Nerfing Healer Role Through Content

[Littlegreen]

you can not only design it for a higher item level, but also make it harder overall, since new players and second classes, both indicators that the player is not as skilled as a veteran player on his mainclass, are excluded from the dungeon.

You can definitely make the content harder to heal but accessible to new players, especially once they've gotten to SB. At that point they should be pretty familiar with their class. It doesn't even need to be just throwing in bigger numbers, you can put mini-mechanics in the dungeon itself or give the trash mobs some tricks up their sleeves. The last time I had trouble in a dungeon was Baelsar's Wall after coming off of a 2 week break and was a bit behind gear-wise and even then it was just the very first couple pulls I was having trouble with (but I did appreciate the enemy bards throwing venom/windbite on party members. It wiped each of my parties when pulling both encounters but it's def the kind of stuff I want to see more of). After that it was laughably easy.


For example, there's no reason that in Sohm Al Hard I should go in as SCH and almost never leave Cleric Stance, even at i267. Selene should not be able to keep the party alive by herself, in boss fights especially. At that point it's too little damage.

[ADVSS]

Man I do not like this topic but often i see complaints that healing is too easy. Personally, at least to me early level healing up to 60 wasnt necessarily what I would call fun and easy, and hence I never touched it after getting whm/sch to 60. I could make some terrible, but realistic suggestions to do this but I kind of respect the healing community because unfortunately as of HW I just cant seem to bring myself to want to or even bother. I will say this, though it might just be a matter of opinion. Cleric Stance could just get trashed/canned/done away with, and have all their damage spells base off of mind. I know some people enjoy the thrill of stance dancing, but that skill really stopped having a logical purpose in 2.- release, since well its not like it was cross classible with thaumaturge anymore.IF they did this though, the draw back potentially could see a change like tanks, potentially lowering overall healing or damage by a noticable amount I dont know how much anyone would like to see that personally
Often we focus about tanks and their responsibility, but in my opinion were sort of downplaying just how important healers are. Tanks are useless if theres no healer, Its an inevitable wipe if the healers are down and no smn. I would rather see more options than what we currently have (smn) to balance it out a little. And then after that, we could dip into whther healers heal too much

[Fernosaur]

I kinda only just got into raiding recently, so maybe I don't have room to talk in the first place. My experience is clearing A9S a couple weeks ago at i269 and most of my knowledge of other raids comes from my bf talking it through with me while he heals it. The pattern I noticed is that even when the damage gets intense, a lot of it is avoidable so I was thinking along the lines of something unavoidable but, with some coordination before the fight, is easily healed through.

Ah, I see. I figured this might be the case.

As Tasashi said in an earlier post, a lot of the problem that makes healing "easy" at this point in the expansion is the massive power creep that has come with higher IL. It is something that was particularly jarring in 3.X because the IL power creep has been ridiculously fast. Compare tank HP at the end of ARR with tank HP at the end of HW. A WAR could have around 14k HP by the time Final Coil of Bahamut ended. Now, a WAR can reach up to 50k HP. That's three times as much HP in a single expansion.


A really good example of this is the way Thordan EX has become by this point. It used to be the hardest HW primal by a massive margin, but now you can ignore a lot of mechanics and still faceroll through him thanks to the IL increments.

In any case, my point is that the problem is less about the content design in terms of concept, and more in terms of how it interacts with our gear levels. Zurvan is a perfect example of something that was released with outdated damage:gear parameters. However, if you had tried to do raiding content or EX primals at around the minimum IL required to enter, your opinion on healing design in the game would be very very different .

Thankfully, I think the devs are aware of this power creep problem, and I hope to see it more or less fixed by the time Stormblood comes.



Another thing that I have to talk about is that the whole "main/off" mentality that applies to healers and tanks is awfully flawed logic. There's no real reason one healer should have to shoulder more of the healing burden other than what their toolkits allow, and the same goes for tanks. You don't see SCH dpsing 80% of the time because the other healer is basically solo-healing the fight. And if this is the case, then the SCH is not efficient or good. A good SCH will make proper use of Eos and their insta-cast toolkit to keep AoE healing covered, as well as emergency healing from people taking avoidable damage and buffed regens+fairy on the main tank. This allows not only for the SCH to DPS, but also for the other healer to have a massive amount of good DPS windows. Of course, the lower the IL, the less both healers can DPS, but the concept should be the same. A SCH doing their job properly will be doing around 30% more healing than the other healer due to the fairy alone.

In the end, it's pointless if SCH's own DPS is 1800 if the other healer's is just 200 or less. It's much better for the raid if both healers are at around 1300, to give an example. All of this ain't because the content is "easy to solo-heal" and SCH is just sitting there DPSing, but because the job's specialty is creating DPS windows by using the fairy to heal and mitigate. Of course, you won't see this in trial roulettes and Party Finder pts, because it actually requires communication and trust between the two healers, and that ain't something you're expecting from PuGs.

The same thing can be applied to tanks, but I think my post is already long enough, lmao.

[Kaizencorr]

I'm of the mind set that anything you can offer as a solution can be countered by utility we already have in game. And the reason we won't see an increase in healer responsibility is because not all healers are created equal.

Not to mention requiring more usage of a healers utility in things like dungeons raises the skill cap in a place not designed for it. And requiring more usage in things like EX and Savage will make the healing requirements they already have become a burden for some.

I think you grossly underestimate how different the healers are. And while I'd love to see the skill cap raised through more cooldown management, I don't think it's something SE is willing to do right now.

[Sebazy]

Healing is a breeze even in some of the Savage raids and still leaves us room to DPS. Hell, SCH is basically a 5th DPS.

As stated above, it'd be very useful to know your raid experience to give us a good idea of the angle you are coming from. Going by Lodestone and such, I'd guess you recently got into the raiding scene and didn't do the prior Alex tiers or Coil? Apologies if this sounds elitist or such, I really don't mean it that way.

In dungeons .....

More mobs isn't really the answer, and if anything will be rather counter productive to your goal as it just overinflated healer DPS (Eg, I was doing 1000+dps on SCH in neverreap/fractal in ilvl 180 gear). Making dungeons more complex or flat out more difficult doesn't really work so well for the bread and butter daily roulette either, rough dungeons will always have a fanbase but the vocal majority will object and rage quit =/

All told, SE appear to have the right idea with gates, they just need to be a little more inventive with them. My vote would be having mobs that merge and progressively hit significantly harder mixed in with pulls. The end result would be a pull akin to the first Brayflox HM pull but with the damage ramping up significantly faster. Healy healers get to throw the tank in the deep end and actually have something worth healing, whereas a group with weaker aoe might be better off sticking to smaller pulls giving the healer significantly more room to DPS.

NM/HM trials ..... (the exploding healer mechanic from Ifrit EX comes to mind).

EX/Savage raids need the .....

Gonna lump my thoughts on primals and savage roughly together to keep this somewhat shorter than war and peace.

I will add tho, it's good that you mention Ifrit EX as that's probably the biggest 'healer fight' primal in the game and it was defo a favourite of mine <3

Starting with the trial specific stuff, I think hard mode primals are in the right place, the only thing I would change here is to rename it to story mode as yeah, 'hard mode' isn't really fitting anymore now that we only have 2 difficulties for these fights.

For EX mode primals, I feel the issue here is that for the most part, healers get it rather lightly with mechanics. However I wouldn't say they are drastically off point, whilst the difficulty has varied somewhat, most of the EX trials are a good stiff challenge in the appropriate gear. Zurvan is probably the most obvious glaring point here and it's a bit of a shame SE didn't alter him to make the first soar unskippable.

The deal with Zurvan kind of stems from SE's current approach to handling boss mechanics at the moment though and I suspect it'll be something they look to address come 4.0. I don't know how much Savage Alex time you have, but pretty much this entire tier of raids has key mechanics and often entire phases that can simply be skipped by strong DPS. Whilst yes, this was a thing as far back as Titan EX where you could skip the need to do a tank swap pre final phase, but it's never been anything like as significant as this to the point where it trivialises really very significant chunks of the encounter.

Somehow removing these skips would go a long way to addressing the seeming ease of Savage currently, particularly A12S which frankly is easier than A11S by someway if you have the DPS to skip the second fountains (Which really isn't hard at all with 15% echo).

Now for the juicy bits, how to make these encounters harder to heal! Three methods spring to mind for me, the first is simply to throw more mechanics specifically at the healers, note that simply jumbling the healers into more mechanics that would otherwise only target the DPS isn't such a good idea as it adds a significant luck element to your overall raid DPS and that isn't going to be popular with the progression teams. As above, Ifrit EX is a fantastic example of this sort of thing in action, A7S shows that it can be fiddled with and expanded upon, I don't doubt there's more options there!

A second option is kind of an expansion of A1S during early progression, forcing the group to spread and stand apart whilst significant amounts of damage is another option SE should explore to force more healing time. We all now how frustrating it can be to heal the various 24mans through aoe damage and it surprises me that SE haven't played on that further.

The third and one I've mentioned in other posts is simply to have the boss or bosses smash both tanks into the floor at the same time T1 and T11 were both great examples of this whilst they were current progression content and it's a theme I'd love to see SE take further. If you've never done it before, T11 is about the best encounter in the game that doesn't have a primal or a dragon in my eyes, well worth a go if you haven't done it already.

You might note that I don't really talk about bigger tank busters, frankly I don't think it'll help much, at best you're going to get the the SCH out of cleric for one GCD to adlo the tank and as is, that's not going to make a blind bit of difference. In my eyes the only way this will work would be to either 1) bring back T5 style debuff chains to draw the healers attention away from freely DPSing or 2) have bosses that auto attack more rapidly for significantly more overall damage combined with smaller but much more frequent and slightly erratic mini tank buster hits. A fed dreadnaught in T4 with ilvl appropriate gear is a good example of what I mean here. Not to mention, a rapid and hard hitting boss opens up visual possibilities to keep things fresh and interesting.

All in all tho, I think SE earn a 'must try harder' on their school report for Heavensward, I'm inclined to say that they got more of the encounters very right than they did wrong with A3S, A5S, A7S and A10S really standing out as fantastically enjoyable turns that were tuned appropriately. A8S was pretty much the perfect end of tier boss showing that you didn't need absurd DPS checks to make something super challenging.

On the /fail side though, they really need to prioritise giving healers more viable options beyond shrugging their shoulders and firing up cleric stance (I made a lengthy rebalance suggestion for AST that was aimed at this exact issue about a year ago). They also need to settle on a single vision of how they foresee the meta heading and actually work on educating the player base to function at a higher overall standard than the dross we have to deal with today, it's not really fair to hammer down on underperforming players when the game does such a horrible to job of informing them as such. Maat would never let this stand in FFXI

One last thing that's not really healer specific but I'll throw out there anyway. Probably the best way to slow down the massively evident powercreep between tiers without diluting the gains from big upgrades would simply be for SE to lessen the increase of vit per ilvl.

[technole]

Not sure if the OP has the complete picture unless they haven't cleared all of Creator Savage.

Scholars heal quite a bit too in Savage, the thought of us just a 5th DPS is a bit of a fallacy. You can't judge that based on the easier floors like A9S/A10S. In-fact the best raid groups this tier actually end up having the Scholar do more HPS than the other healer because of Eos and Indom being so good, yet both healers are still putting up good damage.

While Creator Savage is an easier healing tier than the previous two, the bulk of the work for a regen healer this tier was more on AoE healing like A11S photons, Double Whirlwinds. A12S with Double Holies, Sacrement, and Holy Bleed. Tank busters this tier had more chances to mitigate with being shared with another tank or tower (A11S) and immunities (A11S/A12S). Of course there was also the distinct advantage Dark Knight brought this tier over a Paladin because of magic mitigation. So amount of tank healing depended on your composition, and healer/tank skill (do they mitigate while in DPS stance or play safe in tank stance more than they should, etc)

Zurvan Ex is kind of a poorly tuned fight from the get-go, as noted by all the Skip Soar memes. Especially after the talk that YoshiP said they were considering it's difficulty because of how many groups cleared A12S before January. I felt they probably could have made the meteor debuffs do more damage-over-time cause we sure had a lot of time to DPS as long as you kept regens up during meteor mechanics.

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

I don't think Square is looking for something to increase the gap between the average and the best healers even more. If the persisting enochian change is any indication that they would like to close the skill gap. As much as I wouldn't mind the idea of proper CD management - which, by the way, is already part of it -, having a strict repertoire would make it less forgiving and the skill gap would remain or even increase. Increasing damage isn't something they should do either. Too much and it'll be impossible to clear content till they get more gear. But stay as it is and bloated ilvl would just keep the problem. Even if a little was added it would increase the skill gap as mistakes would become more unforgiving. If we look back at some older raid content, Square-Enix did some things right concerning healing "strain":
Second coil of Bahamut turn 2 (aka Turn 7)
Second coil of Bahamut turn 3 (aka Turn 8)
Final coil of Bahamut turn 3 (aka Turn 12)

If anyone remembers, in Second Coil of Bahamut turn 2 someone had to kite the Renaud that appears from time to time and there was a certain degree of management and planning involved with it. I believe most of the time summoners and bards would do this. I have done it a few times as a Scholar myself while maintaining my part of the healing duty. And this was hella fun to do. It opened some options for the individual player ability within the group. If the healer(s) can handle it, let the healer(s) handle it. If not, let some other player do it.
The same for Second coil of Bahamut turn 3. You had sets of towers and till the last couple you would only need four players to handle that mechanic. Healers didn't had to be included in it. But if they can handle it, why not? It opened up options for the group on how they would tackle certain mechanics without mechanics being forced on certain roles: Role specific jails from Midas floor 3, for example.
For Final Coil of Bahamut turn 3 the story is the same: Red fire/blue fire and fountain in particular.

While the skill gap is still there, the average ability is now from the group as whole. Rather than from a single individual. If healers are doing mechanics, they'd have less time to spend time doing damage. In exchange the rest of the group can focus on doing damage to balance it out. If a summoner would deal with the mechanics, healers would have more freedom to help contribute with damage. Personally I'd love to see more mechanics that could be done by any role. Of course, meta will drive groups to handle mechanics a certain way. And the problem remains that some healers would like to be catered to and take the free ticket out of mechanic- as well as damage duties. But to be frank, healers that can't handle healing and mechanics will just have to wait till the playerbase heavily outgears the content.

[Sebazy]

I'd have a lot more love for T7 if I hadn't have accidentally caneslapped a Renaud to death during my trial with Exordium. Shot my nerves to bits for a week that did lol =(

But definitely agreed on T8, it's kind of a shame it was such a forgettable boss, as the mechanics going on around it with the towers were fantastic.

Very good examples for sure <3

[Urthdigger]

EX/Savage raids need the main healer to REQUIRE focusing on the MT, and this content could do with some more communication between tanks and healers. Tank busters that would OHKO a PLD even with a defensive CD (outside Hollowed Ground), but, say, a WAR could sponge. In this situation, let's say the tank buster would dish out 1k over the PLD health. The healers could top off the PLD and provide a shield the keep him alive and then focus heal him back up or have the WAR Provoke the attack and the PLD takes back aggros while the off healer heals up the WAR and main healer never stops focus healing the tank.

I'd be wary of adding things like this to increase the healer burden. For starters, as others have mentioned this is very reliant on where everyone's stats are. A shot that will OHKO some Paladins will be unsurvivable even shield for others, and surviveable with no shield for better geared tanks (Also, that doesn't mean a WAR can survive due to higher HP: PLD gets more damage reduction, so while the WAR has more HP they also get hit harder.) Secondly, not every class shields equally. I know playing as WHM any mechanic where shields are highly desired makes me weep, since Stoneskin takes AGES and can't be done alongside topping off their HP.

One little issue with the game is how content needs to be clearable with literally any party composition, you can't have skills only certain jobs within a role have, or at least you can't get away with it now. I know the early days of ARR had a few fights where Silence was required, which only one tank, a couple DPS, and one healer have access to, but the only one where it was straight up required was Coil, and at the time you needed to go in with a pre-made party at the entrance, no duty finder. I imagine if they implement any fights down the road that straight up require skills only certain jobs have, that it would need to be a similar case where people can specifically invite people to do those roles and change job beforehand if needed.

[Tint]

I know the early days of ARR had a few fights where Silence was required, which only one tank, a couple DPS, and one healer have access to, but the only one where it was straight up required was Coil, and at the time you needed to go in with a pre-made party at the entrance, no duty finder. I imagine if they implement any fights down the road that straight up require skills only certain jobs have, that it would need to be a similar case where people can specifically invite people to do those roles and change job beforehand if needed.

there were silence potions wich you could throw at the enemy. but since nobody botheres to prepare properly (EVERYONE should have these potions on their hotbar when joining a fight wich requires silence) you are right anyway i guess...