Making Duties Fit for Healers

[Dearche]

...

I understand that grievance, and frankly, I think that the entire role of healers from a quite fundamental design philosophy across through the skill design all the way to encounter design is an issue. This thread wasn't made with the intent to suggest that there weren't other problems, just that encounters was the focus of this thread over other issues.

lifesteal mechanics

Lifesteal actually isn't a bad idea. A vampiric themed boss could have lifesteal on its AOE attacks, combined with a strong visual indicator that they're being healed (so more than just a green number, but maybe an actual heal animation on the boss like lustrate). The other option would be for the boss to have regen during the first phase. Even without an enrage timer, if the regen is aggressive enough, it would force everyone to do the mechanics properly or else be stuck not progressing until everyone gets things figured out. Though there might have to be debuffs like damage down 10-30% per stack or pacify tied to most if not all AOEs rather than make the regen so aggressive that healers have to be able to keep up very high DPS uptime or something.

A very nice way to start a fight and figure out if there's some serious issues with the raid composition.

MP management

Frankly, the entire "DPS to recover MP" is actually something that's done in PVP for certain jobs. While it did take a bit of time to get used to, it was definitely interesting and kinda fun. Unfortunately, it won't happen unless if SE decides that healers are fine being secondary DPS until the big heals are needed again.

In regards to other forms of reloading, the only thing I can think of would be the basic heal spells. But that would be pretty boring unless if the fight design was vastly revamped so that spot healing became useful again. Regardless, it has to be something that makes healers active participants of the raid.

[AziraSyuren]

I'd love to do a boss fight where your opponent had interesting lifesteal mechanics which you had to mitigate effectively in order to prevent their HP pool from increasing.

I actually really like this idea. It'd be like blue/red nails from Nidhogg EX except more involved.

[Absurdity]

I'm one of the voices that pushes back in the duty design threads. Not because I think there hasn't been a decline in creativity (come on, how many times can we do Hello World/Grand Cross/Relativity), but because I want to caution against the idea that "it's just encounter design guys! The kits are fine, we just need to be forced to heal more", because I've seen encounter design threads turn into that around here. My two cents there: Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil isn't encounter design.

If people took simply two seconds to think about the "It's just encounter design" statement then they should be able to realize the issue. You will never have encounter design in all forms of battle content that can keep healers engaged if their kits stay the way they currently are, because that would require all content to be savage difficulty or harder, which is obviously never going to happen.


The question is simple, are you absolutely bored out of your mind while playing a specific job in the majority of battle content this game has to offer? If the answer is yes, there is an issue with the job or maybe even the entire role design.


Savage often only serves to mask this issue, because there are enough other things going on that you don't have time to think about how boring your job's gameplay actually is. And even savage only manages to do that to a certain extend.


The more often you do a savage fight the more apparent this becomes, I had this feeling several times last raid tier while doing E5-E7s. I had farmed these fights so many time that I basically just went through the mechanics on auto pilot...unfortunately not having to think about mechanics anymore gave me more and more time to look at what I was doing on warrior and go "huh, this is actually really monotonous, I'm basically just pressing 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3 for no particular reason until my 90 second cooldown comes back up.", this feeling is most likely a lot more profound on healers since their gameplay experience during farm is even worse.

[Lyth]

If you're capable of planning out every single keystroke in advance of the fight, then you're going to get bored at some point regardless of how complicated you make your job's base rotation. That's not to say that the jobs themselves don't need changes, but that's a different topic altogether.

On that note: If you were the lead raid designer for Pandaemonium, what sorts of concepts and mechanics would you want to see brought to the table?

[Raikai]

If people took simply two seconds to think about the "It's just encounter design" statement then they should be able to realize the issue. You will never have encounter design in all forms of battle content that can keep healers engaged if their kits stay the way they currently are, because that would require all content to be savage difficulty or harder, which is obviously never going to happen.


The question is simple, are you absolutely bored out of your mind while playing a specific job in the majority of battle content this game has to offer? If the answer is yes, there is an issue with the job or maybe even the entire role design.


Savage often only serves to mask this issue, because there are enough other things going on that you don't have time to think about how boring your job's gameplay actually is. And even savage only manages to do that to a certain extend.


The more often you do a savage fight the more apparent this becomes, I had this feeling several times last raid tier while doing E5-E7s. I had farmed these fights so many time that I basically just went through the mechanics on auto pilot...unfortunately not having to think about mechanics anymore gave me more and more time to look at what I was doing on warrior and go "huh, this is actually really monotonous, I'm basically just pressing 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3 for no particular reason until my 90 second cooldown comes back up.", this feeling is most likely a lot more profound on healers since their gameplay experience during farm is even worse.

It's not just the job design or not just the encounter mechanics... it's a mix of both.

The encounter design are not as complex as people think. They are just a game of memorization with very little random elements to it... mostly just a telegraph spawning to the left, or to the right (roughl example) so you just adjust to that. It's not surprising that the hardest telegraphs to deal with are those markers that players need to take somewhere, because that relies on how the player will interact with it. What makes jarring in Savage and beyond is that the number of scripted actions you have to react to are roughly twice as much (and with less visual cues) than the normal modes.

What happens if you over complexify just the job design without looking into how cemented the fight scripts are, you'll probably make normal modes more engaging... But the higher difficulty modes will have their skill floor and ceiling both higher than it is nowadays.

[Absurdity]

If you're capable of planning out every single keystroke in advance of the fight, then you're going to get bored at some point regardless of how complicated you make your job's base rotation. That's not to say that the jobs themselves don't need changes, but that's a different topic altogether.

It certainly will at some point, but the more basic a job is in it's design the faster this happens, especially in a game like XIV where there is very little random variation in the way you execute your abilities.

The point I wanted to make is that if you keep the healer design as basic as "spam 1 and occasionally press oGCD when damage happens" then the encounter design has to make up for it, and it simply can't do that in the majority of battle content since it can't be too complicated for the average player.

What happens if you over complexify just the job design without looking into how cemented the fight scripts are, you'll probably make normal modes more engaging... But the higher difficulty modes will have their skill floor and ceiling both higher than it is nowadays.

Only if beating the higher difficulty content requires perfect execution of both mechanics and your complex job rotations, which is not necessary, it could simply be a part of optimizing a fight after you have already beaten it.

If the average job design becomes more complex than it is now and executing it perfectly becomes more difficult then you could still keep the skill floor required to beat said content the same level as it is currently, keeping perfect execution an optional part for people who enjoy it that simply makes beating a fight faster.


I can however see the danger of this design widening the skill gap between players a lot more than it currently does.

[Semirhage]

I find it interesting that Yoshi said the design team "increased healing requirements" in this tier (I think due to feedback?). This increased requirement seems to mean "the boss barfs out an unavoidable room-wide AOE that deals 80% of a non-tank's health in damage". That's certainly...more frequent I suppose. I wouldn't personally say it's more fun. It's less exciting and more "are you awake". Contrast this with, say, Prey in A1S. Two random people going to die unless they get a Cure 2 in the middle of a multi-hit attack, plus the tanks are getting bustered at the same time. At least with that mechanic you have to coordinate with your cohealer so you're not doubling up on anyone, plus make a quick calculation as to who you hit first so one of your targets doesn't die while you're taking care of another.

It's not a *lot* of engagement to be sure, but it sure beats pressing the Everyone Health Up button because the boss did its Everyone Health Down spell on its regular cadence.

[Imora]

I'd like to see a fight where the boss does a leech effect that steals hp from players as a percentage of current health. This plus dodgeable stuff could be interesting. Need to keep player health lowish to keep the boss from healing, but not too low or they die instantly if they're hit by something.

It'd be interesting to heal, and hold players accountable for mitigation and danger avoidance.

[Lyth]

If Pandaemonium is representative of this game's 'final dungeon' in a homage to both FF9 and that 'World of Ruin' motif that they have going, and if a scythe wielding Zenos (with Fandaniel as his Avatar) are waiting for us at the top, a lifesteal themed boss would make for an excellent final fight. Phased council fight with a final phase in Possession mode. I'd dig it.