An idea about how to solve some of the healing problems

Currently, reading the general mood of the forums I feel as though most people who heal, seem to feel as though healing is somewhat lacking and in need of fixing. What causes problems however is the direction Healers feel the developers should take in fixing the healing role.

I personally looked at raid mechanics and player motivation. Currently, one of the biggest problems I see is that a lot of the mechanics are designed in such a way that if a player makes a mistake and is hit by a raid mechanic they are not as badly punished as the healer(unless it's a one shot mechanic). If you are playing dps and you stand in something that causes you to take damage, but you're still alive at the end of it, even if the mechanic also gives you a vulnerability debuff, who has really been punished most by you standing in it? I feel as though this causes a lot of toxicity that is left unspoken, as Healers end up despising their groups who do not avoid mechanics because they are the ones who have to deal with it (although paradoxically because square has now made DPSing on healers in FFXIV so boring now some healers are enjoying people making mistakes). Either way I still feel as though every player should be encouraged to not stand in the fire for personal reasons not just because "it makes the healer's life difficult".

Now I understand that, yes, Square could go through every dungeon in the game and modify every mechanic so that they all did something like silence players, or apply damage down debuffs if you stood in something to really encourage players to not stand in things they shouldn't, however I think most people can agree this seems a little impractical not to mention it also wouldn't solve the issue of healers still having nothing to do when people don't stand in stuff.

So now we come to an idea that I think would solve most of this. I think every player should have a status attached to them that changes how much damage they deal based on the percentage of HP remaining they have. The status should also increase the amount of damage dealt when you are above 95% HP. This does a number of things:

- It encourages healing without removing the place of healer DPS. It also still places the importance on raid DPS however now the importance of raid DPS is DPS through healing. However the principle of ABC is still there. If everyone is topped, you DPS.

- Top tier raids would no longer be encouraged to simply ditch healers over tanks because while tanks can keep themselves alive, Healers are much more effective at keeping them at high health. With this change the difference between low health and high health would mean something.

- Everyone would be encouraged to not stand in anything because doing so would automatically represent a DPS loss. No longer is a healer penalised by a DPS standing in a mechanic because "moving would cost me DPS." Now not moving would cost them more DPS.

- There would need to be absolutely no changes to any raids or dungeons whatsoever to facilitate this.

Now I know some people are going to say "wouldn't this be a DPS nerf?" Well it wouldn't necessarily be a DPS nerf if the buff to DPS when people were above 95% HP were set high enough. It just needs to hit a sweet spot where the the reduction in damage people are going to see from being hurt will be offset by the buff from being high health.

I also need to acknowledge this isn't a magic bullet. This doesn't suddenly make DPSing on healers fun, you'd still be pressing 1 for eternity, but maybe you be encouraged to use your GCD heals for once because it might actually result in a DPS increase for the raid which is what everyone wants right?

Now if everyone hates the idea that's fine, I'll leave, I just thought this was a neat way of giving everyone what they wanted.

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

It also still places the importance on raid DPS however now the importance of raid DPS is DPS through healing..

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This is already the case.* Imagine two scenarios:

• Scenario A: Standard composition party where the healers do nothing but DPS and the entire party otherwise plays optimally towards the goal of clearing the encounter.
  
• Scenario B: Standard composition party where at least one healer casts at least one heal and the entire party otherwise plays optimally and clears the encounter.

There are a few ways this can turn out:

• The party wipes in scenario A. In other words, the party's overall DPS for the encounter was too low. Any heals that the healers cast in scenario B should be credited to the healers as raising the party's DPS to the level required to clear the encounter.
  
• The party clears in scenario A. If the party's overall DPS for the encounter is lower than in scenario B, as in the previous point, the healers should be credited as raising the party's DPS with their heals. *If the party's overall DPS for the encounter is higher than in scenario B, then the encounter is badly designed with respect to healing and you could have replaced with the healers with more DPS and Tanks.

Just because this relationship isn't easy to quantify doesn't mean it's not how well-played healing works. I'm not sure, off-hand, that your suggestion makes this relationship any easier to quantify, but I guess it does make it more obvious.

Why not, I'll give some feedback.

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

every player should have a status attached to them that changes how much damage they deal based on the percentage of HP remaining they have. The status should also increase the amount of damage dealt when you are above 95% HP.

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Ooh. That's going to affect a lot of the game in very unforeseen ways. What happens when a Monk gets caught up doing a FATE? Are they going to get their butt kicked if they pull more than one mob? They're going to have a hard time staying above 95% health by themselves. What about Deep Dungeons? Or even soloing Deep Dungeons? Is Eureka/Bozja style content going to become much more difficult unless you stack constant heavy regen effects on yourself or bring a healer? Unless tuned very carefully, needing to stay at full health to access your full output could easily slaughter solo content, and that's just a repercussion off the top of my head.

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

If everyone is topped, you DPS

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

There would need to be absolutely no changes to any raids or dungeons whatsoever to facilitate this.

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Hmmm, I don't believe this will change as much as you might think. For one, it changes the "good" HP threshold from "enough to survive the next mechanic" to "full". Which has two flags for me. One, holy overhealing Batman. Two, in most cases that changes the number of heal casts to deal with a mechanic from an average of 1-2 to maybe 2-3. And then it's back to 1111111111111. Making every HP lost a soft White Hole mechanic doesn't change the fact that outgoing party-wide damage is also infrequent, and healing a party to full from 1 takes relatively little time.

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

This doesn't suddenly make DPSing on healers fun, you'd still be pressing 1 for eternity, but maybe you be encouraged to use your GCD heals for once because it might actually result in a DPS increase for the raid which is what everyone wants right?

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That's a personal no from me, but I get where this is coming from. I don't personally think "encouraging more GCD healing" in a vacuum would make the healer role more fun for me, because I think healer GCD toolkits are just as dull and horribly designed as the damage kits. *shrug*

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Why not, I'll give some feedback.

Ooh. That's going to affect a lot of the game in very unforeseen ways. What happens when a Monk gets caught up doing a FATE? Are they going to get their butt kicked if they pull more than one mob? They're going to have a hard time staying above 95% health by themselves. What about Deep Dungeons? Or even soloing Deep Dungeons? Is Eureka/Bozja style content going to become much more difficult unless you stack constant heavy regen effects on yourself or bring a healer? Unless tuned very carefully, needing to stay at full health to access your full output could easily slaughter solo content, and that's just a repercussion off the top of my head.

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I certainly see what you're getting at there. I did have the idea of just making it apply in dungeons and raids and that way outside of multi-person content it wouldn't affect anyone soloing anything and the game balance would remain unchanged. Whether that would bother people I'm not sure.

I also agree that as it stands when you're DPSing it is very boring and I don't think I've met a single person who thinks that any of the Healing DPS "rotations" are fun, just varying degrees of bland. I am also aware however that while DPS matters in this game, most people probably selected the Healer role to Heal and I know at least anecdotally about 70%+ of my button presses in instanced content are DPS button presses not healing button presses. This was simply an (potentially misguided) attempt to shift that in the direction of heals a bit more without requiring a giant restructure of the entire game while still allowing healers to contribute positively to DPS.

You seem to have forgotten Regen effects (HoT) exist.

Let's say a raidwide knocks the group to 10%. The next raidwide is 30 sec away. In this example the WHM might place Asylum and the Sage would Physis II, then 23 seconds later the WHM would have Assize naturally come off cooldown and heal the rest. The party is full before the next raidwide, no GCD heals were used, good planning and heal coordination.

With your change Asylum is almost useless and only there to buff Cure III, which the WHM frantically spams to get the party back full to avoid losing raid buff uptime, and then the later Assize and any HoT goes into massive overheal. Not a well planned or coordinated play, but had to be done to keep the damage buff active. Doesn't sound engaging.

I can see the thought behind the idea (and respect a good discussion), but our toolkits are not designed for always keeping parties topped off. Not only HoT's but look at abilities like Essential Dignity or Excog. Or the fact that if you GCD heal someone to full right away, then an oGCD heal comes off cooldown before they're in danger, it was a waste of a GCD. Topping the party immediately just isn't a good play in this game.

Honestly, at least as far as boss damage goes, it doesn't even need to be this complex.

Simply spicing up auto attacks on bosses would be a great start. Go back to ARR and Coil bosses would routinely have insta cast mini tank busters, cleaves and so forth that they would rotate alongside the proper big abilities. What happened to all of that?

Kaliya at min ilvl is a superb example of what a bosses melee should be like IMHO. Both tanks should be getting curb stomped all whilst the mechanics are going off around them.

The current obsession with comically long cast times with maybe a single auto attack between them has to take some of the blame here.

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

most people probably selected the Healer role to Heal and I know at least anecdotally about 70%+ of my button presses in instanced content are DPS button presses not healing button presses.

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I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

/thread derail off

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

You seem to have forgotten Regen effects (HoT) exist.

I can see the thought behind the idea (and respect a good discussion), but our toolkits are not designed for always keeping parties topped off. Not only HoT's but look at abilities like Essential Dignity or Excog. Or the fact that if you GCD heal someone to full right away, then an oGCD heal comes off cooldown before they're in danger, it was a waste of a GCD. Topping the party immediately just isn't a good play in this game.

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I certainly Acknowledge I may have overlooked HoTs however I would say is that I specifically came here because I knew that even if this suggestion was amazing (I'm not saying it is), it almost certainly wouldn't be fully formed and that I would have missed things. With that in mind I can think of a few changes to the suggestion that would allow HoTs to function and would also prevent healers from having to spam their abilities like crazy but still encourage higher HP states over lower ones. Firstly I would have a damage buff for players over a lower HP threshold, say 80% instead of 100%. Secondly however there would be a scaling damage buff based on peoples HP% however it would not scale linearly but rather logarithmicly. That way people at low HP would need immediate healing to help their damage but healing players over a certain HP% would yield increasingly diminishing returns to the point that it would almost certainly be better for the Healer to be DPSing. However this would also leave room for HoTs to tick steadily increasing the DPS of those players.

It's been mentioned many times before that avoidable damage should punish people with damage down debuffs instead of vulnerability debuffs. Healers shouldn't have to work harder to heal because other people are bad. The group as a whole would have to carry the DPS output though. I do think healers across the board should get buffs specifically for GCD healing and things like Esuna. Let's say you cast Cure 2. You're next Glare should be worth twice the potency now. So Two Glares would be the same as Cure 2 and then one Glare. It's such a simple concept to make healers have GCD spells that are worth using by refunding the damage lost. That alone would go far to make healing more enjoyable if you knew helping people wasn't a sure way to hit enrage. Then lots of avoidable damage would feed into good healer gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

/thread derail off

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This is so true, I would enjoy all of the above. However in order to do so SE would have to take a hard look at our toolkit. One of the first things that I really dislike in this game (and still do) is Esuna, i come from games where i had AOE versions of cleansing, so i find Esuna really clunky . i would enjoy more varying fights that have potentially deadly debuffs of other mechanics to look out for, if we were given some rework.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

It's been mentioned many times before that avoidable damage should punish people with damage down debuffs instead of vulnerability debuffs. Healers shouldn't have to work harder to heal because other people are bad. The group as a whole would have to carry the DPS output though. I do think healers across the board should get buffs specifically for GCD healing and things like Esuna. Let's say you cast Cure 2. You're next Glare should be worth twice the potency now. So Two Glares would be the same as Cure 2 and then one Glare. It's such a simple concept to make healers have GCD spells that are worth using by refunding the damage lost. That alone would go far to make healing more enjoyable if you knew helping people wasn't a sure way to hit enrage. Then lots of avoidable damage would feed into good healer gameplay.

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I do want to acknowledge a potential alternative that doesn't make sense without a little context, but: Max HP down debuffs (iirc Suppuration is what it's called?) would also work to a limited degree. The main thing is they don't affect raw healing throughput in any way, but they do affect mitigation. Needing extra mitigation to deal with Vulnerability stacks is a common thing, but that's only if you're getting oneshot. Vulnerability (and Infirmity, for that matter) also requires you to pay attention to sustained damage sources (I know there's not many, but not every avoidable mechanic applies Vulnerability either), whereas HP Down doesn't (unless you took so many you're getting oneshot by things you're clearly not supposed to. Something that Tanks will screw up too). And given non-healer roles have a surprising amount of surplus in this area, they can help save themselves. The difference between that and raw healing is some healers (Mostly WHM, if we're being honest) don't have the tools to mitigate everything, so this puts the load specifically on non-healers in certain compositions, or at least keeps Shields relevant.

Having that be the penalty instead of damage could be an option in some cases, such as P2S's acidic water. I don't mind P2S's water as is, but some rando eating a DoT feels like far more work than having to baby them extra at a specific raidwide window. Vulnerability ranges in-between and sometimes on one of those extremes and that's cause it depends a lot more on the context of the fight.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I'm a weird one there, but I think that's largely because I play support/healers in most RPGs I've picked up. Straight healing (especially in single-player RPGs) is an infrequent activity in most games. Looking back, I spend most of my time as a support role doing a variety of things. Cleansing debuffs, buffing the party, countering otherwise lethal enemy attacks with the anti-instant death spell, summoning stuff, disabling monsters to give the party a fighting chance against the encounter, and dealing respectable damage while doing so. I enjoy playing healers because they allow me to multitask. Managing four or five different things, fishing through my bag of tricks to keep the party chugging along until my next turn. FF14 doesn't even provide healers a remotely decent multitasking experience, so here I am raging away at awful design with hate hate haaaaaate.

/thread derail off

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/thread derail back on

The first single player and MMOs I played had healers designed to be full-time multitaskers aswell and I'm still as drawn to that design as on the first day I played them. RO had you juggle 6-8 buffs with durations from 15s to 2min, some of them only lasting for one cast or a few hits while healing and debuffing, silence, slow or blind enemies with it's first release, not counting the skills that got added over the years. And the myriad of cRPGs the like Baldur's Gate series and similiar games never encouraged any pure healing; it was ineffective. It was so much better to buff, debuff, cleanse, disable, summon, attack and soak depending on the situation than just spamming the spellbook with healing spells. Nothing like throwing a mass confusion to watch enemies tear at each other.
FFXIV is the first MMO I've ever played that completely dropped the multitasking. It's full deeps mode with healing as sideline activity in case someone screwed up or to occasionally heal the pitiful damage we take.

If I have a toolkit that has synergies, interesting skills and some micromanaging, I don't mind spending a lot of time healing. I think it comes down to micromanagement, whether it's a healing kit or a multitasking kit. I prefer the latter but I can certainly see the appeal of the former, including for myself.
What I absolutely don't like is healing for arbitary reasons, meaning healing for the sake of something that is not threatening and instead just... there. Fill HP bar to X amount. Keep above X % HP for reasons. Heal to stack a buff.
How do DPS feel if a target is attackable but won't drop below 1 HP? They keep attacking it to build resources and because they're bored but it feels bad because they know it doesn't serve the purpose of the role they queued for. Now imagine if that happened constantly throughout the fight.
Or if a tank had to use an enmity combo not so they can tank but because the more enmity they have, the more damage one of their skill does, outclassing the weak dps of their enmity combo. The enmity thing is tacked on and completely meaningless.

PLD had this "higher HP = more damage" with Spirits Within and PLDs and healers hated it. And the effect got deleted (good riddance).
Having to heal without really having to heal because people are not in danger and just want more deeps just feels bad and boring. "Yes, alright, I'll press that stupid unnecessary heal button so you can get your shiny log ffs".

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Originally Posted by Haadrak

I certainly Acknowledge I may have overlooked HoTs however I would say is that I specifically came here because I knew that even if this suggestion was amazing (I'm not saying it is), it almost certainly wouldn't be fully formed and that I would have missed things. With that in mind I can think of a few changes to the suggestion that would allow HoTs to function and would also prevent healers from having to spam their abilities like crazy but still encourage higher HP states over lower ones. Firstly I would have a damage buff for players over a lower HP threshold, say 80% instead of 100%. Secondly however there would be a scaling damage buff based on peoples HP% however it would not scale linearly but rather logarithmicly. That way people at low HP would need immediate healing to help their damage but healing players over a certain HP% would yield increasingly diminishing returns to the point that it would almost certainly be better for the Healer to be DPSing. However this would also leave room for HoTs to tick steadily increasing the DPS of those players.

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Sounds needlessly complicated and is just a convoluted way that doesn't change anything different from what we have currently.

For any solo MSQ instances or solo duties outside the MSQ, the reason why healing requirements are so low is because DPS is supposed to be able to clear them, but challenging enough because DPS doesn't have that many healing skills to fall back on if they mess up. At the same time, those instances are also made to have a decently high HP threshold so DPS can use their full toolkit. Healers would then be left to do nothing much, if anything as a result when they play well - thus largely ignoring majority of their healing toolkit. That suggestion doesn't do anything for this kind of gameplay, including HoH/ PoTD for solo instances when people want to grab the necromancer title for the job they want to play in.

The most simplest solution is to just... give healers something to do outside of things that could be optional. Mitigation + healing are all optional because damage comes out in waves and isn't always required. No matter how you change the healing formula, it's still not possible to make healers spam GCD heals and then call it "good design" because of these other factors. That's why people just recommend to expand healer DPS toolkit.