Would Discipline Priest Mechanics work in FFXIV?

[SendohJin]

This. But, I would argue that you could also equip the new healer style with means of immunizing themselves to these things, rather than causing content to treat them all equally or leaving certain old fights unaccessible to melee healers..

If 1 of the 4 healer jobs can immunize themselves against Searing Wind then the other healers will always be ostracized for that fight. And I'm not just talking about one or two existing old fights but also any future encounters that will use similar mechanics.

player targeted splash damage will always be a thing. having a healer that likes/wants/needs to be in melee range will make job compositions really difficult as there's only so much room available around a boss.

[Shurrikhan]

If 1 of the 4 healer jobs can immunize themselves against Searing Wind then the other healers will always be ostracized for that fight. And I'm not just talking about one or two existing old fights but also any future encounters that will use similar mechanics.

Player targeted splash damage will always be a thing. having a healer that likes/wants/needs to be in melee range will make job compositions really difficult as there's only so much room available around a boss.

All Ifrit Ex really preferred were ranged; casters and melee were screwed equally. Melee space was never really the issue there. Heck, I can't remember a single fight that ever prevented the typical melee/melee/ranged/caster composition. You're also looking at a fight in which the Searing Wind can be rotated out consistently and easily. I don't see anything so wrong with one healer being able to spend valuable cast time to protect the party from itself and related mechanics or have the ability to prevent some percentage of those mechanical debilitators in order to even out its contribution over the fight. It's matter of scale. It does not have to be the case that either the fight breaks the healer or the healer breaks the fight. Mere mitigation of the Searing Wind explosion radius in Ifrit Ex, for instance can make it possible for the "melee healer" to stand at one point of the boss's triangle (flank/back divide) while the melee stand on the other and the tank at the head, both barely within heal range or reachable with instant casts between Searing Wind bursts, allowing the healer's presence but far from outright stripping the fight of its mechanics. Any other limiters—be they by cooldown, shared job resources, mana cost, or the whatever else—can do the same, allowing the job a full sense of control and contribution, but still feeling like it's working with and around the mechanics.

Moreover, should space really be such an issue, what's so wrong then with bringing one extra caster, and moving one healer into melee position? So you might lose a melee dps occasionally in order to fill out the composition; it's not the first time one job's excluded another or a set thereof (DRK diminishing MNK value and vice versa, or MCH prefering an all-physical group wherever possible, or even high healer accuracy reducing the point in having a Bard, or a Paladin the point in having a shielding healer if all would-be lethal raid damage were to fall within its DV timer), and it probably wouldn't be the last. The only real virtue of having all jobs on one character, especially with shared role gear, is that we can swap out accordingly.

because DF is a thing...and in a 8 man DF you can get 2 tanks 3 melees and 2 "melee healers" ....and a lonely black mageeee relegated to the backstaaageee

SE could force more ranged into a melee healer setup ? yeah but queues are bad already for dps , forcing melees dps to wait even more because there is a melee healer , when all healers work withn ranged ....is a bad idea...

Though composition could indeed be an issue (and is one of the reasons I really want to see the ability to queue as multiple jobs, which the duty finder can then match together for the fight by its own more specific criteria), I feel like people do sometimes give DF or pug parties less credit that they deserve. My first time seeing the T6 LoS strat was in a PuG, cus someone didn't know how to do it normally, sprinted around and somehow didn't get eaten, and someone else said "hey, let's just try spinning!"... cleared soon after, a first for most of us. Similarly, I've had DF Levi Ex's where not one person who could prevent sliding down the ship ever did, where stuns were held, people would swap spumes/gyres just in time to avoid Tail Lash, and an Ifrit Ex that started with "let's just do spirals around Ifrit instead of running away", which... worked perfectly.

[Warlyx]

Moreover, should space really be such an issue, what's so wrong then with bringing one extra caster, and moving one healer into melee position? So you might lose a melee dps occasionally in order to fill out the composition; it's not the first time one job's excluded another or a set thereof (DRK diminishing MNK value and vice versa, or MCH prefering an all-physical group wherever possible, or even high healer accuracy reducing the point in having a Bard, or a Paladin the point in having a shielding healer if all would-be lethal raid damage were to fall within its DV timer), and it probably wouldn't be the last. The only real virtue of having all jobs on one character, especially with shared role gear, is that we can swap out accordingly.

because DF is a thing...and in a 8 man DF you can get 2 tanks 3 melees and 2 "melee healers" ....and a lonely black mageeee relegated to the backstaaageee

SE could force more ranged into a melee healer setup ? yeah but queues are bad already for dps , forcing melees dps to wait even more because there is a melee healer , when all healers work withn ranged ....is a bad idea...

[FoxyAreku]

because DF is a thing...and in a 8 man DF you can get 2 tanks 3 melees and 2 "melee healers" ....and a lonely black mageeee relegated to the backstaaageee

SE could force more ranged into a melee healer setup ? yeah but queues are bad already for dps , forcing melees dps to wait even more because there is a melee healer , when all healers work withn ranged ....is a bad idea...

Balance and class creation should never, ever take duty finder into mind.

This game is, and always should be, balanced around 8 man preformed parties, except in the case where they make difficult 4 man content, but they haven't done that yet so eh.

Disc is doing pretty poorly in Legion ATM due to the changes they made to Power Word:Shield and stuff. They're struggling at getting Atonement on enough people quickly enough and doing enough burst DPS to heal them to full. Compared to SCH's insane toolkit of ETactics Succor, WDawn and Indom a Disc-type healer wouldn't be able to compete unless they copied over some aspects of Holy healing, as well. (Pugs were dropping Mythic 5-mans if they got a Disc as a healer who wouldn't swap to Holy; it was that bad.)

I can't say I'm a fan of tying a class's sole form of healing into how much DPS they can do. It either means their DPS is too strong or their healing suffers. They'd be great "off-healers" in an 8-man but if the devs ever come out with any 4-mans that aren't a drooling faceroll a disc-type healer would start to show some struggle.

Everyone keeps talking about Legion, I was talking about Pandaria's disc priest, where you didn't have to place atonement on people and your DPS just automatically healed the closest targets, and you also still had flash heal, greater heal, prayer, etc.

Pandaria WoW was the epitome of WoW gameplay imo and I wish they would go back to that, but that's off topic.

[Duelle]

Balance and class creation should never, ever take duty finder into mind.

I'm gonna disagree with this, because class design will reflect in what happens on DF as much as raids. Which means if you make class design too restrictive or around very specific niches, you will screw over those classes in 4-man dungeons.

Everyone keeps talking about Legion, I was talking about Pandaria's disc priest, where you didn't have to place atonement on people and your DPS just automatically healed the closest targets, and you also still had flash heal, greater heal, prayer, etc.

The point of Disc from back then was basically shields, and cooldowns that turned healing spells into shields. At least from what I've read and what few sources I could find on disc. You had stuff like Penance and Divine Star, but that seems to be the gist of Disc.

On the one hand it seems the devs have based SCH a lot on that version of Disc, just with a pet instead of cooldowns to turn heals into shields. If this is not the case (I mained a prot warrior and ret paladin during my time in WoW, so I have no first-hand experience with any of the healers in that game), you might want to further clarify.

Non-sequitur:

2. I still don't understand what you're asking here. It might be that I fail at reading comprehension or am just too tired to fully process what you're saying.

3. Rather than import stuff from other classes (because the classes themselves don't have much in terms of mechanics), I'd probably ask for different version of certain skills. For example, a DRG has the choice of equipping one of three versions of Heavy Thrust. One increases damage dealt like the current version. One deals only damage (~250 potency) but has a cooldown of 15s and is off-GCD. One places a TP regen effect on you for 30s. You'd still run into the problem of one being mathematically superior to the other two, but that can't be avoided.

4. That approach has a very limited number of applications. Using your Cover example, a PLD that sets Cover as a trait would be pretty damn strong without some sort of internal cooldown on when Cover procs. I can't think of how this would work for certain jobs.

5. The answer is, you don't. The only reason I think they even bother to keep talents is because people will literally foam at the mouth if they suddenly removed talents as whole and made them baseline to their respective classes. Considering the shitstorm Blizzard saw when they did the first talent revamp, people would feel like they took something out of the game even though it would be moved from one part of the design to another. Sort of like the stupidity that took place when Coca Cola changed the formula of their drink (people who didn't care before acted like they had been robbed of a sacred treasure and demanded the formula be restored, and Coca Cola went and did). On that note, the artifact system smells to me of Blizzard testing the waters to see how players take to a progression system where you invest points into traits and advancement. Assuming this is indeed the case, I have a feeling talents will get slowly phased out or outright removed next expansion, specially if the progression for artifacts goes over well with the players.

6. This is not the right question to ask me, because to me everything you've mentioned brings one simple thought to mind: This needs to be redesigned. Every single item is terribly flawed, and thus to me the only course of action would be to re-conceptualize them. I know it's unrealistic, but trying to simply tweak stuff like Meditation and Chakras and WM is like trying to polish a turd.

[Lokier]

Pandaria WoW was the epitome of WoW gameplay imo and I wish they would go back to that, but that's off topic.

This for druid healing. I hate healing in general, less so than tanking, but that's a different story; Pandaria was def' the only time I think druid healing was good or fun. My dad eventually quit WoW perminantly because they screwed over his paladin healer so much he couldn't main-heal anymore, the thing he did and enjoyed since 2005 release...

[Shurrikhan]

Everyone keeps talking about Legion, I was talking about Pandaria's disc priest, where you didn't have to place atonement on people and your DPS just automatically healed the closest targets, and you also still had flash heal, greater heal, prayer, etc.

Pandaria WoW was the epitome of WoW gameplay imo and I wish they would go back to that, but that's off topic.

Mists Disc Attunement was automatic, but it was also a minor healing component, with all the thought of making sure you were milking your free PW:S via Rapture, if that. Traditionally, or really all the way up until Legion, Disc has also had a tremendous case of SCH syndrome — "with enough Discs, it's no longer a mechanic." Barrier shielding in general (both Earth Shield and especially the entire Disc point of superiority) took a dive with Legion, as it's just not a niche they wanted Disc to be guaranteed slots over for certain fights. It now joined the tide of raid-healers, where DPS is about the only thing it has to make up for its lackluster toolkit (compared to Holy burst, or especially, say, Resto Shaman).

If you want the overall package of what Disc meant for a raid, we pretty well have it already: Scholar.

If you mean specifically a bit of direct heals and damage as healing between rolling instant shields and chain-healing-trap buffs, with one really shitty HoT for on the move when all instants and your CD heal are on cooldown, I wonder how it'd differ enough from a SCH or the half-breed AST to really be worth adding. I'd say mechanically it could still absolutely work. I just don't know if it'd bring anything that would feel especially new to the table.

[Welsper59]

Mists Disc Attunement was automatic, but it was also a minor healing component, with all the thought of making sure you were milking your free PW:S via Rapture, if that. Traditionally, or really all the way up until Legion, Disc has also had a tremendous case of SCH syndrome — "with enough Discs, it's no longer a mechanic." Barrier shielding in general (both Earth Shield and especially the entire Disc point of superiority) took a dive with Legion, as it's just not a niche they wanted Disc to be guaranteed slots over for certain fights. It now joined the tide of raid-healers, where DPS is about the only thing it has to make up for its lackluster toolkit (compared to Holy burst, or especially, say, Resto Shaman).

If you want the overall package of what Disc meant for a raid, we pretty well have it already: Scholar.

If you mean specifically a bit of direct heals and damage as healing between rolling instant shields and chain-healing-trap buffs, with one really shitty HoT for on the move when all instants and your CD heal are on cooldown, I wonder how it'd differ enough from a SCH or the half-breed AST to really be worth adding. I'd say mechanically it could still absolutely work. I just don't know if it'd bring anything that would feel especially new to the table.

I gotta agree with this. Disc Priest would work, but that'd just be because we have its FFXIV relative with a pet to do most of the healing: SCH. Unless the game really is going headfirst into prioritizing damage output over everything else, another healer with heavy focus on DPS output to heal isn't going to bold well.

[loreleidiangelo]

I gotta agree with this. Disc Priest would work, but that'd just be because we have its FFXIV relative with a pet to do most of the healing: SCH. Unless the game really is going headfirst into prioritizing damage output over everything else, another healer with heavy focus on DPS output to heal isn't going to bold well.

I'd prefer if they moved away from it, myself. Tired of new healer jobs being judged on how much DPS they can do while healing, or how well they can virtually solo heal a raid so that the OTHER healer can DPS a ton. Very refreshing playing WoW in this regard, where their stance on healer DPS is "if you have time to DPS, your raid has too many healers". It works for Disc in Legion because their raw ability to boost HP bars is weak; you'll bring them to a raid for extra DPS oomph and tank/spot-healing, but they're not so good at both angles like SCH where they'll be mandatory to a comp.

More to the point, Disc's niche is a unique one because of the way raids are balanced in WoW in general. You'll never NEED Power Word:Shield like you'll need Adlo or Noct Barrier for tank busters/AOE version for raid busters. Disc's barriers exist solely AS their method of "healing". They don't have a lot of ways to boost someone if their HP gets low, so they have a bunch of damage-reducing CDs to make SURE no one gets low to begin with. This isn't really how XIV's raids are designed, so if they don't have SOME kind of barrier mechanic SCH will still be the king of "DPS healers". If a Disc-type is basically a WHM but their Regen is put up through DPSing and they have access to burst healing as well...well you can imagine what that would do to DiAST/WHM.

tl;dr if you design Disc with shields so they can replace a SCH in raids they are basically a SCH just with a "DPSing regen", instead of a "pet regen while you DPS" if you remove the shield concept from them they'll either suck because of no burst healing, or they'll have burst healing WITH "DPSing regen" and WHM/AST can kiss their raid spots goodbye.

SE really needs to do away with the design of shields being mandatory for raids, IMO. New healers will never have interesting concepts or designs if they don't start designing fights that break away from the "one burst healer/one shield-and-DPS healer" raid meta.