Final Fantasy XIV’s healer problem and how it’s kind of unsolvable

[Semirhage]

Yoshida: We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be

Yeaaaaaaaaaah no that's not how the definition of efficiency works. Until the day when all characters have a functionally limitless overheal health pool and their abilities lose effectiveness as a scaling function of their missing HP, the only health that mathematically matters is the last one. Wiggle room for varying skill levels of course, but part of the definition of gaining skill is getting closer to "not what a healer's role should be". This reads a lot more like "We think it's a healer's place to never get better at what they do".

This is healing from the perspective from a DPS player who doesn't really think all that much about how healing works. Spending as much time doing damage as possible is roughly how skill improvement works for me, so spending as much time healing as possible must be how it works for them!

[Liam_Harper]

Yoshida: We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be

This doesn't say that healer dps isn't included in dps requirements, just that Yoshi thinks we should be healing more than dealing damage.

Either way it's a misunderstanding. Healing isn't about healing as little as possible, it's about healing efficiently. Overheal and unnecessary GcD are completely wasted actions. They literally do nothing. So we minimize these wasted actions by using our toolkit efficiently and spend the rest of the time contributing to the team in the only other way we can, damage.

It's not our fault our toolkit and the huge lack of incoming damage allows us to be so efficient that we only need to be healing for 10% of the fight. They created this situation.

[Mindiori]

It's not our fault our toolkit and the huge lack of incoming damage allows us to be so efficient that we only need to be healing for 10% of the fight. They created this situation.

Which is in turn why the 'dumbing down' as I'll call it, to any DPS kit or depth outside it - becomes exponentially detrimental. Others have said the same here too, across the board almost. A rare forum consensus moment - highlighting the fact its so widely noticed now.

If they aren't going to create any reason to do your job, as you essentially say - then it is obvious the choice becomes dps as it is the only remaining activity, sans going afk and making tea. So the wheel spins back to questioning developer competence. Thats not to say 'why havent you fixed it' as much as it is to say 'show that you have awareness'.

The simplification has changed nothing. Its simply resulted in the same tiring return to dps, only this time - its spamming even less buttons and losing consciousness and interest while doing so. It would seem, the ball is in their court. Fix next time, or lose any rational reason to claim you entertain your healers/by that nature your whole trinity system.

[Videra]

... I'm now realizing how much I miss Shadowflare and Flaming Arrow.

Man.

[Sylve]

Interestingly, it’s already this way because there’s already a damage component. To get the most value out of Earthly Star, it’s much more efficient to drop it down off cd like Assize. Getting more casts of it is significantly more value than waiting for the perfect moment to use it. Of course, holding it for an extra few seconds to time it better with an Aoe is always a good idea, but generally keeping it on cooldown gives you better returns.



Genuinely curious why you think it wouldn’t be the case. As it is right now for anything below Ultimate, no matter how much you approach the resource limit, there’s always more efficient ways to plan cooldowns that enables healers to use as few GCD healing spells as possible. Ability healing is absurdly powerful, and simply nerfing it is just needlessly raising the skill floor which goes against what was intended by the developers according to that interview. How would you solve this issue?



When the designers have to account for resources, it severely limits the design space they get to work with. We have a prime example in the latest Ultimate where both Healer’s MP bars are completely drained in about ~40 seconds because of the increased frequency of damage in one specific phase. That’s why after those ~40 seconds, the boss does absolutely nothing for like ~2 minutes to allow the Healers to recover. Shiva has something similar at the end of the encounter with Wyrm’s Lament + Akh Morn + Morn Afah. After that she does absolutely nothing but start prepping for the enrage.

There exists a limit to damage frequency to design around, but all that accomplishes is needlessly raising the skill floor and limiting encounter design for which the developers are adamantly against according to that interview. Accessibility is their main concern—not deterring players from playing the role.

The reason is quite simple. Because the Healer's kit isn't changing. We'd retain all the power we have right now, future encounter design would simply have us utilize it differently compared to now.
Just like how some jobs evolve their rotations (BLM, hello) considerably at each expansion's cap, a Healer going back into older content would similarly just return to how things were at that time, just like how a BLM's rotation adjusts according to which expansions content they happen to land in.

On your Ultimate example, that's a phase designed explicitly to burden Healer resources. That Healer MP is drained following that phase is by design and working as intended, so it should be viewed similarly to a DPS check phase where DPS have to burn every resource they have into bursting as much damage as possible with the follow-up phase having no such urgency to account for the fact that all the DPS just spent everything they had to clear the previous phase.

When I suggest to increase the frequency, i mean to reduce the cooldown between mechanics in general.
Take the last boss of Holminster as an example. In a 4m 37s encounter, it uses its Tankbuster just 6 times. Giving it an average cooldown of about 45 seconds. It's Auto Attacks in the mean are dealing just 2000 damage.
Cut that recast from 45 seconds to 15. There's no way the Tank is going to catch every single Buster with an Antibuster cooldown. So you, the Healer, wont be able to cover every hit with Abilities. You'd need to spend GCDs and MP casting cheaper Heals rather than just bombing Cure IIs or you'll run yourself dry.

Similar recasts are found on the rest of the boss damage kit and could be reduced accordingly. We already spend 400mp/GCD to spam DPS and we have infinite MP doing it. By increasing the rate at which damage comes at us, we simply shift some of those GCDs from DPS to Cure/Benefic/Physik to benefit from their associated traits (Except SCH who would need one as i suggested above) for MP management.

Regens and Shields become much more valuable also. Shields especially.
With incoming damage often coming so slowly that a 30 second Galvanize effect would fall off between casts, having that Shield catch more damage would be valuable.
With Abilities pinging the party back to full in seconds, Regens like Medica II tend to be a lot of overheal, so having damage come frequently enough that regens are still ticking makes them much more valuable as they'd tick for full duration with considerably less Overheal.

Much like today, You would strive to keep people at a safe level, not necessarily 100% all the time. That'd be wasteful, especially in the scenario i described above.
Nothing stops the dev team giving new skills that assist with MP management in the future.
There'd be no point to such skills in todays Healing world, but in a future where we heal more often with GCDs they'd help separate average Healers from excellent Healers able to DPS and Heal while balancing MP.

Disclaimer: My use of the Holminster boss is not a suggestion to change existing mechanics, it was simply to demonstrate using familiar mechanics how we can increase frequency in post ShB content without turning the game into whack-a-mole or AoE spam.

[Curisu]

I remember the first week of e8s, when player died to the first AOE, and I as tank constantly died to the early, hard hitting auto attacks.
The first ADD phase AOEs were I even had a few healers leaving because they didn't know how to keep us up.

A few weeks later both healers were able to do the same dmg as the tanks and knew when they had to use a heal.

I know, it is savage but when you give a normal fight the healing challenge of a savage raid, then you will have the "bad" healer leave healing or the game while the good ones will figure out the fight and do again more dmg then healing.

You even see groups wiping in e8 normal because healers can't keep the group up at the soft enrage.

[EaMett]

Forgot to set it to Shiva alone. Those numbers from Edens Verse (All Bosses). I did say i welcomed pointing out where i messed up lol. Thanks for being civil ^^

Using the log posted though, removing the Healers puts the raid total at 81,939. So that party would only have needed to find an extra 3k~ or so DPS from the other 6 members of the party. Which equates to 500 dps per person.

Given that log is from May 3, they would almost certainly have better gear by now. Hell, even just fine tuning their play could net them that extra per person.

Probably really late to the party but.
You're talking about a party full of the best players in the world ALL pulling 100 percentiles on the same pull (keep in mind parse runners will tend to pick a couple of players and focus on their parses before moving onto two others). It's rare to see 3 100% in a pull, let alone 6.
Just check all the top speed kills for shiva, none of those groups would clear without healer dps. And you can bet they're all BiS with the shiva weapon and chest pieces, so I can't even imagine without those items.

The reality is that the "healer dps isn't factored" is an outdated statement coming from a dev team that doesn't have the best of track records when it comes to making accurate healer related statements.

Increasing the frequency of damaging mechanics would basically remove 'downtime'. It doesn't need to hit harder, Just more frequently.

This is basically ultimate. Which is still 70% downtime. So I'm not sure how much people expect "more frequent" damage to be pushed out but the reality is that it's probably way more than what they think and probably more than many can handle. And at that point mana will need to be reworked which will essentially break old content even synched/minilvled. Not saying it isn't the way to go, damage patterns are definitely what need to be fixed, I'm just saying it's not happening in a game that has 4 arcs/expansions worth of content already in place.

[Deceptus]

... I'm now realizing how much I miss Shadowflare and Flaming Arrow.

Man.

And Grenado Shot. Why do they insist on ranged dps having to go close to mobs for their AoE?

[Risvertasashi]

While I don't disagree with the points of the article, I feel it's also worth pointing out - the game is balanced to need very little healing when encounters first come out. Even on a fresh savage raid tier, you will spend most of your GCDs DPSing, not healing. So DPSing is a bit more than just this thing done on the side.

(And, you know, with the current MP management, requiring even a few more GCDs spent healing would run everyone dry)

That said, yeah, some healers can't divide their attention well at all, and should focus on healing first.

[Semirhage]

When I suggest to increase the frequency, i mean to reduce the cooldown between mechanics in general.
Take the last boss of Holminster as an example. In a 4m 37s encounter, it uses its Tankbuster just 6 times. Giving it an average cooldown of about 45 seconds. It's Auto Attacks in the mean are dealing just 2000 damage.
Cut that recast from 45 seconds to 15. There's no way the Tank is going to catch every single Buster with an Antibuster cooldown. So you, the Healer, wont be able to cover every hit with Abilities. You'd need to spend GCDs and MP casting cheaper Heals rather than just bombing Cure IIs or you'll run yourself dry.

While I completely understand this position, I also don't trust encounter design with current approaches to tune this in a way that feels more fun. I've heard people around here say that the "simple" solution is just deleting oGCD heals and forcing healers to GCD more because it's "better".
These GCD healing kits are puddle deep. Lean too hard on them, and you'll start to see Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure. Maybe that's "more satisfying" to some people, but it's pretty much identical to Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare as far as I'm concerned.

While a balancing act between two sleep-inducing halves of a kit might make them more interesting, I don't exactly trust our benevolent class design team to nail that balance.