Can Healer Balance Survive a 4th Healer?

[elioaiko]

I honestly hate the misconception that healers are divided by regen/shield dichotomy.

SCH is a burst, oGCD healer. What's missing is a consistent way to apply shields without actually casting it. They only have Seraph who takes a 4 weaves to fully utilize.

WHM is a power/direct healer. They heal flat HP most of the time with Assize and Asylum as their form of oGCD regen. WHM's focus on GCD healing is still problematic, but at least they have Misery. Weaving and movement is a huge issue as well.

AST was designed to be the inbetween for filling in for WHM or SCH. So therefore it can't be weaker than either. Judging by HW and Shb beginnings, they tried with AST not have strong heals to compensate for their cards. But we all know that all healers need to be competitive at a base level. This happened to tanks as well. Deleting Noct stance is the right step, but it will upset people since AST is losing what little identity they have left. Because of their dual nature, it's near impossible to balance it's kit creating the OP healer that it is today. Bringing AST alone makes it easier for the cohealer to not use a GCD heal.

Yes the difference is important, but if Shb proved anything, is how shields need a rework because they're useless past prog and hardly matter in an optimized environment.

As it stands, they're literally just eHP and have no value past its duration. This is why we saw the rise of double regen with AST and WHM. Regen have value between raidwides whereas shields will fall off. I would prefer if the remaining shield was converted into HP for the target.

[Acece]

Why is Whm considered a regen healer when they have 2 regens anyways lol. ast has like 4 regens, they're also a lot better then whm regens.

[elioaiko]

Why is Whm considered a regen healer when they have 2 regens anyways lol. ast has like 4 regens, they're also a lot better then whm regens.

Agreed, WHM has all but moved onto from relying on regens for their main source of healing. I also miss GCD regens having longer durations. They just feel so short now.

[ty_taurus]

While redefining strengths and weaknesses is a great start, there's a looming elephant in the room...what's WHM's strength? What's its weakness? Those questions and their horrible answers have orbited the heart of why healer balance has been as awkward as it has for years.

Well, based on what WHM used to be in 2.X...

Their strength was their powerful healing capabilities: Cure II, Cure III, and Medica II. These spells had the ability to drastically raise the HP of any or all allies in a way that SCH just couldn't do, not to mention Benediction. This made it much easier for them to heal through raid damage where SCHs needed to work with their barriers and their damage mitigation tools, and also just wait for the faerie to do her work. In SCH/SCH comps, you could really feel how much slower it was to heal the party after heavy raidwide damage.

This came at the cost of the high MP costs for those spells and their weaker MP regeneration. SCH's Aetherflow actually healed 20% of their max MP as opposed to the 10% it restores now, and they also drained MP with every Energy Drain. WHM only had Shroud of Saints, basically the Lucid Dreaming of the past with added aggro reduction. This meant you had to manage your resources very carefully to avoid overspending on MP. They also didn't have nearly as much time to DPS as the SCH did. Benediction was their only OGCD, and with MP being a lot tighter on them back then, spending too much of it on DPS could be intimidating if weren't fully comfortable as a healer or with the content.

We could say that now, mobility is WHM's biggest weakness. It's not exactly a great weakness to have to deal with, and feels clunky to many, but I think if the developers take some inspiration from BLM and give them restrictive ways to manage mobility, that could be a workable angle to go after.

[Kabooa]

We could say that now, mobility is WHM's biggest weakness. It's not exactly a great weakness to have to deal with, and feels clunky to many, but I think if the developers take some inspiration from BLM and give them restrictive ways to manage mobility, that could be a workable angle to go after.

Weaknesses aren't supposed to be "Great". They're supposed to define the "Can'ts" of the Can/Can't dichotomies to carve out a playstyle feel.

In terms of looking over at their mirror, here's what they share.

An instant cast every 30 seconds (Polyglot vs Lily)
An instant cast every 60 seconds (Swiftcast)
An instant cast every 30 seconds (Sharpcast vs Dia)

If you want to even them up completely you need the following.

A set of 3 casts per 60s (Triplecast)
2 1.0s weave windows approximately every 30 seconds (AF/UI transitions)
An average of 1 instant per 30-45s (Non-sharp Firestarter/Thunderclouds)

[Semirhage]

Well, based on what WHM used to be in 2.X...

Their strength was their powerful healing capabilities: Cure II, Cure III, and Medica II. These spells had the ability to drastically raise the HP of any or all allies in a way that SCH just couldn't do, not to mention Benediction. This made it much easier for them to heal through raid damage where SCHs needed to work with their barriers and their damage mitigation tools, and also just wait for the faerie to do her work. In SCH/SCH comps, you could really feel how much slower it was to heal the party after heavy raidwide damage.

This came at the cost of the high MP costs for those spells and their weaker MP regeneration. SCH's Aetherflow actually healed 20% of their max MP as opposed to the 10% it restores now, and they also drained MP with every Energy Drain. WHM only had Shroud of Saints, basically the Lucid Dreaming of the past with added aggro reduction. This meant you had to manage your resources very carefully to avoid overspending on MP. They also didn't have nearly as much time to DPS as the SCH did. Benediction was their only OGCD, and with MP being a lot tighter on them back then, spending too much of it on DPS could be intimidating if weren't fully comfortable as a healer or with the content.

We could say that now, mobility is WHM's biggest weakness. It's not exactly a great weakness to have to deal with, and feels clunky to many, but I think if the developers take some inspiration from BLM and give them restrictive ways to manage mobility, that could be a workable angle to go after.

I agree that's what the strengths and weaknesses were in 2.0. I also think trying to stick to those same strengths and weaknesses have been at the root of awful design over the last two expansions. Being the "healiest healer" doesn't work when you have more than two, not in FFXIV. The content designers want all comps to be able to clear content with a reasonable comfort level. Having bigger heals doesn't amount to much if it's just overhealing. The weaker healers need to be able to keep up after all. Also having terrible MP regeneration just feels like clunky garbage with the way healer kits work; if you don't have meaningful choices to make, MP management just reverts back to the Everquest days of sitting to regain mana during pulls. It's got to involve a risk-reward system to make it work. At the moment, your choice is "Do I cast Glare, or do I just stand here?", rather than something more like "Do I cast Glare, or do I cast this other thing that does less but also costs way less MP?". There's no "management" involved in a system that doesn't allow you to, y'know, do anything to manage it other than pressing the "gimme mana" button on cooldown.

This takes us back to Stormblood, perhaps the nadir of WHM design. Their "strengths" were just slightly larger numbers on their GCD heals (which weren't necessary, and even then AST had some higher potencies there), and theoretically higher personal damage (which was gimped by the fact that WHM has always had to choose between damage and healing, while the other two have far more/smoother methods of doing both at the same time), and the drawbacks were having effectively zero ways to contribute to the party that the other two healers didn't either match, or do better. Plus the myriad things they could do that WHM simply didn't have any abilities for.

My point is, WHM needs to bring something unique to the table. For once. Because its former "strengths" were exposed for the redundancy they ultimately were when parties were given another option that didn't suck.

[ty_taurus]

I agree that's what the strengths and weaknesses were in 2.0. I also think trying to stick to those same strengths and weaknesses have been at the root of awful design over the last two expansions. Being the "healiest healer" doesn't work when you have more than two, not in FFXIV. The content designers want all comps to be able to clear content with a reasonable comfort level. Having bigger heals doesn't amount to much if it's just overhealing. The weaker healers need to be able to keep up after all. Also having terrible MP regeneration just feels like clunky garbage with the way healer kits work; if you don't have meaningful choices to make, MP management just reverts back to the Everquest days of sitting to regain mana during pulls. It's got to involve a risk-reward system to make it work. At the moment, your choice is "Do I cast Glare, or do I just stand here?", rather than something more like "Do I cast Glare, or do I cast this other thing that does less but also costs way less MP?". There's no "management" involved in a system that doesn't allow you to, y'know, do anything to manage it other than pressing the "gimme mana" button on cooldown.

This takes us back to Stormblood, perhaps the nadir of WHM design. Their "strengths" were just slightly larger numbers on their GCD heals (which weren't necessary, and even then AST had some higher potencies there), and theoretically higher personal damage (which was gimped by the fact that WHM has always had to choose between damage and healing, while the other two have far more/smoother methods of doing both at the same time), and the drawbacks were having effectively zero ways to contribute to the party that the other two healers didn't either match, or do better. Plus the myriad things they could do that WHM simply didn't have any abilities for.

My point is, WHM needs to bring something unique to the table. For once. Because its former "strengths" were exposed for the redundancy they ultimately were when parties were given another option that didn't suck.

Right, so I do just want to say that I don't think 2.X was perfect. There were plenty of issues and clunk that were far more acceptable 8 years ago, but wouldn't be now. You point out some of the issues with those old strengths and weaknesses which I didn't really talk about; however, I do think there is something to be said about the concept of those strengths and weaknesses.44Let's talk about the power healing aspect. As you've stated, Power healing doesn't really matter when your "weak numbers healers" can keep up with content just as well, and that's a very real criticism. I do think that 2.X showed how you can actually make that a strength worth having, though. Yes, all healers need to be able to keep up with healing all forms of content, but SCH being a much weaker healer never prevented it or SCH/SCH comps from being able to clear content. SCHs just needed to work harder in order to maintain a healthy party HP by being proactive with barriers and mitigation. It was when you didn't do this correctly that you would start to fall behind, and catching up was a challenge, but I would argue that's perfectly acceptable in XIV. It's when SCH got easily accessible solutions to their low healing power that WHM's strength became unnecessary.

Now, I think for the sake of making the game more approachable to casual players, which the development team seems adamant about, it does make sense to have tools like Indomitability and new Sacred Soil. Personally, I'd argue that it's entirely fine to have high difficulty jobs as long as there are low difficulty jobs to appeal to casual players. Why not make SCH be the high skill floor healer? If that's too much pressure, then play WHM. Not every job needs to be able to appeal to every player. But if we're not allowed to go down that route, then what should happen instead is have tools like Indomitability be safety nets for casual players that should have some kind of meaningful cost. For example, what if we change Aetherflow to be a high burst DPS oriented resource and place more emphasis on the Faerie Gauge as the source of OGCD healing?

Indomitability can stay an Aetherflow action, but using it means losing out on a large chunk of DPS. You need to manage your healing, your faerie, and your utility in order to avoid needing Indomitability, but if you have to, it's there for you. Meanwhile WHM can focus on low penalty power healing. You don't need to worry about managing damage reduction because your healing is both powerful and doesn't take away nearly as much of your DPS. Heck, put more depth into the lily system in such a way that power healing can instead be a DPS gain by pumping up Afflatus Misery or adding Lily actions that compensate for the loss of Glare.

Suddenly you have a much more real value to WHM's power healing. As for AST, we could instead have the AST focus less on power healing, but more on consistent healing. AST has been defined from day 1 as the buff healer that has low personal DPS but can boost the DPS of party members. We should dig into that more and make nearly all of their DPS come from buffs they provide to the party. For them, healing is relatively easy because they dont' really prioritize Malefic when new spells exist that heal and contribute to DPS. Instead, their challenge comes at balancing those buffs. Perhaps it should be more difficult to use them efficiently or your rDPS contributions start to suffer, but not your healing.

[FusionSamurai]

I honestly hate the misconception that healers are divided by regen/shield dichotomy.

SCH is a burst, oGCD healer. What's missing is a consistent way to apply shields without actually casting it. They only have Seraph who takes a 4 weaves to fully utilize.

WHM is a power/direct healer. They heal flat HP most of the time with Assize and Asylum as their form of oGCD regen. WHM's focus on GCD healing is still problematic, but at least they have Misery. Weaving and movement is a huge issue as well.

AST was designed to be the inbetween for filling in for WHM or SCH. So therefore it can't be weaker than either. Judging by HW and Shb beginnings, they tried with AST not have strong heals to compensate for their cards. But we all know that all healers need to be competitive at a base level. This happened to tanks as well. Deleting Noct stance is the right step, but it will upset people since AST is losing what little identity they have left. Because of their dual nature, it's near impossible to balance it's kit creating the OP healer that it is today. Bringing AST alone makes it easier for the cohealer to not use a GCD heal.

Yes the difference is important, but if Shb proved anything, is how shields need a rework because they're useless past prog and hardly matter in an optimized environment.

As it stands, they're literally just eHP and have no value past its duration. This is why we saw the rise of double regen with AST and WHM. Regen have value between raidwides whereas shields will fall off. I would prefer if the remaining shield was converted into HP for the target.

Ast is broken now because it encroached on both other healers territories too much. AST oGCDs are broken, and they lose nothing to weave them. Neutral sect is the best healing button in the game, probably. Sure it requires you to GCD heal, but the value you get from being in both sects is absolutely bonkers, especially in prog raiding.

I feel as though shields turning into healing may be a bit strong, but it would depend widely on what happens to other healers at the same time.

Seraph's should absolutely convert to healing, given you have little to no control over who she targets. Nothing like seraphic veil on a dps taking no damage ^

[Semirhage]

Now, I think for the sake of making the game more approachable to casual players, which the development team seems adamant about, it does make sense to have tools like Indomitability and new Sacred Soil. Personally, I'd argue that it's entirely fine to have high difficulty jobs as long as there are low difficulty jobs to appeal to casual players. Why not make SCH be the high skill floor healer? If that's too much pressure, then play WHM. Not every job needs to be able to appeal to every player. But if we're not allowed to go down that route...

I'm one of those vocal opponents to that design; to me it just feels like giving up the idea of making all three healers interesting and making Scholar's Heavensward/Stormblood OP crown explicit instead of a result of bumbling development choices.

The other ideas have their merits. I'd be cautious about AST's damage mainly coming from buffs, mostly because that's a bear to get the tuning right. And I don't even mean in relation to the other healers- job designers would also have to make sure their solo duty experience isn't significantly worse than the others, and the scaling between 4 and 8-player content could get ugly if their buffs are too strong or weak.

Man, I'd just love a WHM able to break free of this weird Squeenix-imposed design prison where UNGA BUNGA CURE and OOGA BOOGA DAMAGE BONK are the baby rattles you get to furiously shake. A damage reduction buff? My word, that's got to be a capstone! Don't want to fry their brains on a third thing. This whole series has berserk, float, bravery, faith, bubble, bar-spells...It's only in XIV we have GROG SMASH GLARE.

[ty_taurus]

I'm one of those vocal opponents to that design; to me it just feels like giving up the idea of making all three healers interesting and making Scholar's Heavensward/Stormblood OP crown explicit instead of a result of bumbling development choices.

The other ideas have their merits. I'd be cautious about AST's damage mainly coming from buffs, mostly because that's a bear to get the tuning right. And I don't even mean in relation to the other healers- job designers would also have to make sure their solo duty experience isn't significantly worse than the others, and the scaling between 4 and 8-player content could get ugly if their buffs are too strong or weak.

Man, I'd just love a WHM able to break free of this weird Squeenix-imposed design prison where UNGA BUNGA CURE and OOGA BOOGA DAMAGE BONK are the baby rattles you get to furiously shake. A damage reduction buff? My word, that's got to be a capstone! Don't want to fry their brains on a third thing. This whole series has berserk, float, bravery, faith, bubble, bar-spells...It's only in XIV we have GROG SMASH GLARE.

Well the thing is, I don't think SCH needs to be OP either. With the direction we're going in, pure vs barrier healer, what I hope (though have doubt about) is that we can return to the idea of having a main and off healer where the off healers have much higher DPS, but can't heal as efficiently. SCH and SGE are capable of healing through content even when paired together or with another of the same, but in order to accomplish that, they'd both need to sacrifice chunks of their DPS to rely on safety net heals that consume resources that would otherwise go to important DPS, so it would become a balancing act to try and maintain your numbers while keeping the party healthy. This would theoretically prevent the issue of "just run SCH/SGE to have crazy healer DPS numbers" as they would only ideally be capable of pumping out those numbers with the healing support of WHM or AST. You do point out of course that tuning becomes a big deal. If that isn't tuned properly, we have a power imbalance that could make WHM and AST unideal. The penalties for needing safety net healing need to be significant enough to ensure that doesn't happen.

Quite honestly, though, I'm totally fine with taking that chance. I would much rather they take risks and be adventurous with healer designs rather than keep them overly safe and bland as they are now. At the end of the day, endgame balance really has never been that big of an issue in this game because the casual content is what gets played the most. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but even when AST was first released and its numbers were terrible, I still played it and many others did too.

As for the AST buff DPS idea, I think the solution is just to move away from % based buffs. In other words, they have selfish potency based damage, however, that damage acts as a buff and triggers when other characters with that buff use GCD actions on enemies. Here's an example of what I mean:

Buff:
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 100 to the first enemy struck with a spell or weaponskill (5 stacks).
Duration: 20 seconds

The damage technically comes from the AST, but is triggered when the buffed ally attacks. We could have different buffs that apply different potencies and amounts of hits of course and have those buffs attached to GCD heals and other buffs. Something like that.

And I totally agree with you on WHM. I think they need more than just high numbers, and I think expanding on the lily system can create that kind of reward system, but I do think they could afford to focus more on their heals. Make the Blood Lily worth nourishing over Glaring with certain actions, and make tools that help us generate more lilies while also making MP more of a concern. We have Thin Air, but there aren't any impactful ways to use it outside of reviving fallen allies.