Making Duties Fit for Healers

As things stand, the healers are made to basically be DPS turrets that have a few special mechanics tailored to them, and to fix other people's mistakes. Both of those latters being recovering HP, barring the occasional damage prevention.

Fundamentally, I believe that how the weights of these are placed is the problem in FFXIV. As things stand, the priority of how duties is made is dealing damage, fixing mistakes, and doing healer mechanics. Yet at the same time, the job design prioritizes fixing mistakes, healer mechanics, then dealing damage. The complete reverse.

The balance might change from duty to duty, but to my observations at least, it feels like this is how the encounters and jobs are designed, especially in ShB.

Now, as a healer main, I do, in fact, enjoy the idea of being the one keeping everyone alive. I don't know how many people do it for the same reason, but I enjoy the power fantasy of being the very reason why everyone else is still alive after every fight. If I don't heal, the tank dies. If I don't heal, the DPS dies. Everything is enabled by the fact that I heal. Each role has their own fantasy, but mine is that I chose who continues to exist and who doesn't.

So due to that, I'm not trying to advocate for making healers more like DPS or something, but to fix some underlying design directions when it comes to healing.

Now, this disconnect between encounter design and role design has been quite an issue lately, though it is one that had been slowly growing for a long while, and personally, I think that it stems from the meaning of the healer role.

What I mean is that you can view healers in two basic ways: the first is as a tool to fix the errors of other players. Someone gets hit by an avoidable mechanic? Heal them before they get hit again. This is the most wide spread view of healers, and the cause of the old meme: healers adjust.

The latter way to view healers is as a method of dealing with enemy aggression, similar to how tanks work. The enemy deals unavoidable damage, it's the healer's job to make sure that everyone's in a position to survive the next one.

Personally of the two, the latter one is an extremely healthy view of healers. Rather than a tool to fix others mistakes, prioritizing on being the tool that enables others to continue doing their jobs is a much more interesting and friendly way for healers to exist.

By prioritizing on the latter view, everyone becomes more aware of their own role, and has to take responsibility of themselves. Though there has to be a few changes to encounters to facilitate this.

The first is to reduce the view that the healer's main job is to fix other players' mistakes. The way to fix this is simple: include debuffs as part of most avoidable damage. The easier a mechanic is to avoid, the more severe the debuff, though this doesn't have to be a rule.

Petrify, stun, paralyze, and pacify/mute. Most mechanics apply one of these status, depending on the difficulty it is to avoid. Extremely difficult things only give a pacify or mute. Perhaps both. The easiest mechanics to avoid give a petrify. The debuffs don't have to last long. Three seconds for particularly debilitating debuffs, five to ten seconds for the lesser ones. They can even be cleansable to give particularly good healers additional ways to contribute, but they punish the one who messed up first and foremost, and in a way that everyone can see.

The problem with normal avoidable mechanics is that the one who's punished by them is always the healer. The one who made the mistake is only punished if they die from it, and that only happens if they get one-shotted, or receive so many vulnerability debuffs that either the healer can't keep up, or they get one-shot.

There's not really much leeway for these sorts of mechanics, since most of the time people don't care much about taking a hit unless if it'll immediately kill them. Meanwhile, the healer is constantly punished for others mistakes, as every time they get hurt, the healer has to take time and resources fixing them up. Time and resources which could be needed to clear the raid. Both between enrage timers and mandatory healing mechanics.

But...the only heal mechanics that are mandatory are raid-wide AOE?

Personally, these are the most boring forms of damage to heal. Not only have tank-busters fallen significantly in frequency, but there's also not that many mandatory hits that don't just target everyone. Pin-point damage is much more interesting to heal, though knowing that all your single target healing is done because someone else messed up is far less gratifying than knowing that it's a boss mechanic designed just for you and your co-healer.

So, aside from the first change, I believe that if SE is serious about making healers more about healing than being supplementary DPS that covers for others' mistakes and occasionally spams heals to cover raid-wide damage, the other change that should be implemented into the duties is a large amount of targeted damage. Not just targeted AOE markers that someone needs to bring away from the group, but for mechanics to do meaningful damage.

Things like meteor catching doing more than half of the catcher's HP in damage, targeted conals that deal significant unavoidable damage like back in Shinryu (unlike nowadays that you can just run out of them), and other mechanics that just resolve in only a portion of the party or even a single player being damaged in a way that needs to be recovered. This would justify usage of our most basic single target healing (though personally we do need a bit of a potency buff) as it is extremely efficient in MP usage.

Fundamentally, SE can't justify the argument that healers are supposed to mainly heal, if we aren't actually put into a position to actually be healing for even a third of the fight. Filling our hotbars with oGCD heals run counter to this, but if it is to be done, then we do need reasons to be forced to put all those oGCDs on cooldown and still need more healing from our GCDs. And frankly speaking, to keep healing from feeling monotonous, a large amount of that GCD healing needs to come from single target sources. Picking and choosing who to prioritize the expensive and powerful heals/shields and who gets the cheap and efficient ones should be a part of our healing repertoire, and duty design needs to account for that.

Especially in EX/Savage, but the same should be true in normal trials/raids so that healers would become accustomed to this sort of thing and the change isn't a massive shock, forcing a large number of healers to simply drop out of harder content in fear.

That said, the same to avoidable damage like I listed earlier should also apply to regular trials/raids as well. Avoidable damage shouldn't go unnoticed, but it is a lot of the time. I've been watching a lot of streamers as new players have been getting into FF lately, and it's pretty obvious that a lot of them don't even notice they're taking damage until they've suddenly died. Debuffs that hinder them for a few seconds at the time would help them become more aware while being minimally punishing. The 0 or 100 style that they're being affected by is only annoying to the healers until the one making the mistake suddenly throws up their hands in frustration not knowing why they suddenly died. And the few attempts to lesson the annoyance on healers have only made the frustration even greater on the other players by simply reducing the threshold before suddenly dying, increasing their chances of either raging or quitting.

Anyways, while there's tons of changes I believe healers need from a fundamental level, these are the two major changes I think the duty design need to make duties more fun for everyone, though especially healers.

You have some interesting thoughts here.
I usually skip over big posts like this cuz I'm lazy, but I'm glad I read yours.

I especially like this part, and think it would be fun/good to see the Devs experiment more with something like this:

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Originally Posted by Dearche

The first is to reduce the view that the healer's main job is to fix other players' mistakes. The way to fix this is simple: include debuffs as part of most avoidable damage. The easier a mechanic is to avoid, the more severe the debuff, though this doesn't have to be a rule.

Petrify, stun, paralyze, and pacify/mute. Most mechanics apply one of these status, depending on the difficulty it is to avoid. Extremely difficult things only give a pacify or mute. Perhaps both. The easiest mechanics to avoid give a petrify. The debuffs don't have to last long. Three seconds for particularly debilitating debuffs, five to ten seconds for the lesser ones. They can even be cleansable to give particularly good healers additional ways to contribute, but they punish the one who messed up first and foremost,

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They actually did this in the DR Bozja raid. Take 2 avoidable hits within a short time and you instantly die.

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Originally Posted by Adeacia

They actually did this in the DR Bozja raid. Take 2 avoidable hits within a short time and you instantly die.

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Yup, and I liked it.
I also liked them playing with giving us damage down debuffs in many of ShB's Savage fights. And think it would be fun/good to see the Devs experiment more with something like this.

The problem with debuffs I feel is most of them just get blanket ignored..

Oh hey your paralysed for a whole 4 seconds. Well by the time I finish this broil cast and cast esuna it'll have worn off anyway so fk it just cast another broil.. waste of time even trying to cleanse.

As for the doom in DR I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand I don't mind it. But on the other I do kinda think it's perhaps a bit overkill and invalidates near all of the defensive essences. I dunno maybe make it only apply a stack if it hits more than half your hp. So thosenessenses would at least offer sone protection. But its bit late for that now.

The biggest issue with healing has and pretty much always will be the way encounters are so heavily scripted... utnmakes thenicoming damage far to predictable and easy to cover. One raid wide every 30 seconds. Wooooooooo... or however long depending on the encounter...

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Originally Posted by Adeacia

They actually did this in the DR Bozja raid. Take 2 avoidable hits within a short time and you instantly die.

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Actually, I kinda touched on this as a bad thing.

While the vulnerability debuffs (and similar) do punish the one who messed up, it's entirely an all or nothing deal when put to these extremes. Of course, if the debuff is weaker, it's purely a punishment for the healer until the player dies from it.

The issue is the lack of tactile feedback for the one who got it. There's no special screen blink or anything that the player can see easily. But suddenly their combo stops? They can't move? These are the sorts of things people notice, and while I bet that SE got rid of them over the years (they used to show up a decent amount back in ARR), I bet it's because people simply whined about it. But personally, getting rid of something because people whined about it is a terrible idea.

There's a good chance that the healers and tanks got so badly dumbed down was precisely because people whined about them. A lack of tanks because tank anxiety? Let's make it impossible to fail tanking so nobody gets scared of trying it out! Healers whine because WHM's never meta? Give WHM shields and mitigation so that they can play with the big boys, and take away AST and SCH's offensive capabilities so that they're on a level playing field with WHM!

It's not like I can prove that complaints is the reason why these happened, and while listening to complaints is healthy, lots of games had died because devs payed too much attention to them.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The problem with debuffs I feel is most of them just get blanket ignored..

Oh hey your paralysed for a whole 4 seconds. Well by the time I finish this broil cast and cast esuna it'll have worn off anyway so fk it just cast another broil.. waste of time even trying to cleanse.

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Well, the weaker ones can last like 10+ seconds so there is a reason, as long as the guy actually has decent output. A DPS out 4+GCDs is worth more than 1GCD from a healer after all. I'm just thinking that stun lasting much more than 5 seconds is pretty harsh every time someone stepped in red.

Or, the AOE could also give a second stacking debuff that multiplies the duration of the penalty. Get hit once, you get 10 second paralyze. Again? 20 seconds. It could keep on going until they stop taking avoidable damage, something like 60s or so.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The biggest issue with healing has and pretty much always will be the way encounters are so heavily scripted... utnmakes thenicoming damage far to predictable and easy to cover. One raid wide every 30 seconds. Wooooooooo... or however long depending on the encounter...

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I don't think the scripting itself is the problem. It's that the encounter designs for DPS first, and only puts in the bare minimum amount of effort for the other roles to actually do their role. Tanks occasionally have to repossition, and healers have a few raid-wide AOEs. What about ADDs? They're so rare now. And exploding orbs? Tethers that you have to maintain rather than break? Just about anything for the OT to do aside from tank swapping and DPSing?

Healers too. How many mechanics can you think of that healers specifically have to deal with that isn't solved with AOE healing?

I'm not saying there's none, but when there's like one an encounter every five minutes, what's the healer doing for those other four minutes 55 seconds? If I'm doing DDR Suzaku style for a whole fight, all the while trying to sneak in heals whenever I can, that's something I could get behind.

I always felt like fixing healers should be simple: more consistent party wide damage, faster auto attacks on bosses, more use of the infirmary debuff( not removeable, reduces hp recovered) The problem is they probably don't want to do this because if the actual healing portion of the job is hard then less people will play the role, because lets be honest at this point in the game doing the base level healing is pretty brain dead(imo it's been pretty brain dead since HW came out).

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

I always felt like fixing healers should be simple: more consistent party wide damage, faster auto attacks on bosses, more use of the infirmary debuff( not removeable, reduces hp recovered) The problem is they probably don't want to do this because if the actual healing portion of the job is hard then less people will play the role, because lets be honest at this point in the game doing the base level healing is pretty brain dead(imo it's been pretty brain dead since HW came out).

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On a macro level, though, this also means that progging new content becomes a lot more time consuming because mistakes made through learning cause significantly greater consequences. That's the main reason why the design team doesn't want to push healing requirements higher. Progging can be fun, but if the damage is too high, you won't really be able to learn as well when your party's wiping much faster because the consistent damage is 3 times heavier on top of the mistakes they're making.

TC brings up a good point about how counterintuitive OGCD healing is in contrast to the playstyle the designers want healers to have, and I'd argue regens are the same. You get an immense amount of long-term potency over 15+ seconds that can do all the work for you in most situations. These resources should be far more restrictive, because they only really thrive in gameplay that has aggressive levels of healing requirements. We can have the ability to power heal for the sake of big dungeon pulls, but that should come at a great cost so it can't be used to abuse the shallow levels of damage dealt in most boss content without unnecessarily costing you DPS.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

On a macro level, though, this also means that progging new content becomes a lot more time consuming because mistakes made through learning cause significantly greater consequences. That's the main reason why the design team doesn't want to push healing requirements higher. Progging can be fun, but if the damage is too high, you won't really be able to learn as well when your party's wiping much faster because the consistent damage is 3 times heavier on top of the mistakes they're making.

TC brings up a good point about how counterintuitive OGCD healing is in contrast to the playstyle the designers want healers to have, and I'd argue regens are the same. You get an immense amount of long-term potency over 15+ seconds that can do all the work for you in most situations. These resources should be far more restrictive, because they only really thrive in gameplay that has aggressive levels of healing requirements. We can have the ability to power heal for the sake of big dungeon pulls, but that should come at a great cost so it can't be used to abuse the shallow levels of damage dealt in most boss content without unnecessarily costing you DPS.

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If your talking about progging savage content, that is a horrible basis to use for fundamental game balance because much less then half the population even attempts that content. So not to be rude but I really don't care if it makes savage harder for players and I would guess most of the player base doesn't care either based on savage clear rates. If you just mean new content in general I don't see what the issue is with content actually being hard. I think it's safe to say at this point the only way to make healing more challenging is to make gameplay more challenging because they need players to take more damage to keep healers healing instead of dpsing. If they could think of more mechanic based ways of making fights more difficult for healers they would have done it by now. They either need to accept healing is more and more boring and keep content easy or make content harder and keep healers engaged. It's so odd to have to argue that its a good thing people takes more damage so that HEALers have to heal, it would be like saying monsters should have less hp because it makes dps more challenging when they have to actually utilize cooldowns and proper rotations.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

If your talking about progging savage content, that is a horrible basis to use for fundamental game balance because much less then half the population even attempts that content. So not to be rude but I really don't care if it makes savage harder for players and I would guess most of the player base doesn't care either based on savage clear rates. If you just mean new content in general I don't see what the issue is with content actually being hard. I think it's safe to say at this point the only way to make healing more challenging is to make gameplay more challenging because they need players to take more damage to keep healers healing instead of dpsing. If they could think of more mechanic based ways of making fights more difficult for healers they would have done it by now. They either need to accept healing is more and more boring and keep content easy or make content harder and keep healers engaged. It's so odd to have to argue that its a good thing people takes more damage so that HEALers have to heal, it would be like saying monsters should have less hp because it makes dps more challenging when they have to actually utilize cooldowns and proper rotations.

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The GCD healing toolkits are just as boring and spammy as the damage kits are. Shifting fight design back toward spamming more healing spells doesn't make healers less boring. It just makes them boring in a different way. What happens when you have to heal so much your oGCDs are on cooldown? Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

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You know, that's exactly how duties are made for DPS. Or rather, higher HP so that DPS need to do their rotation properly. Healers get squat on that end. Only some raid-wide AOEs and the occasional tank buster for the most part. The rest of our healing is often in the form of fixing other people's mistakes, which is my original issue.

Healers adjust is an old meme, but still one that I still occasionally see people taking seriously, and this is exactly the reason why.

Simply changing content difficulty itself isn't the answer, as all it does is shift who gets left out. As things stand, at least there's a challenge for healers in prog, just that it's not in doing the job they signed up for. If you increase the difficulty of savage, it ends up excluding the casual-hardcore group (or midcore or what have you).

What needs to be done I believe is two-fold. The first is making people more responsible for themselves. If someone messes up a mechanic, the penalty isn't massive damage, but instead a debuff that they can't ignore. Pure damage is only penalizing the healer. Instant death on the other hand is too severe for most mistakes and actively works against learning.

The other is more proper healer mechanics that force us to use our kits. As terrible as our kits are, there's still plenty of room to play with it. Make the act of timing and targeting interesting if we only have one viable heal spell when our oGCDs are gone. Like rapid fire ahk morns alternating between the MT and OT, for a total of double each of their HP over 20s. Make positional healing something we actually have to do! Like, AOE healing but only for a part of the raid, because half the raid has zombify or something and the other has living dead.

For as long as our kit sucks, the encounters themselves can make up for it. It's not like there's a guarantee that our kits are going to become something we'll actually like in EW. And if they do, then it'll be a bonus!

Add more survivable mistakes and/or frequent-but-randomized damage to fights while replacing a bunch of flat heal oGCDs with multiplicative cooldowns of varying length and details. The is a known solution, other games have had good healing systems in the past. Hell, I'd even argue that syncing down in XIV can be a more interesting healing experience if you're doing old content that's actually hard. Max level healers just have too many redundant (and simplistic) tools relative to the problems they're presented in encounters.

Or just embrace where the game's gone and give healers a real DPS rotation while weaving in oGCDs and the occasional heal spell during the big scripted damage.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

The GCD healing toolkits are just as boring and spammy as the damage kits are. Shifting fight design back toward spamming more healing spells doesn't make healers less boring. It just makes them boring in a different way. What happens when you have to heal so much your oGCDs are on cooldown? Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2. Cure 2.

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One way to solve this would be to make actual healing combos where your basic heal (Cure 1&2, Medica 1&2) branches off into different heals that are either more powerful or provide other beneficial effects.

But yes, just leaving GCD heals as they are and then simply forcing people to spam them isn't exactly any more engaging than spamming Glare/Broil/Malefic.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

The problem with debuffs I feel is most of them just get blanket ignored..

Oh hey your paralysed for a whole 4 seconds. Well by the time I finish this broil cast and cast esuna it'll have worn off anyway so fk it just cast another broil.. waste of time even trying to cleanse.

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And SE has a solution for this in their toolbox but they refuse to use it.

The Normal debuff is Vulnerability UP. This does nothing but make the healers job harder.

Lately SE has been choosing to put a Damage Done DOWN debuff on players who miss / ignore mechanics.

If SE put the Damage Down penalty on every missed mechanic, players would be more likely to do them. Miss a mechanic? YOU are responsible for YOUR mess up. Not another player.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

If SE put the Damage Down penalty on every missed mechanic, players would be more likely to do them. Miss a mechanic? YOU are responsible for YOUR mess up. Not another player.

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That would be a viable option, I just hope they never do another fight like E6S in that case. The amount of mechanics you had to ignore as a tank, or melee in general, to not get trash uptime was ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

I always felt like fixing healers should be simple: more consistent party wide damage, faster auto attacks on bosses, more use of the infirmary debuff( not removeable, reduces hp recovered) The problem is they probably don't want to do this because if the actual healing portion of the job is hard then less people will play the role, because lets be honest at this point in the game doing the base level healing is pretty brain dead(imo it's been pretty brain dead since HW came out).

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It's really not that simple with the current game design. We have a very rigid party composition of 2 healers per 8 players with mechanics enforcing that rule by targeting both healers for stacks and such quite often. Other games are flexible. The difference between a well optimized group of great players in BiS and an average one starting prog at min ilv is massive. So no matter how much you bump up healing needed, we'll dps more and more as we get better.

More frequent damage intake is still a good idea, it's silly how rarely we need to heal at times, but as well as that I'd rather just see them embrace the fact that healers dps. Because we do and always will. FF14 is not other games and this idea that "healers should only heal" is an outdated concept the community has stubbornly clung to when in reality MMO's are not bound to set rules. If the devs accept that we're Battle Clerics, they can start looking at how to make that style of gameplay engaging. I personally find a healer that can dish out serious damage when needed far more interesting than the helpless curebot-slave fantasy

Dunno but I feel that part of the healing issue is also due to the fact that healers always have instant cast, oGCD, strong healing tools available at most of the times.

I find hilarious to play WHM in a 50 roulette where I don't have healing oGCDs at all and actually have to share my GCDs between heals and dps. Essentially oGCD actions /insta cast non MP consuming heals trivialized healer MP AND healing requirements.

Any debuff that inhibits your ability to move would just make the person hit by a mechanic become more likely to get hit by more of them, snowballing into death. And then you would have to raise the person rather than just heal them. Bosses that chain together moves are not uncommon. Also is part of the suggestion that mechanics would not really do much damage anymore, because if they are hit even with debuffs, they would still need to be healed.

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Originally Posted by jlewiss

If your talking about progging savage content, that is a horrible basis to use for fundamental game balance because much less then half the population even attempts that content. So not to be rude but I really don't care if it makes savage harder for players and I would guess most of the player base doesn't care either based on savage clear rates. If you just mean new content in general I don't see what the issue is with content actually being hard. I think it's safe to say at this point the only way to make healing more challenging is to make gameplay more challenging because they need players to take more damage to keep healers healing instead of dpsing. If they could think of more mechanic based ways of making fights more difficult for healers they would have done it by now. They either need to accept healing is more and more boring and keep content easy or make content harder and keep healers engaged. It's so odd to have to argue that its a good thing people takes more damage so that HEALers have to heal, it would be like saying monsters should have less hp because it makes dps more challenging when they have to actually utilize cooldowns and proper rotations.

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There are some other good points mentioned, but something else to remember is that a lot of fights are more challenging at first, but ilevel trivializes those fights. Just look at Titania and Innocence--level 80 content that you can now steamroll fairly easy despite being extreme trials because of the ilevel difference. What I'm alluding to is that they don't want initial difficult of content to require a more frustrating grind, especially for the people doing blind runs to learn the fight when it's brand new; however, these fights very quickly lose that challenge the moment better gear becomes available.

It's absolutely not the only issue, but I really wish gear ilevel jumps were in increments of 10 instead of 20.

AoE healing is generally uninteresting because there's no target prioritization associated with it. Exceptions are when you're required to identify a vulnerable player who could die to a follow-up attack (i.e. T9 double Raven dives).

If you're healing in a PvP game, players usually try to focus fire or burst down a single vulnerable player to eliminate them. AoE can play a part in this, but it's more as a setup such that you're left with too many low health targets for you to react in time to all of them. That's where triaging and coordinating with your co-healer comes in. This is also why PvP healing tends to be much more interesting than standard MMO PvE healing. That and the fact that everything is trying to kill you while you do this.

The problem with healing is also partially a tanking problem. There needs to be a real and ever-present risk of tank death. And when a tank dies, it has to have raidwipe potential. Without it, the only consequence of any death is just the dps loss. There are two lose conditions: Fail a mandatory mechanic check, or raid dps attrition.

The reason why this is unlikely to change is because SE feels that if players feel stressed out over performing their role as a tank or healer, then they won't want to play those roles. You can't mess things up. Eat a raw tankbuster? No worries. There's a backup who is sitting around waiting for the chance to actually tank something again. The backup's dead? No worries. The DPS can be healed through the autos while you come back. Dust yourself off, the fight continues on, and everyone gets their loot at the end for participating.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

And SE has a solution for this in their toolbox but they refuse to use it.

The Normal debuff is Vulnerability UP. This does nothing but make the healers job harder.

Lately SE has been choosing to put a Damage Done DOWN debuff on players who miss / ignore mechanics.

If SE put the Damage Down penalty on every missed mechanic, players would be more likely to do them. Miss a mechanic? YOU are responsible for YOUR mess up. Not another player.

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I really like this idea, however it only really works in EX/Savage. It's not like DPS checks really matter below that. Healers don't even run out of MP during wall-to-walls in dungeons like they did as recently as SB (especially the earlier dungeons) so there's no strong push to make sure that everyone's playing at a decent baseline.

And if there's no reason to pay attention to the debuff, people do get shocked when they realize that it's a major thing in high end raids and might end up shying away from the because of it.

Though, that's a very thin balance issue and maybe beyond consideration for us players as it's also effected by SE's vision of the game.

But aside from that one issue, I do love the idea of Damage Down debuffs, but only if DPS checks show up more often in raids. Not just the last duty of the tier, but it's especially important for the check to show up early in the beginning of the tier so people are more aware that this is a thing that's expected, even if it ends up being pretty lenient.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

One way to solve this would be to make actual healing combos where your basic heal (Cure 1&2, Medica 1&2) branches off into different heals that are either more powerful or provide other beneficial effects.

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The annoying thing about this is that we kinda used to have this sort of thing. Cure has a chance of proccing Free Cure, and Benefic has a chance of proccing Enhanced Benefic 2. I remembered a time when this was part of the core healer gameplay, as these procs were very important for the sake of maintaining your MP pool.

It's really unfortunate that the potency of the basic heal spells are so low that it's not worth fishing for the procs over just doing Cure 2/Benefic 2 instead, on top of the lack of worrying about your MP anymore.

I have no idea why anyone wants MP management back with the way healer kits currently work. I've said this in several other threads, but I'll repeat: MP management is only interesting if it creates choice. You choose between being efficient but weak, or powerful but resource-intensive, or some sliding scale between the two. What would you do in FFXIV if your spells cost so much mana that your recovery tools couldn't keep up? I can tell you, because that was WHM in Heavensward. Just casting Stone 3 would eventually bleed you dry. What could the player do in this circumstance to mitigate this mana bleed? Well there was one solution: just stop casting. And sit. Like in Everquest. There *is* no more MP efficient Glare. There isn't a more economical Dia. As it stands now, advocating for MP attrition is advocating for jumping in circles between heal casts to get your mana back.

I can't imagine how simply adding hefty MP costs on basic abilities would make encounters in this game more interesting with the embarrassing dearth of choice the kits have.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I have no idea why anyone wants MP management back with the way healer kits currently work. I've said this in several other threads, but I'll repeat: MP management is only interesting if it creates choice. You choose between being efficient but weak, or powerful but resource-intensive, or some sliding scale between the two. What would you do in FFXIV if your spells cost so much mana that your recovery tools couldn't keep up? I can tell you, because that was WHM in Heavensward. Just casting Stone 3 would eventually bleed you dry. What could the player do in this circumstance to mitigate this mana bleed? Well there was one solution: just stop casting. And sit. Like in Everquest. There *is* no more MP efficient Glare. There isn't a more economical Dia. As it stands now, advocating for MP attrition is advocating for jumping in circles between heal casts to get your mana back.

I can't imagine how simply adding hefty MP costs on basic abilities would make encounters in this game more interesting with the embarrassing dearth of choice the kits have.

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Sorry if it sounded like I was actually advocating MP management as something that should return. I was simply stating that the proc system for the basic heals were actually kinda interesting thing to have that was a bit similar to a healer combo system.

MP management was interesting and even fun at times, but not something which I want back. Not even as a SCH that didn't suffer greatly from a lack of MP like WHM did. I don't want days of bringing BRDs to every raid for the sake of Ballad or something. Not like Ballad restores MP anymore, but that's besides the point.

Things have changed since the old days, and it's almost to the point that I think SE should do away with MP like they did with TP if it wasn't for a few jobs that actually make good use of the MP bar. PLD, DRK, BLM come to mind, and I think maybe more jobs should use MP in more creative ways like this.

I also don't actually advocate a proc system like that's still on Cure and Benefic, as I personally hate proc systems, but doing some sort of synergistic system between the various heals we have is kinda interesting, but the whole reason why I made this thread was to think about making healing fun from a duty perspective rather than simply fixing the jobs themselves.

All the threads tend to look at things from that side alone and only passively complain about duty design after all.

I'm one of the voices that pushes back in the duty design threads. Not because I think there hasn't been a decline in creativity (come on, how many times can we do Hello World/Grand Cross/Relativity), but because I want to caution against the idea that "it's just encounter design guys! The kits are fine, we just need to be forced to heal more", because I've seen encounter design threads turn into that around here. My two cents there: Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil isn't encounter design.

I would really love to see a very clear distinction in what healers are for. Healers should be for healing first, mistake correction second, and damage third. Right now healing and mistake correction tend to be the same thing. But imagine if avoidable aoes didn't all do damage but instead some left debuffs that couldn't be purged by Esuna until it had stacked high enough. Things that impede movement annoy me becuase it causes one mistake to lead to another like was mentioned before but things like damage down are great because it feels bad to the player in error and not just the healer. I think a stacking debuff called "Allegiance" would be perfect to implement across all content. It could cause damage down that increased from 2% for one aoe to 4% for the next and 8% for yet another while a final aoe would result in all damage dealt now healing enemies instead as your Allegiance has fully shifted to them. The fourth stack of Allegiance is when Esuna would become available. Imagine how much more focused people would be on dodging if they new their rotation had a chance to heal enemies. Of course this would mean eating aoes to get to a cleansable debuff would become the goal for some players but if aoes had only a 50% chance to cause Allegiance it would make things very interesting. You might survive unexpectedly and only suffer a stack of Allegiance but in a game so focused on damage dodging everything would take on new importance.

I'd love to do a boss fight where your opponent had interesting lifesteal mechanics which you had to mitigate effectively in order to prevent their HP pool from increasing.

MP management is not a bad thing, and it certainly doesn't have to mean sitting around waiting for your MP5 to kick in.

It's interesting how reliant this game is on vulnerabilities and oneshots to create raidwipes. If you can maintain your full healing throughput indefinitely and have unlimited access to raises, then fight designers can't cause a raidwipe using sustained damage alone. The point of MP management systems is to force you to take a moment to stop and 'reload'. It doesn't have to be very long pause; you could even have an on demand action that restores all your MP but has a cast time attached. Alternatively, you could force the healer in question to dps in order to absorb their missing MP back. The specifics of the pause doesn't matter. It just has to be long enough for bad stuff to happen.

I know that a lot of the 'resource management' gets shifted on to each job's secondary resource system, but it doesn't actually have to be that way.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

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I understand that grievance, and frankly, I think that the entire role of healers from a quite fundamental design philosophy across through the skill design all the way to encounter design is an issue. This thread wasn't made with the intent to suggest that there weren't other problems, just that encounters was the focus of this thread over other issues.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

lifesteal mechanics

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Lifesteal actually isn't a bad idea. A vampiric themed boss could have lifesteal on its AOE attacks, combined with a strong visual indicator that they're being healed (so more than just a green number, but maybe an actual heal animation on the boss like lustrate). The other option would be for the boss to have regen during the first phase. Even without an enrage timer, if the regen is aggressive enough, it would force everyone to do the mechanics properly or else be stuck not progressing until everyone gets things figured out. Though there might have to be debuffs like damage down 10-30% per stack or pacify tied to most if not all AOEs rather than make the regen so aggressive that healers have to be able to keep up very high DPS uptime or something.

A very nice way to start a fight and figure out if there's some serious issues with the raid composition.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

MP management

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Frankly, the entire "DPS to recover MP" is actually something that's done in PVP for certain jobs. While it did take a bit of time to get used to, it was definitely interesting and kinda fun. Unfortunately, it won't happen unless if SE decides that healers are fine being secondary DPS until the big heals are needed again.

In regards to other forms of reloading, the only thing I can think of would be the basic heal spells. But that would be pretty boring unless if the fight design was vastly revamped so that spot healing became useful again. Regardless, it has to be something that makes healers active participants of the raid.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I'd love to do a boss fight where your opponent had interesting lifesteal mechanics which you had to mitigate effectively in order to prevent their HP pool from increasing.

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I actually really like this idea. It'd be like blue/red nails from Nidhogg EX except more involved.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I'm one of the voices that pushes back in the duty design threads. Not because I think there hasn't been a decline in creativity (come on, how many times can we do Hello World/Grand Cross/Relativity), but because I want to caution against the idea that "it's just encounter design guys! The kits are fine, we just need to be forced to heal more", because I've seen encounter design threads turn into that around here. My two cents there: Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil isn't encounter design.

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If people took simply two seconds to think about the "It's just encounter design" statement then they should be able to realize the issue. You will never have encounter design in all forms of battle content that can keep healers engaged if their kits stay the way they currently are, because that would require all content to be savage difficulty or harder, which is obviously never going to happen.


The question is simple, are you absolutely bored out of your mind while playing a specific job in the majority of battle content this game has to offer? If the answer is yes, there is an issue with the job or maybe even the entire role design.


Savage often only serves to mask this issue, because there are enough other things going on that you don't have time to think about how boring your job's gameplay actually is. And even savage only manages to do that to a certain extend.


The more often you do a savage fight the more apparent this becomes, I had this feeling several times last raid tier while doing E5-E7s. I had farmed these fights so many time that I basically just went through the mechanics on auto pilot...unfortunately not having to think about mechanics anymore gave me more and more time to look at what I was doing on warrior and go "huh, this is actually really monotonous, I'm basically just pressing 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3 for no particular reason until my 90 second cooldown comes back up.", this feeling is most likely a lot more profound on healers since their gameplay experience during farm is even worse.

If you're capable of planning out every single keystroke in advance of the fight, then you're going to get bored at some point regardless of how complicated you make your job's base rotation. That's not to say that the jobs themselves don't need changes, but that's a different topic altogether.

On that note: If you were the lead raid designer for Pandaemonium, what sorts of concepts and mechanics would you want to see brought to the table?

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

If people took simply two seconds to think about the "It's just encounter design" statement then they should be able to realize the issue. You will never have encounter design in all forms of battle content that can keep healers engaged if their kits stay the way they currently are, because that would require all content to be savage difficulty or harder, which is obviously never going to happen.


The question is simple, are you absolutely bored out of your mind while playing a specific job in the majority of battle content this game has to offer? If the answer is yes, there is an issue with the job or maybe even the entire role design.


Savage often only serves to mask this issue, because there are enough other things going on that you don't have time to think about how boring your job's gameplay actually is. And even savage only manages to do that to a certain extend.


The more often you do a savage fight the more apparent this becomes, I had this feeling several times last raid tier while doing E5-E7s. I had farmed these fights so many time that I basically just went through the mechanics on auto pilot...unfortunately not having to think about mechanics anymore gave me more and more time to look at what I was doing on warrior and go "huh, this is actually really monotonous, I'm basically just pressing 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3 for no particular reason until my 90 second cooldown comes back up.", this feeling is most likely a lot more profound on healers since their gameplay experience during farm is even worse.

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It's not just the job design or not just the encounter mechanics... it's a mix of both.

The encounter design are not as complex as people think. They are just a game of memorization with very little random elements to it... mostly just a telegraph spawning to the left, or to the right (roughl example) so you just adjust to that. It's not surprising that the hardest telegraphs to deal with are those markers that players need to take somewhere, because that relies on how the player will interact with it. What makes jarring in Savage and beyond is that the number of scripted actions you have to react to are roughly twice as much (and with less visual cues) than the normal modes.

What happens if you over complexify just the job design without looking into how cemented the fight scripts are, you'll probably make normal modes more engaging... But the higher difficulty modes will have their skill floor and ceiling both higher than it is nowadays.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

If you're capable of planning out every single keystroke in advance of the fight, then you're going to get bored at some point regardless of how complicated you make your job's base rotation. That's not to say that the jobs themselves don't need changes, but that's a different topic altogether.

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It certainly will at some point, but the more basic a job is in it's design the faster this happens, especially in a game like XIV where there is very little random variation in the way you execute your abilities.

The point I wanted to make is that if you keep the healer design as basic as "spam 1 and occasionally press oGCD when damage happens" then the encounter design has to make up for it, and it simply can't do that in the majority of battle content since it can't be too complicated for the average player.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

What happens if you over complexify just the job design without looking into how cemented the fight scripts are, you'll probably make normal modes more engaging... But the higher difficulty modes will have their skill floor and ceiling both higher than it is nowadays.

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Only if beating the higher difficulty content requires perfect execution of both mechanics and your complex job rotations, which is not necessary, it could simply be a part of optimizing a fight after you have already beaten it.

If the average job design becomes more complex than it is now and executing it perfectly becomes more difficult then you could still keep the skill floor required to beat said content the same level as it is currently, keeping perfect execution an optional part for people who enjoy it that simply makes beating a fight faster.


I can however see the danger of this design widening the skill gap between players a lot more than it currently does.

I find it interesting that Yoshi said the design team "increased healing requirements" in this tier (I think due to feedback?). This increased requirement seems to mean "the boss barfs out an unavoidable room-wide AOE that deals 80% of a non-tank's health in damage". That's certainly...more frequent I suppose. I wouldn't personally say it's more fun. It's less exciting and more "are you awake". Contrast this with, say, Prey in A1S. Two random people going to die unless they get a Cure 2 in the middle of a multi-hit attack, plus the tanks are getting bustered at the same time. At least with that mechanic you have to coordinate with your cohealer so you're not doubling up on anyone, plus make a quick calculation as to who you hit first so one of your targets doesn't die while you're taking care of another.

It's not a *lot* of engagement to be sure, but it sure beats pressing the Everyone Health Up button because the boss did its Everyone Health Down spell on its regular cadence.

I'd like to see a fight where the boss does a leech effect that steals hp from players as a percentage of current health. This plus dodgeable stuff could be interesting. Need to keep player health lowish to keep the boss from healing, but not too low or they die instantly if they're hit by something.

It'd be interesting to heal, and hold players accountable for mitigation and danger avoidance.

If Pandaemonium is representative of this game's 'final dungeon' in a homage to both FF9 and that 'World of Ruin' motif that they have going, and if a scythe wielding Zenos (with Fandaniel as his Avatar) are waiting for us at the top, a lifesteal themed boss would make for an excellent final fight. Phased council fight with a final phase in Possession mode. I'd dig it.