Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Halfgeeek]

I'm new to the game, a filthy casual that plays for the story, crafting & fun side activities, and only experienced extreme content, perhaps getting into harder stuff later. All the group content has been through random queue / pug / pf.

So far, I've found playing a healer has been challenging, much more than being a tank/dps. As a healer, I can't control how well the other randoms play, but it's my job to keep them alive. (I've had tanks that chain pull in leveling dungeons, wipes in stone vigil, or entire party failing mechanics in extremes etc)

If its a pug with good players, being a healer is very smooth, people avoid avoidable damage, you rarely have to extra heal or rez. But if you have half the group constantly taking avoidable damage, it's.. challenging.

I can imagine you and your elite static, doing things near perfect, and as healers, you & co-healer only have to heal at various timings of the encounter, and not because a joe smith and jane doe ate huge avoidable damage, constantly.

And therein lies the problem. There's almost no middle ground.

Because of the way encounters dish out damage, and most are designed to be avoidable as a test of player skill, the gap between what a healer needs to do to clear said content is massive, entirely dependent on 3-7 other players.

Once you understand this, you realize it is very difficult to find that balance in healer design to cater to a wide range of players.

For example, some of you want healers to heal more, dps less, and one may think they should just make encounters throw out more unavoidable damage, or perhaps more random dmg. That will certainly force healers to heal more.

But is it rewarding to the other players?

The core skill-test in 14 encounters is positioning, timing, avoiding avoidable damage. Players feel rewarded when they manage to avoid that puddle, or resolve a mechanic to avoid massive busters.

The more unavoidable damage you throw at players, the less "skillful" they would feel, and the less rewarding the fight becomes because its now testing the skill of the healers, and not them.

It also keeps the content interesting longer for everyone else, as while they can gear up, get bigger numbers, more hp, if they are not playing well, eating avoidable busters will still get them killed. ie, over-gearing does less to reduce the skill requirement, when most of the incoming dmg is based on clearing mechanics.

This is precisely why encounters have some timed unavoidable dmg, while most are avoidable.

The negative side-effect is if your group plays really well, they avoid so much damage it leaves healers with.. glare/broil spam.

1/2

[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

[ty_taurus]

There are actually a lot of ways we could adjust encounter design to make healer design a more balanced system. A lot of these require some pretty significant changes to how encounters are designed to begin with, but here are some examples, some of which have been discussed in the past on the forums:

1. Replace Vulnerability Stacks with Damage Dealt Down. When players make mistakes, their most common "punishment" is that they take more damage for a minute, sometimes longer. This actually causes more work for the healers and not the DPS or Tanks who make those mistakes. If we switched Vulnerability to Damage Down, then suddenly the punishment is largely on just the person who failed the mechanic. If this means the party fails to meet a DPS check, then yes it's a punishment on the party, but it does make mechanics easier to survive which would actually speed up Prog times regardless since your party would get more time to see more mechanics in a fight and start learning them sooner. This inadvertently allows designers to pump more damage into unavoidable attacks because they'd be able to exclude some amount of theoretical damage from overall calculations.

2. Make more avoidable mechanics about debuffs rather than damage. It probably wouldn't be ideal to make all forms of avoidable mechanics debuffs only, but if we replaced an instance of puddles, for example, with exclusively that damage down debuff mentioned above, it once again is something that punishes the person who failed the mechanic and not the healer. Fully removing damage from those puddles means that unavoidable damage around those puddles can afford to be a lot stronger or more frequent because we know exactly how much damage the party will be taking in that period of time rather than having an amount of theoretical damage that we can't fully predict.

3. Replace some direct damage with cleansable damage over time. This gives healers more of a reason to use Esuna at times, but it also gives healers more time to respond to damage since not all of it is being dealt at once, not to mention players could counter it with regens rather than just using Esuna. Sage's new Haima/Panhaima would be perfect for a mechanic like that, not to mention Kardia, Embrace, Lilybell, Macrocosmos...We actually are getting lots of great tools that would be very helpful against DoT.

4. Doom, specifically the doom from DR. For anyone not familiar, in Delubrum Reginae, rather than Vulnerability stacks you get doom stacks. If you fail a mechanic, you get one stack, and if you get another before the duration runs out, you're afflicted with a non-dispellable doom. These mechanics also do damage, but we could also just have avoidable mechanics that just inflict this doom if we want more severe challenge in completing things. Again, it allows us to make unavoidable damage more frequent and more powerful if avoidable damage is more controlled.

5. Add % damage based on current health to unavoidable damage. Let's say for example that a boss has a raidwide that has a potency of 500 for the sake of this example. Instead, we could lower that to 200 but have it also deal 30% of each target's current HP as damage, not to be confused with max HP. This means raidwides can still KO players at low health, but it counters the issue of gear scaling while also softening the blow to something more survivable at mid health ranges. You could even make some exclusively based on current HP if you want specific raidwides to not be capable of KOing the party. We already have fights that reduce the party's HP to 1 at times. Pair that with max HP doom, and you can make healing more demanding without necessarily punishing them.

I don't foresee all of this ever really taking effect, but there are certainly ways to encourage healing without scaring off casual players since we can customize phases to not actually KO players, at least not initially. Stuff like doom on party members that needs to be cleansed by healing everyone up to 100% max can be scary, but is often accompanied by large breaks in boss damage to give players time to catch up. We could use these types of things more to allow for damage to be more controlled on the design side.

[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).

[Valmaxian]

I think the real issue here is one of understanding, The “elite minority” of healers don’t want the devs to make our jobs harder to play, simply more engaging and designed to fit within the structure of FFXIV battle design (or to revamp battle design to suit the heavy healing toolkits we already have). I don’t want new players to be penalized because they aren’t as comfortable casting offensive spells - let them heal primarily until their comfort level increases and they will likely begin to explore more of their jobs’ capabilities naturally. I however, would like a bit more interaction between skills - adding more weaving options for damage (or healing), incorporating more job lore into our skills (Bravery/Faith, Bar spells for WHM, tactical debuffs for SCH, more meaningful card interaction for AST, etc.).

[Halfgeeek]

There are actually a lot of ways we could adjust encounter design to make healer design a more balanced system. A lot of these require some pretty significant changes to how encounters are designed to begin with, but here are some examples, some of which have been discussed in the past on the forums

You bring up some really great suggestions.

I like the ideas that shift from healer's responsibility to recover other player mistakes (someone takes high avoidable dmg), to the players themselves who made the mistake with a personal debuff. Less responsibility on the healer for these player mistakes opens up encounter designs to allow more healer responsibility on dps (perhaps more complex dps kit) or more healing in general.

I've always thought it was strange how little dispels are needed, coming from other MMOs and early FFXI (RDM main from 2003-2006) especially. Healers get Esuna quite early, but it's rarely ever required!

[AFuzzyMu11in]

You bring up some really great suggestions.

I like the ideas that shift from healer's responsibility to recover other player mistakes (someone takes high avoidable dmg), to the players themselves who made the mistake with a personal debuff. Less responsibility on the healer for these player mistakes opens up encounter designs to allow more healer responsibility on dps (perhaps more complex dps kit) or more healing in general.

I've always thought it was strange how little dispels are needed, coming from other MMOs and early FFXI (RDM main from 2003-2006) especially. Healers get Esuna quite early, but it's rarely ever required!

I like the damage down suggestion too tbh