The Healer Double Standard

[TonberiScholar]

That said WHM players have put up with the same thing from the very beginning WHM players asked for the job to be made more fun we got more effin heals and diminishing returns on our one actually good AoE on top of a nerf to its damage. AST and SCH meanwhile were having the time of thier lives and really really didnt seem to give one iota of a care about WHM

Not every SCH main didn't care.

I called that WHM was going to have problems back before Stormblood.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...55#post4173955

Just no one really listened.

The expectations that healers parse high is not that prevalent in the wider community - healers DPS to different degrees at different skill levels.

While everything you said here's correct, my word choice was bad.

By "my standards" I mean "this post will be a little less excessively long-winded than my usual".

I didn't quite stick to that, but....yeah.

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.

I don't believe that they're willing to redo all their previous encounter design to accommodate "more healing is required", and kits that get stripped down to fit a "more healing is required" model will end up even being even more intolerably boring in everything that isn't new than they are now.

I know old content, by default, is generally considered trivial. But building old content around one set of healing-required levels and new content around a different one will exacerbate that very quickly.

So basically every "fix" (that's a bit generous, I don't know how well these'd work) is trying to fix what I can without touching their baseline set of encounter design principles, as they relate to Healer-role Jobs.

Which are, roughly:

- Encounter damage is generally spiky but infrequent
- Most mechanics, if you mess them up, are not designed to be consistently healed through
- Mechanics you can brute-force heal through are few and far between
- Increasing healing efficiency leads to (through various direct and indirect methods) overall increased party DPS
- The penalty for bad healing generally isn't "you all die due to attrition"
- The penalty for bad healing is generally "you didn't heal the survivable mechanics, people died and you don't meet Enrage".
- Healer "growth" is a path from healing inefficiency (low active time, wasteful MP or cooldown use, missed save opportunities) to healing efficiency
- It is possible to be at maximum healing efficiency and still not be able to complete some encounters
- It is possible to be quite inefficient at healing and still be able to complete most encounters
- Encounter execution "growth" is separate from "Healing growth" and involves dealing with mechanics
- Encounter growth will often stonewall parties even when the Healers have peaked at the level of efficiency their personal skillset allows

Would you agree with the above, or have I missed something? I'm kinda reverse-engineering their design principles based on how I see them create encounters, but that doesn't mean I'm correct about it.

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.

Dropped GCDs have to be punishing. The problem is, the amount of punishment they inflict is relatively standard across both "easy content" and "difficult content".

Dropping a Healing GCD when it's not needed doesn't really matter. Dropping a Healing GCD when it's needed can be lethal to the party.

Healing through GCDs is a blunt instrument that scales too well at lower levels and too poorly at higher levels (as a proportion of your used combat time).

It's fine in easier content to sit and watch until you need to start pre-casting or reactively casting a heal. That "wait and see" method is incentivized because not doing what you should when you should is lethal, but not doing anything the rest of the time is non-lethal, usually.

oGCDs were added as a safety net for easier content but they end up being used to get around GCD use in harder content.

Encounters are tuned by making the Savage/Extreme version and then removing mechanics to make the normal version.

If the Savage/Extreme version started off requiring GCD-locked healing at points, or random damage that's designed to not be healable with oGCD tools, that'd mean that the Normal mode fights would have to be designed entirely differently, beyond just removing mechanics.

And that will make "easier" content too difficult for most Healers at that level to complete.

That's what I mean about the "dropped GCDs being too punishing for healing" thing. You can't break your actionable windows into smaller/more frequent windows, so you have to design the available windows based around the "difficult" version and then remove mechanics to add more windows.

But (like you said), consistency is a skill that's generally harder to pick up at lower overall skill levels.

And making content require more healing through GCDs would greatly exacerbate the "healing is harder at low skill levels" thing.

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

I disagree with this bit entirely.

Healing "skill" would still end up at minimizing the use of GCD heals even if there weren't any oGCD heals in the game. There would still be downtime, there would just be a little bit less of it.

Even if it ends up being a rather distorted point of "every Healer only melds Spellspeed and Piety", people would find a way to create healing downtime even without oGCDs.

Removing oGCDs would be a bigger problem at the low end (it takes away recovery tools) than at the higher end (they'd just optimize GCD healing better).

And due to the actionable windows thing I mentioned above, you can't set every encounter to require even something like 50% of all potential actionable GCD windows to require healing. People would drown.

oGCDs existing or being completely removed won't change any of that.

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).

This is another problem with my word choice, I think.

It's a very low level of optimization in some cases, but "optimization required" content is anything with a DPS Check or Enrage you have to pass.

Anything with a lose condition other than "everyone runs out of HP at the same time", basically. I was trying to find a way to refer to anything with time pressure because that's generally one of the things that separates "normal modes" and "savage" (amongst others).

I just didn't do a very good job of it.

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.

I mentioned this above (I think), but every fix I'm talking around assumes they aren't going to revamp all their prior content to fit a new content design standard.

And making Jobs that don't fit with your old content is a problem that just gets bigger and bigger with content accretion.

I'd rather a fix that manages to fit within their existing content design philosophy/standards/precedents while still addressing the downtime issue.

I think the root solution would be to change healing from a healing minimization/DPS optimization problem to an attrition problem (both in resources and time), and have downtime tools be split off as a separate resource or a non-resource-consumer.

You're still rewarded for doing DPS that way (because that helps you not run out of resources), but you'd also be rewarded for efficient use of healing tools.

Swapping from mostly flat GCD spells with some oGCDs to a set of defined/standardized oGCDs and GCDs that interact with the Job's kit/mechanic/downtime in some fashion (charge up Lily nuke, provide buffs or something else) would be the way I'd prefer they go about doing it, but it's not the only way.

But no matter what they do, here's my main "wants" or "points" that I feel they have to acknowledge:

- The things you do in healing downtime should be interesting, useful, optional to survival and able to be stopped if you need to go back to healing.

- The things you do in healing downtime should have some positive effect on your healing uptime

- Healer growth should scale from "watching when to use your healing uptime tools and avoiding your downtime tools" to "using your downtime tools to support your uptime tools"

- If they have to homogenize for balance, I'd rather it be done on the oGCD level than the GCD level. The former has far less an impact on content "feel" than the latter, since you spend far more time in combat using GCD abilities than you do oGCD abilities.

- Healer Role healing downtime should be used as a distinguishing tool between Jobs because it's easier to do that without breaking random Healer DF team viability