Can Healer Balance Survive a 4th Healer?

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

All it takes are one direct ST and aoe GCD heal each to solve that problem. Every healer always has a direct heal baseline kit, that had always been the case in any game that used any special type beyond direct healing. Even if you happened to have two parasitism healers in a trial that has a phase without target but is somehow so difficult and has such high healing requirements that it was impossible to get everyone above threshold before that phase, all it would take would be one or two GCD heals and done.

Yes, that's true, but they'd need to be very weak or have massive MP costs to prevent people from just spamming those. Blue Mage, for example, only needs Pom Cure and Stotram to heal through most, if not all, synced content and the potencies on those are only 500 and 300 with their MP costs being 200 and 300. While Angel's Snack is nice to have it is not needed to survive most synced Blue Mage battles. White Wind becomes all but forgotten after learning Stotram or Angel's Snack as its MP cost is too great and Stotram too good.

[Lyth]

This game is scripted. If I can prevent damage before it comes out, then that's preferable to healing it back after the fact.

The way that you balance this out is through caps. All forms of damage negation, be it temporary HP or shields, should be combined into a single merged 'overhealth' stat that caps out at some role-based value and decays over time at a fixed rate. The idea being that when a big attack goes out, you need some threshold of 'overhealth' to survive it from your shield healer, and some sort of follow-up burst healing from your pure healer to get you ready for the next attack. You could also design mechanics where you can prevent an additional debuff depending on whether an attack is taken with 'overhealth' up vs. taken raw.

It also creates a situation where your shield healer prefers to 'heal' at close to if not max health, while your pure healer prefers to heal at lower values.

Outside of this, I'm not really sure how 'proactive' healing wouldn't always win out.

[Rilifane]

Yes, that's true, but they'd need to be very weak or have massive MP costs to prevent people from just spamming those. Blue Mage, for example, only needs Pom Cure and Stotram to heal through most, if not all, synced content and the potencies on those are only 500 and 300 with their MP costs being 200 and 300. While Angel's Snack is nice to have it is not needed to survive most synced Blue Mage battles. White Wind becomes all but forgotten after learning Stotram or Angel's Snack as its MP cost is too great and Stotram too good.

Healers have tons of tools that are clearly superior but people still spam Succor to heal the party up or Bene 1/ Cure 1/ Physick in high level content. So I wouldn't put my hopes up that a weak heal prevents players from spamming it over heals that require more than "push button whenever you feel like it".
The spammable baseline heals need to be inferior to the other heals but I guarantee you that it won't keep people from spamming them.

[Absurdity]

This game is scripted. If I can prevent damage before it comes out, then that's preferable to healing it back after the fact.

I'd say it's actually the opposite. If the damage prevented does

1. not prevent a death
2. not save resources you would've otherwise had to spend on reactive healing
then why would you ever waste your time on proactive healing?

This is exactly the issue that "barrier healers" currently suffer from. Why would I ever use Succor proactively when it doesn't prevent a death and I have to heal afterwards anyway? Why would I spend a GCD on a weak shield and additional resources to heal afterwards when the same job can be done by a single reactive oGCD Indom?


Sure, barriers have their uses in current savage fights, but I can't exactly call proactive healing a success when it gets used in maybe 2-3 fights in the entire content patch.


I honestly have no idea how to fix this problem as long as DF has the potential of giving you 2 regen or 2 barrier healers, because this means you can never implement mechanics in 90% of the content that actually require barriers to resolve.

[Irenia]

To be fair, I'm not even sure what proactive and reactive even mean. Like they can be synonyms for shield and burst healing, but why not just call them that instead?

Personally, I've always associated reactive healing to be 'reacting' to a surprise stimulus. And then proactive be the opposite of that. So instead of proactive and reactive, I should call them planned and unplanned?

It matches how my FC taught me back in ARR too, SCH was proactive, putting up shields before damage occurs, and WHM reacts to the damage taken to heal it up.

Then I learned being good at this game means minimizing what you are reacting to and proactively planning as much as you can to ensure success.

[Absurdity]

Yeah it's kinda hard to figure out what is meant with proactive healing, I simply interpreted it as barrier healing in this case. If proactive is supposed to mean "planning your healing in advance" then basically everything falls under proactive healing.

[IceBlueNinja]

Indeed it is trouble some but me whos always in noct if with a whm or grab it before another ast will use oppo amd field when I know aoe spams are coming and hope my di ast or whm regen after. It really aint as hard as it sounds to be of what proactive and reactive heal would be. However ast who does grab noct from me or sch for idk what reason tend to wanna field or succor after damage and to me that is just pointless. Better off using a horoscope reg helios or just helios itself then.

Also hate when another ast takes noct using only one party shield at a time just use both when necessary cause cels op cd is 60 secs and to me ur dps and co healer will have have more time to dps and dont have to regen specially poor whm with mobile issues cause who dont love a 250% party block. I feel at times by having shields up when can there is more up time vs keeping pt 40% and lower then having instead now be throwing up medic 2 and asp helios and even then I tend to see even after a medi 2 or asp helio a regen healer may even still helio or medi 1 if it seem regen not ticking up fast if another aoe is happening immediately after its first.

[Rilifane]

To be fair, I'm not even sure what proactive and reactive even mean. Like they can be synonyms for shield and burst healing, but why not just call them that instead?

Personally, I've always associated reactive healing to be 'reacting' to a surprise stimulus. And then proactive be the opposite of that. So instead of proactive and reactive, I should call them planned and unplanned?

It matches how my FC taught me back in ARR too, SCH was proactive, putting up shields before damage occurs, and WHM reacts to the damage taken to heal it up.

Then I learned being good at this game means minimizing what you are reacting to and proactively planning as much as you can to ensure success.

For me, proactive means healing that requires planning ahead and will not work as well if you failed to do that.
While the healing itself may also come after the damage came in, setting it up took place way before. One example would be ASTs star: to use it efficiently, it's best to place it at least 10s before the damage comes in and in a place where the raid will be in 10s, not neccessarily where everyone is now.
Another example from a different game was Archangel Disc: you spent several GCDs before the actual phase of heavy damage setting up selfbuffs so you could heal efficiently once the damage started to hit. Although a lot of healing was in fact direct healing, it wasn't reactive because simply spamming a skill without setting everything up beforehand wouldn't have worked. Heals were far too weak for that.
Proactive isn't limited to shielding for me - it means planning ahead, setting things up and preparing for what's to come instead of letting it happen unprepared and then reacting to it.
Reactive would mean simply using any heal once HP bars dropped without planning beforehand.

In a coordinated party, even reactive healing is planned, like WHM lilies, so once someone reaches a certain level of gameplay they will never heal 100% reactive. Mapping out every tool available itself is proactive, even if the heals heal reactively. But most people I see in DF definitely heal purely reactively even with skills that are by nature more on the proactive side, like shields or Star.
Being as scripted as it is, FFXIV makes healing proactively much easier than other games but incoming damage is usually so low that even a purely reactive playstyle will get you through every content except some savage bosses.

[IceBlueNinja]

For me, proactive means healing that requires planning ahead and will not work as well if you failed to do that.
While the healing itself may also come after the damage came in, setting it up took place way before. One example would be ASTs star: to use it efficiently, it's best to place it at least 10s before the damage comes in and in a place where the raid will be in 10s, not neccessarily where everyone is now.
Another example from a different game was Archangel Disc: you spent several GCDs before the actual phase of heavy damage setting up selfbuffs so you could heal efficiently once the damage started to hit. Although a lot of healing was in fact direct healing, it wasn't reactive because simply spamming a skill without setting everything up beforehand wouldn't have worked. Heals were far too weak for that.
Proactive isn't limited to shielding for me - it means planning ahead, setting things up and preparing for what's to come instead of letting it happen unprepared and then reacting to it.
Reactive would mean simply using any heal once HP bars dropped without planning beforehand.

In a coordinated party, even reactive healing is planned, like WHM lilies, so once someone reaches a certain level of gameplay they will never heal 100% reactive. Mapping out every tool available itself is proactive, even if the heals heal reactively. But most people I see in DF definitely heal purely reactively even with skills that are by nature more on the proactive side, like shields or Star.
Being as scripted as it is, FFXIV makes healing proactively much easier than other games but incoming damage is usually so low that even a purely reactive playstyle will get you through every content except some savage bosses.

Ah yes better examples indeed. soil earth aslyum would count as well. Love a well time star that goes off as soon as that aoe strikes you making it that you may not even have to cast a aoe regen then. Its fun to try get it just right.

[Shurrikhan]

So instead of proactive and reactive, I should call them planned and unplanned?

Honestly, that seems a lot more accurate to the design possibilities available to it all.

You can have however much planned depth (whether that be using, or specifically saving, an action in advance of some event), and however much unplanned depth (procs, randomization, or other factors not quite predictable that are still integral to whatever you do later beyond just Little-Timmy-took-another-avoidable-AoE). And, of course, there are many different procedures available to each that some may wish to sort into further categories. But, at no point is any of it mutually exclusive beyond just having met some particular need (making the excess, well, excessive/redundant).