Making Duties Fit for Healers

[Dearche]

As things stand, the healers are made to basically be DPS turrets that have a few special mechanics tailored to them, and to fix other people's mistakes. Both of those latters being recovering HP, barring the occasional damage prevention.

Fundamentally, I believe that how the weights of these are placed is the problem in FFXIV. As things stand, the priority of how duties is made is dealing damage, fixing mistakes, and doing healer mechanics. Yet at the same time, the job design prioritizes fixing mistakes, healer mechanics, then dealing damage. The complete reverse.

The balance might change from duty to duty, but to my observations at least, it feels like this is how the encounters and jobs are designed, especially in ShB.

Now, as a healer main, I do, in fact, enjoy the idea of being the one keeping everyone alive. I don't know how many people do it for the same reason, but I enjoy the power fantasy of being the very reason why everyone else is still alive after every fight. If I don't heal, the tank dies. If I don't heal, the DPS dies. Everything is enabled by the fact that I heal. Each role has their own fantasy, but mine is that I chose who continues to exist and who doesn't.

So due to that, I'm not trying to advocate for making healers more like DPS or something, but to fix some underlying design directions when it comes to healing.

Now, this disconnect between encounter design and role design has been quite an issue lately, though it is one that had been slowly growing for a long while, and personally, I think that it stems from the meaning of the healer role.

What I mean is that you can view healers in two basic ways: the first is as a tool to fix the errors of other players. Someone gets hit by an avoidable mechanic? Heal them before they get hit again. This is the most wide spread view of healers, and the cause of the old meme: healers adjust.

The latter way to view healers is as a method of dealing with enemy aggression, similar to how tanks work. The enemy deals unavoidable damage, it's the healer's job to make sure that everyone's in a position to survive the next one.

Personally of the two, the latter one is an extremely healthy view of healers. Rather than a tool to fix others mistakes, prioritizing on being the tool that enables others to continue doing their jobs is a much more interesting and friendly way for healers to exist.

By prioritizing on the latter view, everyone becomes more aware of their own role, and has to take responsibility of themselves. Though there has to be a few changes to encounters to facilitate this.

[Dearche]

The first is to reduce the view that the healer's main job is to fix other players' mistakes. The way to fix this is simple: include debuffs as part of most avoidable damage. The easier a mechanic is to avoid, the more severe the debuff, though this doesn't have to be a rule.

Petrify, stun, paralyze, and pacify/mute. Most mechanics apply one of these status, depending on the difficulty it is to avoid. Extremely difficult things only give a pacify or mute. Perhaps both. The easiest mechanics to avoid give a petrify. The debuffs don't have to last long. Three seconds for particularly debilitating debuffs, five to ten seconds for the lesser ones. They can even be cleansable to give particularly good healers additional ways to contribute, but they punish the one who messed up first and foremost, and in a way that everyone can see.

The problem with normal avoidable mechanics is that the one who's punished by them is always the healer. The one who made the mistake is only punished if they die from it, and that only happens if they get one-shotted, or receive so many vulnerability debuffs that either the healer can't keep up, or they get one-shot.

There's not really much leeway for these sorts of mechanics, since most of the time people don't care much about taking a hit unless if it'll immediately kill them. Meanwhile, the healer is constantly punished for others mistakes, as every time they get hurt, the healer has to take time and resources fixing them up. Time and resources which could be needed to clear the raid. Both between enrage timers and mandatory healing mechanics.

But...the only heal mechanics that are mandatory are raid-wide AOE?

Personally, these are the most boring forms of damage to heal. Not only have tank-busters fallen significantly in frequency, but there's also not that many mandatory hits that don't just target everyone. Pin-point damage is much more interesting to heal, though knowing that all your single target healing is done because someone else messed up is far less gratifying than knowing that it's a boss mechanic designed just for you and your co-healer.

So, aside from the first change, I believe that if SE is serious about making healers more about healing than being supplementary DPS that covers for others' mistakes and occasionally spams heals to cover raid-wide damage, the other change that should be implemented into the duties is a large amount of targeted damage. Not just targeted AOE markers that someone needs to bring away from the group, but for mechanics to do meaningful damage.

[Dearche]

Things like meteor catching doing more than half of the catcher's HP in damage, targeted conals that deal significant unavoidable damage like back in Shinryu (unlike nowadays that you can just run out of them), and other mechanics that just resolve in only a portion of the party or even a single player being damaged in a way that needs to be recovered. This would justify usage of our most basic single target healing (though personally we do need a bit of a potency buff) as it is extremely efficient in MP usage.

Fundamentally, SE can't justify the argument that healers are supposed to mainly heal, if we aren't actually put into a position to actually be healing for even a third of the fight. Filling our hotbars with oGCD heals run counter to this, but if it is to be done, then we do need reasons to be forced to put all those oGCDs on cooldown and still need more healing from our GCDs. And frankly speaking, to keep healing from feeling monotonous, a large amount of that GCD healing needs to come from single target sources. Picking and choosing who to prioritize the expensive and powerful heals/shields and who gets the cheap and efficient ones should be a part of our healing repertoire, and duty design needs to account for that.

Especially in EX/Savage, but the same should be true in normal trials/raids so that healers would become accustomed to this sort of thing and the change isn't a massive shock, forcing a large number of healers to simply drop out of harder content in fear.

That said, the same to avoidable damage like I listed earlier should also apply to regular trials/raids as well. Avoidable damage shouldn't go unnoticed, but it is a lot of the time. I've been watching a lot of streamers as new players have been getting into FF lately, and it's pretty obvious that a lot of them don't even notice they're taking damage until they've suddenly died. Debuffs that hinder them for a few seconds at the time would help them become more aware while being minimally punishing. The 0 or 100 style that they're being affected by is only annoying to the healers until the one making the mistake suddenly throws up their hands in frustration not knowing why they suddenly died. And the few attempts to lesson the annoyance on healers have only made the frustration even greater on the other players by simply reducing the threshold before suddenly dying, increasing their chances of either raging or quitting.

Anyways, while there's tons of changes I believe healers need from a fundamental level, these are the two major changes I think the duty design need to make duties more fun for everyone, though especially healers.

[ItMe]

You have some interesting thoughts here.
I usually skip over big posts like this cuz I'm lazy, but I'm glad I read yours.

I especially like this part, and think it would be fun/good to see the Devs experiment more with something like this:

The first is to reduce the view that the healer's main job is to fix other players' mistakes. The way to fix this is simple: include debuffs as part of most avoidable damage. The easier a mechanic is to avoid, the more severe the debuff, though this doesn't have to be a rule.

Petrify, stun, paralyze, and pacify/mute. Most mechanics apply one of these status, depending on the difficulty it is to avoid. Extremely difficult things only give a pacify or mute. Perhaps both. The easiest mechanics to avoid give a petrify. The debuffs don't have to last long. Three seconds for particularly debilitating debuffs, five to ten seconds for the lesser ones. They can even be cleansable to give particularly good healers additional ways to contribute, but they punish the one who messed up first and foremost,

[Adeacia]

They actually did this in the DR Bozja raid. Take 2 avoidable hits within a short time and you instantly die.

[ItMe]

They actually did this in the DR Bozja raid. Take 2 avoidable hits within a short time and you instantly die.

Yup, and I liked it.
I also liked them playing with giving us damage down debuffs in many of ShB's Savage fights. And think it would be fun/good to see the Devs experiment more with something like this.

[Dzian]

The problem with debuffs I feel is most of them just get blanket ignored..

Oh hey your paralysed for a whole 4 seconds. Well by the time I finish this broil cast and cast esuna it'll have worn off anyway so fk it just cast another broil.. waste of time even trying to cleanse.

As for the doom in DR I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand I don't mind it. But on the other I do kinda think it's perhaps a bit overkill and invalidates near all of the defensive essences. I dunno maybe make it only apply a stack if it hits more than half your hp. So thosenessenses would at least offer sone protection. But its bit late for that now.

The biggest issue with healing has and pretty much always will be the way encounters are so heavily scripted... utnmakes thenicoming damage far to predictable and easy to cover. One raid wide every 30 seconds. Wooooooooo... or however long depending on the encounter...

[Dearche]

They actually did this in the DR Bozja raid. Take 2 avoidable hits within a short time and you instantly die.

Actually, I kinda touched on this as a bad thing.

While the vulnerability debuffs (and similar) do punish the one who messed up, it's entirely an all or nothing deal when put to these extremes. Of course, if the debuff is weaker, it's purely a punishment for the healer until the player dies from it.

The issue is the lack of tactile feedback for the one who got it. There's no special screen blink or anything that the player can see easily. But suddenly their combo stops? They can't move? These are the sorts of things people notice, and while I bet that SE got rid of them over the years (they used to show up a decent amount back in ARR), I bet it's because people simply whined about it. But personally, getting rid of something because people whined about it is a terrible idea.

There's a good chance that the healers and tanks got so badly dumbed down was precisely because people whined about them. A lack of tanks because tank anxiety? Let's make it impossible to fail tanking so nobody gets scared of trying it out! Healers whine because WHM's never meta? Give WHM shields and mitigation so that they can play with the big boys, and take away AST and SCH's offensive capabilities so that they're on a level playing field with WHM!

It's not like I can prove that complaints is the reason why these happened, and while listening to complaints is healthy, lots of games had died because devs payed too much attention to them.

[Dearche]

The problem with debuffs I feel is most of them just get blanket ignored..

Oh hey your paralysed for a whole 4 seconds. Well by the time I finish this broil cast and cast esuna it'll have worn off anyway so fk it just cast another broil.. waste of time even trying to cleanse.

Well, the weaker ones can last like 10+ seconds so there is a reason, as long as the guy actually has decent output. A DPS out 4+GCDs is worth more than 1GCD from a healer after all. I'm just thinking that stun lasting much more than 5 seconds is pretty harsh every time someone stepped in red.

Or, the AOE could also give a second stacking debuff that multiplies the duration of the penalty. Get hit once, you get 10 second paralyze. Again? 20 seconds. It could keep on going until they stop taking avoidable damage, something like 60s or so.

The biggest issue with healing has and pretty much always will be the way encounters are so heavily scripted... utnmakes thenicoming damage far to predictable and easy to cover. One raid wide every 30 seconds. Wooooooooo... or however long depending on the encounter...

I don't think the scripting itself is the problem. It's that the encounter designs for DPS first, and only puts in the bare minimum amount of effort for the other roles to actually do their role. Tanks occasionally have to repossition, and healers have a few raid-wide AOEs. What about ADDs? They're so rare now. And exploding orbs? Tethers that you have to maintain rather than break? Just about anything for the OT to do aside from tank swapping and DPSing?

Healers too. How many mechanics can you think of that healers specifically have to deal with that isn't solved with AOE healing?

I'm not saying there's none, but when there's like one an encounter every five minutes, what's the healer doing for those other four minutes 55 seconds? If I'm doing DDR Suzaku style for a whole fight, all the while trying to sneak in heals whenever I can, that's something I could get behind.

[jlewiss]

I always felt like fixing healers should be simple: more consistent party wide damage, faster auto attacks on bosses, more use of the infirmary debuff( not removeable, reduces hp recovered) The problem is they probably don't want to do this because if the actual healing portion of the job is hard then less people will play the role, because lets be honest at this point in the game doing the base level healing is pretty brain dead(imo it's been pretty brain dead since HW came out).