Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Halfgeeek]

Then to ensure there's a skill check for not-busy healers, they add in enrage/dps checks that require healers to meet a certain lvl of glare/broil spam proficiency. That's the healer's skill check, for when the rest of the party plays well.

So therefore, some have been vocal about the healer's DPS kit, they want a more complex rotation, not just glare/broil/malefic spam.

But beware when you ask for this. It will create another skill-gap for healers, that interact negatively with how well the other 3-7 players on the party plays. Because if the other players are lacking, and demand more healing to stay alive, it will cause many players to fail their new complex dps rotation.

Thus, encounter design with a complex healer dps rotation, will have lower DPS checks to give more players leeway. But for a group where everyone plays perfectly, they will clear it easier, perhaps too easy.

Devs have stated they want to create content that is difficult, but rewarding based on player skill (for all jobs), thus, before you think they are ignoring feedback, you should think how your suggestions alter the game for other jobs & whether its still as rewarding of skillful play.

It's really a fine line and I think some of the more harsh feedback from players don't factor in how it would affect the wider playerbase.

Statements like "they don't know what they are doing", "they don't get how healers are played".. it takes a level of ego to say that to devs who have proven to care about their game & playerbase.

Ultimately, the role of healer can be easy, and boring, or vary to extreme challenge, and its entirely dependent on the players in your party, not you. Just keep this in mind, as it's some that the dev team clearly has in their minds.

2/2

Edit: I added further thoughts here after gaining more end-game experience: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5790145

[KDSilver]

Are we a minority ? = We don't have numbers, we can't tell, but judging from what being actually done in game, I doubt we are so few.

"it takes a level of ego to say that to devs who have proven to care about their game & playerbase"

Caring = being flawless.

Do you know about Monk's design ?
Do you know about SMN changing each expansion because of identity crisis?
Do you know about no effect songs on BRD ?
Do you know about broken MCH design ?
Do you know about Tank ?
Do you know about Healer ?

"I'm new to the game"
Yes you are, so don't come and call us elite with big ego.

This forum has every respons you need that have been raised 100 times.

Thank you.

[Halfgeeek]

"it takes a level of ego to say that to devs who have proven to care about their game & playerbase"

Caring = being flawless.

I don't think any game, or any work of creativity in existence is ever flawless.

As said, I am new, and have not had years of experience, just a few months and browsing these forums seeing the discussion & feedback, some of the posts are needlessly rude towards dev team.

Right now, I am not feeling the simple healer dps to be a problem since I am focused on mechanics, healing, and taking care of players who mess up. Maybe in a year or more, I will get jaded with the simple dps tools on healers..

But devs have to make a game for people like me. They are in effect, restricted in how they can design jobs & encounters because there are a huge playerbase that is either inexperienced and/or not elite (I have no issues with elite players, kudos to them for rising to the challenge).

The one good argument is that they should create encounters solely for elite players, ie, Ultimates (+ mode) and there, they can go ham to push healers to the max (constant healing, mana pot spamming, etc), but doing so, they will have to accept less than 1% of players to clear, like other MMO elite content. From viewing YoshiP in recent interviews, its clear to me they are against making content for such a small number of players. Perhaps they should have a change of mind, since they have enough $$ whereby some investments do not necessarily have to have a great ROI for the wider playerbase.

[Nizzi]

I do not mean this with any sort of ill will, but as of my post of this, you don't have any healers at level 80, so please understand why some can see this post and think you're just coming in here to "combat toxicity" and whiteknight for the developers instead of actually engaging any of us in good faith. The developers are adults; they're mature enough to deal with comments from players, and they've made many mistakes in the past and admitted to them. They're not infallible, and they're not fragile; you don't need to defend them.

But beware when you ask for this. It will create another skill-gap for healers, that interact negatively with how well the other 3-7 players on the party plays. Because if the other players are lacking, and demand more healing to stay alive, it will cause many players to fail their new complex dps rotation.

This disparity of "skill-gap" within healers already exists.



Look at the jump in damage on White Mage, for example.
From the 25 to 50th percentile, it's a 15.5% jump in DPS.
From the 50th to 75th is another 16.3%.
75th to 99th is a 21.5% jump.
Meanwhile on DPS jobs that do have actual involved DPS rotations, you can see that the gap between 75th percentile to 99th percentile on Samurai is a 5.6% increase.

There is a much larger skill gap between percentiles on healers than there is on any other job. This is a issue for a few reasons - worse groups mitigate less and die more, worse healers heal more and are afraid to do damage, worse healers typically play in worse groups.

Healers are at the peak of their power and simplicity right now; there are no buttons to press for damage and tons of healing that is insanely strong, even if GCD heals cost you DPS you don't even need many of them because they heal so much.

Pressure to do more damage doesn't come from having more damage buttons, you can see this if you go back and look at old HW logs. It comes from how the fight is tuned and what it demands, and the fights now demand more damage from the healers than ever before. You can pull up BiS rank 1 speeds kills and take the players in those groups, and pretend they're in a party with 2 healers doing 0 DPS, and the DPS check on a fight like E8S with it's rdps requirement would still be tight.

[Halfgeeek]

I do not mean this with any sort of ill will, but as of my post of this, you don't have any healers at level 80, so please understand why some can see this post and think you're just coming in here to "combat toxicity" and whiteknight for the developers instead of actually engaging any of us in good faith. The developers are adults; they're mature enough to deal with comments from players, and they've made many mistakes in the past and admitted to them. They're not infallible, and they're not fragile; you don't need to defend them.

This disparity of "skill-gap" within healers already exists.

There is a much larger skill gap between percentiles on healers than there is on any other job. This is a issue for a few reasons - worse groups mitigate less and die more, worse healers heal more and are afraid to do damage, worse healers typically play in worse groups.

No ill will, thank you for the comment. This is not my only character, I have not played this one in a few months (server / ping issues / different continent). Still, my experience on other character is only limited to random & PF, not company statics (filthy casual), no ultimate exp, so I won't comment on those specific aspects, just a general design philosophy and what devs have to cater to.

As we agree, the gap in healer performance is already huge and you clearly know its due to other players making few or many mistakes, allowing the healer to spend more GCDs on dps or instead on extra healing, on top of mechanics.

Healers are responsible for: resolving mechanics & keeping the group (variable in performance) alive while throwing out as much DPS as they can. Other jobs either tank + mechanic or dps + mechanics, if healers received a complex dps rotation, it would be added burden comparatively to other jobs. It would further the skill gap that already exists a great deal.

It's a complex issue. Though I do like @ty_taurus suggestions on punishing mechanics shift some from damage received -> debuffs that punish the player making the mistake, rather than just adding burden on healer to heal and recover for the other jobs from their mistake. I do hope to see in EW, more encounter designs that go this route, instead of just more unavoidable damage (it's lame for everyone being hit by something you can't skill-resolve).

[Saimeren]

I've never understood the whole "I only use OGCD's to heal" or "I only toss out a single heal every so often" argument.

Every time I heal I have to actually heal. Some times it's rough and I have to spam everything I have just to keep the tank alive. Then he makes another pull and I have no CD's or OGCD's to use.

Tanks in this game are incredibly squishy. Their mitigation abilities barely seem to matter.

And that's before the Ninja decided to keep dpsing instead of moving away from the boss. Now I have to heal him too, because he refused to play the mechanics.

Healing isn't always the cakewalk that people seem to imply it is. Some times if players are decent and I get a good dungeon/ trial it can go really well, but that's only about 70% of the time.

I always get nervous when people ask for healing nerfs or tank mitigation/healing nerfs.

I might not be the best player, but I'm by no means a bad player, and I definitely need to heal more than "an OGCD every now and again."

[HyoMinPark]

I've never understood the whole "I only use OGCD's to heal" or "I only toss out a single heal every so often" argument.

Every time I heal I have to actually heal. Some times it's rough and I have to spam everything I have just to keep the tank alive. Then he makes another pull and I have no CD's or OGCD's to use.

Tanks in this game are incredibly squishy. Their mitigation abilities barely seem to matter.

And that's before the Ninja decided to keep dpsing instead of moving away from the boss. Now I have to heal him too, because he refused to play the mechanics.

Healing isn't always the cakewalk that people seem to imply it is. Some times if players are decent and I get a good dungeon/ trial it can go really well, but that's only about 70% of the time.

I always get nervous when people ask for healing nerfs or tank mitigation/healing nerfs.

I might not be the best player, but I'm by no means a bad player, and I definitely need to heal more than "an OGCD every now and again."

I think the difference between you and someone like myself that uses primarily oGCDs for healing is that you seem like the type of healer that thinks everyone needs to be 100% HP, 100% of the time; and I am the healer that only heals when it is absolutely necessary and I only heal as much as I need to to ensure people live. I’m not fond of overhealing for the sake of overhealing, and I actually try to let my HoTs do what they’re meant to do as opposed to blatantly negating them with needless GCD heal spamming or using way too many resources on just one mechanic. If you’re overhealing, then you aren’t healing. You’re just wasting your mana and your resources on nothing.

The only time people need to be topped up is before damage goes out. And they may not even need to be full health. Depending on gear and other mitigations present, you can have them less than full HP and still live just fine. It all depends on the type of content you’re in (dungeons versus something like Savage or Ultimate) and present mitigation (e.g., none or you have things up like Heart of Light/Dark Missionary/etc., Samba/Troubadour/Tactician, or Feint/Addle). Damage is scripted in this game, especially raidwides; and instances of back-to-back ones are uncommon in normal content versus higher-end content. Those that are usually have at least 10 to 15 seconds between, which is enough time for things like regens or passive healings like Earthly Star to top up party members before the next raidwide. I see a lot of healers that don’t allow these types of tools to do their job, resulting in massive overheals and wasted toolkits. I don’t know if they’re panicking or if they just think the other healer isn’t going to heal. It’s hard to say.

You seem very much like a safety healer—which is fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that healing requirements in this game are very low and have been for a long time now.

Tanks in this game are not squishy. If you think that, that tells me that you have tanks that likely don’t understand how to properly mitigate or utilize their self-healing tools—at that point, you have a bad tank. Not that the role itself if squishy. Tanks are extremely powerful in this game because they 1. Have so many mitigations readily available, and it takes very little planning for a good tank to know when to use them, and 2. The incoming damage they take is generally very low with few exceptions for a handful of dungeon pulls. Some have better mitigations or immunities than others (looking at you Dark Mind and Living Dead), but that doesn’t change the fact that tanks aren’t squishy. I have to wonder to myself if you’ve ever gotten a WAR in any sort of content recently because they virtually cannot die.

DPS do have the ability to safely eat mechanics and it be okay. If they utilize their own self-healing, this is less of an issue. Even so, you’re being disingenuous implying that this is some huge factor in forcing healers to GCD heal. Healers like SCH and SGE have so many oGCD tools at their disposal, they rarely have to resort to Physick/Diagnosis or GCD shielding even when DPS are eating stuff. If you have an extreme case, then it’s honestly a better use of your resources to just Raise them after they die with their 5 vulnerability stacks versus trying to keep them alive with them. Death usually purges the vulns, so less you’ll be spending on keeping them up in the long run.

If you get a decent dungeon 70% of the time, then that’s 70% of you runs being a “cakewalk”, as you say. Still the majority of the time you are smooth-sailing and not being incredibly challenged in terms of your role as a healer. That said, what I said in my wall-o-text still applies: why does this role so heavily depend on how big of a meme their party members are to actually feel engaging to play? That is a huge problem with the way healers are in this game, and has been for several years. I shouldn’t have to hope for a party of clowns just so I can perform my role.