Must All Healers be Casters?

I haven't really checked if this has been discussed before, so sorry if there's already been a thread on it. Using Astrologian earlier today got me thinking, must all healers be casters? Aside from, well, dev things, could a ranger-styled healer that has no cast bars or even mp be possible?

Of the jobs we have right now, I think Astrologian and Sage could be ranger healers while White Mage and Scholar be the caster healers, where the former would heavily rely on doubleweaving oGCDs while constantly being able to move, and the latter has powerful casts with limited mobility to mirror that of their DPS counterparts.

Admittedly, the caster/ranger line's been a little blurred by the SMN rework, and Healers overall have been given a lot more mobility now that many of their cast times have been shortened to that of AST's. However, the main reason AST even had that shorter cast time in the first place was because of the sheer amount of oGCDs it needs to weave from its card system, but its EW rework's increased that load with the way Redraw/Minor Arcana/Astrodyne/Divination now functions, and the single weave window isn't enough for it anymore.

I do think shortening all the other healers' cast times was a correct move considering all healers also got more oGCDs going up to lv90, but the others don't really need to be able to doubleweave nearly as often as AST does. Lightspeed seems to be designed to cover for that, but the timing to use it is heavily dependent on the party and the duty, and it alone is its own oGCD to weave. The job also has little to worry about with MP economy, so at this point I feel it has very little reason to really be a caster at all.

As for SGE, currently Eukrasia's a weird instant cast with its 1s cooldown adding up to a full 2.5s GCD with Dosis/Diagnosis/Prognosis. It also has a gap closer and Toxicon/Phlegma are GCD instant casts it can stockpile, so it's already got a kit that encourages having a lot of mobility. Being able to doubleweave would also make it easier to throw Kardia around, since most of the time, at least for casual content, we just slap it on the MT and leave it there for the entire duty. Its MP economy's not as good as AST, but as long as your Addersgall usage is good I'd argue it's still mostly unnecessary compared to SCH and of course WHM's.

But more importantly, aesthetics. It'd look way cooler to constantly be able to run and gun with floating laser pods. I found both the cast and shot animations of Dosis to look underwhelming compared to Glare/Broil/Malefic. We don't even get to keep the rapid fire Toxicon, which even the EW trailer showcases with Alphinaud, after it upgrades to the cross slash (not that I don't want the latter), and I'd imagine a Dosis without a cast would have a similar enough feel to somewhat make up for that.

People were asking for a non magic healer throughout shb and yoshida recently said that healers must be Disciple of magic sadly

Not against the idea in theory, but like a lot of ideas on the healer forums I'd say it's putting the cart before the horse. The role needs a huge overhaul to make some of these things feasible. If, for example, you were to just add a ranged layer on top of current Sage and Astro, all you've done is given the two strongest, most mobile, least resource constrained healers even more mobility, more power, and fewer constraints while tying the two healers that actually still have to pay for things to resources, immobility, and the like. One of the biggest conundrums with the healer role is that, with the pattern of outgoing damage and the way FFXIV's combat system works, oGCD heals are way, way, way, way, way superior to GCD heals in basically every single way. They cost nothing, they don't interrupt your damage, they're instant, they tend to be higher potency because they "are on a cooldown" (which ends up not mattering at all given FFXIV's tickle tickle boom damage model).

With the current healing paradigm, a healer that has all instant casts with a buttload of oGCDs for healing and party buffs out the wazoo is just straight better than a slow resource-dependent caster unless you put some HEAVY range taxes on the potencies.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

People were asking for a non magic healer throughout shb and yoshida recently said that healers must be Disciple of magic sadly

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Ah, wasn't aware of that. Well that's that I guess. Do you know if it was in a live letter, and which one if so? I kinda want to know what his reasoning for that is.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

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I mean this was all under the assumption that skills and core mechanics were adjusted to actually make the caster side worthwhile, but that's more or less a discussion for the White Mage threads.

All the fights in FFXIV are designed with the assumption that healers are casters. That could of course be changed, but would require a tremendous amount of work and rebalancing.
Other than such minor issues, one could in principle have melee healers and such. They exist in other MMOs and work well there, so it is clearly possible, but as mentioned they would not fit into current design of FFXIV

Reminds me of Chemist, but how would that work in FFXIV?

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Originally Posted by Bad_Luck

Reminds me of Chemist, but how would that work in FFXIV?

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I don't remember which Live Letter it was in, but Yoshi mentioned that Astro was the result of them attempting a Chemist's Mix ability, finding a hard time making it work, and settling on random buff cards instead.

[QUOTE=Azurarok;5846002]Ah, wasn't aware of that. Well that's that I guess. Do you know if it was in a live letter, and which one if so? I kinda want to know what his reasoning for that is.

It was one of many interviews done straight after EW's launch that got translated over on the ff14 reddit discord. I don't remember which one off the top of my head.

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Originally Posted by Bad_Luck

Reminds me of Chemist, but how would that work in FFXIV?

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tbh though there's a number of ways they could do chemist but we know that whatever way they did choose it would be a shallow shell given the one person in the job team who seemed to care about healers left somewhere between hw and sb and all we got now are people who dont care or actively hate healer players

If chemist is a thing they will still be casting their skills.

Chemist as a healer could work if it was like Ninja.

Either hitting different mixes before throwing/casts or having it interact with the buffs it gives. Like it gives out “Regen Salve” and hitting the target with another skill could expend it for burst heal, shield, AoE heal.

The problem comes from people having to remember the right order and mixes. And NIN mudras get enough complaints so having to cheat sheet a healer? That wouldn’t get cleared.

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

Chemist as a healer could work if it was like Ninja.

Either hitting different mixes before throwing/casts or having it interact with the buffs it gives. Like it gives out “Regen Salve” and hitting the target with another skill could expend it for burst heal, shield, AoE heal.

The problem comes from people having to remember the right order and mixes. And NIN mudras get enough complaints so having to cheat sheet a healer? That wouldn’t get cleared.

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Best solution would be to have each chemist mudra just flat out do something in lore.
Simply tying one button to healing, one button to mitigation, one to utility, and one to damage/explosions. Then the combination & number of times you press determines the strength and effect of the salve. There's no RNG, just science and math. To reduce DPS vs utility argument, you can even go one step further and give all of the buttons a unique charge resource rather than a shared resource.

Chemist was their big chance really. It would probably still have to be tagged as a Disciple of Magic, but they could have really made it unique. Perhaps a physical weapon with instant attack, lots of weaving and a Mix system similar to Mudra for various heals. All sorts of ways they could go nuts.

However Chemist was basically scrapped because Yoshida said it was just too difficult to design. So the best they could do was make a SCH clone without a fairy, tweak it a bit and make it flashy.

If anything says "we really need a heal designer, badly", it's the fact they scrapped Chemist.

Chemist's main weapon should be bombs (both the living and hand tossed) and the job mentor should be a goblin and/or kobold.

Also them landing on AST means they tried it in the ARR~Heavensward days when MP worked significantly differently, right? I wonder if they'd think any differently with the current system?

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

Chemist's main weapon should be bombs (both the living and hand tossed) and the job mentor should be a goblin and/or kobold.

Also them landing on AST means they tried it in the ARR~Heavensward days when MP worked significantly differently, right? I wonder if they'd think any differently with the current system?

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Mp hasn't changed at all. They only standardised the max mp and rounded the casts to end in 0
Additionally they removed a lot of mp management as part of their dumbing down program in shb

WAR (and somewhat PLD) is quite a valid non-caster Healer choice.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Mp hasn't changed at all. They only standardised the max mp and rounded the casts to end in 0
Additionally they removed a lot of mp management as part of their dumbing down program in shb

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From what I've heard/read (I started late shb, if it wasn't obvious at this point) I had the impression MP regen was much sparser in battles, physical DPS used TP for most skills, and part of AST's card mechanics included recovering those resources. It made sense that the variety of support pre-shb AST had was their original take on CHM.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

From what I've heard/read (I started late shb, if it wasn't obvious at this point) I had the impression MP regen was much sparser in battles, physical DPS used TP for most skills, and part of AST's card mechanics included recovering those resources. It made sense that the variety of support pre-shb AST had was their original take on CHM.

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Yes and no. BRD had an MP restore song that was mostly for recovering the healers from disaster, because it competed as an MP spender for them with Foe's Requiem, which debuffed enemies and made them take more magic damage. The Ewer recovered MP which was nice if you needed it, but you couldn't plan around its use. Otherwise, the MP situation was oddly similar to how it is now, for different reasons. Aetherflow restored 20% of maximum MP, plus the recovery from Energy drains meant Scholar had functionally infinite MP. AST had Luminiferous Aether which functioned like Lucid Dreaming (plus some terrible threat management attached) that they could extend with Celestial Opposition. Combined with their lower MP costs across the board, AST also functionally infinite MP unless things started going really far south. White Mage had Shroud of Saints (Lucid but with fewer ticks and a good threat dump attached) and Assize was still a fantastic ability, but MUCH weaker than it is today. It was 300/300 heal and damage potency, you had to effectively choose between the damage and heal with Cleric Stance (so it was basically only a damage tool without the bonus heal effect), it restored 10% MP but was on a ridiculous 90 second cooldown. White Mage, you're gonna love this, was the only healer that bled MP just from maintaining their basic rotation with nothing they could do about it other than hope for Ewers from an AST cohealer or a pity Mage's Ballad from the BRD.

Huh, weird, WHM was the only healer that was MP negative from its basic rotation? We really do come full circle with this job design I swear. WHM's MP economy was overcorrected in Stormblood with Thin Air, several cooldown reductions to Assize (but nerfed MP recovery in exchange. The recovery is effectively the same, but more frequent so it's less punishing if you die). Shroud of Saints benefited WHM from becoming the role action Lucid Dreaming because it had an additional tick. And now here we are in Endwalker, they smacked down one of the major changes they made to rescue WHM's garbage Heavensward MP economy and...we're basically back to garbage Heavensward MP economy, because they fixed nothing else about it since then.

lol ffxi had a TP based melee healer as Dancer

We absolutely could have had melee or physical healers, magical tanks, and other atypical roles. Is it harder to balance? Sure, but it's entirely doable.

That said, our community is hyper critical of even minor balance concerns. Endwalker launched having implemented a number crunching and a damage formula rework, and people were raising pitchforks despite the fact that there was still no "unplayable" job. Yes, there were changes that needed to be made, and still do need to be made, but we're not even at our X.1 patch yet where we typically start seeing more mechanical changes rather than potency adjustments. I mean, healers tend to be forgotten usually, but as far as the other roles, we're likely going to see a handful of mechanical adjustments to meet a stronger equilibrium.

In other words, there would be a lot of pressure on the devs to get new subrole styles down right, and I can understand why they would choose not to go down that route. Why take the risk of your community burning you at the stake when you could just go with what's safer?

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

White Mage, you're gonna love this

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oh no (appreciate the history lesson, thank you)


So WHM was always built around having tight MP management, which is weird coming from ShB because it didn't really quite feel like that, unlike BLM, PLD (at the time), and DRK spending mp fast but also having utilities/phases built-into their rotation for recovering it fast. Healing's more dependent on your party's performance + the boss' rotation so I get they can't make it quite as extreme as them, but the result seems to be a diet version stuck in a rift between power/mp recovery that's ended up not having either of those.

MP in general just seems to be a really odd resource at this point since it's a minor nuisance at best outside those four jobs and an RDM having to mass-raise a raid.

Chemist could work, it just involves a different mindset involving mix. The thing is:

Mix should not be complicated

Do you mix random items in a bossfight to see what works? Do we really want a healer whose main mechanic can fail or be dumped into DPS every chance they get? No, you find or look up a good mix beforehand, and Chemist will be the 5th DPS if they can dps with Mix. And if you can't dps with Mix, well there's only so many ways you can heal, Direct, Regen, Mitigation, AoE. The main limiting factor to Mix isn't actually the complexity, it's the scarcity, the best mixes tend to require specific items that are hard to acquire and the only way to mimic that scarcity with MP.

Thus we have our straightforward Mix system: four buttons, Add regen, Add Shield/mitigation, Add increased AoE, Mix. Every ingredient can be stacked and each one costs more MP than the last. Add a damage recapture for mixing and we're good to go for a baseline.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

oh no (appreciate the history lesson, thank you)


So WHM was always built around having tight MP management, which is weird coming from ShB because it didn't really quite feel like that, unlike BLM, PLD (at the time), and DRK spending mp fast but also having utilities/phases built-into their rotation for recovering it fast. Healing's more dependent on your party's performance + the boss' rotation so I get they can't make it quite as extreme as them, but the result seems to be a diet version stuck in a rift between power/mp recovery that's ended up not having either of those.

MP in general just seems to be a really odd resource at this point since it's a minor nuisance at best outside those four jobs and an RDM having to mass-raise a raid.

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Thing is, MP management is only an interesting or fun mechanic if you get to make choices with it. Cure versus Cure 2 is the closest thing there's ever been to MP "management". Otherwise, you stare at Stone 3, wishing you had more MP but realizing your choice is between casting Stone, and taking your pick of a /dance emote. I've met several people on these forums who want MP management to be a thing. But it's yet another mechanic I think would be grossly unfun on kits as currently designed. We'd need a huge overhaul for it. Because you can't have a healer specifically designed to just sit with a thumb up their butt for a quarter of an encounter not casting anything while the other three can press anything they want as often as they like.

I agree, MP is a really weird vestigial resource at this point. It's very binary. You either have enough or you don't.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Thing is, MP management is only an interesting or fun mechanic if you get to make choices with it. Cure versus Cure 2 is the closest thing there's ever been to MP "management". Otherwise, you stare at Stone 3, wishing you had more MP but realizing your choice is between casting Stone, and taking your pick of a /dance emote. I've met several people on these forums who want MP management to be a thing. But it's yet another mechanic I think would be grossly unfun on kits as currently designed. We'd need a huge overhaul for it. Because you can't have a healer specifically designed to just sit with a thumb up their butt for a quarter of an encounter not casting anything while the other three can press anything they want as often as they like.

I agree, MP is a really weird vestigial resource at this point. It's very binary. You either have enough or you don't.

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And this is why SE just flat out deleted TP. That sort of resource management doesn't fit a game where uptime is the focus. It might be different in a turn based game, where resources don't reset between encounters and so on. But FF14 is not that...

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

And this is why SE just flat out deleted TP. That sort of resource management doesn't fit a game where uptime is the focus. It might be different in a turn based game, where resources don't reset between encounters and so on. But FF14 is not that...

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i think MP management is done decently for BLU tanks because diamondback costs insane amounts of mp and they often have to resort to using blood drain. that concept could in theory work for a kind of bursty playstyle for a healer where they use something like bozja seraph strike and then slowly get back mp with a weaker blood-drain like ability, but they would probably never experiment with something like that since it would be incredibly high risk/high reward and healers apparently have to be designed so its near impossible to fail at them

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Originally Posted by QooEr

i think MP management is done decently for BLU tanks because diamondback costs insane amounts of mp and they often have to resort to using blood drain. that concept could in theory work for a kind of bursty playstyle for a healer where they use something like bozja seraph strike and then slowly get back mp with a weaker blood-drain like ability, but they would probably never experiment with something like that since it would be incredibly high risk/high reward and healers apparently have to be designed so its near impossible to fail at them

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A very simple solution to that would be to create a GCD spell that restores your MP, or perhaps make Lucid Dreaming GCD with no cooldown. This gives you endless MP in theory, but you need to sacrifice uptime to get your MP back making it suboptimal. It's technically a button that would never get used by a skilled player, but it's there to catch the casuals and the newbies when they fall.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

healers apparently have to be designed so its near impossible to fail at them

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Skill ceiling the thickness of a piece paper. Its why healers have no combos at all. Sage is them experimenting with a high risk in their minds.

So the healer would need to be next to anyone they heal? Horrible idea

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

I agree, MP is a really weird vestigial resource at this point. It's very binary. You either have enough or you don't.

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Current MP is just TP 2.0. Why it remains is beyond me outside of the shaky grounds of "class fantasy" or just...punishing healers/casters for dying I guess? Or just to ensure that you can't just raise forever? It's not like casters get much of anything else in compensation for being bound by a resource compared to phys classes.

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Originally Posted by IttyBitty

Current MP is just TP 2.0. Why it remains is beyond me outside of the shaky grounds of "class fantasy" or just...punishing healers/casters for dying I guess? Or just to ensure that you can't just raise forever? It's not like casters get much of anything else in compensation for being bound by a resource compared to phys classes.

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So people can't infinitely raise without repercussions, but they are given the flexibility to do so even if it's not optimal. Gives some feeling of decision making, even if it seems like an illusion based on meta. I mean, RDM's class fantasy is basically that - limited innate MP but powerful red spells through using black and white magic. If they had unlimited MP, they basically have no issues with just spamming red magic over and over again. It puts a dent in verraise if suddenly MP is no longer an issue, but you also have a limited number of times you can raise as a RDM if it becomes an ability / charge resource. Pretty much rendering it useless when no one is dying, but doesn't feel like you're gaining anything without being able to use it. MP being the shared resource sort of removes that issue.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

So people can't infinitely raise without repercussions, but they are given the flexibility to do so even if it's not optimal. Gives some feeling of decision making, even if it seems like an illusion based on meta. I mean, RDM's class fantasy is basically that - limited innate MP but powerful red spells through using black and white magic. If they had unlimited MP, they basically have no issues with just spamming red magic over and over again. It puts a dent in verraise if suddenly MP is no longer an issue, but you also have a limited number of times you can raise as a RDM if it becomes an ability / charge resource. Pretty much rendering it useless when no one is dying, but doesn't feel like you're gaining anything without being able to use it. MP being the shared resource sort of removes that issue.

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One thing we could do for more than just RDM is put a cooldown on effects rather than abilities. The example fitting in this circumstance would be making it so that Verraise can only be affected by Dualcast once per 60 seconds, but can otherwise be cast as normal. This is something we could expand on with other jobs as well.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

One thing we could do for more than just RDM is put a cooldown on effects rather than abilities. The example fitting in this circumstance would be making it so that Verraise can only be affected by Dualcast once per 60 seconds, but can otherwise be cast as normal. This is something we could expand on with other jobs as well.

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Or just put a debuff on someone that they can't be targeted by Verraise within the next 30 or 60 seconds.