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

[AdamFyi]

Look at Engels in the Copied Factory: start of the fight he ALWAYS opens with either an AoE on the left/right, then the other side then a tankbuster. Why not sometimes start with the tankbuster? Or have a chance that he'll use the tankbuster twice in a row?

It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).

change damage requirements so the DPS isn’t as necessary

We had this problem way back in ARR where with Healer DPS not being factored in at all caused fights to get steamrolled through with Healer DPS—allowing entire phases to get skipped. No matter how much you up the frequency of incoming damage, there will always be ways for Healers to optimise and create downtime for DPS. This may potentially cause the skill floor for healing to raise drastically which can potentially deter players from the role completely. It’s the same problem we have with the healer distribution as is. Ast requires significantly more effort to pull ahead or just match both Whm and Sch. After all, why play a role that needs three times the amount of attention and effort compared to the other roles?

[GucciSan]

It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).

I imagine they’d still have limiters on how often a mechanic can occur so this exact scenario doesn’t happen. Going back to the buster example, sometimes the boss opens the fight with one, but now there’s a percentage chance that they’ll do it twice in a row, but it caps at 2 so after that they’ll move on to a different mechanic and won’t use the buster again for a set time. You’d still see all the mechanics you’d need to they just wouldn’t happen in a specific order.

Is it totally random? No not really, but I think adding in some element of unpredictability would make encounters far more interesting than they are right now. The fact that I can know when I’m going to heal, and what exact oGCD button I’m gonna press at the specific point in the fight because the mechanics and my CDs align with each other screams a problem to me. It starts feeling like the fight is accommodating for me instead of me adjusting to it.

[AdamFyi]

Is it totally random? No not really, but I think adding in some element of unpredictability would make encounters far more interesting than they are right now.

Mhm. However, the problem is that you actually need something like 7 tank busters in a row to actually throw off cooldowns like that. There’s a wide array of powerful oGCD healing tools that a double buster every so often won’t really make a dent in anything. And if anything, most consecutive tank busters just get invulned anyway.

Are the oGCD healing tools the problem? No, they’re powerful enough so that they give healers more breathing room to work with. Having a wider array of strong options lowers the skill floor to accommodate more players of lower skill level.

[Irenia]

It starts feeling like the fight is accommodating for me instead of me adjusting to it.

Until I did a full HoH run, I never would have realized this. While the monsters in deep dungeons do have set rotations, the fact that so much random stuff could throw you off. Like, you may know that one monster will do a crazy thing in 20 seconds... So you focus it down. But what if another joins mid fight? Or maybe you fight an easier one, and then the crazy monster joins in? Or offscreen AoE blasts?

Deep Dungeon, in the fixed party only sections, actually try to *beat* you in the confines of its restrictions.

In comparison, most other content doesn't feel like that. They feel like they're *testing* you. A standardized test, if you will.

Maybe people like having a baseline - I can see DPS liking it, but I feel something is lost here.

[MaxDetroit]

Instead of turning into a DPS, once there is nothing to heal anymore, healers should get a lot more GCD Skills to buff Party Members or debuff the boss.
E.g. a buff that gives 10% more damage to a party member, but only lasts for 5 seconds and has a cast time of 2 seconds, something like that (needs to balanced though, to be more effective then doing damage on your own).
So you can re-buff selected party members when there is no time to heal, but you can't buff all party members all the time. It's a bit what the astrologian does with his cards.
Scholar could focus more on debuffing and dotting the boss, instead of spamming one damage skill, and whitemage could actually do damage on its own, but with some more interesting mechanics then we have now (spamming glare).

[MirronTulaxia]

It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).



We had this problem way back in ARR where with Healer DPS not being factored in at all caused fights to get steamrolled through with Healer DPS—allowing entire phases to get skipped. No matter how much you up the frequency of incoming damage, there will always be ways for Healers to optimise and create downtime for DPS. This may potentially cause the skill floor for healing to raise drastically which can potentially deter players from the role completely. It’s the same problem we have with the healer distribution as is. Ast requires significantly more effort to pull ahead or just match both Whm and Sch. After all, why play a role that needs three times the amount of attention and effort compared to the other roles?

I did say “isn’t as necessary”, not remove it entirely. Alternatively to hear people talk about it we may as well do away with the role entirely. It really sounds like people think a proper healer is impossible in XIV, and if so we may as well go a GW2 route and just have everyone manage their own health/reviving and the like. As is the healing isn’t important enough.

[QooEr]

Protect: Role Action Similar to what it did in pvp, gave a short Physical damage reduction on a relatively short CD.

Shell: Role Action Gives a short Magic Damage reduction on relatively short CD. Essentially what Apocatastasis used to do on BLM but to a target.

Eye for an Eye: Lowers target's strength and dexterity by 10%. (remove feint from physical DPS jobs)

Addle: Lowers target's intelligence and mind by 10% Remove from Magic DPS.

There, now every healer has proper support actions.

i actually would love to get mitigation back on healers. i cannot fathom why they removed it from healers (virus/e4e/disable) and gave it to dps in the first place.

yes, it doesn't entirely solve the 1 button spam issue but it still gives healers more things to do, which theyre desperately lacking

[GucciSan]

I did say “isn’t as necessary”, not remove it entirely. Alternatively to hear people talk about it we may as well do away with the role entirely. It really sounds like people think a proper healer is impossible in XIV, and if so we may as well go a GW2 route and just have everyone manage their own health/reviving and the like. As is the healing isn’t important enough.

This is my biggest fear come 6.0. That SE will hear that healers don't heal all that much now and don't want more involved healing and just scrap it altogether. Someone put it really well when they said that the game isn't designed for Healers or Tanks, but 8 DPS with defensive cooldowns. Give everyone a self sustain heal and a AoE heal like DNC and it wouldn't be much different.

[Irenia]

This is my biggest fear come 6.0. That SE will hear that healers don't heal all that much now and don't want more involved healing and just scrap it altogether. Someone put it really well when they said that the game isn't designed for Healers or Tanks, but 8 DPS with defensive cooldowns. Give everyone a self sustain heal and a AoE heal like DNC and it wouldn't be much different.

I doubt they will do that unless they get the chance to redesign most of the levelling content. While experienced players can handle this just fine, casuals would likely suffer, and we're in this situation in the first place due to an appeal to them.

[MirronTulaxia]

This is my biggest fear come 6.0. That SE will hear that healers don't heal all that much now and don't want more involved healing and just scrap it altogether. Someone put it really well when they said that the game isn't designed for Healers or Tanks, but 8 DPS with defensive cooldowns. Give everyone a self sustain heal and a AoE heal like DNC and it wouldn't be much different.

I mean as I said, if they want to call what we have "healing" where it's DPS with some odd responsibilities then we may as well remove the pretense of the job. Give everyone some self-healing, you take care of yourself and maybe some AoE stuff, and we can make the current Healers "Support". Though that'll just basically be DPS with some other buttons being pushed too so it's really just delaying the inevitable shift to everything being a DPS.