The Problem With Healers as a Role Withing FFXIV

[Kabooa]

To be honest, single skills to get increased offensive capacity won't really do much. It'll just add one more button to the current monotomy we have. It's something, but not anything which could be considered interesting to play.

What the healers need is a proper system for dealing damage or support, as well as for healing. Not just a jumble of random oGCDs, but things that synergize with each other so that you'd want to use each skill in certain ways and in certain orders outside of just hitting them based on what's not on CD.

Obviously we'd need a couple more additions. I don't know if you've had the opportunity to do so yet, but I'd head into bozja to try it out. The other healers will need their own thing, but SS fits so well into the White Mage's kit, it'll be one the biggest free shots they could miss if it's not included.

[BungleBear]

From a raiding perspective, I'd say that avoidable damage doesn't have a huge impact on healing, because many mechanics will simply one-shot you if you fail them. Probably more significant is the use of damage mitigation. But the most significant impact on healing might be the level of your party's gear. Higher level gear has several relevant effects. It has higher defensive stats, which means less damage taken. It enables you to kill bosses faster, thereby skipping mechanics with high unavoidable damage. And it increases the amount healing done per healing action. So in general, the better your party's gear, the fewer healing actions you need to use.

Consequently, the amount of resources that healers need to devote to healing diminishes over the the course of a raid tier, as their party's gear (and performance) improves. This presents a problem for developers. If they tune jobs and encounters so that healing remains demanding, and therefore engaging, even when players are fully geared, then it may be too demanding for players with only entry-level gear (e.g. everyone at the start of raid tier).

Some possible solutions:

1. Other MMOs solve this problem by having larger raid parties and less rigid party composition requirements. Whereas a less well geared (or less competent) party may choose to take 4 healers, a better geared party may take only 3 or 2. But this may be too drastic a change for FFXIV.
   
2. Another solution is to make healers' non-healing functions more engaging. But SE might worry (perhaps with justification) that this would distract some healers from their primary function of healing. And anyway, some healers want to be healing, not doing other things.
   
3. FFXIV already implements a solution to this problem in ultimates. These have a fixed item level sync, so you can't "outgear" them. Perhaps the same model could be adopted for other kinds of content, like savage raids. But then the gear awarded for clearing this content would have less benefit. Having said that, people still do ultimates, even though the only rewards are prestige and a sense of personal achievement.

[BungleBear]

Every healer has big single target healing, weaker AOE healing, and everything else is just a variation of the two, with the bulk of abilities veering towards the latter. There's no synergistic effects between the abilities to promote using them in a particular order, or to use certain combinations together to improve the effect. They're all more or less the same abilities with differing effects put on them.

You can argue that the management of all these abilities is the skill of the healer, but frankly, there's not much difference between what we have right now and just consolidating all these skills into four abilities. A single target and AOE heal that uses MP, and a single target and AOE heal that is on a 15s or so CD with 2-3 charges.

This change would make learning healer infinitely easier, but it would also expose just how little there is when it comes to healer design.

I think you're underestimating the diversity in our healing toolkit. It seems like you're saying "every healing ability is either single-target or AOE, so there are only two kinds of healing ability". But surely there are other relevant differences between healing abilities besides the number of targets they heal.

Take SCH, for example. Sure, Indom and Whispering Dawn are both AOE heals. But Indom has lower potency and heals instantly, whereas WD has higher potency and heals over time. So Indom is preferable when raidwide damage is imminent, but WD is preferable otherwise. WD and Sacred Soil are both HOTs with roughly the same potency. But SS has the added benefit of damage reduction, whereas WD doesn't require your party to remain in a tightly circumscribed location. So SS is preferable in situations where your party stacks for multiple raidwide hits. It's not rocket science, but working out which healing ability to use in which situation still requires some thought and planning.

I don't understand why you say that reducing the healing abilities to only four would be "not much difference" but also that it would be "infinitely easier". That seems like a big difference.

[Raikai]

SCH could have only oGCD heals, and a GCD scan ability. Scan a target, and it produces an analysis resource. Get a certain number of analysis resources and you can convert them into a stratagem buff for the party. With the stratagem buff up, the SCH could use a tactical evaluation GCD on the buffed party members to gain tactical resources depending on the role that the ability was used on, which could be used to further improve the party buff like the WHM's buff.

Oh, this is actually a pretty nifty idea for a mechanic!

Honestly, it was a good OP read. I'm pretty curious on what is coming to EW, since healers appears to be the most delicate role to balance, by a huge margin compared to the others, and the fourth healer can really shake things up if not handled across the board.

I feel that a part of the healing problem right now is caused by the abundance of oGCD or insta-cast MP free actions. Healers right now have very little need to use GCD heals, unless the party is really messed up, and that makes the act of healing quite braindead, and on top of that, it nulls rotational MP management. Lucid Dream is only pressed when you're chain-cast rezzes, you don't even need it when you get a rez yourself, because most likely you'll have a bunch of oGCDs to play with. It's glaring how MP intensive a WHM is when you go through a roulette to ARR content.

[BungleBear]

Lucid Dream is only pressed when you're chain-cast rezzes, you don't even need it when you get a rez yourself, because most likely you'll have a bunch of oGCDs to play with.

Sounds like you've got too much piety.

[Dearche]

I think you're underestimating the diversity in our healing toolkit. It seems like you're saying "every healing ability is either single-target or AOE, so there are only two kinds of healing ability". But surely there are other relevant differences between healing abilities besides the number of targets they heal.

Take SCH, for example. Sure, Indom and Whispering Dawn are both AOE heals. But Indom has lower potency and heals instantly, whereas WD has higher potency and heals over time. So Indom is preferable when raidwide damage is imminent, but WD is preferable otherwise. WD and Sacred Soil are both HOTs with roughly the same potency. But SS has the added benefit of damage reduction, whereas WD doesn't require your party to remain in a tightly circumscribed location. So SS is preferable in situations where your party stacks for multiple raidwide hits. It's not rocket science, but working out which healing ability to use in which situation still requires some thought and planning.

I don't understand why you say that reducing the healing abilities to only four would be "not much difference" but also that it would be "infinitely easier". That seems like a big difference.

I mean, I admit that I was exaggerating, with SS being the most glaring example. But in reality, HOTs don't last long enough to really be much of an issue when it comes to AOE healing. The raid-wides often don't come quick enough in significant enough damage that the AOE HOTs don't just end up doing the same work as normal AOE heals.

In the context of FF, most of the time the more deciding factor is the potency of the heal and whether it's a GCD or oGCD heal. And due to what all our DPS actions are, we always pick the oGCD when possible. Even the potency isn't that big of a deal a lot of the time since aside from a few specific examples, they don't vary that significantly.

[Tulzscha]

healers are on a fundamental level, at least with how FFXIV treats them, nearly impossible to fix.

The reasons are thus:

First of all, it's impossible to scale healing between differing combination of skill levels of healers and the rest of the party.

True, healing is and always has been the most inconsistent of all roles to play. Is it a problem that needs fixing? I don't think so, it kind of fixes itself as players get better. What's important is that healers have the tools to fix mistakes up to a point.

The second reason is that no matter how much forced healing an encounter has, the skill of the player directly works against the healer's level of involvement of the encounter.

Same idea as the first point. Your level of involvement doesn't really change you just switch from healing to dps and plan for the next mechanic.

Third is the fact that without predictable and constant damage, there's no opportunity to create healing rotations to keep the act of healing interesting.

I've never known a healer to have a "rotation" unless they healed through dps, nor do they need one. They just need a toolkit to deal with a variety of situations. It's true that FFXIV healers don't have a great deal of variation and I think this is mostly due to the overly scripted nature of FFXIV encounters.

Things SE could do to improve the feel, making each healer unique and distinct, duty design so that playing healers if more fun, etc.

They can only make healers so unique before it becomes a balance problem. At the end of the day when they put a mechanic in a raid or trial every healer needs to be able to answer it, so anything one healer has that's unique to them doesn't really have a place in FFXIV's scripted encounters unless it's just a different way of doing the same thing (shield vs hot vs burst).

As for making healers more fun well that's subjective and largely dependent on player experience - the more you put in to make vets happy the more overwhelmed and unhappy newer players become.

I can think of a few ways to maybe make healing more interesting:

1. The most simple idea would be to add more to healer dps kits. Could lead to button bloat and more confusion for new players while not making gameplay that much better.

2. Increase health pools a lot and incoming damage a bit - more often and in smaller relative amounts - with maybe some random unavoidable damage, thus forcing healers to constantly be healing and reacting to damage regardless of player mistakes. Also change healer kits so we're not simply spamming the same two abilities. Random damage wouldn't translate well in higher difficulties though.

3. Make mana matter more with base abilities, replace Lucid Dreaming with something unique for each job, reduce cost of rez for healers (the rez debuff and cast time are limiting enough). Make cheap heals necessary, mix mana management into dps abilities as well as healing. Reward dot uptime with the ability to heal more, punish spamming the same dps ability with going oom but also offer alternatives, etc.

4. Add entirely new mechanics that healers (and possibly a few other jobs) can deal with. Adds that need to be crowd controlled (long and short term), enemy buffs that need to be purged, attacks that need to be dealt with by more than just heals, movement buffs, etc. Wouldn't help with older content.

5. More different damage patterns that each job deals with differently and more specialized abilities to accentuate what makes each job unique, like removing healing from certain shield abilities or having more hots that can be stacked or smart aoe heals that increase in potency when fewer targets need healing. Essentially results in having different ways to do the same things with different timing but it could be fun. Wouldn't help with older content either.

[Semirhage]

Pretending all the jobs didn't see a complexity reduction or increased ease of play is kind of disingenuous.

I never did. Reduction in complexity has happened across the board, that's without dispute. The healer role just happens to contain the one job in the entire game for which complexity is (seemingly) expressly verboten- White Mage. Some of that's an impression from live letters. Some of it's borne out through design decisions. Some of it is from the community here. The day White Mage gets more than an ankle-depth kit is the day hell freezes over.

[Liam_Harper]

Sounds like you've got too much piety.

Probably a lack of uptime too. Healers who spend half the fight twiddling their thumbs tend to spend far less mana than one filling every moment of downtime with dps casts.

[Kabooa]

I never did. Reduction in complexity has happened across the board, that's without dispute. The healer role just happens to contain the one job in the entire game for which complexity is (seemingly) expressly verboten- White Mage. Some of that's an impression from live letters. Some of it's borne out through design decisions. Some of it is from the community here. The day White Mage gets more than an ankle-depth kit is the day hell freezes over.

That's fair. There's some reason to be optimistic, but far too many to cancel that out and then some.

Here's hoping they don't miss the easy free shots they have.