Healer Mitigation skills - will you guys miss them?

Hey,

One thing I've noticed in Shadowbringers and since Stormblood is we are like losing a lot of our Damage reduction skills like:

-Virus and supervirus passive
-Eye for an Eye and enhanced Eye for an eye
-Protect and proshell passive
-Fey Covenant
-Bole
-Shadowflare (the attack slow on it)
-Blind on Ruin 2 (was made useless by flash anyways but still)
-Stoneskin and enhanced stoneskin
-Disable

There might be more, these are off the top of my head, I think sacred soil once upon a time reduced more damage too... its a shame as we have like one of these 10% damage reductions per healer now as opposed to multiple.

How do you feel about them, will you miss them?

Healers having mitigation is sorta interesting but a weird design because mitigation exists to assist the healer in reducing the need to cast heals. It makes more sense as a benefit to a non-healer job(or the benefit of a very specific healer job) than for a healer to have mitigation themselves in my opinion, as the difference between healing twice and mitigating once then healing is insubstantial. Like you can do some interesting things with healers having access to mitigation but in general its weird if every healer can mitigate the main heal target themselves.

Lets not call protect a mitigation skill by the by. Protect was a non-mechanic that had no purpose existing. It was a spell every healer had and was able to cast at any time that lasts an entire duty and doesn't interact with any other mechanic in the game, giving a totally passive benefit that doesn't interact with jobs in any way. It was surreal it still existed and definitely should have been gone a while ago.

WHM is getting mitigation through temperance.

Pretty much every skill except the bole and Fey cov, died going into SB.

I'll always miss Virus on SCH the most though.

Interesting points Dez! Originally it is what seperated Scholar and White Mage, making them work so well together, it also helped them feel more unique.

I agree protect isn't one like a proactive one and more of a blanket buff, I think the version in PvP could become a nice lily spell which maybe a nice addition to WHM... but we got that with the wings now so it's not really needed at this point but still could be a nice addition.

It does further highlight there want to make all healers to be the "main healer" and share the responsibility. So now between healers they have 20% party damage mitigation between them, and the tanks have the rest of what we used to have with deployable mitigation, and dps have the rest.

The issue with this is healing may just be more stressful if say your tank pulls huge and your dps/tanks don't use such utility, we will see however. But I feel it will be very noticeable perhaps.

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Originally Posted by Knoahl

tank pulls huge and your dps/tanks don't use such utility

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Well, Temperance, Sacred Soil, and even Holy can help take the damage off of big pulls.
But, Collective Unconscious kinda sucks for pulls, RIP AST.

I have the feeling the goal was to make healers not so much heal more as much as play more reactively, which is something most healers in most MMOs enjoy, because it makes you feel like a real healer rather than a nurse constantly patching people up. If you aren't constantly DPSing, and aren't constantly healing, but instead trying to balance mana expendature with how much incoming damage each individual party member is taking, healing becomes actual content rather than something you demonstrate skill with by doing less.

Mitigation hurts this reactive play despite needing to be done ahead of time, at least if the mitigation lasts more than a few seconds, because it dramatically increases the time to the next required burst heal on the tank, making healing a much more lazy affair. There are things you can do with it (Like having it assist in triage heals, Paladin healers in WoW were interesting because they baked mitigation into every heal making a fantastic buddy for any of their other healers. A paladin made healing as a shaman with good AOE, druid with good regen, and priest with good burst all feel very different. Regen is stronger with mitigation, Weak AOE heals with mitigation create interesting tactical dilemas, and burst heal with mitigation makes a single target really hard to kill!) but I definitely find it sorta a weird mechanic for FFXIV healing because it makes it even more passive than it already is. FFXIV healing is very forgiving resources wise (You can full burst heal your MT like some odd 12 times before running dry on mana using your fancy class heals, which is a LOT), so mitigation is less a resource saver or emergency stopgap to stop a wipe and more just something to let you DPS more. While I have nothing against healer DPS I think it is fair a lot of people don't like that skillful healer play is minimizing heal time to maximize DPS uptime. I suspect we will see a lot more erratic damage spreads to keep healers more on their toes, switching targets a lot, and that the mana changes will make DPS spells super forgiving mana wise but make rationing heals more important.

It isn't an accident I think that tanks are getting less mitigation skills overall so that healing is more 'stable' most of the time, with mitigation being mostly the OT's value add to the team.

I also suspect if they find they like this iteration of healers our 4th healer will be a mitigation healer, sorta akin to a WoW paladin. Having one healer really focused on mitigation over raw heal numbers gives that healer a unique identity, compared to every healer just having mitigation naturally which makes mitigation more an efficiency tool.

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Originally Posted by althenawhm

But, Collective Unconscious kinda sucks for pulls, RIP AST.

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Astro already has really good zero-time heals in the form of ED and ES. And with them still totally cornering the rDPS market on healers I doubt they are going anywhere. Plus, Essential Dignity is probably THE most fun healing spell in the game. Absolutely a delight and blast.

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Originally Posted by dezzmont

but instead trying to balance mana expendature with how much incoming damage each individual party member is taking, healing becomes actual content rather than something you demonstrate skill with by doing less.

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If mana efficiency is they key to this expansions healing, which it does look like it's the direction it's going down with removal of MP utility and the Piety changes, it may well be a nice new direction, it just depends if piety scales to a point where we end up with enough MP regen to the point we can just carelessly cast, I doubt it but it's a possibility it could be a thing in later patches in Shb. Maybe by then they'll have refined the new direction they are going in though.

Some, yes -- others no.

For instance: Disable, Bole, and Virus? Yes. Eye for an Eye and Fey Covenant (because of how they worked)? Not a bit.

I'll miss having mitigation, for sure. I just think what we had was mostly abysmal. I'm pissed at the changes, yet will scarcely need a glance back at any here but Bole.

Yes and no. On the one hand, I miss having more options, who wouldn't? But on the other hand, I do prefer having the short term mitigation like Virus and Feint be the job of the DPS so they actually have some responsibilities, and because I'll likely be shielding. I love seeing the whole party come together to help survive a tankbuster.

Give me back Eye for an Eye though. And Stoneskin II while you're at it.

I like defensive roles, and wish healers handled both healing and mitigation. So I will miss them.
(I play tanks as well as healers, to try and get the enjoyment of both, but instead get 2 roles which feel underwhelming and only half the role I want.)
Id be fine losing offense for the ability to be both fully. AST and SCH were the closest, and still werent quite what I want, AND had other elements I hate)
PLD from FFXI was the closest, using heals to stay alive, and to keep mitigation up, or used at the right moments.
It had little to no offensive abilities, which can suck, but im fine with, if it actually has what I want.

Everyone hates on Eye for an Eye due to it's randomness but I loved it. It procced (mostly) once every time I used it. It was great for regular auto attack reduction.

And it really shined in dungeons where tanks were getting hit by multiple mobs.

They removed covenant, but fey illumination have 5% magic mitigation now. They literally merged covenant and illumination into one skill and changed little bit effect into it. 20% boost for defense was not very strong either.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Everyone hates on Eye for an Eye due to it's randomness but I loved it. It procced (mostly) once every time I used it. It was great for regular auto attack reduction.

And it really shined in dungeons where tanks were getting hit by multiple mobs.

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I agree and Eye for an Eye is great on Nael when she is doing multiple attacks in a row.

I liked the idea of being able to help the party stay alive in ways other than just spamming cures on them, but it seems like SE disagrees.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

I liked the idea of being able to help the party stay alive in ways other than just spamming cures on them, but it seems like SE disagrees.

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It seems like they don't even know what Final Fantasy is anymore, slowly we progress down the same road other mmos have as they've got expansions and reached their peak.

Oh we are getting new players, this means we have to dumb everything down and remove all depth... I'd be surprised if these issues aren't resolved until we see a new mmo in the FF series if at all. Healing in FF can't change without DoT's etc working differently and seperatley. Damage as it comes in right now is always predictable, poisons all tick at the same time etc, everything is telegraphed or has a castbar, or happens with a certain frequency. If they increase the damage intake too much, nobody will be able to really react who is "new" to the game.

I honestly have no faith in the dev team after Stormsbloods empty promises and all the fake things we've been told in live letters over the years. I'm going to wait until I see what they have to say at E3, I'm not really feeling the passion for the FF series after 13 which was at least bareable, couldn't stand how simple and unfinished 15 was and 14 was amazing until stormsblood etc hit. It's just a pretty chat room with okayish combat to me these days.

Rant over lol, I'm glad people still enjoy the game, I just wish I did also.

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Originally Posted by Knoahl

It seems like they don't even know what Final Fantasy is anymore, slowly we progress down the same road other mmos have as they've got expansions and reached their peak.

Oh we are getting new players, this means we have to dumb everything down and remove all depth...

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Nevermind that we see from each MMO that has tried "pandering" to new players that most of those new players tend to be turned off by streamlining making their journey to the latest content feel vapid, false, and secondary...

There's oceans of difference between, say, improving the player-scaling on open-world content -- (e.g. FATEs, in our case), so that they can still be done reasonably by a couple people rather than requiring a full party or train of parties -- or implementing further systems of rewards to bring more players into older content (and, ideally, without creating conflicts of interest) and gutting the experience requirements so that these potential fixes are each made superfluous. What happens to the sense of progression in reaching endgame when endgame itself is trimmed to the point of feeling, in expansion #4 or so, no deeper than in expansion #1?

And yet MMOs still try to take the easy path for design improvements and excuse it as "accessibility".
Don't need to improve MSQ if you can just make it skippable via Mogstation purchases; this is for accessibility, not that vile revenue it just happens to generate!

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Nevermind that we see from each MMO that has tried "pandering" to new players that most of those new players tend to be turned off by streamlining making their journey to the latest content feel vapid, false, and secondary...

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They make old levelling content boring with the changes, which in turn has scared off a lot of people I have tried to bring to the game as it is too "simple, slow and boring"

It makes no sense, it's like they have a specific kind of player in mind they are trying to attract to the game, and it's not the original player base they brought in with ARR that is for sure.

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Originally Posted by Knoahl

It seems like they don't even know what Final Fantasy is anymore, slowly we progress down the same road other mmos have as they've got expansions and reached their peak.

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I mean while FF has protection magic uhh... they aren't generally that useful in most mainline games, besides Reflect. So White Mages mostly busting out heals is pretty normal in the series unless it was a gimmic boss where you 100% knew you wanted to shell. If anything the old heal design (Making time mage, which is a BLACK MAGIC class, into Astro for example. Why doesn't it have gravity to cut boss HP in half?!?) was less FF.

Not that that matters. I generally find such arguments appeal to tradition, rather than based on what things should be.

As for dumbing things down, dumbing down the DPS rotation is one thing, but it HIGHLY depends on the context. Just dumbing down DPS rotations without changing content or MP will dramatically make healers less complex and interesting, but new content may make healing more active. That doesn't fix old content obviously, but MP changes might. The way MP works in other MMOs, the ones that SE is currently trying to emulate by the looks of things, is waaaaaaaaaay more complex than FF healing.

Like I really can't stress this enough: FF healing, even with the DPS rotation, is comically simple and easy. To put it into context, imagine having only 4 oGCD manaless heals, only two had any serious level of potency, one literally was for downtime healing, Swiftcast-Raise was on an oGCDs with a cooldown longer than the time to complete the duty you were in, and your big AOE heal+shield on Scholar took 44% of your mana, so if you used it it was the only big heal you were going to use for a long time. Like imagine having to choose between Physic which cost 10% of your mana, Regen which cost 5%, Adloquium for 20%, and Succor for 44%. You can use MP recovery skills every minute or two, agro drops off tanks faster, more DPS applies to the OT, DPS sometimes get splashed at random even IF they do mechanics right.

Now imagine your Nin just took a hit taking them down to 66% HP, you are sitting on 60% mana and you have to remember if this boss attack pattern risks hitting them again or not, and how long it will be until another attack comes in. Do you maintenance heal with 10% of your healing budget for the next minute to get em back up to some odd 88%, regen them for essentially no cost assuming they won't be hit, slam down a Adloquium to ensure they will be ok if a second hit comes in, pop one of your limited oGCDs which come back slower than your mana cycle does limiting your next cycle's healing resources, or decide to AOE heal because the tanks both have chip damage as well? Think quickly now, the next boss attack is coming out in 5 seconds!

Construct 7, eat your heart out!

I am not saying this will be what happens or that it will be good, or that WoW good FFXIV bad because different or complex does not mean better: FFXIV technically isn't ready for this (They would need to allow in-game parse mods, and even really good current healers would lead parties to wipe on basic MSQ progression content), but it is by no means simple or dumbed down. If anything, it would make everyone's brain melt.

Definitely going miss AST bole and stun. Oh, and protect too.

They sacrificed the more passive type of mitigation for more on demand/manual mitigation.
I don't particularly miss any of it really. Besides as a WHM we've only gained mitigation, so that's nice.

I'm still crying my supervirus.
Having your casters never using Addle is heartbreaking when you know 4 years before, you could do it instead.

The only healer job I've played is White Mage, and not a whole lot of it, either, so I will not miss the mitigation skills that the other healer jobs are losing.

Well, I might sort of miss having them used on me when I'm playing a DPS or tank job. We'll have to wait and see how it all works out.

since dev believe healer should heal more, it makes sense to me that they will strip every identity from us except cure 2