If they made healers into pure healers, would you still play it?

[Veis_Alveare]

I think when people look at this some think that if healing was less about dpsing it would be more approachable or that groups/pugs/whatever would suddenly not care about healer dps.

The thing that would have to happen would be a huge spike in incoming damage to the party, and at least to the tank in dungeons. This would be a big change for those of us focused on dps but since we're spent time getting to know our kits and we're ready to adjust to a randomly plummeting HP bar we at least could still be functional healers with a crazy amount more to heal.

The people that would be left out in the cold would be the curebots of today. The people who don't care about efficiency. Right now they can get by because the thing they're shooting in the foot by being lazy is the speed with which their group clears, if they actually needed to apply themselves in order to just keep the group alive though? No way.

This is why SE will never go to a stricter healing requirement. You'd be taking a role that has the absolute lowest skill floor in casual content by a mile and raising it by so much that many of its players would literally be unable to complete group instances.

[Torunya]

I mean, imagine if tanks were purely defensive/mitigative. Would anyone still play them?

They don't need to change Healers, they need to change encounter design.

As Sylve and others prior have pointed out: encounter design is one of the issues at large here if we are to accomodate the "pure healer" mentality -- and the "pure tank", if that ever became a thing. If we go the other way and retain the current encounter design, then dps elements in all jobs are required. This is why tanks feel so much like dps jobs. You just can't have them be solely about mitigation. So if, according to the devs, healers should only heal, should not then tanks only tank? This question is more of a premise that we all already know the answer to, but I find the duality in the contradiciting directions healers and tanks are being taken in to be an interesting -- if not slightly frustrating -- issue.

[Sylve]

The thing that would have to happen would be a huge spike in incoming damage to the party, and at least to the tank in dungeons. This would be a big change for those of us focused on dps but since we're spent time getting to know our kits and we're ready to adjust to a randomly plummeting HP bar we at least could still be functional healers with a crazy amount more to heal.

The people that would be left out in the cold would be the curebots of today. The people who don't care about efficiency. Right now they can get by because the thing they're shooting in the foot by being lazy is the speed with which their group clears, if they actually needed to apply themselves in order to just keep the group alive though? No way.

This is why SE will never go to a stricter healing requirement. You'd be taking a role that has the absolute lowest skill floor in casual content by a mile and raising it by so much that many of its players would literally be unable to complete group instances.

WoW made the "huge damage to make healers heal" mistake a while back. During MoP Heroics didn't even need Healers. So in WoD they just amped incoming damage to the max while making healing really low potency.
It felt absolutely awful. A lot of the time you didn't even know where the damage was coming from, it was just everywhere, constantly. Every (1.5s) GCD was a Heal or someone was falling over.

What most people misunderstand about wanting more healing is that it isn't about seeing HP bars getting chunked to the point of needing to spam Heals, its about breaking the script.

I did an experiment in the MSQ dungeons of ShB, Every spike of damage that needed Healing, not including avoidable stuff like floor markers, had a recast time that lined it up with a powerful oGCD that could almost onetap the damage sustained back to full.

So Healing then just became (and still is) a script where Unavoidable mechanic = oGCD/CD, Glare between because nothing is coming until that next mechanic.

How doi you fix that?
Faster recasts for less damage. (Instead of 70k party damage in one blast and then 45 seconds to heal it, make it 30k damage on an 18 second recast for example)
Odd recasts that dont line up well with oGCDs is another method.
More frequent Tankbusters that do 50k instead of 120k unmitigated, So you'd need to be more aware of your Tank's cooldown usage

It doesn't have to be humongous mega spiky chunk damage, Just a a fairly constant, inconsistent stream of damage being applied. Enough that skilled Healers can apply damage while keeping the party at a safe level.
Makes Shields and Regens more valuable because they catch more damage in their durations. Such a change wouldn't affect Healbots because they don't have the dps layer to worry about, just make people full, But skilled Healers can make judgement calls on the party's ability to allow them to squeeze some damage out.

[Liam_Harper]

If there's one thing I hate in MMO's, it's having a wet noodle ineffective toolkit that I have to spam endlessly to get a mediocre result. WoW got obsessed with this and it never worked. I like feeling powerful and having a wide variety of strong tools, but I want to have situations that really test that toolkit. I want to feel rewarded for putting every bit of it to use and pulling off crazy things. Spamming Medica or Cure II 10 times to heal one health bar is not rewarding nor do I feel powerful at all.

[Saefinn]

I'd not like it but I'd find it better than the situation now.

However, I don't think it works at all as a solution because it would need more than potency changes, it'd need a design overhaul, because there are healing checks in places, for example the Doom mechanic in Hades Ex is a heal check, with decreased potencies and a small window to get everybody up then you're making the mechanic a lot tougher and of course for the level of nerf needed to make easy content interesting could probably even render it near impossible.

The problem is down time, where there are periods where you don't need to heal or don't need to heal much.

A pure heal focus would be not viable with potency changes.

But what they can do is give us back a proper DPS rotation and in future content give us more heal focus through mechanics, restore that balance. It also means they can keep healers accessible for people less confident with their heal kit.

To me this seems the most sensible compromise. The level of overhaul needed for a heavy heal focus would be big, when they actually has an easiest solution and can make us work harder to heal in future. It is content that drives a heal or DPS focus.

This game is not designed to work with the standard healer archetype and TBH I like that, I just wish they'd realise what they've got and embrace it instead of trying to make it something it is not. There's nothing wrong with being different, I also wish people would stop trying to apply design logic from outside of this game and expect it to change to accommodate that. There's plenty of MMO's that do it the "standard" way, why make this game too much like others? Especially when this game's way worked really well with how the game is designed...just they've moved away from what already worked to only find they've made the experience dull.

[Sylve]

I'd not like it but I'd find it better than the situation now.

However, I don't think it works at all as a solution because it would need more than potency changes, it'd need a design overhaul, because there are healing checks in places, for example the Doom mechanic in Hades Ex is a heal check, with decreased potencies and a small window to get everybody up then you're making the mechanic a lot tougher and of course for the level of nerf needed to make easy content interesting could probably even render it near impossible.

The problem is down time, where there are periods where you don't need to heal or don't need to heal much.

A pure heal focus would be not viable with potency changes.

But what they can do is give us back a proper DPS rotation and in future content give us more heal focus through mechanics, restore that balance. It also means they can keep healers accessible for people less confident heal kit.

To me this seems the most sensible compromise.

This game is not designed to work with the standard healer archetype and TBH I like that, I just wish they'd realise what they've got and embrace it instead of trying to make it something it is not.

I never suggested reducing our healing strength.

No changes need to be made to our kits, Just the frequency we'd be required to use our tools. Instead of looking at my oGCDs and saying "welp, Mechanic A will need Earthly Star and Mechanic B will be fixed with Celestial Opposition and every GCD can be Malefic", Those oGCDs would be able to handle 1 in 3 of their assigned mechanics to the faster/odd recasts. Likewise with Tankbusters, I can't just assign Essential Dignity to the guaranteed-to-be-mitigated Tankbuster that turns the Buster into a Tickler.

I'd need to make decisions about what i use, when i use it and how i can use the windows those oGCDs offer me to sneak in some DPS. Previous encounters would be unchanged, just encounter design going forward. And since no changes are made to our kits, no need to adjust anything using the old encounter design.

[Saefinn]

I never suggested reducing our healing strength.

No changes need to be made to our kits, Just the frequency we'd be required to use our tools. Instead of looking at my oGCDs and saying "welp, Mechanic A will need Earthly Star and Mechanic B will be fixed with Celestial Opposition and every GCD can be Malefic", Those oGCDs would be able to handle 1 in 3 of their assigned mechanics to the faster/odd recasts. Likewise with Tankbusters, I can't just assign Essential Dignity to the guaranteed-to-be-mitigated Tankbuster that turns the Buster into a Tickler.

I'd need to make decisions about what i use, when i use it and how i can use the windows those oGCDs offer me to sneak in some DPS. Previous encounters would be unchanged, just encounter design going forward. And since no changes are made to our kits, no need to adjust anything using the old encounter design.

The OP suggested it.

But I cannot help but feel encounter design is based to work around how healing kits work, because in higher content, you still make those kinds of decisions. I think part of the problem here is that healing kits work well for high end content and are balanced that way but the difficulty jump means that lower level content suffers. We adjust for lower content we affect higher content. This is why one of my previous suggestions has been make raid balance separate (kinda like we do for PvP but not that extreme).

For example, if you wanted to adjust those oGCD windows to make Grand Cosmos more interesting to heal, what impact would that have on Shiva Savage or the new Ex fight?

The solution I support would allow room for Grand Cosmos to be more interesting than it is currently for a healer by giving us more to do when we're not healing without impacting high level content, with a view to make future content more engaging on the healing side.

[Sylve]

The OP suggested it.

But I cannot help but feel encounter design is based to work around how healing kits work, because in higher content, you still make those kinds of decisions. I think part of the problem here is that healing kits work well for high end content and are balanced that way but the difficulty jump means that lower level content suffers. We adjust for lower content we affect higher content. This is why one of my previous suggestions has been make raid balance separate (kinda like we do for PvP but not that extreme).

For example, if you wanted to adjust those oGCD windows to make Grand Cosmos more interesting to heal, what impact would that have on Shiva Savage or the new Ex fight?

The solution I support would allow room for Grand Cosmos to be more interesting than it is currently for a healer by giving us more to do when we're not healing without impacting high level content, with a view to make future content more engaging on the healing side.

Well ... Why would encounter design change in Grand Cosmos affect how we use our oGCDs in Shiva?
Once again, Our kit remains exactly as it is right now. But Grand Cosmos bosses would use mechanics in more rapid succession. For slightly less damage per hit, more often.

Turning us into DPS jobs that press a healing oGCD when the script requests it is basically what you're asking for. Lack of things to do except DPS in downtimes is the problem.
The solution isn't more elaborate downtime DPS, its to reduce the amount of downtime we have in between necessary healing.

[Saefinn]

Well ... Why would encounter design change in Grand Cosmos affect how we use our oGCDs in Shiva?
Once again, Our kit remains exactly as it is right now. But Grand Cosmos bosses would use mechanics in more rapid succession. For slightly less damage per hit, more often.

Then I misunderstood the point about oGCD frequency.

Then we are talking about the same thing. To accommodate a heavier healing approach would require encounter design to be changed.

Logistically speaking that is considerable amount of work, because it is a lot to change and rebalance, because it's a lot of content. Work I don't see the devs investing into healers.

We also raise the skill floor which I don't think the devs would do as they are trying to keep it low for roles to be more accessible. IMO keeping the skill floor low and raising the skill ceiling is more productive if their aim is accessibility.

Embracing that healer DPS is a thing and making that more interesting respects the game's existing design, accommodates accessibility, is less work & is an easier solution and can break the monotony, it accommodates solo play too and is nothing drastic at all, because the game was already designed for it, they just dumbed it down to death.

[Sylve]

Embracing that healer DPS is a thing and making that more interesting respects the game's existing design, accommodates accessibility, is less work & is an easier solution and can break the monotony, it accommodates solo play too and is nothing drastic at all, because the game was already designed for it, they just dumbed it down to death.

They already did that. The reason for our DPS kits being simplified isn't because of "dumbing down" or pure healing nonsense, it was done to eliminate the disparity between the Healers DPS output.
Yoshi-P talks about it here: https://twinfinite.net/2019/05/ffxiv...ers-interview/

If you start adding more complex rotations, we go right back to the olden days of WHM doing all the heavy lifting while the co healer focuses on DPS.

If you want more interesting downtime options, we're better off with DPS synergies with our Healing output. Something akin to the Blood Lily. Not literally the Blood Lily and Misery, But the concept that Healing feeds into our DPS in some way that feels organic.
Not so much that we go back to the aforementioned olden days, But enough that we deal our damage in a way that doesn't compete with our healing. WHM and its Blood Lily along with AST and its Cards are excellent starts, all SCH needs is some kind of interesting synergy with its kit for dealing damage.

I don't think we'll ever escape from having a filler GCD nuke. We don't have the ramp up freedom that a DPS job gets and (much like it used to) losing your ramped up damage state (All DoTs rolling etc) would be a pain to recover from in terms of DPS.
We just need to be able to seamlessly switch from Healing to Damage without feeling like we're 'losing' something.