of our oGCD means of dealing with it), sadly.

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What I mean is, lets say a raidwide hits for 50k, we have 60k max hp so we're not going to die to it. It doesn't matter if WHM can heal for 20k or 30k for example, as it's gonna take 2 GCDs either way. the extra 10k would not be useful. However, being able to reduce that 50k to 45k is, while 'surplus to requirements' (as it wont kill even if not mitigated), the point is that you CAN mitigate it. At no point is there a 'well your mit had literally zero effect' in the same way overhealing can have. As you say, it might be possible for natural regen to handle some things. But Mit can make things that 'cant' be handled by that natural regen, into 'can' situations. Doubly so when the Mit applies a regen effect of it's own.

Rather than having 'more burst healing tool' added each expansion for the Pure healers, more ways to restore smaller amounts, but more often, would probably work better. There's a reason I found Curtain Call so much easier on AST than WHM, and it wasn't just 'well they have like 4 regens'. It was that their healing tools (Star, CO, CU, Horoscope) are all 60s CDs. WHM just doesn't have any good 'short CD tools', cos it relies on the lilies for its design. Which is fine, but damn when you're out of lilies in highend content you're back to playing ARR.

Maybe a solution is to remove one half of what Barrier healers do, and make it Healer wide, either the shields or the Mit. Personally, I'd vote for Shields. This way, we could have eg WHM Temperance no longer applies 10% mit, but a fat regen like PVP. CU on AST no longer applies 10% mit, instead the regen is stronger while the barrier is channeled. For shielding, WHM can have Stoneskin as a Lily spender, and AST can have Noct/Diurnal midcombat swapping as part of it's gameplay. The Barrier healers will instead have ALL of the Mit, and also additionally room for 'mitigation via debuffing' such as Virus and Disable type skills. Some might say 'oh then the WHM will be bullied into using the shields, because it's damage neutral for them' and to that I say 'yeh, and its fine because it's damage neutral for them.' The WHM provides the shield and the fat HPS after the hit, the SCH provides the Soil to mitigate and Virus to debilitate.

Maybe not the perfect solution, but we seem to agree: Pures don't have enough 'stuff', Barriers have too much 'stuff', redistribution makes some sense

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Rather than having 'more burst healing tool' added each expansion for the Pure healers, more ways to restore smaller amounts, but more often, would probably work better. There's a reason I found Curtain Call so much easier on AST than WHM, and it wasn't just 'well they have like 4 regens'. It was that their healing tools (Star, CO, CU, Horoscope) are all 60s CDs. WHM just doesn't have any good 'short CD tools', cos it relies on the lilies for its design. Which is fine, but damn when you're out of lilies in highend content you're back to playing ARR.

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That's another funny thing, isn't it? Especially prior to Lillies' being hastened to a 20s CD, barrier healers (or, especially, all but WHM) all had better (or, more granular) ways to deal with minor healing needs at no uptime cost.

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WHM just doesn't have any good 'short CD tools', cos it relies on the lilies for its design.

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Which may just be a matter of splitting some of its oGCD burst tools (e.g., two charges of Tetra at just 400p each and half the recast time)? If we're working with a fixed budget, that seems to be all that's possible. Else, we could siphon the any excess/flavor strength from its GCD heals towards oGCDs, but that would thereby increase the job's maximum combined DPS+HPS under optimized conditions, a definite buff.

Aside: The Stormblood recuperation system (at its foundation, more flexible than ShB-EW Lilies, though horribly undertuned and in need of optional spending instead) was aimed at hastening abilities in such a way, but, as a recuperation system, still required that GCD healing be spent to see its benefits; it otherwise considered WHM already balanced until such time as GCD healing was necessary, which then really just meant that WHM was supposed to gradually gain advantage in healing-intense situations. I actually prefer that atop any other system by which to supply 3+ mobile GCDs per minute --say, a shorter DoT and each DoT you cast grants a stack of a buff, up to 3, by which your next heal can be cancelled via movement to be instant-cast instead [otherwise doesn't consume the buff stack]-- and an empowerable means of bankable burst damage as that doesn't require the bloat of separate Lily spells... but that still leaves the issue of what levels of per-execute potency would tend to better fit content, being neither so small as to take an extra cast no so large as to be excessive.

Hmmm.

If any healer could do with 'increase the job's maximum combined DPS+HPS under optimized conditions', let's be real, it's WHM. Back when Misery became DPS neutral, I had a shortlist of things I hoped for with WHM. Misery being 'less DPS taxing' (my method was by making it an OGCD, thereby changing it to be only 30p loss, easily made up for by raidbuffs), Assize 2 charges (so you could hold one for healing purposes with small DPS loss, due to not being in raidbuff), Tetra 2 charges (at 700p, AST's Essential averages to 700 and has 40s CD, come on SE), and most importantly for the point here, Lilybell reduced either to a 120s CD, or to 90s CD, with 3 stacks. At the time Macrocosmos was all the rage in the memes because of P3S, and my thinking was that we can make Lilybell competitive with Macro not on power (there's no matching it), but 'availability'. If it's up twice as often as Macro, it's more versatile as a tool, whereas Macro does one thing, but very very well.

Lilybell Duration is nice and all, but I only get to use 3 of them during P8S whether they last 15 or 20s. If it were a 90s CD though, it'd have been INSANE for this tier, with all the raidwide-bleeds, it'd be up for so many more of them. It'd be 1200p total healing, with Asylum totalling 900p. OFC, this doesn't address the issue that we have too much healing power and not enough to use it on, hence the idea that we give WHM Afflatus: Sanctuary or whatever (and AST some shields too), so we can change from 'Lily heal that will, when combined with the cohealer's response tool, almost certainly overheal' to 'Lily Shield which will definitely be 100% value (could make it so 'if shield remains when duration expires, heal for that amount' for true 100% value), won't be overwritten in content where having it matters (because people at that level of content know not to overwrite each other's shields), and due to being DPS neutral via lily system, is an indirect RDPS gain for the team, since the SCH no longer has to cast Succor there'. Only issue is, that gained GCD for the SCH will be attributed to the SCH on the funny website, not the WHM, so people will complain still.

'Lily shield + HPS pump OGCD' synergizes better within your own kit than 'Lily HPS pump + HPS pump OGCD', I think. Way too easy to end up overhealing if your tools to work with are big pumpy healing ones like PI, Rapture, Asylum, Lilybell, Medica 2 (god forbid)

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

If any healer could do with 'increase the job's maximum combined DPS+HPS under optimized conditions', let's be real, it's WHM. Back when Misery became DPS neutral, I had a shortlist of things I hoped for with WHM. Misery being 'less DPS taxing' (my method was by making it an OGCD, thereby changing it to be only 30p loss, easily made up for by raidbuffs), Assize 2 charges (so you could hold one for healing purposes with small DPS loss, due to not being in raidbuff), Tetra 2 charges (at 700p, AST's Essential averages to 700 and has 40s CD, come on SE), and most importantly for the point here, Lilybell reduced either to a 120s CD, or to 90s CD, with 3 stacks. At the time Macrocosmos was all the rage in the memes because of P3S, and my thinking was that we can make Lilybell competitive with Macro not on power (there's no matching it), but 'availability'. If it's up twice as often as Macro, it's more versatile as a tool, whereas Macro does one thing, but very very well.

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Oh, agreed. For sure. Especially if this were the patch before the Lily buffs. My focus was more on just the kind of thing you're doing with Lily here. If something has on-paper parity but the difference in how well particular tools fit the actual contexts, then we either need to allow for some on-paper imbalance to compensate or we need to differently split up the less fit powers to bring their in-practice performance nearer to expectation.

Sorry that my latest posts have been distracted. Only time I've had to post, let alone collect my thoughts, has been small breaks between tutoring sessions.

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Originally Posted by IDontPetLalas

Incidentally, you missed neutral sect, so this part "They have no party shields and no high uptime mitigation potential, though AST's isn't terrible because it's up frequently " , so I would say that "isn't terrible" doesn't apply in many cases.

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I...didn't?

Note I said party shields. Single target shields don't affect the whole party. (I'm not trying to be snippy, that's just what I mean by "party shields"). So like, if there's damage coming in that will one-shot people, SGE can use Holos, Zoe + Eukrasian Prognosis, and Panhaima. SCH can use Seraph + Consolation, Succor, or far better, Recitation + Adlo + Deploy, and people often forget but Expedience also has a damage reduction component...and it lasts for a lengthy 20 seconds. And they can use some of these in conjunction with each other as well as with their damage reduction CDs. SCH can pair Soil with Fey Illumination (for magic type damage; also increases the size of that Spreadlo shield), SGE can stack Kerachole + Holos (Kera and Tauro don't stack, but they both will stack with Holos)

So they have mitigation that affects the whole party, including ones that are up every 30 seconds, and they have both CD based party shields and spamable party shields that can be used at any time (Succor and Eukrasian Prognosis can be used at any time unless you're outright OOM)

Conversely, AST has 2 single party shields and a 10% damage reduction every 1 minute. WHM has the same shielding (a slightly stronger 500 potency vs 400) and the same damage reduction...once every 2 minutes. While AST's is up frequently ENOUGH to be up for most major mechanics you need to reduce the damage from, WHM's tends to miss every other (every second) major damage spike mechanic. AST's is up JUUUST frequently enough to not have this problem all the time. Each of them can save exactly 2 people from "you don't have enough HP to survive this attack" per minute. And the spamable Adlo and EuDiagnosis (non-crit) generate 580 potency barriers vs Benison's 500 and Intersection's 400...

Oh, I'm stupid. Neutral Sect. XD

Yeah, best part is, when I typed that up, I was thinking AST had an AOE barrier, but then I was looking through their abilities and didn't see it outright (I have said many times AST is the healer I don't play - have it at 90, but haven't messed with it and mostly CT Roulette, Cutscene Roulette, and Frontline Roulette leveled the thing), and so I was like "Well, I don't want to say it has something it doesn't" and so removed it. But yeah, add Neutral Sect's 312.5 potency AOE healing AND they can slap an additional 400 potency heal on whoever the two weakest party members are to ensure they survive just in case. It's a 120 sec CD, but...it still exists.

So yeah, AST is basically a "Barrier-lite" healer.

So WHM is the only actual non-Barrier healer in the game.

POINT: We don't have a Pure/Barrier split. We have a WHM/everyone else split.

EDIT:

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

Besides, nobody takes AST over WHM for mitigation of all things.

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I mean, yes but also no. The answer's a bit nuanced.

Even IF WHM had the same party buffs as AST, AST would still be the meta choice because it has the party buffs AND mitigation potential. The slightly higher personal DPS that WHM brings wouldn't make up for that. With AST you get 0.5x a second Barrier/mitigation healer AND you get party buffs.

SCH is the given choice because it has both. AST and SGE are roughly interchangeable in the second slot because SGE offers a bit more additional protection for prog while AST offers more party damage and half the mitigation anyway. WHM has literally none of the things the meta cares about.

I do agree that SCH/SGE works well because it's easy to not overlap incompatible shields. Adlo > Diagnosis > Prognosis > Succor is the order of precedence, which arguably also favors the strongest shields anyway, and Adlo's crit secondary shield, EuDiagnosis' crit secondary shield, Holos, Panhaima, and Consolation/Seraph shields (and Neutral Sect) all stack just fine.

Again: This ends with the result of it's not Pure/Barrier, it's WHM/everyone else.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Consider, Medica 2 ticks are 150 now (god i remember when they were 50, and it lasted 30s...), Soil and Kerachole both tick for 100 per tick. 15s duration, 30s CD. For the (arguably) low cost of just two lost Energy Drains per minute, a SCH/SGE comp can have 100% uptime on '66% of the potency of Medica 2', but without having to spend 4 Glares worth of potency (or MP) on maintaining it. It's ridiculous how much HPS the 'barrier healers' have, and with the change that happened a while back on the naughty website, where Mit now counts as HPS, often I see logs where I (the WHM) am doing 2/3 or even HALF of the 'effective HPS' of the Barrier healer. Maybe that's me being trash and a bad cohealer, but I also have the same happen in reverse when I'm on SGE, they have 66%ish of the healing of me

And I think the issue is simple: Healing throughput only helps if there's healing to do, but Mit ALWAYS has some effect. And if the Mit is strong, the Healing required is lessened. Weird isnt it

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Exactly!

That's why I noted that raw healing always has to be LARGER than mit + healing because mit has additional effects (it's always useful as you say, but it also allows people to survive things that otherwise would kill them, and raw healing doesn't revive the dead), meaning to be balanced, raw Pure healers need to do something like 125% to 150% the healing of the Barrier healers. The problem is, the Barrier healers can arguably output comparable healing to the Pure healers AND mitigation. AST can do the Pure healing bit but also provide some decent mitigation, and stupidly has better MP economy than WHM while doing so.

It seems that WHM should have SOMETHING going for it. Either the biggest heals OR the best MP economy when spamming them OR more mitigation.

"It has Cure 3" seems not to be a valid answer, especially since Thin Air was neutered to curtail its usability in high impact situations. And Lilybell, Macrocosmos, and Panhaima all EXIST anyway, somewhat neutering Cure 3's use case of "spam during periods of high damage to save the party from pulses/waves of high damage". NidhogEx was the "When I learned to love Cure 3 fight" for this reason, but all those abilities, in addition to other oGCD tools combined with them, now exist which didn't then. Back then, you had Soil/Collective + Thin Air Cure3 spam. Now you have all these other tools to the point a SGE could - at level in entry level 90 gear - soloheal ZodEx's multi-hit healing checks as long as you killed him before that very last one (9 hitter) before the Enrage. Which, if you were solo healing to pick up a 5th DPS, your party should have been able to do.

Also, I agree with you on a lot here, though I think mitigation, not shields, is what should be healer-wide. Or at least more NORMALIZED - every healer should have at least one up every 1 minute, and ideally a stronger one up every 2 mins and a weaker one up every 1 min. Like imagine if Consolation had a 5% mitigation when used and Collective was 5% while Neutral was reworked to remove the barrier but provide 10% (basically inverting WHM's 60 sec boosting AOE heal potency + weaker mitigation vs 2 min boosting healing done and 10%, AST's would be 60 sec boosted healing done with the HoT with the lesser 5% mitigation while the 2 min would be the AOE healing boost and 10%).

As we learned from P1-8S (if we didn't already know it before), mitigation is king and when the party isn't mitigating, the healers who can't are blamed for people dying. It'd be nice if all the healers had those tools. We'd still get blamed, but at least we'd have the agency to actually do something about it.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I mean, yes but also no. The answer's a bit nuanced.

Even IF WHM had the same party buffs as AST, AST would still be the meta choice because it has the party buffs AND mitigation potential. The slightly higher personal DPS that WHM brings wouldn't make up for that. With AST you get 0.5x a second Barrier/mitigation healer AND you get party buffs.

SCH is the given choice because it has both. AST and SGE are roughly interchangeable in the second slot because SGE offers a bit more additional protection for prog while AST offers more party damage and half the mitigation anyway. WHM has literally none of the things the meta cares about.

I do agree that SCH/SGE works well because it's easy to not overlap incompatible shields. Adlo > Diagnosis > Prognosis > Succor is the order of precedence, which arguably also favors the strongest shields anyway, and Adlo's crit secondary shield, EuDiagnosis' crit secondary shield, Holos, Panhaima, and Consolation/Seraph shields (and Neutral Sect) all stack just fine.[/hb]

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The answer for what is meta and why is usually lacking a lot of nuance.
If people go for strong comps it's "Would we survive? Yes -> More deeps" - which ironically meant that people switched off AST early tier when mitigation would matter most because their buffs weren't nearly as strong from the lack of gear of the rest so WHM brought less mitigation on paper but more than enough to survive in practice and the reliable dps.
There's also a long list of mechanics or chains of mechanics where you can't use CU for mitigation because it wouldn't catch enough people. Especially on the problematic mechanics that are most likely to kill people from damage taken like Ruby 5, Cachexia 1, towers & birds, all Harvests, Hippo jumps, Fourfold, Snake 2, NA1/2 except for stack, towers. That often leaves huge gaps when you can't use it fur survival.
You can't rely on CU for survival in these cases because you'll not catch everyone and it needs additional single target shields/ mit from someone else for them to make it work which isn't always available or feasible to apply in time on the right target.
AST is nowhere near a second barrier healer. WHM is lacking mitigation but AST isn't that much better off to consider it the healer that brings "half the mitigation", that's just exaggerated.


And the priority for shields in terms of opportunity cost/ efficiency would be:
EDiag (since SGE gets a damage return from Toxikon) > Adlo > Physick (since SCH fairy keeps healing) > Diagnosis
ET Succor + EProg works just fine most of the time too, if someone really doesn't want to coordinate properly then you're, Succor + Prog works and is easy. But I have yet to see a single time when we both need to spam GCD aoe heals, including on the "cursed boss for SGE/ SCH".
But for ease of use, Adlo + Diagnosis and Succor + Prognosis does the job.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

The answer for what is meta and why is usually lacking a lot of nuance.

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With this, I totally agree.

But the reason WHM is so non-meta is it doesn't win any of those arguments. SGE does comparable DPS to WHM while also offering additional benefits; and is arguably about as easy to play once you get how it works. AST does comparable healing to WHM while also offering additional benefits. SCH does comparable damage and comparable healing to WHM while also offering additional benefits.

This varies during the tier and based on gear, but WHM's personal damage is not significantly greater ENOUGH to make up for the difference. You always want at least one mitigator early in the tier because of lower ilevels and that raidwides now seem tuned to where they do absolutely one-shot the weak Jobs (Healers and Casters) outright if not mitigated. This pretty much guarantees you will want at least one of SCH, SGE, or in a pinch, AST. Because of all its benefits, SCH is pretty much the in demand choice if you can get your hands on one. After that, AST is the only one that does significantly less damage than WHM. Because SGE does comparable damage, SGE is actively competing with WHM for the non-SCH spot in early gear levels. And as people gear up and AST buffs become more powerful, AST moves up into that competition since its raid damage contribution is now competitive or better than WHM and SGE's bulk damage.

Right now on the forbidden site for P5S, WHM, despite being the most played overall, is the least represented at the top end. SCH/AST is still the meta, with SCH/SGE being an entirely functional alternative.

That's unfortunately a problem WHM had for years ever since AST got added. It has absolutely no defining feature. Starting at level 1 and being the easiest to play isn't a good defining feature nor should being the classic FF poster child healer and the resulting popularity of it be considered as a class being perfectly fine by SE.
Its personal DPS was always lowest the moment everyone got a tiny bit of gear and from then on it was the worst choice for the rest of the expansion, it had nothing special or any reason you'd take it over another healer. And with mitigation playing a bigger role in EW than in ShB, where you could easily get away with playing Diurnal/ WHM it fell even further behind.
AST mitigation is fairly bad compared to SGE and SCH and not enough in a pinch early tier which is why saw practically no AST/ WHM clears unless you really have an outstanding group that mitigates the hell out of every scratch but it brings better dps and that's its saving grace. It also helps that Yoshi practically announced that you shouldn't even think about taking two shield healers.
So we have AST + SGE/ SCH as the meta, with AST/ SCH winning for dps - as always and the 2min burst meta made it even worse. Definitely doesn't get one bit tiring, nope.

I wonder what would have happened if Yoshi hadn't openly discouraged taking two shield healers into content.
Considering SGE/ SCH even beats AST/ SCH on a few fights at the top end, it probably wouldn't be a considered a meme comp that you just take if nothing else is available and real competition for AST/ SCH, leaving WHM in the dust even more. Because the fact that PFs and statics usually lock to shield/ pure combination definitely helps WHM getting a spot but at this point it's like the participation trophy phys ranged get for providing the 5% bonus.
I really wish they'd stop treating participating trophies that barely keeps a class/ role afloat as functioning class design.

If Yoshi hadn't heavily implied you'd want 1 pure, 1 barrier, SCH SGE would be viewed as a 'real comp' (as it's power level proves it is), rather than a 'meme comp'. And this would have a great side effect: it'd show even more that A: WHM is suffering bad and needs a fresh look designwise, and B: the Pure/Barrier split is a sad joke and should be reverted

And I did consider 'mit is the thing that is given to all healers', and it'd work too. But I like the idea of all healers being able to throw up nonstacking GCD shields, because that way it opens the door for more design in fights. You know how Ifrit's knockback wave can be negated if you have a shield that reduces the damage to 0? As I've probably mused before at many times, we could have 'shield checks' in the same way that something like Seat of Sacrifice has a 'pure HPS check'. And I want to bring Stoneskin back, because WHM hotbars have plenty of room to do so

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

That's unfortunately a problem...

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Agreed with this post, but I'll note that SCH/SGE has been taken to many fights and isn't considered a meme comp. The only meme comp/comp no one uses is WHM/WHM.

Arguably one of the reasons WHM is prevalent at all is that the raw number of WHM players probably close to equals the number of SCH + AST + SGE. I don't think it's QUITE that, but WHMs are probably something like 40% of healers. So even the elitist (not elite) meta-chasers have to settle for them in their PF groups because they'd rarely get a party otherwise. If AST was as played as WHM, you just wouldn't see WHM at all.

One thing that is kind of interesting to me, though, is WHM/SGE seems to be a thing. I noticed in the top P5S runs, there were several groups running that. No idea why, but I guess it works for them. /shrug

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

B: the Pure/Barrier split is a sad joke and should be reverted

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I mean, let's be honest: That's already apparent. WHM was not QUITE but not FAR FROM blacklisted in 6.0 because of how much they had to crutch/chad (depending on your perspective) their co-healers to be competent at all. SCH/AST/SGE paired with WHM's were essentially solo-healing the fights - SAVAGE fights - which says even more how much Barrier Healer HPS is overtuned and how WHM was effectively redundant.

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But I like the idea of all healers being able to throw up nonstacking GCD shields, because that way it opens the door for more design in fights.

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Maybe, but I feel like this is why they wouldn't do it.

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that. Because of diminishing returns and multiplicative (rather than additive) stacking, mitigation has a far lower risk of that. Sure you CAN mitigate the heck out of a mechanic, but then (a) you've used up all your mitigation at once and (b) diminishing returns prevent outright negating entire mechanics. I don't disagree it could lead to fun mechanics, but that's what the Devs are...largely avoiding... <_<

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Originally Posted by Renathras

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that. Because of diminishing returns and multiplicative (rather than additive) stacking, mitigation has a far lower risk of that. Sure you CAN mitigate the heck out of a mechanic, but then (a) you've used up all your mitigation at once and (b) diminishing returns prevent outright negating entire mechanics. I don't disagree it could lead to fun mechanics, but that's what the Devs are...largely avoiding... <_<

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Context matters. Negating the Damage Down in E10S for the wall-orbs (for uptime) is clearly cheese and not intended. Negating the Ifrit KB via shielding is memes, because it's not a threat, just a mild inconvenience. Negating the same Ifrit KB, but in UWU, is the intended strategy for the fight. It's 'cheesing the mechanics' only because the design wasn't made with it in mind. But if it WAS made with it in mind, then it's no longer cheese. It's the intended solution. There may need to be a clear indication that 'hey if you have a shield up for this mechanic, you can negate it/not get a debuff/it's a good idea to' for newer players to understand the concept, but maybe not. After all, how many people completely ignore all the interject-able casts in the game

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Originally Posted by Renathras

With this, I totally agree. But the reason WHM is so non-meta is it doesn't win any of those arguments.

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The reason WHM is non-Meta is because of YEARS of being shafted and people just accepted for the most part.
In HW, WHM had MP issues, even with the inclusion of several oGCDs and the MP restore on Assize being added to its toolkit. AST would go on to receive several buffs to its toolkit that made it not only comparable to WHM in terms of healing output but had significantly better sustain AND offered utility that WHM couldn't match.
In SB, they fixed WHM's long standing MP issue with the creation of Thin Air but shafted it in literally every other category. Removal of Stoneskin so no on demand shielding, Divine Benison requiring Lilies to even work but using up ALL lilies when used, the original conception of Lilies/Confessions being RNG based, as well as the trait Secret of the Lily 2. Let's also not forget that they also decided to just rip out several of WHM's skill entirely from the class to make them Role Actions, like Divine Seal becoming Largesse so that SCH and AST could just buff up their already powerful heals even more than WHM could ever hope to catch up with.
It wasn't until ShB that WHM became even remotely close to being meta that some people even asked for WHM to be NERFED because "It's the simple job, it shouldn't do more damage than the complex AST/SCH".

There has never been hope for WHM to be meta since it just kept getting worse but people just kept gaslighting any and all complaints towards the job because it was "simple" as though that was an excuse. Which is why I can never understand people that argue to keep the terrible Healer design on WHM when it so clearly needs SOMETHING to make it stand out more.

Yeah I keep telling some of my FC mates that the healer role is very "situational". Even doing the same fight is gonna be different depending on the players in the party. Take day 1 alliance raid. The new one recently stirred the community some because some groups breezed through the content while other groups really put up a struggle. Thus healers work very different in those two types of groups, and its the same across the board with all content. I don't EVER expect a healer to do a complicating DPS rotation while they are in a very high maintenance group. I've already got hounded by some statics to do more damage while they still make mistakes in savage content. Its almost like you can't win as a healer, so the feedback is not helping at times.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that.

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It's worth noting that the only shields that can't stack are barrier healer GCD shields. Basically, Eprog. They added a shield to Holos that's almost as much as a plain Eprog. Neutral Sect shields also stack with Spreadlo.

I'm quite certain that allowing Eprog to stack with Galvanize won't make the slightest difference when we already have Spreadlo and a huge range of stackable mit, oGCD shields and tank lb. There are no lethal mechanics you can skip or ignore by adding a Zoe Eprog to the current selection. We can already stack ridiculous shields and mit and Eprog is a drop of water.

Really, they don't have a legitimate reason. They just don't want to change it. Same with many other outdated things on healers, their tiny job design team is already strained simply lining up SGE/WHM and PLD with the 2 minute burst window and heal reworks are bottom priority.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that.

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Yet Macrocosmos completely invalidating certain raid mechanics is perfectly fine (heavy /s)

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

The reason WHM is non-Meta is because of YEARS of being shafted and people just accepted for the most part.

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No, it's not really that. WHM hasn't always been shafted, per se. WHM in ShB was one of the stronger healer options in vacuum. The problem is it continues to not have buffs in a game where the meta is always chasing buffs. You can see a similar situation with MCH. In a vacuum, MCH was fine. In an average party, a skilled MCH would bring more DPS than a DNC or BRD's buffs would. But the meta said it was trash anyway. And so how do they (finally) fix it? Boost its damage (a 3rd time) but also giving it a...mitigation. And I don't mean this as a slight, as the community collectively seems to think MCH having Feiddle is actually a huge deal and seem to prize it as the utility MCH needed.

So it doesn't even have to be damage buffs/utility NECESSARILY. It just has to be strong if its not. Healers could also be balanced based on mitigation vs buffs, but they aren't. The lowest mitigation Healer (WHM) is also the one with no party buffs. The highest mitigation one also has a strong party buff (SCH) which is why it is guaranteed a spot. Then we have AST with buffs (and some mitigation) and SCH with mitigation, and it's easy to see why WHM is out in the cold.

I guess it depends on how you define "shafted", but WHM is okay in terms of functional. SB I would consider shafted. EW I consider lacking. And it's not lacking in vacuum. It's lacking compared to all the other healers having buffs (AST), mitigation (SGE), or both (SCH).

In ARR, WHM was fine and accepted as the "main" healer in parties.

In HW, AST was total garbage on release and took several buff passes to get it to "be good', and for most of its existence, there was always a "great" and "meh" AST spec. In ShB, for example, Diurnal was considered pretty good and preferable to Nocturnal.

In SB, WHM was total garbage because the Lily system sucked buns and the game was shifting hard against GCD heals and WHM didn't have oGCD heals to really speak of to cover that gap. ShB turned this around with Lilies as a stand in straddling oGCD and GCD heals effectively for WHM, and SCH was clunky enough many people didn't play it. But the bigger reason ShB worked and EW didn't is because...


...EW screwed the pooch with the 2 min meta. It strongly forced buff synergy as optimal play. In ShB, because buffs were all over the place and some comps legitimately didn't have buffs to speak of to bring, and so damage was more normalized. That's why PLD worked in ShB and not in EW. It's also why WHM's consistent and higher personal damage worked. The second problem is that SGE was added. nAST was a second Barrier healer, but still did low personal DPS. But SGE roughly matches WHM in damage output, while bringing more mitigation and almost as much healing to the table. Without SGE, the meta right now would be WHM/SCH for prog and SCH/dAST for farm, and possibly solo WHM for solo healing. Instead, it's SCH/SGE for prog and SCH/AST for farm, and either AST (high end groups, AST buffs >>> WHM's personal damage) or SGE for solo healing as both can do it just fine.

So in EW, it's a combination of the 2 min meta making non-buff Jobs, non-burst Jobs (sustained/smoothed damage) less desired, and a healing competitor was added that does comparable damage to WHM while also providing comparable healing with more utility (SGE) while its existing direct competitor (AST)'s healing was buffed to essentially match WHM's anyway.

The problem with WHM isn't that it's bad or "worse", it's that the 2 min meta has force shifted the game to a specific set of abilities being highly desired, a second set being somewhat desired, and WHM hasn't been given either while it's competitors were largely given both.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Yet Macrocosmos completely invalidating certain raid mechanics is perfectly fine (heavy /s)

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One. And they went out of their way not to make another like that in the next tier (not to mention Lilybell and Panhaima have similar outcomes), and that is nothing compared to Critlospread LB3 cheese.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

It's worth noting that the only shields that can't stack are barrier healer GCD shields.

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Oh, I don't disagree with you - this is another reason Barrier Healers are OP right now. I meant that's the entire reason they were skittish about that for a while. Before completely forgetting they were skittish about it. I feel like it was KIND of not intended, since if they didn't care they wouldn't have made it where shields didn't stack. They did that originally to prevent nAST and SCH shield stacks, and then kept that tradition with SGE. When Seraph was added, it was a big deal as a special CD because they stacked, but now everyone and their dog (except WHM) has a party shield. Hell, PLD and WAR both do! It's one of those "Here's a cool special thing, doesn't it feel awesome to use?!" "Oh, crap, we've given you so many, they feel normal to use! Well, guess we'll just keep doing that since it's normal now." XD

It's kind of like the automatic Crit Direct Hit stuff. Felt amazing when you had one or two, but then it became normal AND required reworking other skills and stat boosts because of how they upended the optimal builds and stuff.

It's a lot of stuff like that where they need to really either turn back the clock on healers or go in a different direction or split them or something. But it makes the Pure/Barrier split a laughable failure. I feel like next expansion, Pure/Barrier will be like Main Tank/Off Tank was from ShB.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Context matters. Negating the Damage Down in E10S for the wall-orbs (for uptime) is clearly cheese and not intended. Negating the Ifrit KB via shielding is memes, because it's not a threat, just a mild inconvenience. Negating the same Ifrit KB, but in UWU, is the intended strategy for the fight. It's 'cheesing the mechanics' only because the design wasn't made with it in mind. But if it WAS made with it in mind, then it's no longer cheese. It's the intended solution. There may need to be a clear indication that 'hey if you have a shield up for this mechanic, you can negate it/not get a debuff/it's a good idea to' for newer players to understand the concept, but maybe not. After all, how many people completely ignore all the interject-able casts in the game

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Accurate.

Fair enough. I think they intend KB Immunities to be used on those "intended" ones, though. Generally. Ultimates are kind of weird in that they are their own animal, but not something we can base the rest of the game (including Job mechs) around, really.

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Originally Posted by Gember

Yeah I keep telling some of my FC mates that the healer role is very "situational". Even doing the same fight is gonna be different depending on the players in the party. Take day 1 alliance raid. The new one recently stirred the community some because some groups breezed through the content while other groups really put up a struggle. Thus healers work very different in those two types of groups, and its the same across the board with all content. I don't EVER expect a healer to do a complicating DPS rotation while they are in a very high maintenance group. I've already got hounded by some statics to do more damage while they still make mistakes in savage content. Its almost like you can't win as a healer, so the feedback is not helping at times.

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Mhm. Agreed.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

No, it's not really that. WHM hasn't always been shafted, per se. WHM in ShB was one of the stronger healer options in vacuum. The problem is it continues to not have buffs in a game where the meta is always chasing buffs.

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That seems an overly constrained way to look at the situation. If you could get the same effect, as a party, as having those buffs without actually needing those discrete actions... there'd be no real issue.

That's not to say WHM should never get buffs (though I do hope they won't be more hit-on-CD <5% dmg amp raidbuff garbage), but neither is their presence or lack the delineating factor.

Moreover, the reason for WHM's leading value in certain fights in ShB wasn't anything to do with its supportive kit or even its sustained DPS, but simply because it could cleave adds with a banked Misery. It, in those rare cases, actually offered a potential net advantage in features over other healers.

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You can see a similar situation with MCH. In a vacuum, MCH was fine. In an average party, a skilled MCH would bring more DPS than a DNC or BRD's buffs would. But the meta said it was trash anyway.

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When are we talking here? In Endwalker before the latest wave of buffs, MCH's rDPS (which already includes DNC/BRD buffs' value) was far enough behind DNC and BRD at over the 50th percentile that their advantage in aDPS (i.e., how well they could exploit raidwide buffs) wasn't about to make up for it.

Assuming you had a player with equal skill in practice on any of the three jobs, it'd be in the party's favor at that time for them not to take MCH, even before accounting for the further advantage in non-rDPS utility DNC and BRD hold over MCH.

Uh...I'm not sure WHM's value in fights was because once every 60 seconds it could cleave 2 adds for around 1200 potency (once all buffs factored in) Misery.

WHM's value in ShB was its raw healing (pre-nerf Thin Air Cure 3 spam made anything that didn't outright kill the party and that people could stack for entirely survivable, largely by WHM solo spamming Cure 3) and WHM's consistent DPS in the pre-2 min meta buff world where sustained consistently high damage actually was more relevant than high burst buff window damage and said buffs.

.

As for MCH: For most PF groups, the team as a whole isn't above 50%, so MCH's damage was comparable. Moreover, with lower skilled parties (the average in PF and in random ques), a decent MCH was doing comparable overall damage to a decent DNC/BRD if they were in a party of low-gear middle-to-scrub level players (e.g. the average playerbase)

In other words, MCH was the better option to the average player party. You know, those people who don't know what the Balance is and eat crayons while waiting for their ques to pop. :) But because the meta said it was trash, people who were WELL below the meta even mattering were ditching it for DNC/BRD even though MCH would have brought their party more damage in the content they were running (stuff like HydEx farm parties and the like).

It's in the party's favor to have a DNC/BRD if the party collectively is anywhere above 60%. It's not if they're collectively below 40%.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Accurate.

Fair enough. I think they intend KB Immunities to be used on those "intended" ones, though. Generally. Ultimates are kind of weird in that they are their own animal, but not something we can base the rest of the game (including Job mechs) around, really.

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We can definitely salvage parts that are useful and can be made to fit with the 'rest of the game' though. There's a fair few things we see that some of the ultimate raiders will make comparisons to. For example, in the latest EX there's a bit where 2 people have to take tethers, and keep swapping who's taking them before the stacks they give hit 5. At the same time, 'limit cut' numbers are above people's heads, saying who's gonna get cleaved. As soon as I saw it, I said 'ah wormhole' and we tried to solve it in the same way, ie 5/6 takes the tethers first, so there's time for the debuff to fall off before their cleave. It's actually 7/8 who start with the tether here, but the point remains the same: I associated it with an ultimate mechanic, and it turned out to be very similar solution. They love to do this with other mechanics from savage too. EG: the patch after Titan and his big halfroom punches, we got Engels in the 24man and his big halfroom punches.

People say 'dynamo/chariot' for in/outs because of UCOB, people say 'rot' for literally any mechanic where a debuff is passed via contact (even if the debuff doesn't work like rot, 'it times out you die' is rot everything else isn't), people say 'limit cut' every time a 1-8 number appears above their head

And for the UWU KB, negation via shield was definitely the intended solution. At the time of release, BRD and MCH did not have Arm's Length in their kit. Nor did tanks, PLD had Tempered Will, WAR had Holmgang and IR (if it lined up), and DRK had to try and time it right with Plunge. And at the time, Plunge's animation-vs-effect difference was awful. Like, Benediction level of delay. Still remember having to use Cover as PLD to allow both myself and the BRD to avoid getting kb'd by Vacuum Wave in Exdeath (doorboss ver), had a macro for it and everything.

Reminiscing aside, yeh, we could definitely have mechanics which say 'hey have a shield on for this'. As a very quick example, let's take an example boss, who has a raidwide called, idk Blast Wave. Instead of casting it, and it does damage once, we could have this raidwide do TWO instances of damage. One with a static value of say, 200 damage, and one that is scaled to however much for the raid's difficulty. This '200 damage' raidwide could be flagged as 'unique' damage typing, or even better, introduce a new 'yellow shield' icon to say 'hey shield against this one to negate something'. Since that 200 damage is calculated 'first', the shields you apply would protect against it before the 'real damage', and it's such a low amount of damage, literally any shielding at all will protect you against it. Debuffs would be even easier. Have a raidwide that applies a debuff, with a description saying 'Does X effect. Fully negating the damage of the attack that applied this debuff will prevent it's application.'

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

We can definitely salvage parts that are useful and can be made to fit with the 'rest of the game' though. There's a fair few things we see that some of the ultimate raiders will make comparisons to. For example, in the latest EX there's a bit where 2 people have to take tethers, and keep swapping who's taking them before the stacks they give hit 5. At the same time, 'limit cut' numbers are above people's heads, saying who's gonna get cleaved. As soon as I saw it, I said 'ah wormhole' and we tried to solve it in the same way, ie 5/6 takes the tethers first, so there's time for the debuff to fall off before their cleave. It's actually 7/8 who start with the tether here, but the point remains the same: I associated it with an ultimate mechanic, and it turned out to be very similar solution. They love to do this with other mechanics from savage too. EG: the patch after Titan and his big halfroom punches, we got Engels in the 24man and his big halfroom punches.

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Right, but this is exactly why this doesn't work: That mechanic has been unclearable in PF so far. Either people do enough damage to clear the boss before it starts (which is possible) or it wipes parties. Most of us have no idea what "Wormhole" is. I saw it come up in a Reddit discussion where people were talking about how hard the mechanic was and I pointed out it's the most difficult version of Limit Cut I've ever seen, and someone said "It's easy, it's just like Wormhole", and everyone else in the thread was like "wtf is 'wormhole'? o.O"

Mechanics that aren't obvious aren't obvious.

As a healer, I figured out a while back no damage negates knockbacks, but that's because I've been healing since 2.3 and noticed it in my Praetorium runs (Ultima Weapon) where sometimes I'd get punted and other times I did not, and I eventually figured out that was what was going on. Had I been a Tank or DPS, I don't think I ever would have realized that was going on.

I've literally never heard anyone say "dynamo/chariot". People say "in/out" or "ring/point blank". Rarely (Hunt community), you'll hear "Bog/Flush" because of ShB's Mudman A Rank, but usually people only say it related to that fight. I've never heard "dynamo/chariot" before ever. I think you're overestimating how universal things within your subgroup of the community are to the community at large. I've also never heard "rot". The term is "tethers". Most people also say "cleaves" not "Limit Cut". Raiders say "Limit Cut". Everyone else calls them "cleaves".

UWU or original? I'm trying to remember when UWU came out, but everyone's had a KB since they implemented Role Actions in place of Cross-Class, right? I never remember when that was, but I think it was when SB/4.0 came out. Though I guess maybe it was just Melee at the time...? But either way, that was kind of my point: The Devs demand more from Ultimate raiders, who have to know a lot of specifics and special nuance. For example, people at one time knew that Fleche used Piercing damage type. :)

Though I do agree there could be a "shield this" indicator. I mean, we have all kinds now, from stack to spread to lightning rod to prey and on and on. They could have some kind of "this needs to be shielded" indicator just the same.

I'm more saying I highly doubt they'll do it. Could be wrong, but seems like it.

What they'd do instead of weird debuffs, though, would probably just be make attacks that one-shot unshielded people. But then we still run into the mitigation vs shielding thing. They also prefer people being able to avoid stuff like that unless it's a healing check (e.g. the bleed in ZodEx), but in those cases, they're designed to be healing checks (spamming heals/oGCDs after the damage), not pre-sheidling checks that are just a "can you press button <AOE shield> before a mechanic or fail?"

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Originally Posted by Beddict

There were two questions, transcript is on Reddit here.

Question 1:

Question 2:

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This was eye opening, thank you. I hope they continue with the road started from P8S, is a step in the right direction.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Though I do agree there could be a "shield this" indicator. I mean, we have all kinds now, from stack to spread to lightning rod to prey and on and on. They could have some kind of "this needs to be shielded" indicator just the same.

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bumping old thread yeh yeh, just rereading and had the idea, since we have 'flashing cast bar = interrupt this', we could introduce a new castbar, either of a different color (eg green by default to tell you it's a healer thing), or a shield icon over it to say 'this needs shields to negate something about it, be that a knockback, a debuff, etc'

https://i.gyazo.com/cf11b7870f0de439...f6acb0b87e.png

I prefer the green one, I'm not good at drawing shields. Also, of course, the color of the 'green, 'shield this' bar' would not need to be green, it'd be the default but it could be changed in the options menu to any color the user prefers (for colorblindness accessibility)