Fix healer engagement by healing the enemy (not a joke)

I don't think healers will get a fundamental change in design, nor does it seem like self sustain of tanks will be changed. The most productive question may be: how can we increase the cognitive load of the healer job in normal/non-heated combat, within the current design?

Since it doesn't seem like healing demand will increase for our teammates, my suggestion is that we should start healing our enemies instead. Well, more accurately, anti-healing them.

Here's how it would work: All it would take is 1 GCD for each healer. This GCD applies a debuff to your enemy target that "marks" a certain amount of hit points. While those marked hit points remain, they take increased damage. Once that marked amount of damage has been dealt, the debuff wears off.

For pure healers, if you cast the anti-heal ability while the previous debuff still has marked hit points remaining, those marked hit points simply increase UP TO the amount of a single cast. So you can't stack more marked hitpoints than one anti-heal's worth, you can only refresh/extend it.

For shield healers it should be riskier. If you cast anti-heal while marked hit points still remain, that cast is completely wasted. No additional marked hit points get added. This means they have to be extra careful to only cast when there's no prior marked hitpoints active. The higher risk should be rewarded with better damage amplification.

Why do I think this works? Well, it doesn't seem to violate the existing healer patterns SE seems determined to keep. Yet it significantly raises the healer skill ceiling and cognitive load (in comparison to how it is now), even in content with low healing demands. Healers will need to be more alert during burst phases (which is where most other jobs get their challenge from - aligning burst windows). They'll need to cast this GCD more frequently during burst and anticipate when burst begins and ends to time the anti-heal optimally.

Besides that, I don't think this would be too disruptive to existing balance since it can be tweaked through damage percentage adjustments without changing how encounters fundamentally work. Though this maybe up for discussion.

This also fits the job fantasy themes, for example:
White mage: Corrupting or weakening the enemy's natural vitality - the opposite of their nature magic healing
Astrologian: Placing a malefic star or curse upon the enemy that draws misfortune when triggered
Scholar: Applying a strategic biolysis-like compound that makes marked tissue more vulnerable to subsequent attacks
Sage: Injecting harmful nouliths or toxins that make the enemy's body more susceptible to damage

TLDR give healers more attacks

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Originally Posted by SamRF

White mage: Corrupting or weakening the enemy's natural vitality - the opposite of their nature magic healing
Astrologian: Placing a malefic star or curse upon the enemy that draws misfortune when triggered
Scholar: Applying a strategic biolysis-like compound that makes marked tissue more vulnerable to subsequent attacks
Sage: Injecting harmful nouliths or toxins that make the enemy's body more susceptible to damage

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None of these are "healing the enemy." :confused::confused::confused:

Healing is restoring HP, applying barriers/shields, applying mitigations, applying buffs, removing debuffs, and the like.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

None of these are "healing the enemy." :confused::confused::confused:

Healing is restoring HP, applying barriers/shields, applying mitigations, applying buffs, removing debuffs, and the like.

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Originally Posted by Bad_Luck

TLDR give healers more attacks

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Maybe I'm stupid but I believe mechanically speaking this is more like healing than your average dps ability. It's effectively a buff to your allies, and the way it's applied requires timing based on the enemy's health, and thus based on incoming damage. It's inversed healing. Thematically it's more in line with dps abilities, but mechanically it follows healer patterns. That's all I meant.

Healing the enemy?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EaBgTD...9ubGluZQ%3D%3D

Cleric Stance!

I thought Cleric Stance was hard to deal with when it was still around, but what it does is toggle the type of damage you do against the enemy. In Cleric Stance you did more damage to the enemy, at the cost of nerfed healing for allies.

So what I think lines up the most with your desires is: reinstate Cleric Stance.

Healing roles won't feel like a complete chore to do damage. And since it's toggleable, you get to decide when the punch up happens for burst damage. And when healing time in a fight comes back, toggle back to normal stance.

Just make it an typical extra attack, independent of others. Why purposely make it usable in solo play?

I'd be all for adding some undead enemies that we can heal to (un-un)death in some side-content, but that should leverage the actual healing kit rather than just making a needlessly wonky use of what amounts to simply an extra offensive action.

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Originally Posted by Sabey

Cleric Stance!

I thought Cleric Stance was hard to deal with when it was still around, but what it does is toggle the type of damage you do against the enemy. In Cleric Stance you did more damage to the enemy, at the cost of nerfed healing for allies.

So what I think lines up the most with your desires is: reinstate Cleric Stance.

Healing roles won't feel like a complete chore to do damage. And since it's toggleable, you get to decide when the punch up happens for burst damage. And when healing time in a fight comes back, toggle back to normal stance.

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If They bring that back, l am just going to throw it out of the hotbar and ignore the small dps number l see on my screen

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Originally Posted by Sabey

Healing roles won't feel like a complete chore to do damage. And since it's toggleable, you get to decide when the punch up happens for burst damage. And when healing time in a fight comes back, toggle back to normal stance.

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How is it not a chore to also constantly have to toggle a stance on and off for DPSing?

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Originally Posted by Sabey

Cleric Stance!

I thought Cleric Stance was hard to deal with when it was still around, but what it does is toggle the type of damage you do against the enemy. In Cleric Stance you did more damage to the enemy, at the cost of nerfed healing for allies.

So what I think lines up the most with your desires is: reinstate Cleric Stance.

Healing roles won't feel like a complete chore to do damage. And since it's toggleable, you get to decide when the punch up happens for burst damage. And when healing time in a fight comes back, toggle back to normal stance.

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That's not how Cleric Stance worked or anything like Cleric Stance would work if "reinstated", though.

You get balanced around it anyways, so it's purely a way to deal a quarter your usual healing if you started dealing more than a quarter damage within the last 5 seconds and costs you an oGCD gap every time you want to swap between healing or attacking. Add to that how it is crippled by ping or packet loss or SkS or even just the poor server check rate and you've got a mechanic that exists only to add bloat that disproportionately hurts players further from data center host locations (and, to a lesser extent, from Japan regardless).

There was no "decision" to be made between doing normal damage and doing a quarter or less of it. Even if you continue to leave the stat portion out, leaving only the -20% healing for +10% damage, your damage would still be tuned around that +10% damage and your healing around the normal healing, while the only added control (rather than mere ping check) it'd offer is to skills that deal both damage and healing simultaneously (Assize, Earthen Star, Pneuma, etc.).

If you want more palpable choice between damage and healing, the simplest solution is just to increase healing requirements such that they actually tax our GCDs and increase healer damage commensurately. And if you want damage to be less dull, then that's equally improvable by adding offensive actions (the more cognitive load the better) and adding inadvertent interaction with heals (e.g., short DoTs, MP-efficient heals, and HoTs fighting for space, such that the better one knows a fight, the more damage they can put out while still keeping everyone up and not going oom).

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

That's not how Cleric Stance worked or anything like Cleric Stance would work if "reinstated", though.

You get balanced around it anyways, so it's purely a way to deal a quarter your usual healing if you started dealing more than a quarter damage within the last 5 seconds and costs you an oGCD gap every time you want to swap between healing or attacking. Add to that how it is crippled by ping or packet loss or SkS or even just the poor server check rate and you've got a mechanic that exists only to add bloat that disproportionately hurts players further from data center host locations (and, to a lesser extent, from Japan regardless).

There was no "decision" to be made between doing normal damage and doing a quarter or less of it. Even if you continue to leave the stat portion out, leaving only the -20% healing for +10% damage, your damage would still be tuned around that +10% damage and your healing around the normal healing, while the only added control (rather than mere ping check) it'd offer is to skills that deal both damage and healing simultaneously (Assize, Earthen Star, Pneuma, etc.).

If you want more palpable choice between damage and healing, the simplest solution is just to increase healing requirements such that they actually tax our GCDs and increase healer damage commensurately. And if you want damage to be less dull, then that's equally improvable by adding offensive actions (the more cognitive load the better) and adding inadvertent interaction with heals (e.g., short DoTs, MP-efficient heals, and HoTs fighting for space, such that the better one knows a fight, the more damage they can put out while still keeping everyone up and not going oom).

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I should have emphasized how bad Cleric Stance was and how I was glad to see it get the boot, I had many encounters where the excuse for the tank dying or the party wiping was "Oops Cleric Stance, bleh" (RIP Stone Skin and Protect). But I was also a new ffxiv healer back then.

More ocd damage from SCH would be nice, like what if Indomitability also did aoe damage? or like Shadow Flare, have Sacred Soil also do aoe DOT damage?

I wish healers worked more like how a Blue Mage healer does. Of course they are kind of barebones, but the idea is there:

Most of the GCDs are spent with healing actions managing MP, with a couple 'emergency' expensive oGCD healing. Of course you'd still need a GCD nuke for when absolutely no healing is needed at some point.

Then, the bulk of a Healer's DPS would come from weaving strong oGCDs in between the healing. Or in case of AST, cards buffing others.

As a BLU, you spend most of your GCDs spamming Pom Cure or other healing actions with cast times, and you weave your many ogcds between them.

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Originally Posted by Sabey

I should have emphasized how bad Cleric Stance was and how I was glad to see it get the boot, I had many encounters where the excuse for the tank dying or the party wiping was "Oops Cleric Stance, bleh" (RIP Stone Skin and Protect). But I was also a new ffxiv healer back then.

More ocd damage from SCH would be nice, like what if Indomitability also did aoe damage? or like Shadow Flare, have Sacred Soil also do aoe DOT damage?

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The more you hybridize healer spells, though, the less swing you ultimately have available to you. That seems a non-issue for now when so much output is locked behind CDs, but even then this means that your maximum DPS is locked behind potentially/likely wasted healing and vice versa. That's... fine(?), I guess, for occasional flavor and in moderation (e.g., if you want a use-on-cooldown rhythmic ability), but it's worth noting that even all the original hybrids weren't really hybrids; due to Cleric Stance, you still had to choose which side --damage or healing-- would be neutered nearly into irrelevance.

For my part, I just want to see...

• Relative healing requirements drastically increased, such that around 40-67% offensive uptime is the norm, depending on content;
  
  
• healers have their damage increased commensurately to this reduced uptime such that in-practice damage is about the same and the gap between their 100%-uptime total offensive contribution and that of the average DPS is about halved;
  
  
• healers get 1-2 more offensive actions and 1-3 more offensive interactions (not requiring new buttons, but still adding cognitive load) to better "deserve" that added damage and reduce the gap between partial and full uptime (such as through CDs and pseudo-CDs like DoTs or passively-ramped spendables, heals refunding potency onto attacks, etc.), ideally in ways that create some priority conflicts mitigatable through fight-knowledge between maximizing heal-efficiency and maximizing damage-efficiency despite this available efficiency bump (as was the case when we had short DoTs and shortish HoTs); and
  
  
• to make room for the above, 2-3 overly set-use-case or use-on-CD actions trimmed from healer (starting with Lucid Dream, for instance, replacing it with commensurately increased passive MP regen) and
  
  
• ideally, at least some interaction between kit items, but only insofar as would be a net increase to agency and cognitive load (rather than just resulting in bundling or overpowering the total contribution of a skill that leads into others), since though priority conflict is already a very solid means of increase, it rarely comes off quite as flavorful as the [pretense of] complexity available through "synergies"/interdependency (which may also supply the priority conflicts I want anyways).

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Originally Posted by Sabey

More ocd damage from SCH would be nice, like what if Indomitability also did aoe damage? or like Shadow Flare, have Sacred Soil also do aoe DOT damage?

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I've never felt that adding damage to healing was a good idea. It results in the healing side of things becoming even more trivial since everything gets used as soon as its off cooldown and you're only left with the most basic heals for actual healing. Reacting quickly to party mistakes and coming up with a heal plan on the fly is one of the few areas where the combat isn't overly rigid, and I don't want to lose that.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

I don't think healers will get a fundamental change in design, nor does it seem like self sustain of tanks will be changed. The most productive question may be: how can we increase the cognitive load of the healer job in normal/non-heated combat, within the current design?

Since it doesn't seem like healing demand will increase for our teammates, my suggestion is that we should start healing our enemies instead. Well, more accurately, anti-healing them.

Here's how it would work: All it would take is 1 GCD for each healer. This GCD applies a debuff to your enemy target that "marks" a certain amount of hit points. While those marked hit points remain, they take increased damage. Once that marked amount of damage has been dealt, the debuff wears off.

For pure healers, if you cast the anti-heal ability while the previous debuff still has marked hit points remaining, those marked hit points simply increase UP TO the amount of a single cast. So you can't stack more marked hitpoints than one anti-heal's worth, you can only refresh/extend it.

For shield healers it should be riskier. If you cast anti-heal while marked hit points still remain, that cast is completely wasted. No additional marked hit points get added. This means they have to be extra careful to only cast when there's no prior marked hitpoints active. The higher risk should be rewarded with better damage amplification.

Why do I think this works? Well, it doesn't seem to violate the existing healer patterns SE seems determined to keep. Yet it significantly raises the healer skill ceiling and cognitive load (in comparison to how it is now), even in content with low healing demands. Healers will need to be more alert during burst phases (which is where most other jobs get their challenge from - aligning burst windows). They'll need to cast this GCD more frequently during burst and anticipate when burst begins and ends to time the anti-heal optimally.

Besides that, I don't think this would be too disruptive to existing balance since it can be tweaked through damage percentage adjustments without changing how encounters fundamentally work. Though this maybe up for discussion.

This also fits the job fantasy themes, for example:
White mage: Corrupting or weakening the enemy's natural vitality - the opposite of their nature magic healing
Astrologian: Placing a malefic star or curse upon the enemy that draws misfortune when triggered
Scholar: Applying a strategic biolysis-like compound that makes marked tissue more vulnerable to subsequent attacks
Sage: Injecting harmful nouliths or toxins that make the enemy's body more susceptible to damage

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Hmmmm. Having the target take increased damage is not the way to go. FFXIV already has many abilities in place which allow player characters to deal extra damage to enemy mobs and bosses.

Um, I understood it quite different.

What OP asked is another way to attack. OP wants something akin to healbombing or at least more ways to debuff enemies using heals.

What while Cleric Stance was an ability what was in the way. It was simply an unfun way to swap Int and Mnd when Int = magic damage / Mnd = Heal strenght was enforced. Imagine that there was a way a level 100 Scholar heal less than 1,000 HP on a GCD heal. When tank's HP is easily over 190,000. This is Cleric Stance.

Maybe it could show up one of those ‘keep this object/npc at (as close to) full HP’ type mechanics? I highly doubt they’d rework the skill set of every healer available solely for the resolution of a singular, specific mechanic though. Or like some zombie adds appear and you have to heal them to kill them?
I mean, they can barely handle adding 2-3 new cool-down abilities every expansion lol, never mind creating the animations and effects for new ‘offensive heals’, fitting it into existing skill set, etc.