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

[Valic]

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



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.

This is a hard one cuz tanks always have been about doing at least a little dps while they pull. Most games have them put debuffs on targets, pull abilities, their own mitigation, and etc to keep mobs.... So.... Yeah tbh I think I would still play tank o.o. Aion had it so they had a yank, a shout to hold aggro if needed to be used a couple times, aoes,and a couple of mitigation tools, same as other games, but they still aoe'd or did damage when tanking, it just wasn't their focus of course. Healers in most games had a similar idea but they had a more direct job as a lot of things outright killed without healing... So healing was more of what they dd than dps most of the time. There were also points where MP conservation was actually a thing so dps from a healer could actually be negatively impacting if that meant they couldn't heal the party back up soon. Not saying a healer should never dps or "ONLY" heal but it falls in the same category as your metaphor that they likely wouldn't have "purely just this" for their skillset. It's a bad comparison to say what if tanks had pure defensive/mitigation because that has never been a case really, healers tho this actually has been a case before and has worked.

[ty_taurus]

I completely and understand the desire for some players to want a "pure healer" who spends little-to-no time DPSing, and I can respect that as a play style. That said, I find it extremely selfish and disrespectful to all other players when people who want this play style demand that all the healers turn into this. No, not all of us want this, and presenting that as the only way that healers can be well-designed is narrow-minded. As others have pointed out, just nerfing potencies and boosting raid damage won't suddenly make the healers more engaging.

Now, I do think we deserve to have a healer that's designed to play like a pure healer in some regards. That's not to say that they shouldn't be contributing to raid DPS at all, but that their contributions should come from GCD buffs, and I think the Astrologian should turn into this in the future. Take the damage buffs away from the cards and put that into GCD buffs that deal damage when your allies attack enemies so when you have your healing downtime, you spend it spreading damage buffs around the party, possibly with other support effects attached to encourage you to think about who you're casting them on. That can be one of the healers for sure, but it certainly shouldn't be every healer.

[Saefinn]

snip.

During those old days of WHM doing the heavy lifting, I recall the complaints being "why don't you give us more utility?" instead of "why don't you take some of their utility away?" For a long time the request has been to bring White Mage up and not the others down, hence some of the "first time?" memes I've seen out of White Mage's.

But the important thing is, they were more fun to play this way, I agree an increase in healer focus is needed in encounter design because the downtime is too great for a lot of stuff, but I'd still want to see a better developed down time because downtime will happen and again you're talking a huge job retroactively adjusting the content.

And furthermore, solo play is a thing, solo FATEs, questing, solo instances and so on. With 1v1 being a thing in Bozja, imagine being the SCH getting it? You'd be spamming Broil/Ruin II.

I don't see how the old way was so bad or what the harm was, WHM was in need of love and this was the problem. But their solution made things a lot more dull.

Of course, it doesn't have to be just like the old days, there are other ways to break things up, in previous threads I have made suggestions to that effect, my idea for Scholar for example would keep the exact same skills but have ability to utilise them differently based on the situation, where you might trade off healing efficiency for utility, a principle that already existed with faerie choice.

But the short if that idea is that faerie choice mattered again, even to the point of how Fey Union, Seraph and Fey Blessing worked but also expand how Emergency Tactics and Deployment Tactics worked, to not just affect healing abilities, Eg. Emergency Tactics could make a Biolysis deal all its damage at once, kinda like a Thunder proc on BLM, or Deployment Tactics could be used as a Bane, or heck Emergency Tactics could turn any Aetherflow abilities into something else. Though they are all examples of the concept, rather than considered for how they should function exactly.

They were some design choices I thought about that could use the existing design without adding any new abilities, but would offer more complex options if I found myself in a situation where it was better for me to. Yet despite being more complex it would not affect the skill floor either. The added bonus, you are self nerfing, meaning your healing effectiveness is decreased the more you embrace utility.

[Canubirt]

In regards to the topic of this,

I think if they move any more further to a pure healer focus than they have already done, the game would be absolutely boring for healers. There are not even that many fights that require major healing. Take ES5, if played correctly you can get through it with basically one healer. Taking a look at FFlogs and some of the top guilds, they had one healer of choice and a scholar. The scholar casted 1 Adlo with deploy and fairy casts, and three fairy regens. that was it. he has 135 broil casts, and around 30-40 of the other dps abilities. Thats how little healing was needed for that fight. Now the other healer and a total for healing abilities of about 30 casts. The other healer was a ast who also casted 167 malefics (think thats the name) plus his/her dots. This is a pretty large problem if they want to move to pure healer which they have already tried.

So yeah simply put, they either need to make fights far more healing intensive or they need to healers something else to do. Homogenization is destroying this game at this point.

When WoW tried the same thing, people quit in droves (i myself being one of them) and honestly, i dont have a problem doing it to FF even though i love the story.

[Sylve]

During those old days of WHM doing the heavy lifting, I recall the complaints being "why don't you give us more utility?" instead of "why don't you take some of their utility away?" For a long time the request has been to bring White Mage up and not the others down, hence some of the "first time?" memes I've seen out of White Mage's.

snip

If they had left WHMs raw healing as it was but upped it's DPS potential to match AST and SCH ... Why bring the other 2 when you can just do double WHM and have uber throughput AND uber dps?

In a vacuum, The 3 Healers did around as much DPS as each other. But when you put them together, One healer got stuck being "The Healer" while the other one turned into a Green DPS. And that healer stuck in "The Healer" role was always the one with the more potent heals.

I never suggested changing existing design. You brought up GC and and Shiva, i just answered your question. I specifically said "Encounter design going forward". No retroactive changes needed. Old content functions exactly as it does now and interacts with our kits in the same way.
But in the future? We might need to change up how we approach healing in the new content. Much like how current healing power, even when scaled down into previous tiers of content, blows away the kind of power we originally had when it was relevant.

Much as we do right now, We adjust how we play in old content because current jobs don't play like they used to.

The more complex you make downtime 'options' the less optional they become. Like SCH or WHM in Stormblood, if you ever dropped your DoT timing, your DPS tanked. Then you had to dedicate multiple GCDs just getting back to where you were before whatever happened to break your timing.
That works for DPS jobs because if someone else messes up, it doesn't tank your performance. Healers have a responsibility beyond 'kill the thing really hard', unlike DPS.

So we were given a DPS style that goes from zero to max in two GCDs. Sure, it's simple. But the more complexity you add to it the harder it gets to recover when something interrupts your damage. If you give DPS recovery tools (For example, a button that sets up multiple DoTs) then the complexity is gone because you start with "max damage" button and then .. filler nuke.
With no recovery button, losing your ramped state tanks your output. So its lose/lose. Except if you're a super hardcore min/max optimiser who never makes mistakes or parties with people who are less than perfect.

The problem with turning healing buttons into DPS buttons per your suggestion here, is that they're not options at all. Unless healing is absolutely required, you can bet that all of that SCH's resources are going to be bent towards DPS.
Remember when SCH lost Energy Drain and how enraged they all got that they couldn't blow Healing Resources on damage?
And in a group setting, that SCH is going to shunt the healing off to the co healer so they can continue to operate at maximum DPS. And boom, we're back to Stormblood.

If you want to bring Selene back, why not give her DPS synergy with Shields. For example:
When damage is absorbed by Galvanise/Catalyze, it charges a gauge for Selene.
Summoning Selene consumes gauge over time but transforms Biolysis into a secondary nuke on a short cooldown, with Selene having essentially an oGCD damage spell you weave between Broil casts.
Selene would be summoned alongside Eos, rather than replacing her.

In such a scenario, your active healing/shield is empowering your DPS without competing with your Healing. You can stock up gauge and dump it in downtime. Even works when solo since you can just Adloq yourself.

The only trouble there, naturally, would be keeping its DPS potential on par with the other Healers, lest we cause players to ignore them in favour of "moar deeps".

[Saefinn]

If they had left WHMs raw healing as it was but upped it's DPS potential to match AST and SCH ... Why bring the other 2 when you can just do double WHM and have uber throughput AND uber dps?

In a vacuum, The 3 Healers did around as much DPS as each other. But when you put them together, One healer got stuck being "The Healer" while the other one turned into a Green DPS. And that healer stuck in "The Healer" role was always the one with the more potent heals.

Giving WHM more utility would obviously mean balance has to be adjusted elsewhere, but this is what they asked for at the time. 3.0 made WHM's identity of "the healiest healer" redundant, but is the design choice SE has tried to stick to.

Yes, I know balance is hard, but I feel people's hangups over balance is emphasised too heavily I know to a degree yes, it's important, but I settle at "good enough to do the content", balance should not be considered more important than how fun something is to play.

It's really when you're at that top percentile level where you're incapable of pushing your numbers harder but the next guy is that it truly matters and let's face it, people who care at the level are likely to pick whatever is meta, especially if they're aiming for world first and things and there will always be jobs that are excluded from that. But...this seems like a smaller number to accommodate for at the cost of other people enjoying their role?

Outside of that, what it'll affect is how much better you have to be to top the next guy, but is a variety in difficulty between jobs such a bad thing?

And it'll affect people who have the mentality "I must pick meta over not meta" despite their group not being near the percentile where it really matters and end up turning away a non-meta player with a high DPS for a meta player with mediocre one...which annoyingly is something I've seen happen and it's stupid IMO.

I never suggested changing existing design. You brought up GC and and Shiva, i just answered your question. I specifically said "Encounter design going forward". No retroactive changes needed. Old content functions exactly as it does now and interacts with our kits in the same way.
But in the future? We might need to change up how we approach healing in the new content. Much like how current healing power, even when scaled down into previous tiers of content, blows away the kind of power we originally had when it was relevant.

On the GC and Shiva I corrected myself because I misunderstood what you were trying to say. But putting all that aside, I think there are wires crossed, because I think we are in agreement right up until the point I believe we need more to do in our downtime, especially for easier content.

Given this difference and there being a problem with playing a healer being boring for a most of the game's existing content, I am curious how you'd deal with the following:

Expert Roulettes
Level 80 Roulettes
Normal Raid Roulette
Alliance Raid Roulette
Level 50/60/70 roulette
Trial Roulette
Levelling Roulette
FATE Grinding for EXP
Doing Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High
Being a new player levelling a healer & doing quests
Doing Solo Instances
Doing Eureka
Doing Bozja when it comes out (as I predict it'll follow the current trend) - especially the 1v1 fights.

If our only adjustment is to change all encounter design for the future, this is the only content healing is fun in. This is all content where 40 to 85% of the time I've got to DPS because my healing is too efficient. Because with this change, I'm locked out of enjoying 95% of the game's content as a healer...which is pretty much where I am now, where it was not the case before. Just, I'd be in a better place with new content (but I bet with iLevel increases, people knowing fights better and better geared people, finding things more second natured, we'd start seeing more downtime anyway).

[Torunya]

This is a hard one cuz tanks always have been about doing at least a little dps while they pull. Most games have them put debuffs on targets, pull abilities, their own mitigation, and etc to keep mobs.... So.... Yeah tbh I think I would still play tank o.o. Aion had it so they had a yank, a shout to hold aggro if needed to be used a couple times, aoes,and a couple of mitigation tools, same as other games, but they still aoe'd or did damage when tanking, it just wasn't their focus of course. Healers in most games had a similar idea but they had a more direct job as a lot of things outright killed without healing... So healing was more of what they dd than dps most of the time. There were also points where MP conservation was actually a thing so dps from a healer could actually be negatively impacting if that meant they couldn't heal the party back up soon. Not saying a healer should never dps or "ONLY" heal but it falls in the same category as your metaphor that they likely wouldn't have "purely just this" for their skillset. It's a bad comparison to say what if tanks had pure defensive/mitigation because that has never been a case really, healers tho this actually has been a case before and has worked.

I appreciate the mentioning of Aion. I remember that yank (and how good it felt to use).

And I see your point. Dealing damage is more intrinsic to the tank role in that they deal damage to establish and hold hate, while the healer role doesn't need to deal damage in order to heal, strictly speaking. That is a fair distinction to make. I think what I wanted to focus on was more the direction tanks and healers are being taken in, and where they came from. Both tanks and healers have always had a versatile dps toolkit in ffxiv, yet it is only the healer that is experiencing a neutering of its dps toolkit while the tank is experiencing a steady metamorphosis into a "designated dps that also holds aggro." Now, if tanks are allowed to embrace their dps half, why can't healers? Would expanding on the dps toolkit for healers, to the same degree as tanks, be so terrible for healer accessibility?

Additionally, I have no doubts that a "pure" job could work, but that presupposes that the game is designed to accomodate that kind of play -- which ffxiv currently does not. The problem there is the clashing philosophy of what the devs would have you do versus how it really works. But that is an issue for another day. It's late and this old man needs his tea.

[Semirhage]

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.

Wasn't this the interview that told the community that Yoshi doesn't know how healers play in his own game? At the time that interview came out, the Site That Shall Not Be Named had the healing/DPS rankings of all three healers. The problem wasn't that WHM had "higher potencies" and was forced to "do all the healing" while the Scholar "DPSed away", the problem was that Scholar was outhealing and out DPSing the White Mages at the same time. Because having free enormous potency off-GCD heals like Excog, Indom, Whispering Dawn, etc that you can seamlessly toss out basically whenever you feel like it between damage casts is a far more effective strategy with how 14's combat system works. That and, you don't want WHM doing healing if you can help it because their filler spell has more potency, so you're ironically losing more damage if you make your WHM swap to GCD healing.

If they had left WHMs raw healing as it was but upped it's DPS potential to match AST and SCH ... Why bring the other 2 when you can just do double WHM and have uber throughput AND uber dps?

Much as I loathe how they did it, I'm glad they at least tried to even out the DPS contributions of all three healers. DPS is the metric in FF14. It just is. This right here is the reason why WHM was kicked out of parties in Stormblood. Because if you allow the opposite situation instead, why the hell would you take a useless overhealer who can't damage worth a crap when you can take the wonder twins of super damage, mega utility, and more than adequate healing? Having higher healing potencies isn't an advantage. If all healers have to be viable, extra healing is overhealing. If all three healers are going to stay out of the trashbin, you need them to bring roughly equivalent damage. All fights are DPS races and you aren't punished for overdamaging, so damage is king.

[Saefinn]

Wasn't this the interview that told the community that Yoshi doesn't know how healers play in his own game? At the time that interview came out, the Site That Shall Not Be Named had the healing/DPS rankings of all three healers. The problem wasn't that WHM had "higher potencies" and was forced to "do all the healing" while the Scholar "DPSed away", the problem was that Scholar was outhealing and out DPSing the White Mages at the same time. Because having free enormous potency off-GCD heals like Excog, Indom, Whispering Dawn, etc that you can seamlessly toss out basically whenever you feel like it between damage casts is a far more effective strategy with how 14's combat system works. That and, you don't want WHM doing healing if you can help it because their filler spell has more potency, so you're ironically losing more damage if you make your WHM swap to GCD healing.

I recall this narrative.

And yes SCH's problem was that HW made SCH OP and SCH remained OP for Stormblood, which is why WHM's identity of "healiest healer" became redundant, and a mix of them ended up buffing AST early on in HW. SCH was OP because it was basically good at everything.

ARR balance was that there was a dichotomy between SCH's shield healing and WHM's healier heals - I remember finding working with a WHM co-healer in ARR to be great. But SCH's healing ability improved with HW and AST was added to the mix, which seemed to be designed around a dichotomy they just made redundant, but seemed to try and fit it in fulfilling both of their shoes. But still designed WHM seemingly with the view that WHM should be the healiest of heals, which doesn't really mean a lot any more.

[Deceptus]

No and they can never make healers "Pure Healers" because healers have to be able to level outside of dungeons / complete the MSQ.

Wasn't this the interview that told the community that Yoshi doesn't know how healers play in his own game? At the time that interview came out, the Site That Shall Not Be Named had the healing/DPS rankings of all three healers. The problem wasn't that WHM had "higher potencies" and was forced to "do all the healing" while the Scholar "DPSed away", the problem was that Scholar was outhealing and out DPSing the White Mages at the same time. Because having free enormous potency off-GCD heals like Excog, Indom, Whispering Dawn, etc that you can seamlessly toss out basically whenever you feel like it between damage casts is a far more effective strategy with how 14's combat system works. That and, you don't want WHM doing healing if you can help it because their filler spell has more potency, so you're ironically losing more damage if you make your WHM swap to GCD healing.
.

And that narrative was subsequently harshly debunked by showing that at the highest level, WHM and SCH DPS were almost identical and their healing requirements were almost identical as well.