Isn't playing WHM optimally going completely against what SE wants healers to be?

[Kabooa]

It's also worth stating optimal play doesn't mean a hyper specific manner of play. It simply means never letting a GCD rest, unless some circumstance is in play that would make you stop. (Like Blighted Bouqet)

Optimal play is a contextual thing. You heal when you need to heal, you prep when you need to prep, you nuke when you need to nuke. It's not a once-per-X thing, or a 'tank only gets healed at 10% thing' (But did you die?), or 'only do this' thing.

[gti443]

With this indecisive way of thinking, content is being designed in a way that caters to both playstyles. All this does in the end though, is create a situation where there's too little damage to heal through, which puts healers who just want to heal in a bad spot, because there's not enough damage going out to warrant you not doing anything else.

Content is designed in a way that its challenging now and accessible down the road. That Yoshida is willing to let healer DPS be the X factor doesn't mean he's against it, and I seriously doubt they aren't tuning arount it to some degree... but limiting it or balancing against it would not only raise the bar for world firsts, it would raise the bar for everybody in the long run. The man wants more people raiding, not less.

Maybe its sacrilegious to suggest but if one healer's kit isn't doing it for you... try another? Especially after taking a year off I love the current WHM DPS kit but I absolutely hated Scholar's DPS kit when I mained it during ARR. I dunno, I'm more about being comfy than "unique" or whatever.

[Sebazy]

My question is, as someone who is self-admittedly doing more of the healing in your static than your co-healer (due to reasons that work best for your team, which again, is perfectly fine), how do you feel about still having the time in this game to dedicate 1/3rd of your GCDs to DPS? Do you think that means the healing is well-designed in this game or that there's an issue with how powerful we are, at either the healing end or the DPSing end?

That's a really tough question to give a straight and simple answer to =(

Personally I feel that the DPS we can do is in about the right place, but the HPS we can put out is perhaps too bursty given the comparatively tiny HP pools and limited survivability that we have. The fact that I can typically top a 50k+ hp tank from next to nothing in ~5 seconds with oGCDs really limits the options on the table for the content creators.

As far as the sheer number of GCDs I'm using on healing vs DPSing goes, you're right in that it's a surprising number of GCDs for someone like myself who isn't especially DPS orientated. It's not like I'm doing huge amounts of optimisation to achieve this, I'm simply filling in as many gaps as I can with dots and stones. I do think that O4S does a better job of masking this issue than A12S did tho so perhaps that's why I'm not particularly jaded about it.

As far as the alternatives SE could go with... The issue here is that there's no perfect approach that doesn't step on someone's toes.

Everquest was perhaps the poster child for making healers do little else beyond healing in raids. Certain Everquest healers were highly powerful and I'd go as far as saying that my Shaman's soloing capability was borderline absurd. Yet my role in raids pretty much boiled down to maintaining a 7 minute debuff and keeping junkie mages and clerics fed with HP even tho I might have been soloing the exact same content an hour or two ago to 'reserve' the zone. FFXI's raiding was near enough the same story with the majority of supports and healers having very mundane roles irrespective of their prowess elsewhere in the game.

Perhaps the closest match for what we have in FFXIV now would be my times PvPing as a Resto/elemental hybrid specced Shaman in early WoW. That made for fantastically fluid and enjoyable gameplay and I was never lost for something to do in pretty much any PvP situation in or outside of an instance. Of course there my support abilities (WF totems etc) had as much if not more value than my personal DPS or even heals in some situations and given the mess that we've got over AST, I don't think that's something that Yoshida's class team has the courage (or even talent perhaps) to pull off whilst still keeping things balanced.

Overall I think what we've got now strikes a reasonable balance and things are perhaps better than what we've had prior. To achieve more healing without ruining some other aspect of our gameplay or massively ramping up the difficulty for healers I suspect SE will need to take a page out of WotLK's book by substantially buffing HP pools, making healers work far harder to refill them and making it more of a battle of attrition rather than simply a case of 'you fail, you dead'.

[Kabooa]

I'd argue Cataclysm took a better approach to triage healing. WotLK, at least in the final tier, was pretty much the mitigate or die, burst heal them up, except it happened on a frequency that would pretty much kept the healers healing.

Cataclysm slowed that down a fair amount, introducing the idea of a basic kit for everyone (The Fast/inefficient, the medium/baseline, and the slow/efficient heal), while giving them unique tools across the classes that solidified them as better in certain areas. (Druids and hots, Priests and mitigation, Shamans and Totems, Paladins and Beacon). We more or less have that now, but the encounters are formulaic scripts rather than, say, an assortment of five mechanics that the boss will choose based on RNG/other criteria.

Imagine for a moment that Catastrophes tankbuster isn't telegraphed with a cast bar (Though it would mean that a At-Level tank doesn't -need- a CD to live - if they're at full health). It changes the dynamic of the encounter because you don't have an exact timing for the tankbuster. Just a window of when it can happen.

Now make the tank buster capable of being used at any time (though with a cooldown) and that changes things further. There's a level of urgency that exists simply because the boss isn't a spreadsheet of what happens when, and that changes the entire dynamic of the healing game.

[Dregenfox]

^ it changes it from figuring out the most optimal healing/dps rotation into whack-a-mole. I got bored with classic WoW's healingn style because it basically amounted to staring at HP bars instead of understanding mechanics and planning for big heal checks while doing the actual fight. I'd just press lesser heal over and over again canceling it at the last cast to conserve mana, or letting it go off if the tank fell low enough.

IDK how it is now, but the classic WoW style basically made healers slaves to the hp bar, and in 40-man raids it basically covered the majority of your screen so you couldn't watch the action even if you wanted to.

I had a lot of fun with Tera's action-based healing style that actually forced me to look at bosses and mechanics, and I like that FF14 allows me to do things similarly even though it's tab-target.

[gti443]

Cataclysm slowed that down a fair amount, introducing the idea of a basic kit for everyone (The Fast/inefficient, the medium/baseline, and the slow/efficient heal), while giving them unique tools across the classes that solidified them as better in certain areas. (Druids and hots, Priests and mitigation, Shamans and Totems, Paladins and Beacon). We more or less have that now, but the encounters are formulaic scripts rather than, say, an assortment of five mechanics that the boss will choose based on RNG/other criteria.

I quit right around the beginning of Pandas so I can't comment on WoW nowadays but in hindsight I dunno if I remember healer gear checks like Heroic Deathwing's Spine all that fondly. IIRC how the mechanic worked is that you had to spam overheals to clear a leech type of debuff on your party before any of your heals would reach them.

I guess I'm largely pro healer DPS because as I see it the alternative is gimmick fights.

[Kabooa]

I quit right around the beginning of Pandas so I can't comment on WoW nowadays but in hindsight I dunno if I remember healer gear checks like Heroic Deathwing's Spine all that fondly. IIRC how the mechanic worked is that you had to spam overheals to clear a leech type of debuff on your party before any of your heals would reach them.

I guess I'm largely pro healer DPS because as I see it the alternative is gimmick fights.

I generally boil things down to the baseline. I see no difference between a game forcing you to spam a basic heal and a game forcing you to spam a basic damage spell. The targets differ, the interaction doesn't. Thus, Healer damage or not, it's all a button press. The simple Healer damage 'rotations' in this game only solidify that further. You push buttons. If the healing needs to happen, it's the heal button. If the healing doesn't need to happen, it's the Damage button.

[gti443]

I... hrm. Going back to Yoshida's comments I think something he specifically wants to avoid is making encounters as... binary as you're presenting. I think that's part of the appeal of FF over something like WoW... you seem to remember Cataclysm as "dynamic" but aside from some random effects I remember encounter design being very gimmicky and on rails. Since the beginning FF has had a lot more room for... improvisation, and it seems the intention is to keep it that way.

True Savage notwithstanding. I'm hopeful its on par with SCOB Savage but I guess we'll see.

[Kabooa]

I... hrm. Going back to Yoshida's comments I think something he specifically wants to avoid is making encounters as... binary as you're presenting.

I haven't played WoW since Pandaria, but the times mentioned thus far (LK, Cataclysm) and BC (Best tier), every boss encounter was a bag of tricks used based on certain criteria. That criteria could be RNG based, party position based, etc. The mechanics are not that different from FF14, but the way they are chosen and the order they are used are what changes from encounter to encounter. The Raid Party in WoW must adjust to the mechanics that come out, not pre-plan around them (The Spreadsheet comment)

Edit: That isn't to say there were not some timed mechanics. WoW wasn't a masterclass of boss design, but it's easy to see the trimming of certain paradigms from WoW early, to WoW late, and the MMOs that followed in its footsteps.

In FF14, Savage Encounters tend to be tightly scheduled dances. Hali's second half is actually a refreshing difference, even if only for one specific mechanic (Tile stomping) but otherwise it still maintains a 'Nothing else changes from first to last'. This allows an encounter to be 'harder', but only in a shallow sense. It's a memory fight. It's not dynamic. This is why a Healer can plan GCDs ahead of time, because you know when the tankbusters are coming in, you know when the raid busters are coming in, and you know when Regen, Excog, and Essential Dignity are all you need.

There's actually not a lot of flexibility in FF14's encounter design. If you clear an encounter in FF14, odds are you cleared it in a way that's 90-95% the same as another team.

Using Burning Crusade as an example, there are a fair amount of examples where the Boss Kill strategy wildly changed based on the Raiding team in question, because the mechanics had to be handled, but the vast arenas, larger parties, and more than pass/fail approach to those mechanics allowed them to be handled in a variety of ways.

[Elamys]

You're basing your argument on a quote that you're taking waaaaaaaaaay out of context if I'm not mistaken? Please correct me and link a quote that says otherwise if I'm wrong tho <3

It's not an all or nothing thing. I'm not saying the devs want healers to never DPS, nor am I saying that healers SHOULD never DPS. They say entire dungeons in that quote, it's clear they don't want healers to DPS the entire time, but that doesn't give us an exact number. I'm not taking it out of context at all. I'm trying to keep it WITHIN the context of the original quote, which is largely a case of "well, we don't like healer DPS that much, but we accept it's a part of the game right now, but changes have/may come in the future." That's all.

I don't want them to remove healer DPS entirely unless it somehow becomes that healers have to constantly heal. I don't like standing idle.