Will Healers Still be Forced to DPS in 4.0 Due to Lax Content?

[Aramina]

So, to everyone saying that healers have too much downtime, and that healing is too easy, you have to understand the reasons why that is. And also understand that this will not change because of these reasons.
It's not a design mistake, it's completly deliberate. FFXIV is designed in a way that once a healer's job becomes easy enough (being because of gear, good party member or good healer), then downtime is supposed to be filled with damage skills. That's just how it is.

I don't think anyone is saying that it is a mistake (as in accident). I know full well it is deliberate, BUT the thing is it does not have to be this way. I have played pretty much every MMO that has been on the market for the past 20 years and this is the ONLY one that has been like this. Maybe this is how they want it (clearly it is... at least for the time being) but that won't stop me from hoping that one day it may not be so. Plenty of other games have a very large casual contingency yet somehow they are able to provide more healing opportunity.

[OcieKo]

This game is honestly way too easy at the base level for both healers and tanks. Support roles have been going downhill since EQ1, even EQ2s Enchanter was a vastly stronger killer than EQ1s in terms of damage sourced from them, and they were still pretty weak initially.

I do agree MP maintenance is probably the most obvious culprit for the healer issues, its too easy to maintain. I cring every time I see a WHM recast that 1500MP Medica II that has 13s left rather than save 500MP by using Medica 1, but that wont do diddly squat to their ability to make it through a fight.

I'm hoping the changes to CC and the focus moving from mana replenishment on core abilities to trying not to use it in the first place (Thin Air/Lightspeed synergy) are precursors to wanting to make duch things more important than... ROFL regens will do everything for me. Only form of healer efficiency recognized here is non healing GCD availability/use. Good use of CDs and not wasting MP on overhealing are meh whatevers.

A serious lack of fights that use all available tanks too. We bring 3 to 24mans now and are lucky if we have any reason to use 2 more than 3 times during the whole raid for more than... 5 min, barring MT dying. And lack of tank use and tank interesting fights makes healing burden less as well. One of the things I liked about early Alexander Gordias: Fist of the Father, dividing the tanks among the 2 healers.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

It's not a design mistake, it's completly deliberate. FFXIV is designed in a way that once a healer's job becomes easy enough (being because of gear, good party member or good healer), then downtime is supposed to be filled with damage skills. That's just how it is.

Therein lies the problem because the devs cry foul at our expectations for healer DPS yet cannot appreciate why such expectations exist. The same applies to tanks doing mass pulls, which we know the devs are less than fond of. When content is tuned this easy, people push the limits. I don't even do mass pulls for speed, I do them to feel like a tank since anything less than six mobs means I may as well delete my cooldowns. I'll certainly have no need of them. Frankly, I would argue it is a design flaw due to the devs desire to bridge the skill gap. They have made around about amendments, which I do like, but have missed this game's lack of difficulty contributes significantly to that skill gap. When players can clear content with gear a year out of date, what incentive do they have to improve? There is no sense of urgency; no need to progress. So when they attempt Savage, it utterly demolishes them since the normal mode equivalent barely requires five people.

[Fyce]

I don't think anyone is saying that it is a mistake (as in accident). I know full well it is deliberate, BUT the thing is it does not have to be this way. I have played pretty much every MMO that has been on the market for the past 20 years and this is the ONLY one that has been like this. Maybe this is how they want it (clearly it is... at least for the time being) but that won't stop me from hoping that one day it may not be so. Plenty of other games have a very large casual contingency yet somehow they are able to provide more healing opportunity.

When people say that it's "badly designed", they often think that the reasons beind these design decisions are bad or that there's simply no reason behind it. So, I just wanted to remind everyone that reasons do exist and that they were good and legitimate ones.
That aside, I'll have to disagree on your stance that "evey MMORPG does it the other way". A lot of modern "action" MMORPG aren't focused on HPS that much. Besides, healers often play the role of CC supports with a variety of offensive CC skills and buffs that doesn't do much in terms of healing. "Pure healing" is something even D&D doesn't do. And successful MMO with a "WoW" gameplay are quite old now. Stuff change. The "old ways" aren't guaranteed to be the best. Especially not when the audience changes as well.

Raising HPS requirements will only do one thing only: make bad healers have to switch, or even quit the game.

I don't think that making healing harder would make it more fun. It will just take a few GCD that you'd spend on casting Stone, and make you use Cure instead. For me, both are just a button to push, it doesn't make much of a difference. It only raises the chances of failure, and thus the overall amount of wipes we'll have to deal with.

So, maybe that the current balance is a bit leaning towards the easy side slightly too much, but it's hard not to be biased as we now had to spent many months being overgeared, thanks to (or because of) the Creator being easier, and ways of getting i270 being plenty.
Hard to tell if Stormblood will be as easy.

Therein lies the problem because the devs cry foul at our expectations for healer DPS yet cannot appreciate why such expectations exist. The same applies to tanks doing mass pulls, which we know the devs are less than fond of. When content is tuned this easy, people push the limits. I don't even do mass pulls for speed, I do them to feel like a tank since anything less than six mobs means I may as well delete my cooldowns. I'll certainly have no need of them. Frankly, I would argue it is a design flaw due to the devs desire to bridge the skill gap. They have made around about amendments, which I do like, but have missed this game's lack of difficulty contributes significantly to that skill gap. When players can clear content with gear a year out of date, what incentive do they have to improve? There is no sense of urgency; no need to progress. So when they attempt Savage, it utterly demolishes them since the normal mode equivalent barely requires five people.

As I said, my post was focused on non-savage content. It's true that the only incentive to gear up in "normal" content is solely to improve clear times. But isn't that enough? Do you really want to have some 4-man dungeons in your roulette that can't be cleared simply because your healer cannot keep up with HPS just because of his gear? I don't think it'd be fun, honestly. And it appears that the devs are on my side on this.

On the other hand, regarding savage content, a lot of groups simply cannot clear a fight if they don't gear up. They just hit a wall where they say "well, we'll have to farm the previous battles to gear up a bit, and spend a few weeks of tomes as well". So, here's your incentive.

[Aramina]

I don't think that making healing harder would make it more fun. It will just take a few GCD that you'd spend on casting Stone, and make you use Cure instead. For me, both are just a button to push, it doesn't make much of a difference. It only raises the chances of failure, and thus the overall amount of wipes we'll have to deal with.

That's fair, I can see what you mean. Let's see if I can explain how I see things though.... I want my contributions to be meaningful. While doing dps is certainly not meaningless, in that damage is never meaningless, it is also not meaningful for the most part. Whether I dps or not is not going to make or break an encounter and if what I do doesn't matter in the long run... why am I there? If healing requirements were higher than I would have a sense of accomplishment knowing that had I not done my part then we would have failed. I do understand your point though about other people not wanting to be in the situation where if someone fails then they don't complete their objective, so admittedly, my views are a touch on the selfish side if I think of it that way. :P Maybe Savage raiding *is* the answer but I find it a bit sad that there is effectively nothing in between pants-on-head and must commit to x amount of time.

TL;DR I guess ultimately my complaint is less about the difficulty (or lack thereof) of story/side dungeons and more about a lack of content for people who want their play to be purposeful, even if they do not have the desire/ability to commit to a static.

[Sebazy]

There are plenty of older MMOs like that. EverQuest was famous for the tank being just a tank and a healer being just a healer and the CC classes being all about CC.

Even Everquest had a decent amount of depth if you were willing to take risks. The things I got up to back then on my Shaman are nigh unimaginable in a modern MMO primarily due to overcautious developers and strictly vertical progression centred around tightly regulated itemisation. So many good memories of my comedy solos as well as some of the low man feats my guild pulled off =(

In games where crowd control is powerful, you might end up with some CC classes that are incredibly desirable but a horrible pain in the ass to level without help since their game-breaking CC is balanced by their tedious or non-existent damage capability.

And just when I was basking in the glory days, you had to go and remind me of the trauma that was trying to keep the guild's Enchanter teams onside and off strike =( My Shammies were so much easier to work with for some reason!

[Bourne_Endeavor]

As I said, my post was focused on non-savage content. It's true that the only incentive to gear up in "normal" content is solely to improve clear times. But isn't that enough? Do you really want to have some 4-man dungeons in your roulette that can't be cleared simply because your healer cannot keep up with HPS just because of his gear? I don't think it'd be fun, honestly. And it appears that the devs are on my side on this.

On the other hand, regarding savage content, a lot of groups simply cannot clear a fight if they don't gear up. They just hit a wall where they say "well, we'll have to farm the previous battles to gear up a bit, and spend a few weeks of tomes as well". So, here's your incentive.

To an extent, yes. I don't think current Experts should be easily doable in gear a large portion of the playerbase has replaced. Xelphatol released with a minimum ilvl 210 when anyone who played throughout 3.3 had 240 while 250 was the new standard. This meant we outgeared both Experts by upwards of 40 ilvls without even touching Savage or the EX Primals. Gear levels is not the only issue. There is no mob priority or need to heal half the time. I hearken back to the healer DPS expectation and how Yoshida said he dislikes us in Cleric Stance so much. Well, I'm sorry, but if I wasn't, I may as well make dinner while playing otherwise I'll literally being standing around. Even the easiest content should incentivize the roles selected. PotD on the higher floors does a decent job without going overboard. You have to heal fairly regularly and mass pulls are ill-advised. If dungeons started off hitting pretty hard so you were less inclined to pull the room, but as you gear, you can get away with more. That would feel rewarding. Most of Heavensward's were faceroll at release. The exceptions were Leveling ironically. Balesar's Wall and Solm Al Hard had some good ideas too.

Savage doesn't have this problem but EX saw a steady decline in difficulty. Incidentally, the ease of Zurvan led to the "Skip Soar or Disband" mindset. In all fairness to the devs though, they've mentioned mechanic skips like Soar were a mistake. So hopefully they correct that.

Just to clarify since you mentioned it to Aramina. I am not advocate for just a HP spike, but instead greater variety. I often use PotD as a template because it does a lot of things right. You have priority mobs to discourage aoe spamming; surprise spawns; patrolling mobs; higher damage in lieu higher HP. All of these give PotD a bit of dynamism and make even a couple mobs more interesting. The reason people find dungeons boring, in my opinion, is there's nothing to them. We just pull everything and aoe them all down. Doesn't matter what they do or what they look like; just aoe 'em all down.

[Fyce]

-snip-

Don't get me wrong, I completly understand where you're coming from and what you want in terms of design. But, again, the more you raise healer's expectations (from a healing perspective), the more people will fail.

In the infamous 111 pages thread, one defender of the "princess healers" posted this video. The time stamp I put in the link highlight a wipe on Ziggy because of a number of bad decisions and lack of appropriate reactions from the Healer in particular (running in 3 AoE, failing to do the mechanic, and then failing to heal herself). If you ask more from that kind of healer, they will not be able to clear in a reasonable amount of time unless they get good teammates to carry them. This is already a ~38mn run on a main story dungeon. You really can't give them one or two more wipes.

So, when I say that increasing the healer's responsability in terms of healing will make some people quit the job, I really mean it. One might say something like "if they're so bad at healing, then they shouldn't be playing with that role! Especially if that lowers the skill floor for other healers". But I don't think that SE likes that idea, at all. This is why the design of the healer role is like that: you have a very low skill floor when it comes to healing, but if you want to squeeze every GCD you can, then oGCD and risk management comes in play. Besides, that goes quite well with the Final Fantasy franchise.

FFXIV is a mainstream game. So SE has to please a wide variety of players. The current healer design is a very good compromise in that aspect.

Again, I understand that people who choose to play healer want to heal. But that's not possible in the "core" content. Hardcore progression is where they should be heading if they want a challenge in terms of healing, as oGCD, GCD, MP and HPS management is crucial.

I truely think that this is the best they can do to please everyone as much as possible.

[Shurrikhan]

Snip

Resultant question then: "Would the game be in a better place if shit healers were to get good or get out?"

That potential sub number of princess healers with no other role is quite a blow, but then, so too can be the numbers lost to lack of interest among more skilled players.

[Shurrikhan]

Just to clarify since you mentioned it to Aramina. I am not advocate for just a HP spike, but instead greater variety. I often use PotD as a template because it does a lot of things right. You have priority mobs to discourage aoe spamming; surprise spawns; patrolling mobs; higher damage in lieu higher HP. All of these give PotD a bit of dynamism and make even a couple mobs more interesting. The reason people find dungeons boring, in my opinion, is there's nothing to them. We just pull everything and aoe them all down. Doesn't matter what they do or what they look like; just aoe 'em all down.

As much as I'm generally a critic of PotD, in odd comps or at high floors at least, this is a concept really worth enjoying and one I'd love to see entered into more of the dungeon experience. Heck, it's probably the first thing in XIV to actually feel like a (traditional/archetypal) dungeon experience. The rest, while enjoyable when making the most of the paradigm, are pedal-powered roller coasters.