Could we do without healing Potency?

Getting stronger gear is always the goal in a MMO. It separates those who can invest hardwork and time from those who can't and serves as a badge of pride. Unfortunately for healing in FFXIV our healing kits are extremely bloated and become less and less useful as we gear up. It's kind of sad to fight for better gear and then have less fun healing in it. Savage fights and extreme trials are perfect examples of healers being pushed at minimum item level and then having very little to do once the gear score rises. Our single buttons dps rotations then become the focus of our time and the monotony is unbearable for many.

A possible answer to this would be to do away with healing potency altogether and let every ability restore fixed percentages of health. Some may remember there was a time when Scholar's Lustrate restored a fixed percentage of health to the target. Imagine if Medica restored 15% of all party member's health and Medica II Restored 30% over 15 seconds as an example. If every ability functioned like this it would mean a healer would need to map their healing efficiently over every fight no matter how they were geared and use their toolkit more as intended.

A side effect of this would be tool tips that don't have an abstract potency for their descriptions. Healers could communicate exactly how strong their regens are to each other and the party and resist the urge to over heal by throwing everything they have out at once.

Currently, better gear makes content easier and it could continue to do this by its increase to maximum defense for the party and dps output as well. Taking less damage does reduce the healing burden but stronger heals and stronger defense together are already making healing unnecessary in many encounters and that invalidates the whole purpose of healers. If we did away with the improved healing half we could have better balance between the dps and healing aspects of the toolkit.

If healer gear was strictly for a dps increase it would finally make the distinction clear that healers are intended to support their party with personal dps. Healing efficiently would be much more rewarding for players too as it would be clearly evident without gear creep making healing a one button and done event for every raidwide.

Healing with percentages instead of potency would further mean that stepping into high end content as a healer is safer at minimum item level. You know your healing doesn't depend on your gear but your resource management.

I don't think dps and tanks should have percentage based healing tho. Things like Clemency and Vercure should scale with gear while healers alone interact with health in a more economical way to distinguish the role.

You cant fix healing as long as encounters stay heavily scripted and predictable.

When you know your parties only ever going g to take raid wide damage every 37 seconds then its always going to be the same answer. Toss a single medica or something and just let the regen effect top everyone off. Then repeat 37 seconds later.. or at whatever predetermined time frame for whatever encounter your in.

Changing heals won't achieve anything as long as encounters stay predictable and scripted. You can see this because the same thing happens every time the devs try to make healer more important the exact same thing happens. Oh hey its 1 extra god heal and then straight back to 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 until next week where new gear will negate the need for that extra gcd heal.

If you want to make healing more engaging and fun you need to break the scripts and make damage unpredictable. So on the one hand you might only get 1 raid wide boom every 40 seconds. But on the other hand you might get 3 of them in 15 seconds...

Older mmos were much better for this as fights were a lot more randomised and lot less scripted..
Even XI (75era at least) bosses were much more random they could any of there ability in any order they chose and it kept players on there toes a lot more.

Newer mmos you can often dodge a mechanic 30 seconds before it's even started because you know exactly when it will happen and knownexactly where you need to be to avoid it

The idea itself is pretty good, but since fixed healing values are under normal circumstances quite overpowered, it would usually require some sort of drawback, like having a long CD/cast time/high mp costs.

As for the matter of Healing itself, i mentioned this on a few Threads already (and i hope you forgive me in doing so)but so far, every Dungeon in this game can be healed by a conjurer with only cure1&2 and medica 2, even with big pulls. Next, i am going to test this on regular trials and see how far two Conjurers get (If any experienced Endgame Raider with a masochistic vein and natural stubborness could test this in Eden/Omega Raids synched or Unreal content, it would be much appreciated).

But back on the matter at hand, i think Healers would be far better off if they had at least 7-8 out of their 15 healing abilities replaced by utility and/or offensive spells.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

A possible answer to this would be to do away with healing potency altogether and let every ability restore fixed percentages of health. Some may remember there was a time when Scholar's Lustrate restored a fixed percentage of health to the target.

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I also I remember that SQEX renoved all % heals after people were using them to cheese mechanics in Rhamu EX and we haven't see another since. So I wonder if this isn't something they'd ever go back on.

I definitely understand that there are some issues with healing, I'm not sure that % heals are a good solution to those problems though.

I understand the reasoning behind it to an extent. Whenever gearing up through progression, getting more gear makes the fight exponentially easier people take less damage, healers need to heal less (especially when their heals keep getting bigger), healers get to do more damage as well as everyone else so the fight end sooner. I feel like % based heals would just mean that healers heal more when other people gear up instead of them.

I also understand the desire for more randomized fights so that everything isn't so scripted. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that have problems with the scripted fights, but I feel like it results in success being based more off skill than randomness. There are certainly ways to deal with it, but random fights typically mean random difficulty. The more randomness you inject into a fight, the more of a difference between an "easy' and a "hard" pull and it makes it a lot more difficult to balance and keep those 2 extremes "tight." Again, not an insurmountable problem and I'm not even sure if people care about that, but it's something to bring up.

Personally, I think it would be leaning back into status effects that should be cured. Status effects that greatly decrease how much health is healed (e.g. -90% incoming healing) that will need to be spotted and cured before attempting to heal the person who received it. It would nice if the healers were rewarded with paying attention to these effects and curing them. Maybe bombs that would go off and require a bunch of healing but if you cure it in time it just costs that one GCD; curable status effects that cause increased damage (basically, curable vun stacks).

The idea would be that a healer that is just casting heals would _maybe_ be able to keep everyone up, but one that is paying attention to status effects and curing them would have a lot more time to DPS and would be much more comfortable with healing.

Really though, a lot of people talk about "fixing" healers, but I don't think that everyone has a single definition of what's wrong with healers. There are a lot of people that want different things with healers.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

If you want to make healing more engaging and fun you need to break the scripts and make damage unpredictable. So on the one hand you might only get 1 raid wide boom every 40 seconds. But on the other hand you might get 3 of them in 15 seconds...

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Have to disagree with this, random damage spikes would suck since the game is not designed with constant and unpredictable healing in mind due to how taxing and suboptimal gcd heals are mp and dps wise and how boring anything past CD heals are (they're basically another version of 2-1-1-1-1-1-1).

There is also the problem that for those healers that want to try to push the limits of their job suddenly that optimization work would become an rng farm (more than now), "oh fuck the rng aoe happened 3 times in 15s F for the parse" would be very common and frustrating (letting alone that people eating aoes and such is also another form of random damage spikes and its not something most of the healers are fan of), and that the healer problems would persist at lower levels and in normal mode which dont push healer gameplay that much (and looking how the devs design things, won't do ever) so we're left with the boring dps rotation.

The problem in this game is not the predictability but the fact that what we do the most is not interesting, if we dps 80% of the time the devs have to make sure that the dps rotation is fun and engaging or we will be bored 80% of the time (which is what happens now) and looking how the game refuse to challenge healers in 90% of the content what they should do imo is to embrace the "green dps" mentality because contrary to the healing kit, the dps/support part of our kit is static and not affected by "how much damage this does" so could be engaging at any difficulty level.

HP restored per potency scales with gear at almost the exact same rate as maximum HP. 100 potency of healing is worth roughly 4.0-4.5% of a healer's max HP and has been for the entire expansion.

As long as maximum HP increases with gear and mechanics deal integer damage, the percent HP dealt by a raidwide will decrease as gear improves and the effectiveness of a flat percentage healing spell will be equivalent to current healing spells. The only change would be that a healer will be more effective healing a better geared player and less effective healing a worse geared player.

Suppose a healing spell that restores 20% HP. On a player with 100k HP it'll restore 20k. On a player with 150k HP it'll restore 30k. If an attack deals 90k damage then restoring those two players to maximum HP will require 4.5 casts on the lower HP (less geared) player and 3 casts on the higher HP (more geared) player. The healer's own gear no longer impacts their effectiveness.

Edit: Making healing a percentage of the healer's max HP would work the same way as what we have now while still keeping the healer's gear relevant. That might make it easier to think about numbers, though difference between max HP on healers and max HP on melee or tanks will still complicate it.

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Originally Posted by Jaelommiss

Suppose a healing spell that restores 20% HP. On a player with 100k HP it'll restore 20k. On a player with 150k HP it'll restore 30k. If an attack deals 90k damage then restoring those two players to maximum HP will require 4.5 casts on the lower HP (less geared) player and 3 casts on the higher HP (more geared) player. The healer's own gear no longer impacts their effectiveness.

Edit: Making healing a percentage of the healer's max HP would work the same way as what we have now while still keeping the healer's gear relevant. That might make it easier to think about numbers, though difference between max HP on healers and max HP on melee or tanks will still complicate it.

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Also, the player with the updated gear would take less damage in addition to having higher health. It would also make the difference in survivability between tanks and nontanks even bigger than it is now and the survivability difference between well geared and poorly geared people would be a lot bigger.

The more it's discussed, the more it shows that it won't fix anything, just move around the problem.

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

There is also the problem that for those healers that want to try to push the limits of their job suddenly that optimization work would become an rng farm (more than now), "oh fuck the rng aoe happened 3 times in 15s F for the parse" would be very common and frustrating (letting alone that people eating aoes and such is also another form of random damage spikes and its not something most of the healers are fan of), and that the healer problems would persist at lower levels and in normal mode which dont push healer gameplay that much (and looking how the devs design things, won't do ever) so we're left with the boring dps rotation.

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From a design perpective and given the official stance on parsers, any content changes that would mess up a parse are a none issue. the devs wouldnt even consider parsers in any potential design changes.
As for the green DPS i can't see them ever going down that path because there's a pretty large crowd of people who play healers to heal. if they want to dps they'll play dps jobs... making healer dps more mandatory would effectively alienate a significant chunk of the playerbase.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

As for the green DPS i can't see them ever going down that path because there's a pretty large crowd of people who play healers to heal. if they want to dps they'll play dps jobs... making healer dps more mandatory would effectively alienate a significant chunk of the playerbase.

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Sure, except the game is designed with healers DPSing in mind and specifically tells healers that they should be DPSing whenever they aren't healing. Healers that don't DPS because "they play healers to heal" ultimately aren't playing the game the way its intended and quite frankly are being toxic if they're refusing to even try.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

From a design perpective and given the official stance on parsers, any content changes that would mess up a parse are a none issue. the devs wouldnt even consider parsers in any potential design changes.
As for the green DPS i can't see them ever going down that path because there's a pretty large crowd of people who play healers to heal. if they want to dps they'll play dps jobs... making healer dps more mandatory would effectively alienate a significant chunk of the playerbase.

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Not saying that they would do that just for parses, I was just adding another reason (with other 2 more) about why it would be a bad idea that could frustrate a good amount of people (once again, every healer who doesnt like people to die to avoidable damage woudnt like this) and woudnt really solve the issue, what they mustn't do is design the game around people who dont know how/want to play the role properly because then we end in the situation we are right now. Healers must dps, from high end duties to hall of the novice and all the solo quests, all the healers are told to dps so those who dont want to do it imo shoudnt be listened when it comes to design the job as they lack the proper knowledge/experience on how really the role works, would be like balancing football rules around those who want to play using the hands instead of the feet.

In the way I see it the devs basically caged themselves, if they dont want to touch the dps and want healers to have a proper design then instead of giving random spikes of damage they should change all the GCD heals so they are no longer the heal version of the 2-1-1-1-1 and increase the hps requirements for every kind of content in the game, requiring a lot of work as it should be a retroactive process to not make the content from lv1 to 80 dull and boring and furthering from their goal of having an accesible normal mode. Thats why I think dps/support should be the most reasonable paths devs could follow for healer change (and the one modern mmos tend to follow) as mastery of those shoudnt be critical to do casual stuff (newbie friendly), ideally would reward players that have experience and play properly (higher skill ceiling) and no matter the challenge of the content it would work as its an interaction that doesnt depend on external factors, while healing depends on the upcoming damage.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

Sure, except the game is designed with healers DPSing in mind and specifically tells healers that they should be DPSing whenever they aren't healing. Healers that don't DPS because "they play healers to heal" ultimately aren't playing the game the way its intended and quite frankly are being toxic if they're refusing to even try.

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yes and no.... i think the issue there is the lack of dev clarity, the game does indeed tell you hey do some damage when ya not healing but until recently healer dps wasnt even accounted for when tuning encounters. and one of the reasons healer dps got so dumbed down is because they didnt want healers to feel pressured into doing dps.. with the general attitude of press this button if you can. if you can't do worry about it..

but either way. changing or buffing healers dps doesnt solve the problem with the actual healing and that is the overall lack of things to actually heal....

The whole role is a mess honestly.. personally i'd kill toget my dots andbane back but i'd also kill to actually have uses for my healing skills.

the real issue imo is the devs clearly have this vision of what they want healers to be... but at the same time theyre so afraid of even a hint of challenge that there vision just falls apart everysingle time they try and do something about it.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

yes and no.... i think the issue there is the lack of dev clarity, the game does indeed tell you hey do some damage when ya not healing but until recently healer dps wasnt even accounted for when tuning encounters. and one of the reasons healer dps got so dumbed down is because they didnt want healers to feel pressured into doing dps.. with the general attitude of press this button if you can. if you can't do worry about it..

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If anything it's the opposite. With how dumbed down healing has become it's encouraged more than ever to press your dps buttons.
The general idea of "Always be casting" has never gone away. It's just less to think about for fledgling healers now that there's less buttons involved in the process.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

the real issue imo is the devs clearly have this vision of what they want healers to be... but at the same time theyre so afraid of even a hint of challenge that there vision just falls apart everysingle time they try and do something about it.

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I'd say the really issue is more a disconnect between job design team and fight design team. Both Tanks and Healers have more tools to do their jobs with but fights have few mechanics that require those tools to survive even at min-ilevel.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

but either way. changing or buffing healers dps doesnt solve the problem with the actual healing and that is the overall lack of things to actually heal....

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But focusing on improving dps is probably the only way they can realistically solve this problem with how they've built this game. As much as its the norm to point out how little healing we actually do now, the healing burden really hasn't changed much at all in this games lifespan. Going back and looking at some of my old runs, my best Alex Prime had me spend 51% of my gcds on damage while my sch cohealer spent 92% of their gcds on damage. Keep in mind this is back with OG clerics and a fraction of the oGCDs we have now. If I performed better (lot of overhealing and a death by the looks of it) we would have spent roughly the same amount of time on damage versus healing as we do now, despite the lack of oGCDs.

The reason nobody complained about the lack of healing back then is because we were too busy juggling 3+ dot timers and utility CDs on top of stance dancing. Compared to now where you spend all that time pressing the same key waiting for mechanics to happen and hope you don't forget your dot because you zoned out.

Percentage based healing would only work if it were based on the caster's HP, not the target. Making it target based would be OP on tanks for obvious reasons, and would make super undergeared healers heal the same as max geared healers in all cases.

But the calculations would have to be adjusted so that the base healing values are set by percentage first, then debuffs are applied. The big problem with classic Lustrate was that it ignored debuffs all together and just healed a percentage of the target's HP outright, so a WAR could just eat all the -healingReceived debuffs and still get healed for obscene amounts three times per minute per SCH present.

And if all heals were adjusted to be based on the caster's HP, then it's really not fundamentally different from potency-based healing because potency-based healing scales with IL and maxHP-based healing scales with IL, so why bother changing it in the first place?

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Percentage based healing would only work if it were based on the caster's HP, not the target. Making it target based would be OP on tanks for obvious reasons, and would make super undergeared healers heal the same as max geared healers in all cases.

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And an undergeared tank, who takes more damage, is getting less heal o.@

I don't like the whole idea anyway. Better gear should affect all your skills, not just the 2 dps spells. Doesn't sound very satisfying.

Honestly, the issue is more that our baseline healing is absurdly powerful. They could probably slash all our healing potencies in half, and we would still be able to get away with DPSing the majority of our time in most encounters.

It's a bit sad, because as Ultimatecalibur mentioned, it doesn't really give us the chance to utilize the full suite of healing spells. Though I'll admit, most of the actual GCD kits aren't terribly interesting to begin with, so it's not as if I'd like having to turn to them in their current iterations. :p

personally i find it's less a matter of potency and more a matter of redundancy (as long as skills like bolide and walking dead exist, we'll NEED that potency as tank hp continues to scale so freaking high). too much of all three healers' kits was pruned off to double- and triple-down on the exact same healing effects so that an 'answer' is always available at all times to incoming damage, and it cost them anything that they could consider doing when healing isn't required.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

Sure, except the game is designed with healers DPSing in mind and specifically tells healers that they should be DPSing whenever they aren't healing. Healers that don't DPS because "they play healers to heal" ultimately aren't playing the game the way its intended and quite frankly are being toxic if they're refusing to even try.

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No, I agree with Dzian's stance. If I wanted to play a dps I'd play a dps not a healer. Does that mean I won't dps at all in a fight? absolutely not. What I want as a healer is not to fill my 90% down time doing dps with more dps buttons!!! I don't want more dps buttons. I want less down time.

I get it that SE for some Twelvesforsaken reason doesn't want to address this issue, and thus more dps buttons to press would "fix" said issue. My thing is, no. I don't want to settle. And I shouldn't have to either.

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

No, I agree with Dzian's stance. If I wanted to play a dps I'd play a dps not a healer. Does that mean I won't dps at all in a fight? absolutely not. What I want as a healer is not to fill my 90% down time doing dps with more dps buttons!!! I don't want more dps buttons. I want less down time.

I get it that SE for some Twelvesforsaken reason doesn't want to address this issue, and thus more dps buttons to press would "fix" said issue. My thing is, no. I don't want to settle. And I shouldn't have to either.

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That's a fair request, but until that happens, the expectation is for healers to do DPS when they're not healing.

Calling that "down time" is subjective. Tank's job is to hold aggro on an enemy and use mitigation skills. It's not "downtime" when they have enough enmity and a mitigation buff is rolling, but there's nothing else for them to do within their role's unique responsibilities. They're expected to continue to DPS because DPS is ultimately a majority of everyone's role in a group in addition to other responsibilities depending on your role.

Healers aren't somehow exempt from that because of expectations from other games or because of personal expectations based off the name of the role. It only _seems_ like downtime because of the extremely simplistic game play surrounding that portion of the role.

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Originally Posted by Raminax

Though I'll admit, most of the actual GCD kits aren't terribly interesting to begin with, so it's not as if I'd like having to turn to them in their current iterations. :p

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Neither are the oGCDs in most cases. There is basically no interaction between 90% of the abilities in a healer's kit, be it GCDs or oGCDs and oGCDs mostly boil down to "Restore X amount of HP instantly"

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Neither are the oGCDs in most cases. There is basically no interaction between 90% of the abilities in a healer's kit, be it GCDs or oGCDs and oGCDs mostly boil down to "Restore X amount of HP instantly"

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Absolutely this. The only healing abilities I can think of that have depth beyond 'push button, get heal/regen/shield' are Plenary and Horoscope. Maybe Earthly Star and Excog if we count special trigger conditions as a type of complexity.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

That's a fair request, but until that happens, the expectation is for healers to do DPS when they're not healing.

Calling that "down time" is subjective. Tank's job is to hold aggro on an enemy and use mitigation skills. It's not "downtime" when they have enough enmity and a mitigation buff is rolling, but there's nothing else for them to do within their role's unique responsibilities. They're expected to continue to DPS because DPS is ultimately a majority of everyone's role in a group in addition to other responsibilities depending on your role.

Healers aren't somehow exempt from that because of expectations from other games or because of personal expectations based off the name of the role. It only _seems_ like downtime because of the extremely simplistic game play surrounding that portion of the role.

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First off, I never said healers were exempt nor have I said healers weren't expected to do DPS.

My enjoyment of the healer role is balancing both dps and healing. What I am saying is the healing portion of fights need to be changed. Not the dps. What I am saying is that giving me an extra 2-5 dps buttons to press does not, will not, cannot fix my enjoyment of the role so no, no I don't want it. We can do 30% of our time dps. We can do 40%. Hells for all I care we can do 60%. 90% however, isn't fun at least for me and giving me more options is not how you fix it.

Is it possible for them to reduce downtime and turn the downtime activity into something other than Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare? Both? Both is good.

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

... We can do 30% of our time dps. We can do 40%. Hells for all I care we can do 60%. 90% however, isn't fun at least for me and giving me more options is not how you fix it.

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I hate to say it but the likelihood of them ever pushing that level of healing pressure outside of ultimates is almost zero. You have to keep in mind that the healers spending 90% of their time doing damage are usually skilled healers in equally skilled groups that have already memorized the mechanics and have their CDs planned out. If downtime was reduced to the point those selfsame healers are needing to spend +40% of their time on healer gcds, then your midcore and casual groups are just gonna get slapped around and bullied because downtime is designed to allow those groups to recover from mistakes in-between sets of mechanics. The more you reduce that window the more fights become a series of jump rope mechanics where everybody has to play optimally or wipe. And the dev team know this since the last time they tried to push content to that degree was back during Gordias and to a lesser extent Midas and anyone who was around then can tell you what an unmitigated disaster it was, as the raiding community more or less collapsed from it.

As it stands improving our dps kits is probably the easiest solution to downtime boredom, cause I really can't see them changing the content difficulty.

I'd like to see more healing uptime, but it's still a fact that as we become geared and in groups with perfect mitigation planning, it's unavoidable that we end up with a fair bit of downtime. Fights have to be designed to be possible at min ilv prog. For that reason, engaging downtime filler other than healing is important. The other issue is that SE's idea of more healing is just to make raidwides or a brief set of mechanics hit really, really hard but leave the long stretches of downtime intact. E11s/E12s are perfect examples of this, sometimes you need to crack out the GCD heals/shields/mitigation for huge chunks of damage, other times you're safe for 30+ seconds. Also SE seem very hesitant to apply increased healing requirements on anything but the last boss of the Savage tier. They claimed to have bumped damage in Eden's Promise, but e9s and e10s are basically a joke to heal with gear/planning, to say nothing about Normal.

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Originally Posted by Jaelommiss

Absolutely this. The only healing abilities I can think of that have depth beyond 'push button, get heal/regen/shield' are Plenary and Horoscope. Maybe Earthly Star and Excog if we count special trigger conditions as a type of complexity.

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I like Diurnal bubble too in how you get a few sec of mitigation on flash for raidwides. For something like Diurnal/WHM e12s, catching both DD and Earthen Fury casts is essential. Who knows what they'll do to that now Noct is going. Horoscope is good but Plenary is poor design in that it has to be used just before a weave window (if using Rapture).