Healer design is still terrible and I'm tired of apologizing for it.

[Liam_Harper]

Funnily enough, this is why I think energy drain is good design.

It lets people who would rather waste resources on overhealing and are just in parties to collect tomestones and glam do what they want while being functional, but also let players who have fun optimizing get something more out of it.

The problem with energy drain (and WHM lilies) is that they're exclusive to SCH and WHM, while the other healers get ridiculous amounts of oGCD's for free. Optimizing lilies or maxing ED uses only results in output that's roughly on par with AST/SGE. Therefore ED or Misery isn't a reward, but becomes a penalty or tax that you're forced to try and mitigate simply to keep up.

ED could be good design, but not in a world where two healers get the same advantages for free.

[Leigaon]

...I would like to see more healer checks in the game in general that required me to flex my knowledge of the kit. Or barring that, something more engaging in my kit then simply a clone of whm where I'm just spamming 1 nuke...

What would be a situation either that exists in the game or that you can make up yourself that would be fun for everyone as a healer and get them to use more of what is in their kit. Or would that require some refurbishing of current skills to get it right? What would you have the offensive spells do, if anything, to assist with the defensive side of a scholars toolkit?

Either up the CD timers of abilities or increase raid wide/unavoidable damage so I am not using the same CD for everything.

Ex: I stated earlier I can use Exaltation 100% over Celestial Intersection for tank busters in just dungeon content alone because they come ~ every 60. If Exaltation was every 90s I'd instead use CI. Conversely if another tank specific attack happened in the same fight in under 60s that would make better use of Exalt (perhaps a short heavy bleed) I'd use Exalt there and cover the next TB with CI because the shielding was better.

- Prune redundant abilities by making them into upgrades at higher levels while still keeping them at lower levels.

Ex: There is no better example than Benefic and Cure 1 to Benefic and Cure 2. The trait for it would be hard to place, because I believe WHM has some issues with Cure 2 straight up overriding Cure 1 in some situations... but that is something that better skill leveling touches imo.

- Allow parts of our kit to play more with one another than just X

Ex: Good one for AST is Synastry. I love the ability. It only works for Benefic why? Instead of two CI charges Synastry can be used for it to place CI on both Tank/other target along with ED, A.Benefic and pretty much anything but the cards if its single target (unless you want it to also work with cards and/or Astrodyne and deal with the rebalancing headache that can cause)...

I want to make sure I'm seeing this correctly so I can understand where you're coming from.

1. Reduce/Adjust the time of some of the higher cooldowns on certain jobs so you have the option to use the best action for your healer depending on the situation. In this case Exaltation (120s) vs Celestial Intersection (60s, 2 charges.).

For this example, would you be okay with reducing CI's cooldown to say 30/45/60 seconds and in return reduce the healed potency?

2. Condense spells and instead give them upgrades of previous spells. In this case Cure/Benefic 1 & 2. I'm not sure about having issues with Cure 2 override Cure 1, I rarely am using Cure 2 though outside of Ex's. But that's just me. I think upgrading them at the same level as Ast (26) would be fine. To you, would this be to help reduce bloating with actions or just the fact that having them as separate spells seems redundant?

3. Have actions / abilities / buffs interact more with each other like Synergy but expanded through other abilities. So instead of Synergy just healing target B while you heal target A you could do other moves that would heal or maybe even enhance other players.

Actually, I'm sure I need to think on it more. I wonder if someone can tell us why having Synergy for instance is only limited to single target cures. Would having a boost from other abilities such as Earthly Star or Collective Unconscious cause unbalance. More than just saying "you'd have to balance other healers..." I'm looking for some specifics. Not saying you have them, but it's a good question. What would it break?

[Sebazy]

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record...

Warhammer Online's healers were an interesting case study in this sort of thing. Whilst the execution wasn't perfect across the board, the healers were very tightly designed with large amounts of cross kit synergy. With the melee healer you quite literally fed the resource needed for your powerhouse burst and aoe heals by swinging your hammer. The cleric style healer had a complex buff system to play around with. The robed healer was built around the mechanic that the more you DPS'd, the more your heals were enhanced whilst the more you healed, the more your DPS spells were enhanced with the goal being to try and maintain a median to get the best results.

Again, it wasn't entirely perfect, the robed healer was arguably the least well tuned of the 3 with it's system not really paying off but I'll argue that for all it's flaws, the melee healers were the most enjoyable well designed and rewarding healing experience I've ever seen in any MMO I've played. It rewarded playing on the edge and taking educated risks like no other healer.

Basically, if it was my task to tackle this issue, my first avenue would be looking at interactions and synergy within our kit or other ways in which good play could actively be rewarded.

[QooEr]

What would be a situation either that exists in the game or that you can make up yourself that would be fun for everyone as a healer and get them to use more of what is in their kit.

a fight as heal intensive as living liquid or bjcc in tea, for starters. e11s cycles. the frequent damage in e12s p1. a8s robot phase. those are all very heal intensive phases. long enough to be more than just cure iii spam for a few gcds, but short enough that you need to use every tool at your disposal to get past them.

even in casual content you can have more interesting healing without going to such extremes. great gubal library's first miniboss autoattacks the party randomly, and it sure as hell ensures i have to at least actually pay attention to the party list more than once a minute, which is something i cannot say of even some savage floors. (anyone remember e7s lmao??)

if the devs are going to give healers multiple near full party heals every minute, then they should make the party take damage accordingly.

[WaxSw]

The problem with energy drain (and WHM lilies) is that they're exclusive to SCH and WHM, while the other healers get ridiculous amounts of oGCD's for free. Optimizing lilies or maxing ED uses only results in output that's roughly on par with AST/SGE. Therefore ED or Misery isn't a reward, but becomes a penalty or tax that you're forced to try and mitigate simply to keep up.

ED could be good design, but not in a world where two healers get the same advantages for free.

So much this, the problem of ED and current Aetherflow or afflatus heals its not its design in vacuum is just that they don't fit in the current healer landscape where Ast and Sge exist

[RinaShinomiya]

Warhammer Online's healers were an interesting case study in this sort of thing. Whilst the execution wasn't perfect across the board, the healers were very tightly designed with large amounts of cross kit synergy. With the melee healer you quite literally fed the resource needed for (...)

This reminded me i should send YoshiP another letter kindly asking for Green Mage to be added in the game, just in case the previous 204 letters were unread.
Tho if they made a melee healer play exactly like the 4 we have now I'd laugh, mainly cry but also laugh.

[Anhra]

Warhammer Online's healers were an interesting case study in this sort of thing. Whilst the execution wasn't perfect across the board, the healers were very tightly designed with large amounts of cross kit synergy. The cleric style healer had a complex buff system to play around with. The robed healer was built around the mechanic that the more you DPS'd, the more your heals were enhanced whilst the more you healed, the more your DPS spells were enhanced with the goal being to try and maintain a median to get the best result.

That Buffing mechanic would be great if it would get inplimented into AST. Imagine it kind of like this:

AST getting neutral sect and essential dignity removed, benefic 2 being a actual upgrade to 1. Lost abilities get replaced by new dps spells that may or may not compliment the incoming thing im about to mention.
Everytime you play a card, the AST gets a stack which boosts the next Healing ability by 5% (can stack multiple times, like up to 100%). Now if we would assume that AST also gets unique card effects again, one such effect could also be like, the balance for example, also boosting healing potency of the next spell by 10% (doesnt overcap the 100% mentioned earlier) .

[Liam_Harper]

Melee healer in ff14:

Scratch (DoT), Punch, Punch, Punch, Punch, Punch, Punch, Punch, Punch, Punch...

[ForteNightshade]

Other than proper uptime there's not much to "learn" in that fight.

Don't blame players when they come up with an optimal strategy. Blame SE that the Trial is designed in a way that the optimal strategy is literally, follow the Dorito.

That isn't optimal, it's lazy. I'm certainly won't deny Zodiark's mechanics aren't well thought out. Nonetheless, you can't be optimal by depending entirely on someone else to lead you around.

So yes, I can blame the players who can't be bothered to actually look at his mechanics for themselves. At least when those same players are trying to argue healers have too many responsibilities and need to stay incredibly simplistic to be functional. Or when said players claim they're perfectly capable of handling EX or Savage contents so long as they have Bis gear.

[Grimoire-M]

That isn't optimal, it's lazy. I'm certainly won't deny Zodiark's mechanics aren't well thought out. Nonetheless, you can't be optimal by depending entirely on someone else to lead you around.

So yes, I can blame the players who can't be bothered to actually look at his mechanics for themselves. At least when those same players are trying to argue healers have too many responsibilities and need to stay incredibly simplistic to be functional. Or when said players claim they're perfectly capable of handling EX or Savage contents so long as they have Bis gear.

The problems with the content do not change at min-item level. XIV's healers are explicitly designed around everyone else making way more mistakes than you should reasonably expect in the long run, because their encounters are entirely based on finding the safe spot, which one person CAN do in cases like Zodiark. That invariably makes balancing between newbies and the speedclear/world-first meta worse. If you're expected to dodge everything, you're gonna try and dodge everything. but if your primary mechanical test irrespective of role is dodging things, you shouldn't be surprised when things feel stale and/or frustrating. The result of that design is healer kits have an extremely limited shelf life. What people are asking for is for SE to do something to prevent healers from getting stale as a result of that, either by changing the encounters such that penalties for getting hit by a positional mistake are lower but unavoidable damage is higher yet overall potential damage intake in those spike windows remains the same (you know, making mechanics less punishing in isolation, but still require healers when things are going well), or by giving healers things to focus on when things -are- going well. In my opinion, both should happen, because multi-dot management ultimately lets people like FuzzyMuffin meet expectations by only gunning for 100% DoT uptime while people who do want to maximize their support potential have appropriate pressure DURING prog AND more things to micromanage after they're done prog.

The ultimate result of dodging is this game feels super easy for veterans but impossibly annoying for newcomers to get into if they rush. The design's gotta let up somewhere, and shifting the tempo of encounters is generally a good way to do that.