Thoughts on countering gear ilvl (that we'll probably never see): Gravity damage

We've talked about it many times: Probably the biggest issue with healing in recent years is that even if new content is fun to prog, it eventually gets out-geared, as does all the old content, and now there's not nearly enough damage to warrant the library of healing tools we have access to.

I feel like there's a really simple solution to this issue from a design point--why not just make at least harder fights have a gravity damage quality to it? Like, let's say when a fight is released, they want the raid-wide attack to deal roughly 75% of everyone's HP as damage (this is just an example).

Why not drastically lower the potency of the attack while adding a factor that always deals, say 60% of each party member's current HP as damage (the total damage can be mitigated though). This way, as players gear up, a large portion of the damage will actually go up. We still want some of that damage to decline with gear though, which is why the attack isn't entirely gravity-based. As you gear, you'll still be weakening the potency portion of the damage.

Now, there are obviously a lot more elements to encounter design that we can discuss regarding healing, and this isn't the only issue, but it was something that came to mind recently and I couldn't get it out of my head.

There have been a few, like Black Hole on Exdeath and Eden's Gravity on Eden Prime (though unlike your example, they targetted your max HP instead). I suppose you could find an answer as to why they're so infrequent in an interview somewhere, but I guess neither the developers or players really like them when they're so rare.

A 510 Monk has 4644 defense.

A 530 Ranged (same armor class) has 4844.

200 defense is about 1% damgae reduction.

You go from 21% to 22% mitigation.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

A 510 Monk has 4644 defense.

A 530 Ranged (same armor class) has 4844.

200 defense is about 1% damgae reduction.

You go from 21% to 22% mitigation.

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Basically this. The difference between week one healing and week eight healing mostly stems from familiarity with the content, optimized mitigation, and inflated HP pools eliminating the need to shield raidwides. Gear is not the problem. Even week one at min ilvl makes it easy for a healer to achieve >90% offensive GCD uptime while still covering the majority of the healing burden. That drops a bit in later fights where shields are needed before most raidwides, but it's still above 80%.

The only reason that this level of 'downtime' is problematic is because healers have nothing engaging to do with that time. The solution, then, is to either provide healers with engaging activities for this downtime or to dramatically reduce the amount of downtime.

Reducing downtime would require increasing the number of necessary healing actions. This could be accomplished by significantly weakening healing (reduce healing potencies by >80%), significantly increasing the frequency of unavoidable damage, or some combination of the two. This is more or less how healing works in WoW-like MMOs, and would alienate a large portion of both the healing community and casual healers.

You could make every raidwide hit in the game drop players to 1 HP (with the exception of some healing checks like J Waves) and it wouldn't meaningfully alter healing game play.

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Originally Posted by Jaelommiss

Basically this. The difference between week one healing and week eight healing mostly stems from familiarity with the content, optimized mitigation, and inflated HP pools eliminating the need to shield raidwides. Gear is not the problem. Even week one at min ilvl makes it easy for a healer to achieve >90% offensive GCD uptime while still covering the majority of the healing burden. That drops a bit in later fights where shields are needed before most raidwides, but it's still above 80%.

The only reason that this level of 'downtime' is problematic is because healers have nothing engaging to do with that time. The solution, then, is to either provide healers with engaging activities for this downtime or to dramatically reduce the amount of downtime.

Reducing downtime would require increasing the number of necessary healing actions. This could be accomplished by significantly weakening healing (reduce healing potencies by >80%), significantly increasing the frequency of unavoidable damage, or some combination of the two. This is more or less how healing works in WoW-like MMOs, and would alienate a large portion of both the healing community and casual healers.

You could make every raidwide hit in the game drop players to 1 HP (with the exception of some healing checks like J Waves) and it wouldn't meaningfully alter healing game play.

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There is another way, one somebody mentioned in a thread (and I'm not sure who it was tbh). Significantly reduce oGCD healing and force us back into the old ARR GCD healing. Though I don't think many would like that, even if it WOULD decrease healing downtime.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

There is another way, one somebody mentioned in a thread (and I'm not sure who it was tbh). Significantly reduce oGCD healing and force us back into the old ARR GCD healing. Though I don't think many would like that, even if it WOULD decrease healing downtime.

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Converting every healing oGCD to GCD with a longer CD would add a maximum 7.5 healing GCDs per minute to AST, 6 to SCH, and 5 to WHM. Many single target heals wouldn't be worth the GCD so I expect the actual healing GCDs added per minute would be far lower. 30-40% healing uptime would be preferable to the 0-10% that we have right now, but it would still leave an enormous amount of one-button filler for healers to deal with. I'd also suggest putting Energy Drain and AST's Play (but not Draw and Redraw) on the GCD and increasing their potency to compensate for the lost GCD. Playing cards on the GCD would help alleviate the controller issues that AST has, too.

Solution: more debuffs to use Esuna on. Stronger ones, too. A DoT status effect should be a high risk if left untreated. More than one DoT left untreated on the same player should be fatal. Turn Paralysis into a stun. Turn Slow into Stop. Etc.

EDIT: Come to think of it, why does nobody ever consider Esuna anyway?

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Originally Posted by Wolfsbane706

EDIT: Come to think of it, why does nobody ever consider Esuna anyway?

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Mostly because it's not very interesting most of the time. The debuff is either negligible and can be ignored or is lethal and must be cleansed.

Look at how healers handle HP damage. It's a threat that we're given multiple tools to handle. We know that it'll continue to occur as the fight goes on. There is decision making involved in how we resolve missing HP that will affect our future actions. A misused resource can have knock on effects for the remainder of the fight.

Cleansing debuffs doesn't have that. If the debuff needs to be cleansed we all have a single button to deal with it. There's no variation between healer jobs now that Selene is gone. How a healer chooses to cleanse a debuff won't affect anything at all later in the fight.

That's not to say that cleansing doesn't have its place. Removing six Throttles in TEA within 9 seconds makes cleansing order vital and forces healer coordination. The freezing debuff from Icelit in E8S needs to be cleansed from dps but left on tanks to control knockbacks. The tankbuster from the sixth boss of DR applies a dot and a 15 sec Doom to the main tank that needs to be removed. All of these debuffs and cleanses work well because they are part of a larger mechanic, but would be grating if overused because there's nearly no thought involved in their resolution. The more often Esuna is required, the less novel it becomes. Anything more than one or two mechanics per tier would feel repetitive. Debuffs that affect or restrict actions (slow, stun, sleep, damage down) are incredibly punitive given how tight rotation timings are in this game and need to be reserved for failed mechanics.

As an aside, debuff management was used extensively during the Nael phase of UCoB however it was a party-wide responsibility because Esuna could not cleanse any of them. Even if you have no intention of attempting the fight I would recommend looking it up. I can't think of a better way to handle debuffs than what they did there.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think most good healers enjoy the multitasking element of healing more than they do the actual healing aspect of it. As it stands increasing damage is a bit of a band-aid solution to the current level of boredom people are facing when they play the role.

Instead of just slapping high damage onto things they should make healing as a role more busy and intense, making mp and resource management harder as well as creating a dps rotation that demands more attention than what we're currently stuck with.

Healing should be the busiest role, but instead it's the one that occupies the least of your attention because mp management is easy, healing is easy, and dps is easy.