The Healer Double Standard

[LariaKirin]

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

[...]
We already know they can design engaging DPS Jobs, and we already know they listen to feedback on Tanks and adjust.

So why are Healers the outlier if it's not a case of them "not getting it"?

I'd be very careful with generalizations. You could put me into both the like and dislike camps depending on what you ask me. Which is why it's important to have discussions and offer feedback. No one has an opinion as simple as "like everything", "dislike everything".

For example, people keep referencing downtime - but healing downtime is not a job design issue (maybe too many OGCDs), it's an encounter design issue for the most part. Or a playerbase issue - given that people run content 100 times and expect it to be perpetually interesting - which is unreasonable at best.

I won't comment on the Yoshida quote without a link for context. For all I know, it could be a direct quote or a quote of a quote of someone's interpretation of a translation of what he said.

Healers are not an outlier. They've consistently addressed issues with healers at launch before. Maybe not to everyone's liking, but then again, that is also a case for DPS and tanks - it is not all sunshine and roses there either.

Designing tanks and DPS is a significantly easier task than designing healers because you do so in a vacuum (almost):
- Ninja has one job - dps - and you can design that independently of what the party does and independently of the encounter.
- Tank has two jobs - tanking and dps. Tanking is dependent on a scripted encounter. Dps is independent of the encounter/party.

A healer has two jobs - healing and dps.
- Healing is dependent on a scripted encounter, but also unpredictably variable and is tightly coupled with the party.
- In order for its dps to be interesting, you have to offer trade-offs between healing and dps AND design encounters that facilitate this interaction.
It's quite simply not that easy.

They do though, because of two things:
[...]
This is the big one, and arguably the more important goal. They need to break the ability to turn Healing GCDs into DPS GCDs at a 1:1 conversion rate. So long as that exists, the "DPS Healer meta" will always exist.
[...]
Necessary Healing and optional stuff should be on entirely different timescales and you shouldn't be able to trade one for the other.

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.

It does, but this is going to sound like a tautology. Bear with me.

"Standard" amounts of healing are "however much healing throughput is required by SE's internal metrics to judge the content as 'clearable' for the intended item level".

[...]

As I said, the amount of healing is variable depending on your party.

This: "This is, broadly speaking, your combined "healing burden" for the fight, assuming people use bare minimum cooldowns, are in bare minimum gear and screw up half the screw-uppable mechanics." is probably a decent approximation, but what happens when people are not in minimum gear and don't screw up mechanics at all?

You propose that Savage encounters require more healing than the "standard" amount, but that is already being done. Even the most optimized savage runs in Stormblood do not get away with 0 healing GCDs.

What you said and proposed in this sense is not at all different to what we have now.

[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.

[deadman1204]

Well considering that theres quite a few healers that are so DPS happy that they let the tank die after they've blown thier cooldowns I don't see the downside of the argument. a Tank can still keep aggro a healer thats DPSing when they should be healing is a liability.

I feel like healers get the blame even when its a bad tank. Whenever tank dies, people look at the healer. Was the tank using cooldowns appropriately? Pulling too much? Thats much harder to figure out, so bad tank = healers fault

[Crushnight]

You know what i'll be dreading Tuesday healers not getting touched outside mp costs :S

I can see it happening, they really really should have dedicated healers going to their events if none are popular enough make it a hidden raffle to healer forum users (Have posted here 10 times in the last month etc) to try and get at least proper feedback not just people who barely touch it (seriously cannot believe people said the healer changes were fine at media build like most people here could see the problems a mile off.)

[fantasticm]

You know what i'll be dreading Tuesday healers not getting touched outside mp costs :S

I wouldn't worry too much about this happening.

[BahamutxD]

They got healing bad since the beggining and this is just a consecuence of it.

They are attemping to fix healing taking the easy routte- making the healer job weaker instead of giving a revisit to most encounters in this game to add heavier damage income to tanks and the party from random/unavoidable sources. Okay, reworking the whole game is too much? make it past level 50-60-70 and start giving healers spells to deal with that after those levels.

Force the healers to heal. Give them a bigger/varied healing kit - Earthly Star and Synergy from AST or Excogitation from SCH are a good example of interesting healing spells. Other MMOs have delayed heals, HoT healings, chain heals, heals that react to damage...

Just stop giving healers straight heals, specially if they are oGCD. That takes us nowhere and do nothing except for making the situation even worse.

[Miiu]

They got healing bad since the beggining and this is just a consecuence of it.

They are attemping to fix healing taking the easy routte- making the healer job weaker instead of giving a revisit to most encounters in this game to add heavier damage income to tanks and the party from random/unavoidable sources. Okay, reworking the whole game is too much? make it past level 50-60-70 and start giving healers spells to deal with that after those levels.

Force the healers to heal. Give them a bigger/varied healing kit - Earthly Star and Synergy from AST or Excogitation from SCH are a good example of interesting healing spells. Other MMOs have delayed heals, HoT healings, chain heals, heals that react to damage...

Just stop giving healers straight heals, specially if they are oGCD. That takes us nowhere and do nothing except for making the situation even worse.

If you're just looking at the healing toolkit. I'd argue that healers are not weaker. Not at all. They're insanely strong (looking at you SCH and WHM). AST is definitely one of the weaker healers when it comes to healing content they don't know. But all current endgame content can be healed easily by any healer combination.
We have so many tools to heal that we don't even need to use them all.

But don't get me wrong I am not saying that the current healer balance is by any stretch of the imagination without faults. And there are a some big ones.

[Crushnight]

I wouldn't worry too much about this happening.

Truly wish i could believe that but after SB where whm was barely touched for ages (Planary Indulgence) to just making things bizarre (Emnity reduction on a lot of heals but gave assize 45s cd which negated the emnity reductions), the battle design team do not have a good track record for adjusting healers period (20% balance for 30s anyone), so the bar is extremely low right now for Tuesday.

[Hatstand]

For those who want to bring this to the attention of the devs, upvote the healer questions for the open letter. At the very least hopefully we can find out whether the devs have heard the outcry and are planning to do anything.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...43#post5092843

[Crushnight]

For those who want to bring this to the attention of the devs, upvote the healer questions for the open letter. At the very least hopefully we can find out whether the devs have heard the outcry and are planning to do anything.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...43#post5092843

Thank you for link ^^ got my hlr question and the question i really like a response to