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

[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.

[Risvertasashi]

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.

Oddly enough, some of the better healing experiences I've had were in games are where damage is 100% avoidable. But the key difference is they're harder to predict; not on set timelines, etc.

You touch on this when you comment dodging is easy for veterans. Even in a fight like Z extreme, you're often looking to see if the safe spot is in one of two locations (Slightly more for the stars, but there will always be a safe spot in the front half of the arena). The fights rigidly conform to patterns, have set timelines where there might be 2 paths or maybe you don't know if the mechanic will be "in" or "out" but it always occurs at the same time so you're ready for both.

A game that's as set or predictable as FF14, then, runs into several problems. At least in harder content or content meant to present a challenge... Even messing up once has to often be lethal (or in the case of ultimates and harder savages, a group wipe event). A lot of damage has to be unavoidable, but not too much so a healer death can be recoverable at least a little bit of the time.

But even if you do all that, the whole GCD uptime design means there's a lot of healing/recovery downtime. And thus... we run into the stale healer problem, not limited to ex primals but even extending up into ultimates.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Oddly enough, some of the better healing experiences I've had were in games are where damage is 100% avoidable. But the key difference is they're harder to predict; not on set timelines, etc.

You touch on this when you comment dodging is easy for veterans. Even in a fight like Z extreme, you're often looking to see if the safe spot is in one of two locations (Slightly more for the stars, but there will always be a safe spot in the front half of the arena). The fights rigidly conform to patterns, have set timelines where there might be 2 paths or maybe you don't know if the mechanic will be "in" or "out" but it always occurs at the same time so you're ready for both.

A game that's as set or predictable as FF14, then, runs into several problems. At least in harder content or content meant to present a challenge... Even messing up once has to often be lethal (or in the case of ultimates and harder savages, a group wipe event). A lot of damage has to be unavoidable, but not too much so a healer death can be recoverable at least a little bit of the time.

But even if you do all that, the whole GCD uptime design means there's a lot of healing/recovery downtime. And thus... we run into the stale healer problem, not limited to ex primals but even extending up into ultimates.

Z extreme is an abomination of a mechanic with the rotation. So, I would never hold someone accountable for choosing to follow the leader and never learn it.

[Grimoire-M]

Oddly enough, some of the better healing experiences I've had were in games are where damage is 100% avoidable. But the key difference is they're harder to predict; not on set timelines, etc.

You touch on this when you comment dodging is easy for veterans. Even in a fight like Z extreme, you're often looking to see if the safe spot is in one of two locations (Slightly more for the stars, but there will always be a safe spot in the front half of the arena). The fights rigidly conform to patterns, have set timelines where there might be 2 paths or maybe you don't know if the mechanic will be "in" or "out" but it always occurs at the same time so you're ready for both.

A game that's as set or predictable as FF14, then, runs into several problems. At least in harder content or content meant to present a challenge... Even messing up once has to often be lethal (or in the case of ultimates and harder savages, a group wipe event). A lot of damage has to be unavoidable, but not too much so a healer death can be recoverable at least a little bit of the time.

But even if you do all that, the whole GCD uptime design means there's a lot of healing/recovery downtime. And thus... we run into the stale healer problem, not limited to ex primals but even extending up into ultimates.

The fact XIV leans hard on its predictable scripting is definitely part of the dodge problem, though even when it's unpredictable I don't think playing Where's Waldo mid-fight is necessarily fun by itself. Spread & stack markers/tethers at least make you coordinate with your group which creates more dynamic tension, and I generally find mechanics that encourage that interaction to be more fun in a group environment. Still, I don't expect SE's predictability to ever change until they clean up their AI. The bug abuses involving cleave routines on ARR/HW Bosses look very similar to the breaks with Stormblood Bahamut, which makes me think it is a universal problem. I don't think that's gone away just because they turned the ranges up of tank busters to 150y or abuse fixed boss positioning/timing to get things to perform properly. But I suspect that work is probably why they can't do it. It seems way more reasonable to ask for more raid-wides and prey markers, and to design fights around macro-management mechanics that essentially act as soft-enrages by triggering those mechanics. You can technically do that with some basic add spawns with guaranteed routines that demand crowd control without ever putting down an actual AoE at all if it weren't for those abuse cases. But it could be done with their hidden AI host mob doing a quick headcount while running a background timer for when those things are supposed to happen. Or by introducing something as seemingly boring yet persistent as Nisi or Allagan Rot hot potato and putting in appropriate fail-safes. All of those are fine, if you tune around the potential spikes.

The tools and systems are certainly there, they just need to be willing to explore them again, using the context of how they've built around their mistakes to make it work. I just think sacrificing position-based mechanics for ones that demand consistent player interaction is the easier ask and more interesting space. RNG is RNG, and I don't think RNG fixes XIV's problems without other layers like that being put in place first.