Changing all or almost all heals to off-global cooldowns

As of 5.0, tanks only have a couple gcd actions that contribute to tanking. Defense and enmity actions, with a couple exceptions, are handled on ogcd weaving.

However, despite that not being quite accommodated for healers (the tanks have a decent portfolio of instant gcd offensive actions), healers basically play like that to the extent that they can. We avoid gcd heals as much as possible. So it seems like a natural convergence is in order there. So it makes sense to make healers just like tanks in that regard: have a good amount of instant gcd offensive actions, and then do most of the healing via ogcd weaving.

I think that's the way to go if they want to let healers evolve to match the way players use them. Increase the variety of GCD dps moves in their rotation, while bolstering the oGCD healing kit so that healing is done through instant abilities alone except in the most extreme cases that a pause in dpsing is needed for a GCD spell type heal. So basically just accepting the way they are already being used and double down on it, make it more fun.

The only problem would be, if, in an emergency, you would need to spam them. B ut you could allways make a 1 sec CD out of it and slap some MP costs onto them. Which we know they can due to lustrate and Darkknight skills.

I see where you're coming from, but I'd argue we'd still need at least one or two gcd heals for emergency use. Yes yes they will never be touched under ideal circumstances, but not every player is playing under ideal circumstances.

Technically you dont "NEED" emergency heals, since the oGCD IS the emergency heal. (Unless im misunderstanding what the request is.)
If they actually allowed for an oGCD healer, that would open up the possibility of 3 different healing styles.
(1) Heals mostly on the GCD, and nukes mostly oGCD
(2) Heals mostly oGCD, and nukes mostly on the GCD
(3) Pet heals, both nukes and heals on the GCD.
(technically a few other combos, such as 50-50 etc)

Personally felt this was one of the better ways to handle the DPS healer design. (Not to be confused with how i think healers should be handled as a healer role. but how they should be handled in FF14)

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Originally Posted by PondHollow

As of 5.0, tanks only have a couple gcd actions that contribute to tanking. Defense and enmity actions, with a couple exceptions, are handled on ogcd weaving.

However, despite that not being quite accommodated for healers (the tanks have a decent portfolio of instant gcd offensive actions), healers basically play like that to the extent that they can. We avoid gcd heals as much as possible. So it seems like a natural convergence is in order there. So it makes sense to make healers just like tanks in that regard: have a good amount of instant gcd offensive actions, and then do most of the healing via ogcd weaving.

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As of 5.0, everything a tank does contributes to tanking so long as their enmity generator is active. GCD, OGCD; hell, sometimes I think they could just stand there and look intimidating and they would still keep hate. It seems these two roles are constantly compared to one another when it's like comparing apples to potatoes. There is very little that is the same between the two.

I felt that ogcd heals were part of the problem pre ShB. I assumed that in an attempt to make healers use their GCD heals more, SE would either increase outgoing raid damage, CD durations, or reduce the potencies on these skills. They didn't really do any of that. OGCD heals nurture the green DPS aspect to our healers, which is why I felt so strongly that they would get some kind of adjustment since SE wants healers to be more like traditional healers.

The way I feel about ogcd and gcd heals right now is that it is the wrong combination to a lock. I feel that ogcd heals should serve to assist with healing, not outright take care of the brunt of the work. GCD heals should be really powerful due to the cast time, and ogcd heals should be weaker than gcd heals because they are instant and free of resources other than time. With healing the way it is now, devs need to figure out how to consume healer downtime, not free it up.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

I felt that ogcd heals were part of the problem pre ShB. I assumed that in an attempt to make healers use their GCD heals more, SE would either increase outgoing raid damage, CD durations, or reduce the potencies on these skills. They didn't really do any of that. OGCD heals nurture the green DPS aspect to our healers, which is why I felt so strongly that they would get some kind of adjustment since SE wants healers to be more like traditional healers.

The way I feel about ogcd and gcd heals right now is that it is the wrong combination to a lock. I feel that ogcd heals should serve to assist with healing, not outright take care of the brunt of the work. GCD heals should be really powerful due to the cast time, and ogcd heals should be weaker than gcd heals because they are instant and free of resources other than time. With healing the way it is now, devs need to figure out how to consume healer downtime, not free it up.

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The issue isn't the heals so much, it's the highly scripted and predictable nature of the encounters that poses the problems with many things within the game. healing being one.

when damage is as predictable as it is you simply don't need to heal, you can simply toss out an ogd to cover the next few autos and let some form of regen or fairy embrace top up all the rest safe in the knowledge there's no real damage incoming for a good 25-30 seconds or so depending on the particular encounter you happen to be in.

increasing raid damage or weakening heals wouldn't or even hasn't really change anything as the damage is still far to predictable and thus safe to just let regens or pets take care of it. whether it takes 15 seconds to top people off with a strong regen or 30 seconds with a lower potency regen. It makes absolutely no difference when you know theres no damage incoming for the next 40 seconds.... and thus weakeing potencies or increasing how hard things hit wouldn't change anything if encounters were still just as predictable.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The issue isn't the heals so much, it's the highly scripted and predictable nature of the encounters that poses the problems with many things within the game. healing being one.

when damage is as predictable as it is you simply don't need to heal, you can simply toss out an ogd to cover the next few autos and let some form of regen or fairy embrace top up all the rest safe in the knowledge there's no real damage incoming for a good 25-30 seconds or so depending on the particular encounter you happen to be in.

increasing raid damage or weakening heals wouldn't or even hasn't really change anything as the damage is still far to predictable and thus safe to just let regens or pets take care of it. whether it takes 15 seconds to top people off with a strong regen or 30 seconds with a lower potency regen. It makes absolutely no difference when you know theres no damage incoming for the next 40 seconds.... and thus weakeing potencies or increasing how hard things hit wouldn't change anything if encounters were still just as predictable.

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I partially agree, only because even if mechanics were left predictable, things could still be adjusted to keep healers on their toes. Encounter design being faulty is something I bring up often, and if potencies, durations and such were adjusted, healers would have to plan differently to handle them. Basically a situation where you know big damage is coming in 15-20, but your ogcd heals are either not potent enough to bring everyone to safety, or will still be on CD, so you are forced to use GCD heals to get the job done.

Again, right now ogcd heals taking care of the majority of the payload is a big problem. Dare I say healing would be way more interesting/stressful/fun/whatever one chooses to color it if ogcd heals were just straight up removed from the game entirely. I'm not even kidding. I already did this running some content (not current raid content). Basically I was curious how healing would feel if I disabled my ogcd heals and ran some dungeons and trials with some FC mates. I can speak for only me, but being forced to use my gcds to heal made me feel SOOOOO much more like an actual healer. I honestly was a gorilla out of the cage, and hadn't had that much fun healing outside 24-man in a long time.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The issue isn't the heals so much, it's the highly scripted and predictable nature of the encounters that poses the problems with many things within the game. healing being one.

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Yes scripted fights is part of the problem, however it also enables cool interactions between different abilities and that is what actually makes some encounters "hard" in the first place, learning how to deal with that specific combination of abilities.

However, I still feel like there could be parts in the fights where there would be more randomness in damage, like there could easily be fights where the boss just randomly tosses raidwide damage and tankbusters during the enocounter during certain parts, this has to be done in a way though that doesn't screw with other mechanics. The fight design is really peculiar in this game since the scripted fights enable really sick looking abilities and combinations where when you see them first time you are like "wtf is this I don't undestand anything" but after a couple of tries you get it. Now imagine if the boss would just randomly throw abilities around, it would create 3 things:

1. encounter difficulty would be rng based. If the boss would do it's attacks randomly, you would get better and easier patterns and harder patterns.

2. Certain cool combinations would not be possible. Some fights rely on showing you the individual mechanics and then comboing them later on, without scripting this wouldn't really be possible.

3. Fights would overall be harder if the current abilities stayed the same. They would probably need to nerf the mechanics somewhat if the boss would do them randomly, dealing with mechanics on the fly rather than memorizing them and when they come out would just straight up be harder, and I am not sure that is what they want.

What I think would be the right way to do it is somewhere in the middle, retain the scripted combinations, but in between them have bosses do a certain rotation of abilities in random order, and have him replace certain abilities with others randomly. Like for example in start of levi he does raidwide, tankbuster, knockback, platform destruction, now let him randomly choose between raidwide and tankbuster in place of first 2 abilties, so the fight could go: raidwide/tankbuster -> raidwide/tankbuster -> knockback -> platform destruction and after that let him deliver the scripted sequence of abilities. We can take a look what would happen if we let him retain the random ability picking here, like you could have 2 temporary currents and then the puddles, or the puddles first and then the temporary currents. However we immediately see here that the other option is much easier than the other one later on when the puddles actually drop, which some people will dislike, it is a good example of comboing abilities that scripted fights allow and the reason scripting should stay to a certain extent.

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Originally Posted by PondHollow

Changing all or almost all heals to off-global cooldowns.

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I thought that's basically what we have right now and what is causing the problems. My opinion is that all heals except for the oh sh%&£ button should be GCDs.

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Originally Posted by Rufalus

I think that's the way to go if they want to let healers evolve to match the way players use them. Increase the variety of GCD dps moves in their rotation, while bolstering the oGCD healing kit so that healing is done through instant abilities alone except in the most extreme cases that a pause in dpsing is needed for a GCD spell type heal. So basically just accepting the way they are already being used and double down on it, make it more fun.

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The thing is, though, healers can only get away with using no GCD heals precisely because their oGCDs are so powerful and damage intake is so low and predictable (meaning that 90+% of the time tank-healer pairs can play around a far lower HP margin without additional risk). That's not because GCDs are inherently useless; it's because they've been actively made superfluous.

Speaking from a WHM's perspective, the only heal I have that I'd like to see be changed from GCD to oGCD is Regen. With Solace, Rapture, plus our other GCD heals, I don't see a reason to change the others to oGCD,

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Originally Posted by Gemina

As of 5.0, everything a tank does contributes to tanking so long as their enmity generator is active.

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Good point, and it brings to mind the possibility of passive healing via offensive-oriented spells, perhaps with a stance. At present there's only Earthly Star and Assize if I recall correctly, but the effect could be tacked on to all or most spells.

I would greatly enjoy fistweaving in this game.

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Originally Posted by Corbeau

I would greatly enjoy fistweaving in this game.

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Don't we already do exactly that the vast majority of the time, just without needing to be in melee range?

I would say the closer answer is exactly reversed in regards to better healer design:

Change all heals to GCD. There's no need for instant OGCDs with the entire fights being scripted. Changing all heals to OGCDs just begs the question as to why healers exist in the first place. If healing damage is just an afterthought that interferes with actual GCD action and is a nuisance rather than a part of the role. Just make everyone a dps class, make them personally responsible for not standing in bad or eating mechanics, and cut out the middle man of healing lost hit points entirely. Savage fights are already halfway there to begin with.

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Originally Posted by Toystore

I would say the closer answer is exactly reversed in regards to better healer design:

Change all heals to GCD. There's no need for instant OGCDs with the entire fights being scripted. Changing all heals to OGCDs just begs the question as to why healers exist in the first place.

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Exactly! It's what I've been stressing about since 4.2 or so. The way I see things is the cast times are key. These jobs are casters after all, and as the devs have continuously gone away from GCD healing, the further they put themselves from their "pure healer" vision.

Pruning the healer DPS kits was honestly like killing perfectly good grass to get rid of weeds, and then the weeds survive. They tampered with what wasn't even causing problems for healers to begin with. The glaring issue with healers that they cannot seem to grasp are the ogcd heals, and encounter design. Both of which went even further in the direction of problematic in ShB. Now healers are still every bit of a green DPS as they ever where, but many feel less engaged because DPSing as a healer is about as fun as counting grains of sand.

In short, we are stagnant until SE finally stops trying to fix the disposal when the problem is the kitchen sink. I don't think they realize how OKAY most healers are with having to heal more. I love it when bosses do back-to-back-to-back AoE. Makes it feel those shields and regens are actually necessary to survive. I want more of that, Make 'em bleed SE! We'll patch 'em. I promise.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Exactly! It's what I've been stressing about since 4.2 or so. The way I see things is the cast times are key. These jobs are casters after all, and as the devs have continuously gone away from GCD healing, the further they put themselves from their "pure healer" vision.

Pruning the healer DPS kits was honestly like killing perfectly good grass to get rid of weeds, and then the weeds survive. They tampered with what wasn't even causing problems for healers to begin with. The glaring issue with healers that they cannot seem to grasp are the ogcd heals, and encounter design. Both of which went even further in the direction of problematic in ShB. Now healers are still every bit of a green DPS as they ever where, but many feel less engaged because DPSing as a healer is about as fun as counting grains of sand.

In short, we are stagnant until SE finally stops trying to fix the disposal when the problem is the kitchen sink. I don't think they realize how OKAY most healers are with having to heal more. I love it when bosses do back-to-back-to-back AoE. Makes it feel those shields and regens are actually necessary to survive. I want more of that, Make 'em bleed SE! We'll patch 'em. I promise.

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I recently got The Burn again on my WHM in a roulette. Mist Dragon was fun. That's the fight where you can't just throw a few regens and dps away. We definitely need more fights like that.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Exactly! It's what I've been stressing about since 4.2 or so. The way I see things is the cast times are key. These jobs are casters after all, and as the devs have continuously gone away from GCD healing, the further they put themselves from their "pure healer" vision.

Pruning the healer DPS kits was honestly like killing perfectly good grass to get rid of weeds, and then the weeds survive. They tampered with what wasn't even causing problems for healers to begin with. The glaring issue with healers that they cannot seem to grasp are the ogcd heals, and encounter design. Both of which went even further in the direction of problematic in ShB. Now healers are still every bit of a green DPS as they ever where, but many feel less engaged because DPSing as a healer is about as fun as counting grains of sand.

In short, we are stagnant until SE finally stops trying to fix the disposal when the problem is the kitchen sink. I don't think they realize how OKAY most healers are with having to heal more. I love it when bosses do back-to-back-to-back AoE. Makes it feel those shields and regens are actually necessary to survive. I want more of that, Make 'em bleed SE! We'll patch 'em. I promise.

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Can't agree more, except on one thing: healers are more green dps than ever. The constant addition of ogcd heals with each expansion means we can spend more and more time dealing damage, our gcd heals are becoming more useless every two years. Back in HW, we had to choose between heals and dps, it was impossible to do both at the same time. Hell, I even found some savage logs where healers casted their basic heal spell more often than their nuke.

I wish healing was a complex task, and not something we can handwave thanks to all our instant heals. I want to be forced to stop and heal, and not just cast Medica II every two minutes.

I don't think I'd be wrong if I claimed that healers want healing to be a challenge, not an activity as complex as clipping your fingernails when they get too long.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

In short, we are stagnant until SE finally stops trying to fix the disposal when the problem is the kitchen sink. I don't think they realize how OKAY most healers are with having to heal more. I love it when bosses do back-to-back-to-back AoE. Makes it feel those shields and regens are actually necessary to survive. I want more of that, Make 'em bleed SE! We'll patch 'em. I promise.

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SQEX have designed themselves into a corner by this point - both in terms of actual implementation, but also in philosophy. On several occasions they've claimed that they wish for the game to be accessible to many demographics, among which MMO novices has been highlighted. To cater to novice and "casual" players, the difficulty in the game is very low. Even 80 levels into the game, content labeled "hard" and "expert" only set players against basic mechanics and interactions, and often only one at a time. I don't mean to disparage players that have limited time or other hindrances to their performance, but by setting the bar so low it becomes increasingly difficult to marry the job design and intent with the reality of how the game is played.

As long as our tools are as plentiful as they are and as powerful as they are, in the face of the terribly basic challenges that entail the commonplace content, healers with any modicum of skill will gravitate towards dealing damage and oGCD healing.

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Originally Posted by Eisenhower

As long as our tools are as plentiful as they are and as powerful as they are, in the face of the terribly basic challenges that entail the commonplace content, healers with any modicum of skill will gravitate towards dealing damage and oGCD healing.

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I don't know why exactly, but Square seems to be hellbent on making healing the official "I want my non-gaming friend to play with me" role. DPSers get complex rotations, tanks have been turned into DPSers with defensive cooldowns, and then healers get Fisher-Price "Baby's First MMO."

They want healers to be "pure healers" and not DPS, to the point of actively removing most DPS skills from healers (making them incredibly, mind-numbingly boring to play the MSQ with), but they're terrified of deviating from perfectly-scripted fights or doing anything that even remotely stresses the healer (like The Vault or Aurum Vale did), seemingly out of a fear that healers are babies who will get scared and run away at the first sign of a challenge. That's the only explanation I can come up with that makes any sense: healers are the dumbed-down role by design. It would explain why they don't see anything wrong with the role, why they're so dismissive of healer complaints in the Live Letters, why nobody on the dev team plays a healer, why DPS and Tank jobs get all the interesting design and shiny toys, why there hasn't been a new healer job for two expansions in a row, etc. It also explains why healer design is in such a bad place, when the rest of Shadowbringers is positively bursting with quality, from the story, to the music, the tank/DPS class design, and the new trials and raids; this makes incompetence unlikely as an explanation, which suggests that healers are stupidly easy to play because Square wants them to be stupidly easy to play.

And short of Yoshi-P forcing the job design team to sit down and Malefic-spam all the way through the MSQ, from ARR to ShB, as healers, I don't see how this is going to change.

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Originally Posted by Flay_wind

I recently got The Burn again on my WHM in a roulette. Mist Dragon was fun. That's the fight where you can't just throw a few regens and dps away. We definitely need more fights like that.

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A couple of weeks ago I got a Burn run with some first-timers. On the mist dragon they all got hit by the AoEs, the DPS each died once, the tank died two or three times, and we still cleared it on the first try. It was my most fun dungeon run of Shadowbringers so far.

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Originally Posted by Punslinger

That's the only explanation I can come up with that makes any sense: healers are the dumbed-down role by design. It would explain why they don't see anything wrong with the role, why they're so dismissive of healer complaints in the Live Letters, why nobody on the dev team plays a healer, why DPS and Tank jobs get all the interesting design and shiny toys, why there hasn't been a new healer job for two expansions in a row, etc. It also explains why healer design is in such a bad place, when the rest of Shadowbringers is positively bursting with quality, from the story, to the music, the tank/DPS class design, and the new trials and raids; this makes incompetence unlikely as an explanation, which suggests that healers are stupidly easy to play because Square wants them to be stupidly easy to play.

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Pure conjecture on my part, but I strongly suspect that there's no dedicated developer for healers - it's just someone that works on the other roles that also happen to have the healer workload on their desk (because the alternative that there IS a dedicated dev for healers producing what we have now is terrifying). Adding to this, a PLL revealed that high level play testing was done with invulnerability a lot of the time. Only reasonable, seeing how you shouldn't have to stop testing when someone from the dev team messes up a mechanic. It's better to simply acknowledge that the event should have wiped the party and move on to the next phase to test. But the approach feels detrimental to testing healing stress and resource requirements.

SQEX are probably afraid to push (new or anxious) players away from the healer role considering the connotations to the role. At the end of the day, the entire role suffers the consequences.

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Originally Posted by Eisenhower

Pure conjecture on my part, but I strongly suspect that there's no dedicated developer for healers - it's just someone that works on the other roles that also happen to have the healer workload on their desk (because the alternative that there IS a dedicated dev for healers producing what we have now is terrifying).

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I always had the impression---not just for SE but for MMORPG developers generally---that they don't really break stuff up like that. Like, maybe developers don't have particular classes assigned to them; everybody just works on everything, mostly together. Instead of Bob being the healer developer, maybe Tuesday is healer day.

(You know, I just picked that day at random, but maybe Tuesday is healer day, so they're always busy with maintenance or something. XD )

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Originally Posted by Eisenhower

Adding to this, a PLL revealed that high level play testing was done with invulnerability a lot of the time. Only reasonable, seeing how you shouldn't have to stop testing when someone from the dev team messes up a mechanic. It's better to simply acknowledge that the event should have wiped the party and move on to the next phase to test. But the approach feels detrimental to testing healing stress and resource requirements.

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I think it depends on whether it's like the invulnerability in classic TIE Fighter, where you can't take any damage, or like the one in the Halo custom edition, where you can be reduced to 1 HP.

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Originally Posted by PondHollow

As of 5.0, tanks only have a couple gcd actions that contribute to tanking. Defense and enmity actions, with a couple exceptions, are handled on ogcd weaving.

However, despite that not being quite accommodated for healers (the tanks have a decent portfolio of instant gcd offensive actions), healers basically play like that to the extent that they can. We avoid gcd heals as much as possible. So it seems like a natural convergence is in order there. So it makes sense to make healers just like tanks in that regard: have a good amount of instant gcd offensive actions, and then do most of the healing via ogcd weaving.

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No, no, a thousand times no lol. They need to stop the trend of healers being DPS with healing abilities used as an after-thought; if anything they need to make DPS abilities be "second-class oGCD" and ramp up the incoming damage so that 75%-85% of non-movement keypresses are for healing related abilities.

Never going to happen but I can dream :)

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Originally Posted by Shinkage

No, no, a thousand times no lol. They need to stop the trend of healers being DPS with healing abilities used as an after-thought; if anything they need to make DPS abilities be "second-class oGCD" and ramp up the incoming damage so that 75%-85% of non-movement keypresses are for healing related abilities.

Never going to happen but I can dream :)

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My worry with going this route is you risk making the leveling & MSQ experience even more of a drag than it already is.
And given how little regard they've shown for our leveling experience in regards to others, I'm not very hopeful that it would turn out well.

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Originally Posted by Wawachume

A couple of weeks ago I got a Burn run with some first-timers. On the mist dragon they all got hit by the AoEs, the DPS each died once, the tank died two or three times, and we still cleared it on the first try. It was my most fun dungeon run of Shadowbringers so far.

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Thank you very much for reminding me of Mist Dragon, the boss fight that toppled the Griffin as my favorite dungeon boss in the game. It had consecutive attacks, both avoidable and not, different things going on at the same time, hit like a truck filled with anvil-shaped bricks. But best of all? Someone could get hit by everything and you could still pull through. No super strict enrage timer (that I know of at least) and healing could be a challenge that I greatly welcomed with's massive aoes, required movement, dps-checks and ice puddles. Finding a safe spot and hoping you could stand still long enough to hardcast Ressurection is still pretty tense there.

To answer the OP, I don't think changing most heals to oGCD would help. On Scholar I already have a ton of healing at an instant cast. I would like some more close-shaves because I need to cast Adlo or just so I remember where Physick is. Also cast time on Embrace and Whispering Dawn again on a mortal Lily. Having to stand still, even for a second that was required for Sustain, can increase tension because you need to watch where it is you stand still. By doing this and the game keep throwing you aoe curveballs you start getting a feel of each cast and when you can start sliding. Which is why hardcasting ressurection in 24-man is still a hazard sport, and I love counting every second as I swear the boss can smell when Ress is being hardcasted.

Can't help but feel spoiled with all this healing potency. I was already powerful when working with Eos in tandem, but now I'm some divine being that instantly fills healthbars with a little flick of the wrist (Or Seraph's wrist). Back in ARR only instant oGCD was Lustrate, it's power was in trade for the Aetherflow cooldown and sharing resource for Energy Drawin, Bane and Sacred Soil. Things started getting weird when Indom came and suddenly quick AoE healing, my achilles heal, wasn't a problem anymore. I'd wish they'd instead of Indom had dwelved further into the possibilties presented with Deployment Tactics and Emergency Tactics. Maybe make ET increas MP cost of Succor, but also increase healing potency. Or a new offence ability: Sapper Tactics. Galvanize only shields for 50% healed, but explodes when shield is spent. If more Galvanize buffs are nearby they explode aswell in a chain!