The Healer Double Standard

[TonberiScholar]

If that's the case then why have the different roles to begin with?

To enable greater diversity in encounter design.

In theory, anyway.

DPS Roles are kind of the intended "starting point" of the encounter design. They cast the spells that make the peoples fall down or whatever, and usually get the "popular" character/class fantasies/aesthetics, and (seemingly), the lion's share of the design work.

Healers are there to enable them to make attacks in group-based content that would be non-survivable with only a soloing-focusing kit. Stuff like tankbusters, raid-wide damage and "avoidable" mechanics that are survivable but very dangerous if you don't avoid them. Without Healers you either need an active dodge system or everything needs to be survivable with solo-DPS levels of self-healing. Which puts you at something like PSO2 or early Guild Wars 2 levels of "zerg and stab to death" group content, which isn't very exciting for anyone involved. Healers add an element of counter-play to the boss's actions, and make it so that counter-play can't just be done by a soloing-level kit (because otherwise why not just bring 8 solo Jobs)?.

Tanks are there to provide a focal point/starting point for organization, because it's a lot harder to coordinate people to do anything when everyone has their own idea about how everyone should follow them. They also allow encounter design to include attacks that would kill your average soloing DPS but won't immediately kill someone with higher defenses/health, to make bosses seem more threatening. And they allow melee-specialized DPS to exist without having to run all over the place.

In short, Healers and Tanks give up some of their damaging output for either boss counter-play (on the part of Healers) or added survivability for specialized Tank-killers (on the part of Tanks). Enrages and DPS checks solely exist to make sure that they don't abandon the DPS roles along the way.

However, "healing unavoidable damage", "recovering from scripted damage", "recovering from avoidable mistakes" and "taking Tankbusters to the face" can't be tuned to take up 100% of your in-battle time. They'd either make content un-completable by all but the most skilled/coordinated/geared groups, or they'd end up being made so trivial that they lose the initial purpose and ability of the Healer/Tank roles in expanding on the basic solo gameplay formula.

Thus, downtime. For Healers, it's the time between healing bursts of unavoidable damage, healing mechanic-mistake avoidable damage and keeping people from dying to attrition. For Tanks, it's everything you do between surviving something that would kill someone who isn't a Tank.

Part of the solution to the downtime problem is to fill the time between required Healer-specific/Tank-specific responsibilities with more general mechanics that are addressable by anyone but may be targeted at either Tanks or Healers specifically or may be randomly targeted.

But a fight that consists solely of Heal-spamming or Defensive cooldown spamming interspersed with mechanics aimed at you/aimed in your general direction is exhausting and frustrating for most players, especially if it's coupled with the DPS checks that are necessary to ensure DPS roles even get a spot in the party.

So they have to ease up on both the Tank-specific and Healer-specific responsibilities (to not make the jobs impossible or trivialize them) while also not making every fight a Thordan-EX-level series of mechanics vomit.

Non-DPS-role DPS opportunities are where they fill that remaining gap. It allows Tanks and Healers to make up for DPS Jobs that are slacking (and they will, because they're typically the largest group of players, and the more apples you have, the more bad apples you're likely to have). and it allows (with proper play), the minimizing of the time/resources you need to respond to Tank/Healer-specific responsibilities.

The problem is that going too hard on the Tank/Healer-specific responsibilities makes content non-completable for the vast majority of players, especially in roles that are traditionally less common. And going too hard on the generalized mechanics also makes things too hard, for everyone. But going too light on them ends up making fights "too easy".

Other MMOs typically handle this by having the expected party composition change as Healers/Tanks get better at their role-specific responsibilities (through gearing or fight practice or increasing player skill or a lucky string of no mistakes or whatever). That's why, say, WoW will reduce the amount of Healers in a raid group and replace them with DPS specs or DPS Jobs once the Healing can be handled with less actual Healers.

This solution, while it works elsewhere, won't work here due to a design decision specific to FFXIV. The devs want a strict (by Role) party composition, meaning you aren't supposed to drop Tanks/Healers for DPS Roles when you can swing it. So Healers/Tanks need something to do to keep them "necessary" even when they aren't strictly "really" necessary.

So, as inane as it sounds, the Healer-specific/Tank-specific responsibilities are usually made to be handled by things that only Healers/Tanks can bring. And that, more specifically, you need a bare minimum number of Tanks/Healers to do. Stuff like Tank threat management (for Tank swaps or add phases) or alternating Healing-focused cooldowns to cover extended series of Tank or raid-wide damage.

What we end up with is having Healer/Tank gameplay being very cooldown-focused to cover those role-specific responsibilities, because requiring them to take GCDs greatly increases the chance for errors beyond what is recoverable, due to how the long the game's GCD is, how punishing dropping a GCD is and how easy it is to do so.

But a consequence of that is that we end up with fight designs that have a lot of non-Healing/non-Tanking "downtime" once you learn fights and not a lot of stuff to do in said downtime other than DPS.

That's where we get our current higher-end group-content paradigm from. And why "make Healers have to heal more" really isn't a solution, either, because the fight designs are built around having two Healers' worth of cooldowns (most of the time), and requiring Healers to be GCD-locked is too punishing for a lot of players to handle due to the ease of dropping GCDs relative to the GCD length and overall fight length.

The GCD doesn't change between "normal" and "savage" content, so "Normal'ifying" a Savage fight basically means taking out mechanics (which hits at either the Role-specific responsibilities or the general mechanic responsibilities). They can't (or at least they haven't shown) a well-tuned ability to remove mechanics but add GCD healing burdens to normal fights when they downtune them from Extreme/Savage, and I don't expect them to any time soon.

Now, the question I come to because of all of this:

Why does the thing we (Healers) do for the majority of our time in group-content combat (use damaging actions to contribute to group DPS) have to be boring, flat and one-dimensional?

It's not necessarily about the number of buttons. There are jobs in this game that have interesting DPS decisions to make with less actual buttons, and Jobs with more.

But our damaging GCDs are flat, boring and one-dimensional. Our Healing GCDs are flat, boring and one-dimensional. Our healing oGCDs are...okay, I guess, but they exist more for the purpose of enabling mechanics responses than they do as key pillars of the Healing kits (at least according to what seems to be SE's Healer design philosophy). In practice, it means that optimized players lean on oGCDs to trade Healing GCDs for damaging GCDs to get through fights faster, and that's at least marginally more interesting than sitting there waiting to react to damage with a GCD cast-time heal. But it's not "good", by any means.

We need Healer DPS kits that have interactions with the rest of the Healer toolkits, and we need GCD heals (where they have to exist) to be tied more into Job mechanics. Though, I guess before that, we need Job mechanics on Healers that are interesting enough to keep us busy in combat.

White Mage's ShB Lilies system/Afflatus Misery is a good start, but it's far from "enough", even for White Mage. And it's definitely not enough for SCH/AST.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, etc.