Would Discipline Priest Mechanics work in FFXIV?

[Reinha]

If a melee healer has ranged heals, then it's not really a melee healer.

A melee healer is one that has only melee attacks and is considered a melee for boss mechanics. An example is the Mistweaver Monk in WoW, who would never be targeted by boss abilities that are meant to keep the ranged moving (puddles, spreading debuffs etc). If there are any such mechanics that specifically target healers (like in A4) then the melee healer simply doesn't do any dps during those mechanics. There are both positives (not being targeted by certain mechanics) and negatives (not being able to dps in every situation) to being a melee healer so I'd consider it balanced overall.

How would this healer work with the others? Like there are 3 healers right now and we add a discipline-like healer for the 4th...it would need to be balanced very carefully to make sure it was not overpowered compared to other healers...like I can see it now raid groups only taking this new healer and SCH while WHM and AST get backseated and no one wants to take them since this new healer can DPS a lot and heal simultaneously. This game isn't like WoW when it comes to battle so I just don't know if it can be added properly, but I do like this type of healer.

I think it could be a healer that can actually take the spot of the SCH, unlike Nocturnal AST. A healer that has significant dps and can cause automated healing during dps, but whose "pure" healing capabilities are not as good as a WHM or Diurnal AST has. To make sure SCH stays put they could make the new healer (I'll call the new healer DISC) incompatible with SCH in some way. For example make DISC dps cause random absorb shields which overwrite the stronger SCH shields. When balanced in such a way the best comps would be:

WHM / DISC
AST / DISC
WHM / SCH
AST / SCH

Everyone would have an equal chance to get a raid spot, and have 2 good co-healer options and 1 not so good option (WHM / AST and SCH / DISC). Nocturnal would remain the way it currently is: a stance that is used only when paired with another AST (or in some cases WHM) in DF.

[Tolmos]

In Rift there's a class called the Chloromancer that works closer to what the OP described. It's the mage healer, and heals are based on a % of the damage done. You can pick a player and also boost the heals it produces on that player, so the tank will get the bulk of the heals while the party gets a smaller amount.

I, personally, enjoyed the original way the Disc priest used to work back during Vanilla WoW/BC. It was a very shield based healer, focusing on mitigating damage and then dropping heals once that damage was mitigated. In that respect, Scholar fits most closely (which is why I play one).

Based on this new description of a Disc priest, I'd say a new class would probably be needed, as it is closer to Rift's Chloromancer.

[Voltyblast]

Snip

If they invested WHM+SCH combo so much that's difficult to work new ways of healing, then this means it would be nearly impossible to make new healers in the future because they would eventually be copies of the first 2: anything else that is not similar will be ignored...and this is not a good thing.

But I'm the first one to say that the main culprit is the game itself and the mentality it asks of "meta": in most mmorpgs I played every class is viable with maybe one or two exceptions, but I really had a hard time seeing one class being preferred overall and the reason was that each class had a unique method of play that had more or less utility in certain fights: some classes were better kiters, some had better aoe, some had better single target damage, etc. But overall they were all useful in their own way.

The way the game demands for a specific "meta" in terms of jobs, to the point that all future jobs could be copies of pre-existing ones, could lead us to more copy cat jobs in the future. And if future jobs will be locked behind expansion like HW did, why would I want to level it when the original 10 are basically the same (and probably more balanced than the new ones, who could be underpowered)?

I'm curious of what they're gonna do but if the next jobs are copies of pre-existing ones again, I'll just stick with what I already know: it's not that they're that different anyway.

[FoxyAreku]

I also played Disc Priest and I like it also.

Only thing I am wondering is...

How would this healer work with the others? Like there are 3 healers right now and we add a discipline-like healer for the 4th...it would need to be balanced very carefully to make sure it was not overpowered compared to other healers...like I can see it now raid groups only taking this new healer and SCH while WHM and AST get backseated and no one wants to take them since this new healer can DPS a lot and heal simultaneously. This game isn't like WoW when it comes to battle so I just don't know if it can be added properly, but I do like this type of healer.

IMO, if the heals that come off of DPSing was merely equivalent to say, Eos, or thereabouts, I think it would work quite well as a scholar replacement.

[Miste]

IMO, if the heals that come off of DPSing was merely equivalent to say, Eos, or thereabouts, I think it would work quite well as a scholar replacement.

Yeah that would work. I was just wondering because right now in WoW Disc Priest healing through their DPS is pretty potent so if converted to this game would be broken I think lol xD

[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.

[Duelle]

If they invested WHM+SCH combo so much that's difficult to work new ways of healing, then this means it would be nearly impossible to make new healers in the future because they would eventually be copies of the first 2: anything else that is not similar will be ignored...and this is not a good thing.

It's not so much whether it's similar design-wise, but whether the results in-group are similar.

At least as I've seen it argued, a big part of the problem is that SCH is very damn powerful. Heal shields are supposedly invaluable in raids given how they're currently designed. This creates a problem where WHM is easily replaced so long as the alternatives have similar healing throughput. None of the other healing approaches would come close to damage prevention from crit Adlos (there was that one comic where Sephirot basically surrendered without a fight to a raid only because they had a SCH), and I say that as someone who has seen other healing designs over the years.

There's also the issue of the game engine's design. HoT focus is really hard here because overhealing generates aggro, so as much as I want a resto druid analogue in this game, you're not going to see a proper adaptation because it'd make initial pulls a nightmare to the tank. Things like smart-heals are elitist fodder (much to my dismay) and push classes designed around it to the niche of raid healing (something FFXIV doesn't support because raid healers shine in large raids, which as already established the game lacks).

But I'm the first one to say that the main culprit is the game itself and the mentality it asks of "meta": in most mmorpgs I played every class is viable with maybe one or two exceptions, but I really had a hard time seeing one class being preferred overall and the reason was that each class had a unique method of play that had more or less utility in certain fights: some classes were better kiters, some had better aoe, some had better single target damage, etc. But overall they were all useful in their own way.

The thing is that most MMOs support large raids in some way. For example, WoW's raiding allowed for small discrepancies between healers because in a 40/25-man raid you needed tank healers and raid healers, with tuning allowing for either to efficiently heal in 5-man dungeons. Thus no one is really affected because a healer can heal both major facets of content.

[Shurrikhan]

A healer thats heals are dependent on its dps? Very possible, but the system and attitude of how the trinity is "supposed" to be would have to change in my opinion- More importantly how tanks were dealt with in 3.2. Sure! more attack power meant more mitigation! More self healing! "More better" tanking, with "more better" tank enmity generation! anyway like i said before i think it would be fun to play, a cool concept, but i think it would get nerfed so hard it was unplayable, till something changes in the meta. Very possible yes, unlikely atm

The main thing, I imagine, would be leveling out the potential for combined average, or simultaneous, intensity of healing and dps. At present, uptime in either healing or damage-dealing costs uptime in the opposite. Periodic effects can smooth that out to some extent, by offering multiple filler casts' worth of potency in a single GCD, but in the end even a Regen is a lost Stone III and vice versa. For a damages-to-heal type of healer to be balanced without being niched into positions of guaranteed slots and abandonment, it would need to be able to have trade-offs between damage-to-healing effectiveness, buffing the conversion rate or number of targets or radius or split bonus, etc., versus the actual damage done.

In other words, you can't have just one answer for every situation (minimal setup to allow healing, and then just dps, dps, dps, and dps).

For it to be balanced by niche without being excluded or bound, you would indeed need to adjust the meta, which in turn requires adjusting a huge number of fights or broadening design on future ones to its advantages a viable but non-guaranteed place.

[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...