Raise rework - an alternative solution to the current healer issue
After reading most of the discussion in #FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE, and the other adjacent topics, there seems to be 3 main points of view.
- More confident / experienced healers feeling increasingly less useful / needed in easier content.
- Less confident / experienced healers who want to avoid a stressful experience while enjoying the class fantasy of their role.
- Non healers who have / had or are afraid of a bad experience with a weaker healer ruining content for them.
Those 3 groups would all benefits from a rework of the raise mechanic itself. Be it closer to deep dungeon, pvp, criterion, giving raise to a few more classes, or even remembering Phoenix Down are a thing in the Final Fantasy universe. I'm not sure myself of the correct way, but hopefully criterion gives enough data to the team to figure something out something more concrete.
Let me explain the benefits I can think of by challenge level of the content.
- Dungeons:
Healer primary use is raising people still learning the content. If the healer is the one learning it and dies the current solution to inconvenience the group is to make the content easy enough or give enough tools to the other jobs so that the healer death is inconsequential and they can watch the rest of the group or the tank clear it by itself
Having a high raise availability would both allow the fight to be more threatening to players (~30-45s as an average time to kill the group without heal) without having the threat of the single point of failure we currently have.
- Extremes (also apply to easier 8M content like normal trials, normal raids, alliance raids):
The only 2 ways to wipe in this content is either the 2 healers dying (without a red mage / SMN) or close to a total party kill (5+ deaths).
The damage is usually enough to kill a group without healing decently fast. Having a higher raise availability would allow the healers to have a more involved downtime activity (be it more complex dps rotation, a more involved supporting kit or preparing for the next healing phase, by building up some resources)
- Savages:
Healers are definitely needed here, the issue stem from farming run when the number of mistakes tends to diminish and healers are left pressing the same GCD 80+% of the time, and 60%+ of their Actions on this same button
Having a more common but globally limited pool of raise would allow several ancillary benefits:- As previously mentioned the healers could afford a similar rate of mistake than the rest of the group without causing a premature demise. We can use this opportunity to have a more involved downtime kit, something similar to a tank in complexity would be a good starting point at least for a few healers.
- Having a limited number of raise globally would make a single death itself more penalizing, enabling the encounter design team to use different challenges than the increasingly common "one person mistake snowball hard and kill almost if not everyone"
- Address the balancing issue between the caster with and without a raise. Currently either the one without raise are tuned higher and it feels bad for those without. Or inversely bringing a caster without a raise in a progression fight hurts everyone unfairly.
- Ultimates:
Nothing much to say here, fights are intended and should be tuned to challenge everyone in the group, this includes healers. Having raise isn't even useful since when doing current patch ultimate, multiples death would kill you at the phase enrages or next mechanic anyway
