Idea to fix controversy about healer dps.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I also feel the difficulty of the healer checks revolve around how mechanics are made too for Savage tier content. A failed mechanic is either a wipe / death, so there's nothing to "heal" per say.

This stems from what Tridus eluded to. The developers have essentially backed themselves into a corner since the only threatening mechanics is things which will kill you outright or come incredibly close. Even God Kefka's aoe damage isn't the frightening aspect. It's the fact he reduces you to 1HP then spams raid wide aoes. Likewise, both he and Exdeath used gimmicks that require everyone to be at 100%, thereby forcing more healing. If healers couldn't bring you from 1 to 70,000 in seconds, you could have less OHKO mechanics as damage would be threatening again.

[tdb]

I think the "problem" with healer DPS is a fabrication by players. The root cause is that designing content to keep healers busy 100% of the time is extremely difficult. There's a very thin line where healing constantly is just enough to keep everyone alive. On one side of that line the healing isn't enough and the party wipes. On the other side everyone sits at full HP and heals are needed less than 100% of the time. But people have very different levels of skill and gear. If you draw the line at the casual end, the hardcore players will spend most of their time not healing. If you draw it at the hardcore end, the casual players won't be able to heal enough and are effectively excluded from playing healers.

There isn't much that can be done to level the playing field. You could tighten gear sync to make everyone play at a fixed item level. Differences in player skill would still remain though and it would also make gear progression rather pointless. To equalize the healing output between casual and hardcore players you'd have to dumb down the battle system enough that the hardcore players would instantly flee to other games upon seeing the patch notes.

Tying small buffs to healer DPS skills is at best a stopgap measure to legitimize the use of DPS spells for healers. A 2% or even 5% healing buff is unlikely to make or break a fight due to the balancing issue discussed above. At worst it's seen as a needless complication of the healer toolkit and will scare casuals off from trying healing classes.

I like the doom mechanic in some fights which can be cleansed by healing the player to full. It's not very difficult but it does require a certain level of awareness from the healer. More healer mechanics like that would be welcome.

To be honest I don't think the DPS or tank roles are particularly "challenging" either, at least in content I've played. I've yet to see a single boss fight hit enrage (but I'm still making my way through SB MSQ so maybe enrages are a thing in top-tier content). Those roles just always have buttons to press because you never have a situation where you killed all the enemies and have to wait for more to appear. Even in fights where the enemies do come in waves the next one spawns instantly once the previous one is dead.

Maybe player HP pools and heals could be redesigned to make healing less twitchy? Currently a big hit can reduce player HP by tens of percents, and sometimes these hits are even unavoidable. The good healers can restore the lost HP very quickly, yet you can't have too many of these hits in a quick succession to give the mediocre healers a fighting chance too. If player HP was massively boosted then the healer's struggle to outheal enemy damage would be more similar to the other roles' struggle to beat the enrage timer.

Taking the idea further, player HP could be made into a thing which only exists in combat. The HP could start from a low value and in addition to normal hits which instantly reduce HP the boss could deal "delayed damage" which is only applied when the fight ends. If someone doesn't have enough HP to cover all the accumulated delayed damage, the fight fails. After the fight HP bars would disappear until the next engagement where they would be reset to the starting value.

This still leaves us with the problem that there's little value in overhealing. Even if the healer is able to heal for twice the amount needed to survive, the fight won't end any sooner. Meanwhile the total damage output of the party directly determines the duration of the fight. To make all roles' contributions equally valuable there needs to be a mechanism whereby they all work towards the same goal. At the moment that goal is defeating the enemy by depleting its HP pool. It seems to me that unless the entire battle system is redesigned from the ground up, giving DPS spells to healers is the simplest way to achieve this.

[Dzian]

I mean... no offense intended here, but this is basically what I said. If you want to clear with less effort and more down time that is a polite way to word wanting a lazy clear.

People virtually universally expect tanks and dps to constantly be pressing buttons, healers are the only ones who are given this weird 'free pass' by some players to slack off.

It's not a lazy thing for some people. They simply enjoy a slower pace.

Ever since beta there have been people saying the combat is too fast and lacks real substance. You never feel any of your moves have impact.

Ever since beta you've had people saying combat is too slow and the Gcd should be 1.5 seconds or so because there's a life long wait between skills.

There's times where I'd maybe been playing my Sam or pld or something a lot that day and I go run something with friends or whatever I'll play heals for the slower pace. And I know many healers that are the same they just don't like fast paced button mashing...

It's also why I never have for never will invest in skill speed even if it outweighed crit by 10 points to 1.

I kinda think they should bring back weapon delays impact. Warrior shouldn't be able to swing a big heavy axe as fast as a paladin can swing a sword.. bring back slow hard hitting clases and fast quick hitting classes instead of everything mashing buttons endlessly.

I'd happily take a slower Sam if I actually felt it's abilities had weight. But generally mashing buttons so much I couldn't even tell you the difference between shifu and jinpu without looking. Same with gecko kasha and yukikaze.. just a bunch of flashes all of them. No weight or impact at all.

[MoroMurasaki]

It's not a lazy thing for some people. They simply enjoy a slower pace.

Enjoying a slower pace is fine if you don't expect the same rewards and results of someone putting in more effort. The problem is that healers playing at this slower pace slow down dungeons/fights for other players and recieve the same rewards for completion.

Wanting to do less work, even if the root cause of your desire stems from desiring slower gameplay and not deliberately dodging the effort, is still lazy. The class you're on doesn't matter. Healers wasting GCDs is just as reprehensible as tanks or dps doing so. A dps could kill enemies with auto attacks- sure, it would take a long time, but what if they enjoy that pace?

This is a slippery slope and one which there is no reason to go down. Lazy is still lazy at the end of the day.

[tdb]

I had some thoughts after my previous post. Let me start by defining the goals of a fight and how each goal contributes to them.

Goal A: Defeat the enemy by depleting their HP pool. Success means the fight is won. You can't really fail this goal, only succeed faster or slower.

Goal B: Keep everyone alive and in good health. Failure means the fight is lost. You can't win the fight with this goal, regardless of how much you heal.

You'll notice that there's very little synergy between the goals. A character's damage output does not depend on how but HP they have, as long as it's greater than zero. Similarly the enemy will do full damage as long as it has even one HP remaining.

The DPS role contributes primarily to goal A. They also sometimes contribute to goal B by killing adds and thus reducing the enemy damage or avoiding instakill mechanics. In any case they'll use their primary toolset of damaging abilities.

The tank role contributes to goal B by keeping the attention of the enemy on themselves and soaking damage. As it happens the mechanism for keeping enemy attention is hitting the enemy, so tanks also naturally contribute to goal A with their primary toolset.

The healer role contributes primarily to goal B. They can also contribute to goal A but must use their secondary toolset to do so. Because goal B alone cannot result in winning the fight, the primary toolset of healers has more limited usefulness compared to those of the other roles.

So, the problem seems to be that healers can't use their primary toolset to contribute to finishing the fight. The OP suggests adding a synergy from the healer's secondary toolset to the primary, i.e. from goal A to goal B. I think this is a suboptimal solution because it makes healers feel like they have to use their damaging spells. But what if we added a synergy the other way?

In the current battle system overhealing is completely wasted. If everyone is at full health, the healer has no productive use for their healing abilities. Classes based on heal over time (WHM, diurnal AST) may even be in that situation somewhat below full health because the HoTs will handle it. My idea is to make overhealing useful by adding a damage buff to it. If you heal someone over their HP maximum they'll gain an invigorated buff and deal more damage for a short while. The buff will constantly decay so the healer will have to keep overhealing to maintain the buff. This creates a synergy from goal B to goal A, allowing the healer to have 100% uptime with their healing spells while contributing to finishing the fight.

I haven't thought about numbers in depth yet, but it could be something like this. Every 5% overheal gives the target one stack of invigorated, with each stack giving 1% boost to damage. The buff caps at 20 stacks and loses one stack every second (an alternative would be uncapped with exponential decay but I think this is easier to understand). If the character is not at full health they lose two stacks every second.

WHM's benediction will need to be altered to restore 100% of the target's HP so it can overheal (and instantly give full stacks of invigorated if the target is already at full health). AST's essential dignity may or may not need changes as well.

[Seraphor]

It's incredibly easy to overheal.
You're basically giving all healers a permanent Balance buff tied to their most potent heals.

That would need to be balanced with a huge MP cost on healing spells that can very easily overheal.

WHM would cone out far above the other two, as SCH is mitigation over healing, and the ASTs most potent heal scales with HP so it doesnt overheal.

[Seraphor]

Also this would just result in healers spamming heals even when everyone's at full HP, instead of alternating based on HP levels.
It'd still be mandatory for high speed play to be continuously casting, like a BLM, but be utterly braindead, just heal heal heal!

[tdb]

Yes, there would be balancing considerations obviously. I did imply that my numbers were only intended as a rough starting point.

I don't think having a permanent damage buff is intrinsically bad. NIN is expected to maintain huton, MCH is expected to maintain hot shot, BLM is expected to maintain enochian, etc. The obvious way to counter a new damage buff is to increase boss HP accordingly.

Having healers continuously heal was kind of the point. It seems some people don't like healers switching to DPS spells and some don't like healers being idle when there's nothing to heal, so my aim was to make constant healing useful. Perhaps it would allow for more interesting healer rotations as well.

Shielding classes would indeed be at a disadvantage with this overhealing mechanic. Perhaps shields should be counted as effective heals for this purpose, so if actual HP + shields go above maximum HP it counts as overheal.

Essential dignity lists a potency of 400 so I assumed that to be a base potency which is available regardless of current HP. If that's not the case then the skill would definitely need to be adjusted.

[VanilleFang]

damage buff on overhealing.

I'm sorry, but no. This is a terrible idea. Overhealing is like... the easiest thing to do. You are suggesting that healers spam AoE heals and HoTs to give a near permanent 20% damage buff. WHM, in particular, would be come so incredibly broken and mind numbing to play.

Side note: you can fail at reducing enemy HP to 0. It's called hitting an enrage timer.

[RopeDrink]

Ironically, above methods have no sympathy for those who are actually happy to DPS. I'll be honest, if they reworked Healers into a position where they typically favour 'always healing', that'd be far less interesting to those who enjoy the fact that they can go above Healing and contribute elsewhere (in this case, doing damage). I love DPS'ing as a Healer and I'll laugh at anyone who tells me in a Dungeon that I shouldn't be doing so -- but it's not that I love DPS'ing as a Healer that makes me enjoy playing a Healer in FFXIV, it's the versatility of being able to do so that is appealing. I'm neither filling HP bars nor 'hitting tings till dey ded', I'm doing ALL of that. It is why classes such as WHM (which some will tell you they found 'boring' or 'basic') doesn't bore me at all as I'm constantly going between a healing powerhouse and a damage contributor, with a side-order of shielding/buffing, albeit only slightly.


It's safe to assume SE won't adopt any method that drastically alters things - not only are they backed into a development corner based on how the game currently functions, but they'd also upset too many people on any end of a spectrum by throwing a spanner in the works too heavily. As we all know, no matter how well intentioned a change, or even how necessary a change may be, someone out there is going to hate it. Some DPS-Healers and Netflix Healers may not want to 'heal more', the Healer-Purists may not want to 'damage more', some want more buffers no matter what way the wind is blowing etc.

I honestly think that increasing versatility across the board (including Tanks, Healers and DPS) would be a better start compared to increasing the amount of Healing or DPS. Example, even having old ST-Stoneskin back would allow the likes of WHM to dedicate time towards pre-casting a barrier to nullify or dampen certain harsh mechanics. I'm not asking for that, just giving an example of how you can throw in 'more to do' without it necessarily being tied to healing or DPS, without encroaching on, say, SCH who is a more shield-orientated play-style and causing homogeny.