The Problem with the current Savage or Party Finder Raiding

There is a lot of talk about a healer problem recently, with a lot of requested changes. I want to talk about the current Savage and hopefully give some insight in this very niche problem and a possible Solution. (there is also a tl:tr, and I am interested into peoples opinion on it, since I didn't see anyone trying to clarify it, this is also my opinion ofc.)

This tier has shown that mitigation and especially the coordination of mitigation, over all roles, is difficult. And that more in party finder grps, to a point where a lot of healers give up. This only affects a very small amount of people since it only affects uncoordinated grps that have also a low itemlevel and therefor lower hp, which makes mitigation more important. This leads to a very good experience in coordinated grps, where you feel challenged and rewarded, but to a bad experience in uncoordinated grps, where you get the Sisyphos feeling, with the stone yelling at you to just push harder.

It is a problem that is hard to change, in grps with very good coordination you only need one healer (which you can see with the solo healer clears that where done weeks ago). While the other end gets blasted by a normal raid wide even tho everyone was full hp.
So you take 10min of everyone's time to map out all the faints and reprisals and addles, and say when you use your stuff and where your co-healer should use his, or the preferred method of "just wing it". Party Finder grps (even clear party's) are often very chaotic and need a lot of "on the flight" adjustments.
This will resolve itself in time, because with more gear each week the mitigation needed will become less. (which is not a good solution imo)
My solution would be a visual, to see if people have mitigation up. I remember Feast having it, with their additional. In the party Window for each party member, you had 2 icons with stuff like Faint or Rampart, that also greyed out when used + showing the cd time on it. I know that is fairy hard to implement because of limitations but i wouldnt mind giving up the MP bar, as it is mostly useless. I also know the concern about "harassment", but you also need to give the players the chance to improve themself. A Sam might be more inclined to press his faint, if he sees that everyone's mitigation is still on cd and a raidwide is coming up.

tl:tr: The coordination of mitigation in Party Finder Grps in the early weeks is very unpleasant. A Solution to it could be Visual Help, like a removal of the mp bar in the party window and addition of two Icons, showing cds for each Role, for example: Tank: Reprisal + Rampart, Melee: Faint + Secondwind, Caster: Addle + swiftcast, Healer: Lucid Dreaming + swiftcast, and for Range: Secondwind and maybe make troubadour/tactician/Shield Samba a Role ability. You could also make those two Icons job based. I ofc would prefer seeing the cd from temperance over lucid dream. But i cant see happening with the current limitations.

I fully agree that when mitigation is necessary, then more visual clarity is also necessary. Things like magic attacks being differentiated from physical attacks, so we can know for sure when Dark Mind/Dark Missionary and Heart of Light are actually useful instead of figuring it out our selves.

Giving mitigation debuffs back to healers would be a good step towards easing this facet of the frustration IMO.

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Originally Posted by Mithron

I fully agree that when mitigation is necessary, then more visual clarity is also necessary. Things like magic attacks being differentiated from physical attacks, so we can know for sure when Dark Mind/Dark Missionary and Heart of Light are actually useful instead of figuring it out our selves.

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For anything casted, having orange cast bars be physical, but purple bars be magical would be a good start. The particle effects surrounding enemies using actions could be more drastic between physical and magical actions. And when people get hit, having an orange or purple glowing effect left behind for a second could also address auto attacks, or the impact leaves a glow or so. It's a fairly simple solution, really, at least in terms of the concept. The only challenge would be the implementation. Having that clarity could allow future content to address that more and give players tools that cater more specifically to certain types of damage.

It's the same with debuffs as well. I've been saying for a while that debuffs that can be removed with Esuna need the UI reworked to be far more clear. Esuna isn't used nearly enough to encourage especially casual healers to remember it exists, tand then the UI of a debuff being removable is extremely visually limited. Doing what FFXII does would fix this issue easily:

https://i.imgur.com/v1Vcwsg.jpg

And presumably, if we can make debuffs that clear and apparent, then using them and asking that of healers (and bards) is something more content can do.

I have an opinion about this...

Now hear me out. I fully understand how enjoyable it is to participate in group mitigation, having support skill ect (I played several jobs through every expansions). I truly understand.
However... and considering how things happen in party and duty finder in general... for a healthier future for healer in pugs situation who tend to get insulted for things they aren't responsible of... (understand, not mitigate enough)...

I think party mitigation should be a healer task for the most part, and let role like phys ranged and tank still get at least one tool.
So yes, I am for the removal of things such as Addle and Feint to give Virus back to SCH for example.
Letting WHM having a Stoneskin equivalent back (usable with lily for example).
Reducing Neutral Sect CD and give back Disable to AST

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Not everyone will agree with this and I'll fully understand.
But healer won't have to feel powerless about this anymore.

(Let's be real... a LOT of player even in Savage content just completely forget they have party mitigation. They just DPS and expect healer or tank to do this part. I (we) even already saw people removing these actions from their hotbar, judging it "useless").

This is also a job balancing problem too. The difference between a party with some combination of RDM/SMN/MNK/RPR/DNC and a party with none of those is going to feel very different for the healers.

In PF though, none of that extra mitigation/healing is reliable. You basically have to play as if it doesn't exist, because the one time you don't have any of those classes in the party, or the RDM forgets to double mitigate a raidwide, you're going to suddenly struggle way more to keep the party alive. And in the end, it becomes the most reliable/optimal to just look for the highest DPS jobs and leave all the healing/shielding to the healers.

Meanwhile, in statics, where it's a lot easier to establish a consistent mitigation plan, healers are bored to death because these extra mitigations cover way too much mitigation. And again, it's probably optimal to just take one DNC, one RDM/SMN for the raise during prog, and have every other job focused on DPS.

SE either needs to make those extra mitigations more reliable in PF (like with a UI that shows % mitigation currently applied and who has cooldowns available, and also give every job similar levels of extra mitigation/healing) or they need to just remove all the extra mitigation, so healers can have a reliable experience.

... That is what I would say if it didn't lead to massive homogenization and a more boring game overall. In actuality, I don't know if this problem is fixable, or if it's just something we need to put up with forever. For now, I think it's best to accept that DPS mitigation is just a nice bonus if it happens, but it can't be relied upon.

We can't exactly give all the mitigation back to healers. If so, then it really does become a healer's fault if the party does everything right and still dies. That just leads to a high skill floor for healers and we'd still just have the current issues in a new form. Sadly it's better off with everything spread across the party. It's only really a problem right now because we're in the middle of a mindset shift.

Remember, back when Alexander Gordias came out it shifted us all into the DPS mindset to clear raids as it was that mandatory, the party often didn't have enough DPS to kill the bosses unless healers DPS'd as well. Right now we're in the middle of another shift, a shift to teach DPS to use their mitigation skills whenever possible, as otherwise the party will not survive.

I think Feint and Addle need to be rethought out. Adding rewards that enhances gameplay beyond less damage taken would help tremendously. Something as simple as changing their tooltip to include: "Increases Limit Break Gauge in proportion to the amount of damage reduced," would encourage these skills to be used in all levels of play instead of leaving them as selectively mandatory in some high end content. Imagine if Reprisal made all damage done under it's effect restore a small portion of MP to Healers. These kind of useful interactions would make the actions much more appealing and cause the player base to use them more before they become mandatory to survive. Also, I thought it was odd that after making Reprisal an aoe to assist with dungeons that logic didn't trickle over to Feint and Addle as well. Why aren't they all aoe to assist with dungeons?

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Giving mitigation debuffs back to healers would be a good step towards easing this facet of the frustration IMO.

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I feel like this would switch the frustration around.

Imagine if healers are responsible for the bulk of mitigating and a heavy raidwide goes out and your curebot co-heal just spams a few Medica at it. Or imagine being the dps and you have 2 curebot healers, your ability to Addle has been stripped from you and you just wipe 7-8 minutes into a fight.

Considering how rare good healers are right now, I honestly don't trust the average healer with all the mit responsibility. It would be a nightmare in PF. At least when it's spread out there's a chance a few in the group will know what they're doing and you at least won't get one-shot. SE either need to find a way to make raids less mitigation reliant, or find a way to educate the playerbase on how valuable they are.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I think Feint and Addle need to be rethought out. Adding rewards that enhances gameplay beyond less damage taken would help tremendously. Something as simple as changing their tooltip to include: "Increases Limit Break Gauge in proportion to the amount of damage reduced," would encourage these skills to be used in all levels of play instead of leaving them as selectively mandatory in some high end content. Imagine if Reprisal made all damage done under it's effect restore a small portion of MP to Healers. These kind of useful interactions would make the actions much more appealing and cause the player base to use them more before they become mandatory to survive. Also, I thought it was odd that after making Reprisal an aoe to assist with dungeons that logic didn't trickle over to Feint and Addle as well. Why aren't they all aoe to assist with dungeons?

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Your average player who ignores Addle/Feint doesn't care about LB generation. It's not an incentive. Additionally since Addle, Feint and Reprisal actively hinder LB generation under normal conditions. Same goes for MP regen for healers. The tank doesn't have much reason to care.

If literally themsleves taking less damage isn't an incentive no small random bonus on party members will help.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

SE either need to find a way to make raids less mitigation reliant, or find a way to educate the playerbase on how valuable they are.

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I'm absolutely for the latter, even through failure if necessary. For too long has the game allowed players to use maybe 1/3rd of their entire job kit throughout 99% of the game until they come into your ex/savage parties and waste everyone's time.

I'd argue the current state is highly detrimental to the one sandbagging your party as well. When the game never teaches people how to play properly their experience will be absolutely awful once they step into harder content and they won't even know why.
They will probably go through a few parties at best before deciding to never do it again, but they could've easily cleared had the game not reinforced that being clueless is completely fine for 300 hours.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I feel like this would switch the frustration around.

Imagine if healers are responsible for the bulk of mitigating and a heavy raidwide goes out and your curebot co-heal just spams a few Medica at it. Or imagine being the dps and you have 2 curebot healers, your ability to Addle has been stripped from you and you just wipe 7-8 minutes into a fight.

Considering how rare good healers are right now, I honestly don't trust the average healer with all the mit responsibility. It would be a nightmare in PF. At least when it's spread out there's a chance a few in the group will know what they're doing and you at least won't get one-shot. SE either need to find a way to make raids less mitigation reliant, or find a way to educate the playerbase on how valuable they are.

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They could attach a "mitigation debuff" effect to certain party members, which would clue in every person in the group that they have to alternate mitigations because other players would have their mitigation disabled or effect reduced. The mechanic's concept is similar to enemies applying a HP recovery debuff, except there's no way around this but to get others to mitigate. Not sure how well that would turn out though.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

They could attach a "mitigation debuff" effect to certain party members, which would clue in every person in the group that they have to alternate mitigations because other players would have their mitigation disabled or effect reduced. The mechanic's concept is similar to enemies applying a HP recovery debuff, except there's no way around this but to get others to mitigate. Not sure how well that would turn out though.

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The problem with that is that it assumes people are using their mitigation in the first place. What is just as likely is that they will look at the debuff and go "Mitigation? Eh, doesn't concern me."

Game needs better mitigation tells. Especially when it comes to the difference between physical and magical attacks. The problem is feint and addle are role actions and outside of second wind and arms length you will be surprised how many dps dont even have those abilities on their hotbars.

The problem is too much pressure on a healer in pf when in reality it falls on the group to mitigate properly as a whole. But that is very hard to coordinate that without voice comms like a static would have.

There's really nowhere that needs mitigation until Savage, then suddenly you're meant to realize it's important, figure out which mechanics are physical or magical and understand how snapshotting mit works (particularly important for bleeds).
Furthermore even in Savage, in some groups you get away with 0 mit because gear carried you, or the SCH was spamming Succor nonstop, or the other players knew what they were doing. Then you go into a team where they needed your mit, wipe and assume it was their fault because "idk, it was never a problem before".

The whole design of the game does nothing to prepare players for an endgame where it really pays to be prepared and know the little details.