Healer identity in 5.0

[Kacho_Nacho]

If we want a revolution in Healer identity, healers need to actively heal again. This oGCD and GCD split is madness. Our healers aren't healers. They are hybrids

I'm wondering if S.E. will blanket nerf healing across the board? While this sounds like a drastic measure, it may be what is needed to address the sheer power of healers in FFXIV.

Because that's the real issue here.

[tesni_g]

I'm wondering if S.E. will blanket nerf healing across the board? While this sounds like a drastic measure, it may be what is needed to address the sheer power of healers in FFXIV.

Because that's the real issue here.

I agree.

No matter what happens, it will feel like a nerf, but I think above and beyond we will see a nerf where it will take several heals to get people back to full and the tanks will need constant care. And possibly a nerf to the ogd abilities so that they don't just solve problems like they do now.

I have mixed feelings, because I do like the idea of using healing spells more than we do, but it will likely end up exactly the way eventually, when gear catches up, except that the ogcds won't be quite as good. Unless they slowly scale tank gear so that they don't mitigate (much) more with gear so they still take that damage. Or slowly scale the HP gain on gear so that hots never get the room to work between mechanics. Or no-scale MP and potency so that it takes five heals to top off and mana has to be reserved for that healing, so just waiting in between casts, which sounds miserable.

None of those sound viable, honestly. So they have a real challenge designing content before and after the gear, each tier.

Even if they do nerf ogcds, the expac will still start favoring WHM because of the sheer throughput required, then, we learn the fights and get some gear, and the utility classes will win out again. Like they always do.

I really would rather see healer "power" level stay the same and bring WHM up to that level, because honestly? Most classes have abilities that are powerful, fun, and cool, and make them feel like a warrior of light. Story-wise, we're going to another world, we've fought gods, we've ended wars. In gameplay, DPS and tank classes are going to get new toys that give them moments to shine and to contribute meaningfully and to get excited about.

Healers, tho? Nerf.

[Mimilu]

I agree.

No matter what happens, it will feel like a nerf, but I think above and beyond we will see a nerf where it will take several heals to get people back to full and the tanks will need constant care. And possibly a nerf to the ogd abilities so that they don't just solve problems like they do now.

They would have to find a way to make hard-casting heals actually interesting to entice people to play healers.
I really hope they don't do this... =A=

[Coltvoyance]

For me, the idea of just standing around and not contributing to lowering the enemy's/enemies' HP is boring (especially considering the only way to clear a fight is to get said enemy's HP to 0).
Spamming DPS spells then healing a tank that just got tankbustered to below 50% with a oGCD heal just feels way more thrilling (and kind of empowering) to me. ♥

It's boring because it doesn't feel important.

In most MMO's I was proud to say "I make HP bars go up". I'd say it to myself with glee, frequently. Healers are usually highly valued in parties because of the difficulty that comes from healing well. In FFXIV though, healing is trivialized. It's expected. It's a non-factor. They overbuffed healing, and as a result took all the joy/accomplishment out of it. They gave you 10+ "You Win at Healing" buttons for the role and ruined it.

So what were healers left with? Same benchmark for accomplishment as everyone else. Bigger, faster DPS numbers. So you're treated like everyone else that shares that benchmark. You're not you're own role with a different set of requirements for what it means to win, you're judged by the same merit they are: "Do more DPS". The DPS is what's making you feel accomplished in the role. Healing is just the mini-game you're playing on the side.

Other games I'd think "I'm working hard to keep them alive so they can do their job and kill it. This is the part I play." In FFXIV I think "Welp, that healing part is done, I better get back to pulling big deeps so I can prove I'm a good healer..."

[Gemina]

They would have to find a way to make hard-casting heals actually interesting to entice people to play healers.
I really hope they don't do this... =A=

What do you mean? Needing to hard cast cures is what actually feels enticing as a healer. It's what makes me feel like an actual healer. A recent Orbonne run I had left me little time to cast anything offensively. I still was, but the 90/10 DPS/healing ratio easily adjusted to about 40/60. I hardly casted Broil at all, and focused more on DoT upkeep to sustain damage to the last boss. It was so fun, and I felt I had purpose outside of a green DPS. I'm not even going to say that it was unfortunate that I had to rely on player derps for this change in ratio. I welcome it. We're not perfect, and mechanics that confuse players and unavoidable damage is how the CPU provides challenge. Such things need to be accounted for when designing healers.

I know a lot of players will feel like this kind of adjustment would feel like a nerf, but I am hard pressed to call this role a healing role when in the majority of content we spend 90% of the time DPSing. Which when you think about it, a good portion of that time is spent either spamming Stone/Broil/Malefic against single target, or Holy/Miasma II/Gravity against multiple targets. How is that enticing? And the answer is not to give us more DPS options. We are healers, and none of the three even have this identity, let alone their own. They're all green DPS.

With a reduction to the reliance on ogcd heals, time spent hard casting curative abilities will undoubtedly go up. The question then remains how do they diversify our healers and also leave room for a fourth in the future? Unfortunately, I don't have this answer. I'm not a game designer. It could come from utility but they really have to be careful when it comes to how healers benefit raids outside of healing. It's part of the problem we currently have.

[HyperiusUltima]

snip

Hard-casting Heals in a meta where literally more damage = Less Healing is a prospect that was picked up in Gordias when we had the overtuning issue. This carried on all throughout Stormblood.

If they take less emphasis off oGCDs being the only thing you need to worry about and make GCD matter again for Healers it’ll shift people’s mindsets. They may not like the change, but don’t we all remember HW BRD? Everyone hated it, but they adapted over time.

If WHM is going to have an identity or competitive place at all, they will have to tune down oGCD healing going forward.

[tesni_g]

What do you mean? Needing to hard cast cures is what actually feels enticing as a healer.

I'm not the person you asked, but for me the enticement of healing isn't the hard casting because anyone can play whack a mole on the green bars. It's using the whole class's package to best effect.

FFXIV does not have enough hard casting.

If healers are "forced" back into a lot of hard casting with a removal of ogcds, the game would feel really slow. Especially when every other role does a lot of weaving and juggling.

At least right now, AST and SCH feel like the other jobs in FFXIV in how 'busy' they stay. Not as busy as BRD or anything, but there's stuff do. Removing those would make it play like a completely different game.

A considerably higher ratio of direct healing would be great. Healing more would make me forget how mind numbing Malefic spam is. Sometimes.

But I suspect the way to accomplish this is less with class design and more with encounters. Even in savage modes, the mechanics are paced far enough apart that somebody has a cooldown that alleviates the need to direct heal. So we could see damage patterns that happen more frequently--less of those would be devastating, meaning that Star and Indom still shine for the big ones... but there's still a lot going on in between, and the only thing that's "up" will be Medica or Emergency Tactics + Succor.

Healer DPS is still the elephant in the room. So long as we have metrics, we will have optimization. We will have the push to heal "as little as possible". They could do like other MMOs, which is to make healer's damage output so awful that there's no point, but solo duties and open world play are already boring and long enough as it is. And even then, the community that plays higher end content is still going to say that pitiful stone spam is better than no stone spam.

I think to encourage more direct healing, tough encounters need to deal out low-grade damage at near-constant frequencies. Direct heals would need to heal for less against large HP pools, but also cost less MP to encourage near-constant casting. It sounds counter intuitive to healing more, but I want healer dps to be buffed--not Malefic and Stone and Broil per se, but all the dots and abilities, and maybe even give healers more ogcd/gated abilities. Then the healer DPS game becomes more about keeping up dots and using abilities in between heals, and there's a lot of room for identity development there. If Combust/Star/Lord/burst phase ability are the bulk of AST damage, the question "should I cast Malefic or top people off" won't always be answered "duh cast Malefic."

"Duh cast Malefic" isn't fun.

tl;dr I want more direct healing too! But I want to see it through encounter design instead of ability nerfs

[Hustensaft]

With a reduction to the reliance on ogcd heals, time spent hard casting curative abilities will undoubtedly go up. The question then remains how do they diversify our healers and also leave room for a fourth in the future? Unfortunately, I don't have this answer. I'm not a game designer. It could come from utility but they really have to be careful when it comes to how healers benefit raids outside of healing. It's part of the problem we currently have.

You can also argue what's even technically possible for FFXIV heals do to.

For example, I'd argue that HoTs are already mechnically poor in FFXIV and loose one of their major advantage. HoTs generally give you a rather smooth HP curve, esp. if several are on a target. In FFXIV though, HoTs and DoTs tick on a global interval. They heal a large junk of HP on every global 3 second server tick. Instead of a smooth curve, you just heal large junks in between casted heals. In combinations with FFXIVs encounter design where lots of damage happens in short intervals, HoTs aren't much more then a massive overheal generator. (A WoWs resto druid Hots will overheal 10-25% - a WHMS HoT generally are at 40-50% overhealing - if he ). WoW at some point changed encounter design, while signficantly increasing player HP (or reducing healing done), to allow for more then just instant/casted heals to heal. ou could also question the total lack of even one single channelled spell being a consequence of technicaly limitations...

Then there are more philosophical question about what Absorbs should do. WoW had strong absorbs on two specs at one point, we're now down to one weak single-target absorb spell on one single healing spec - general gist is that strong absorbs either take any danger out of encounter mechanics, or you tune mechanics around them, and they become mandatory. In FFXIV you have strong absorbs, and a generally poor state of HoTs.

Further you can argue about how many buttons does a healer need to perform it's task. I personally believe, and that's why many other games don't have healers with more then ~5 core buttons), that the required number to heal 90% of all stuff thrown at you is just that low. Anything past that is redundancy, that ultimately only allows to counter more failures by other players.

[Kalise]

tl;dr I want more direct healing too! But I want to see it through encounter design instead of ability nerfs

Though, irregardless of if priority was shifted from oGCD via nerfs or via encounter design, the overall outcome would be that people will think of it as a nerf.

Since, going from DPSing 80% of the time to DPSing like 40-60% of the time will be a loss of DPS no matter what the case is that is making you shift.

That said, if the issue against going towards more GCD healing is merely how "Slow" the gameplay would feel without oGCDs... Then the problem isn't even that big.

You don't need to remove oGCD's to promote GCD healing. You merely need to shift the power of oGCD vs GCD healing.

At the moment, oGCD reign supreme because they're MASSIVE heals that make GCD heals plain not necessary. It's not just Benediction that is doing ridiculous burst healing, but all oGCD heals.

If you reduced the power of oGCD's, you can still keep them in healers kits, just they can then become supplementary healing skills, rather than the primary source of healing output.

Much like how DPS jobs have their primary damage coming from GCD skills and oGCD skills are less powerful but get weaved in alongside their GCD skills during the small periods between ability usage and GCD resets.

This would actually let you make healers busier, since you can afford to reduce oGCD skills actual CD's so they can be used more frequently, when they're not healing for 50%+ of someone's life.

Essentially, turn oGCD's into something that you use to quickly top up someone who went critical HP to buy time for a GCD heal to replenish their health, or something you use after a GCD heal to get that extra burst of healing to for example, get a Warrior back from 1HP after a successful Holmgang.

Thus making optimal Healer play be about balancing usage of your entire kit. DPS GCD's, Healing GCD's and oGCD's.

Which can then be further played upon with encounter designs that focus less on singular large bursts of damage, but more frequent, random, damage spikes.

[Feidam]

In my opinion the ogcd heals should really be oh crap! buttons. You save them for certain mechanics and moments. They shouldn’t be as they are now so healers can play at being another dps. Dpsing and healing is fun I agree. The ratio at the moment is way way off though.