The Healer Double Standard

[TonberiScholar]

You've written quite the article, so I'll only be addressing what I think is most important.

Absolutely not. The ability to turn healing GCDs into DPS GCDs is at the heart of optimization. Balancing your healing and DPS is arguably the most important piece when it comes to having fun as a healer.

Moving necessary healing to OGCDs is exacerbating the problem, creating even more downtime. We have so much downtime right now because of a few things: encounter design, overtuned OGCDs, a party which takes no aditional damage after having done the encounter 100 times.

The main reason I said your proposed changes do not fix anything is because the interesting interactions you proposed can be done with what we have right now, without any of the healing reworks.

Real quick (...okay, by my standards, anyway).

I'll do a more detailed response if you want later:

Turning healing GCDs into DPS GCDs is a double-edged sword. It allows for greater optimization but is also the thing that allows the "Healers are DPSing too much" complaints to even surface.

It's also, at least in part, why healing is seen as "difficult" here above and beyond other MMOs. Which leads to them cramming the Healing kits full of mostly-unnecessary redundant healing buttons at the cost of utility or DPS or ability interactions.

I'd rather break it up front, separate the two pieces and then explicitly build optimization potential and heal-DPS interactions into the Job Gauges/Job mechanics. Instead of now where you have relatively flat GCD Heals and GCD Damage tools and the only interaction is that you want to minimize the GCD Heals for GCD Damage where possible.

Adding oGCD "recharge" mechanics to GCD DPS or buff or utility tools and coupling them with higher-DPS options moves the decision tension from "do I heal or do I pew" to "I heal and then either speed up my oGCD or use my heavier-hitting thing and hold out til its natural recharge".

It's a minor distinction (and kinda clumsy), I admit. But I think it'd help ease things up at the low end (because reaction is usually easier than planning) while allowing the high end more room.

Instead of a gradient from "Heal a lot" to "DPS a lot" (which causes "I just want to heal" Healers to complain), if you build it up front to have a severe distinction between Healing and Damage, you're basically baking both functions into the Job as required and expected. Which, in practice, is what we have now, but there's enough people with a stake in denying it that Healers keep getting nerfed because of it. Bonus: Separating them out means they can make a real "mostly just heals" Healer with actual Job interactions that can provide rDPS (like buffs or something like Misery) without ending up at the "they have to compete with a DPS'ing Healer" point. You just obfuscate the rDPS a bit and make it an actual mechanic that fills downtime.

At lower optimization levels, it'd be possible with this system to heal reactively based on incoming damage as you see it (which seems to be what most non-optimization-focused players' perception of "a Healer" is).

At higher optimization levels, you still have the option to heal reactively, but you're doing fights (Savage) where the basic allotment of oGCDs will run dry and you need to effectively use your GCD options to recharge charges or lower cooldowns on your oGCDs so your party doesn't die to attrition.



I don't believe it can be done with "what we have now" for the same reason why "just make Healers have to heal more" or "fix it in encounter design" doesn't work:

The game's longer GCD relative to fight length coupled with the general mechanic lethality makes dropped Healing GCDs too punishing for how easy it is to do.

This is the root cause of those "they can't make content require too much healing" statements you see around. They're correct, but no one ever really seems to elaborate on why because I guess people think it's self-evident.

It's too early for me to be eloquent on this, so it's going to sound like I'm being condescending or oversimplifying, but I promise I'm not trying to be. If there's any bit of this I'm most personally invested-in, it's this.

My specific method for getting around the problem isn't something I'm super-attached to, but I feel like the problem does need to be addressed.

GCD Impact

In fight design, you only leave a certain number of "windows" within a given fight's Enrage timer for the player to take actions.

Some potential GCDs are taken up by mechanics responses or movement or downtime or phase changes or your allowed margin of mistakes or whatever.

What's left is the players' pool of potential uptime.

The longer the GCD, the fewer specific things a player can do in the fight in total.

This means that proportionately, each action you take with a longer-GCD setup (like FFXIV's) has more weight to it because it's contributing a larger portion to the outcome of the fight than in something like WoW's.

This also means that each GCD you spend not doing something is more punishing, because it means you're losing more of a proportion of your potential fight contribution.

This matters to Healing gameplay specifically because it means that losing, say, one GCD because you're not hitting buttons is bad. (that is not intended to be a joke statement)

But losing three or four GCDs because you're afraid of getting clipped by a mechanic is worse, and suddenly you're the equivalent of ten or more WoW-length GCDs "behind" in your healing throughput.


This is exacerbated even further by the general split of FFXIV mechanics into three categories:

- Immediately lethal upon screwup ("dodge or else", like Landslide)
- Lethal upon multiple screwups but theoretically recoverable ("please dodge", like Vuln stacks)
- Expected/unavoidable damage that must be countered by Healer gameplay ("please stack for heals", like Bright Sabbath)

With healing outcomes being, essentially, binary (without resource attrition), you can only have an effect on the latter two mechanic types.

But if you're behind several "steps" and then something like Bright Sabbath hits, you're far more likely to have a party wipe if several people ate vuln stacks.

If someone ate a vuln stack and you're trading Healing GCDs for DPS GCDs, the person that ate the vuln stacks is going to die.

They aren't going to blame the vuln stack, though. They're going to blame the fact that they saw you cast a Broil or a Glare prior.

And that's why Healers can't have nice things.

Making an explicit split in the time scales for "Healing" and "non-Healing" (however it's done) sets the expectation, up front, that you're going to be able to heal anything unless you run out of resources or hit the wrong button or aren't in range or are dead or whatever.

I want (what I consider) the (boring) bits of Healing in non-optimization-required content (read: DF, leveling dungeons and non-Extremes) to be so simple that someone just reacting to incoming damage with a slowish reaction time can still get their party past the attrition checks.

Because that seems to be all that SE wants to expect or require from Healers, as shown by their continuing design decisions from ARR til now.

I'd rather that be codified up front and gotten out of the way so they can spend the rest of their time making Healers interesting to play for people who end up anywhere on the optimization scale at all.

Ranging from "I occasionally throw a rock" all the way up to "I solo heal while getting orange". And for the record, I'm far closer to the first end of that scale than the second.

Splitting off the "basic" healing stuff and putting it on its own resource pool (both in time required in-combat and in traditional resources) seems to be the easiest way to accomplish that without requiring a rework of every bit of content in the game to accommodate higher healing requirements.

And "make oGCD heals the baseline" is the easiest solution I came up with to meet that goal ("easiest" is relative, obviously).

I don't see a way to make that work with GCD healing while still keeping lowest-end content consistent with SE's ongoing stated/realized design goals.

[LariaKirin]

Real quick (...okay, by my standards, anyway).
[...]

The expectations that healers parse high is not that prevalent in the wider community - healers DPS to different degrees at different skill levels. Healing is generally seen as difficult because of the responsibility you have.
The impact of a botched rotation or mechanic on a DPS is significantly less punishing than a missed heal. You have to care about all mechanics in the fight and there's alot more to pay attention to as a healer.
These challenges begin to fade the higher up the skill ladder you go, making the following statement true: "Healing is more difficult and more interesting at lower skill levels. Healing is less difficult and less interesting at higher skill levels".

Healing downtime becomes a problem (earlier) at higher skill levels because once your party knows the entire fight and has done it plenty of times, all that variability and unpredictability goes away. What you are left with is this game of "how many DPS GCDs can I get away with?".

Optimization begins to happen when you know the encounter well enough that it's trivial. The fun of optimizing broils (pun intended) down to a single goal: maintaining uptime on the boss.
For melee, this means taking risks with movement, doing the mechanic as late as possible, etc..
For casters, this means not interrupting casts by slidecasting and pre-positioning. BLM has a simple rotation, but is still one of the most fun jobs to play.
For healers, this means transforming as many healing GCDs into DPS GCDs as you can.

Optimization happens in two ways:
- Individual optimization, which is basically "how many DPS GCDs can I get away with?".
- Group optimization, which is "how many DPS GCDs can WE get away with?", to the point of everyone knowing their 42nd GCD and DPS/tanks going out of their way to save the healers 1 GCD.
In both of these cases, healing the encounter is a non-issue.

By removing "Heal GCD -> DPS GCD", you would be removing an important part of what makes DPSing on healer fun at higher skill levels.
By moving heals to OGCDs, you are exacerbating the healing downtime issues.

This is an exaggeration, because you have not suggested completely removing healing GCDs. We would be in the same place with perhaps different OGCD heals and different GCD heals. So I am left wondering what problem you are trying to solve. That is why I say that the interesting interactions you suggested can happen with what we have now.

The game's longer GCD relative to fight length coupled with the general mechanic lethality makes dropped Healing GCDs too punishing for how easy it is to do.

This is the root cause of those "they can't make content require too much healing" statements you see around. They're correct, but no one ever really seems to elaborate on why because I guess people think it's self-evident.

Why shouldn't dropped healing GCDs be punishing?

I disagree with the second statement. The reason why they can't make content require too much healing is because it is too variable and unpredictable, depending on your party. Player consistency would become more important and because consistency is not a strong point at low skill levels it would make the encounter too difficult.

Encounters would be either too hard at low skill levels or too easy at high skill levels - a product of SE trying to appeal to two groups that have different interests and expectations from the encounters in the game.

Real quick (...okay, by my standards, anyway).
GCD Impact
[...]
Making an explicit split in the time scales for "Healing" and "non-Healing" (however it's done) sets the expectation, up front, that you're going to be able to heal anything unless you run out of resources or hit the wrong button or aren't in range or are dead or whatever.

I want (what I consider) the (boring) bits of Healing in non-optimization-required content (read: DF, leveling dungeons and non-Extremes) to be so simple that someone just reacting to incoming damage with a slowish reaction time can still get their party past the attrition checks.
[...]

By setting that expectation you are exacerbating the downtime problem. OGCD healing is the cause of healing downtime.

No content requires optimization. It happens either consciously (people actively trying to optimize) and subconsciously (people know the encounter well enough that they do things they otherwise wouldn't in their first clear).

I do think healing should be nerfed (especially OGCDs) and it has indirectly through the disproportionate scaling of Health Pools. And while this would increase healing uptime - it would merely inflate it, not fix the problem. I do keep bringing up encounter design because that is the only way of adding unpredictability for higher skill levels, where this healing downtime issue is most prevalent.