Dear Square Enix, do something with GCD healing please.

[ThorneDynasty]

Even when every GCD is of equal potency you are punished for missing steps in the long run and do not want to delay further offensive GCDs. The additional reason varied ppgcd gives not to delay your rotation (though, again, it does not constitute a decision, since you literally cannot skip ahead in that rotation [obligatory mention of PLD filler trim exception]) is if it'd bottleneck other actions with constrained GCD-tie-ins, such as Life Surge or Reassemble.


"Maim, etc." was an example (hence the "etc") of a GCD within a tank combo. And if your examples are only applicable to aspects of two tanks...


That's exactly how tanks' only or lower-potency-per-execute combos are used, though? Taking n steps to perform a single, not-adjustable decision doesn't make them any less a mere rote fallback.

Filler doesn't have anything to do with decision making, it's about whether an action is a integral step in the rotation.

[Shurrikhan]

Filler doesn't have anything to do with decision making, it's about whether an action is a integral step in the rotation.

And again, your distinguishing part is literally just that, say, Royal Authority's 363.3 ppgcd is split into 6 steps and 4 buttons. What happens once it's a PvP combo, for instance, and therefore you hit the same button each time? What of the likes of Requiescat's Holy Shock spam, since you're not about to get the 3 different strings' worth of contextual wrappings without sacrificing a large portion of your existing kit?

Would WHM suddenly be more exciting if Glare required 3 different buttons (Glare, Side Glare, Snide Glare)? Would it be more entertaining if, by having to heal before having completed all n steps, you sacrifice disproportionately more damage?

(I'd argue the last is at least somewhat approaching a reasonable idea, but from the worst possible angle.)

[Silver-Strider]

Focusing on GCD healing and compelling players to use GCD healing, in pursuit of "making healers HEALERS" would require a complete redesign of the entire game and it's encounter design. It would go way beyond the scope of just simple job redesigns. That's why it's not talked about and suggested as much from people more familiar with the role, it's simply too difficult to do an entire game overhaul to flesh out one role especially given how reluctant they are to even do minor tweaks.

Adding a mini dps rotation or additional skills to utilize in healing downtime is far easier and more likely to be implemented and it's why many of us ask for it. "Healers should HEAL" is a fine moniker but completely ignores how this game is played (and most mmos in general), and being puritanical and inflexible helps nothing.

Why would the game require a redesign?
If the game switched from Healer's DPSing 80% of the time to Healer's healing 80% of the time, the only change that would be needed would be that Heal Spells would cost what our DPS spells currently cost and vice versa. Cure 2, Medica 2 and Regen would be 400 MP, while Glare and Holy would cost 1k while Dia cost 500 MP. Also, given that mechanics in old content was never adjusted to account for the current game design of healers, I don't think SE would bother updating them either. I mean, some prey mechanics in older content like Coils required the use of Shields to get thru them and neither WHM and AST have any shielding abilities at all pre SB. They've been nerfed to not be lethal anymore sure but that's realistically all SE did to adjust that content. Would making enemies hit harder in low level content but have less health really require a redesign? Hardly. Something else to consider is that, there are currently GCD healing abilities that currently exist to try and put more emphasis on GCD healing. Macrocosmos and Pneuma are both GCD healing abilities that are DPS neutral and thus can be utilized for healing without negative repercussions in their usage. Afflatus Spells just need a buff and they'd fall into that same category as well so the idea has merit and is entirely doable.

[Kabooa]

And again, your distinguishing part is literally just that, say, Royal Authority's 363.3 ppgcd is split into 6 steps and 4 buttons. What happens once it's a PvP combo, for instance, and therefore you hit the same button each time? What of the likes of Requiescat's Holy Shock spam, since you're not about to get the 3 different strings' worth of contextual wrappings without sacrificing a large portion of your existing kit?

Would WHM suddenly be more exciting if Glare required 3 different buttons (Glare, Side Glare, Snide Glare)? Would it be more entertaining if, by having to heal before having completed all n steps, you sacrifice disproportionately more damage?

I think to this day my favorite iteration of healer came from Protection Monks in Guild Wars.

Restoration monks while you found your feet, but when you were ready to not only be a road block but the whole damn gatekeeper to death, Protection was there waiting for you, and the only attack skill I had slotted was my wand's auto attack.

[Grimoire-M]

Really the point is that healers need more resource management and interaction between elements of their kit to make it more interesting to optimize while by the same token encounter design needs to adjust to the player demand of same overall damage when things go wrong but more overall damage when things go right. That’s something I think everyone agrees on in general, if not the details.

[Liam_Harper]

Why would the game require a redesign?
If the game switched from Healer's DPSing 80% of the time to Healer's healing 80% of the time, the only change that would be needed would be that Heal Spells would cost what our DPS spells currently cost and vice versa. Cure 2, Medica 2 and Regen would be 400 MP, while Glare and Holy would cost 1k while Dia cost 500 MP.

That would be a disaster.

You can't just "make healers heal 80% of the time". A 20:80 ratio of dps and healing for a reasonably new player in min ilv prog would be a 75:25 ratio for an experienced player in BiS with a good group using mitigation. The difference between a new player and a well geared and optimized player is massive. It's impossible to set a fixed percentage on how much a healer should heal and design exactly that.

The main difference now would be that the experienced player would have to afk half the fight because their mana pool can't even support half the amount of Glare casts.

[Shurrikhan]

That would be a disaster.

You can't just "make healers heal 80% of the time". A 20:80 ratio of dps and healing for a reasonably new player in min ilv prog would be a 75:25 ratio for an experienced player in BiS with a good group using mitigation. The difference between a new player and a well geared and optimized player is massive. It's impossible to set a fixed percentage on how much a healer should heal and design exactly that.

The main difference now would be that the experienced player would have to afk half the fight because their mana pool can't even support half the amount of Glare casts.

So extreme a shift would indeed leave little room both for shifting towards offense, thus devaluing the feeling of benefit made through optimized utility, and for those less capable, making the healer role more exclusive (a good thing to some degree, but that finding that degree is a fine and very precarious step).

However, a lesser difference really would amount to just MP adjustments, especially when you consider where that damage can be placed without breaking fights (one-shotting tanks whose defensives, even optimized, have been exhausted): "white" or "sustained" damage, the likes of P3N's off-tank quadruple-hits every few seconds (enough to consistently pop TBN, a decent benchmark for answering "Is the sustained damage significant?" if started just before a volley).

That's an area that, if anything, reduces the punishment from lesser knowledge or less developed habits for our healers, because there's a smaller difference in optimal action between damage spikes and damage lulls and damage intake and response therefore become more intuitive.

[Kabooa]

However, a lesser difference really would amount to just MP adjustments, especially when you consider where that damage can be placed without breaking fights (one-shotting tanks whose defensives, even optimized, have been exhausted): "white" or "sustained" damage, the likes of P3N's off-tank quadruple-hits every few seconds (enough to consistently pop TBN, a decent benchmark for answering "Is the sustained damage significant?" if started just before a volley).

To be quite honest, I don't think any of FF14 has any room for MP management. That probably ended in Shadowbringers or earlier, but barring specific cases such as Black Mages and raises, there might as well not be any MP costs on damage spells.

MP doesn't matter, it hasn't mattered for a while, and very few have wanted it to matter again in any meaningful way. As far as a universal resource goes, MP is dead, and perhaps its time to formalize that just as they did with TP.

[ty_taurus]

To be quite honest, I don't think any of FF14 has any room for MP management. That probably ended in Shadowbringers or earlier, but barring specific cases such as Black Mages and raises, there might as well not be any MP costs on damage spells.

MP doesn't matter, it hasn't mattered for a while, and very few have wanted it to matter again in any meaningful way. As far as a universal resource goes, MP is dead, and perhaps its time to formalize that just as they did with TP.

I don't think MP needs to die really. PLD, DRK, and BLM are able to utilize MP as a meaningful resource, and once upon a time, BRD did as well. I won't say they ever will do more with MP, but I honestly feel like every job could take advantage of MP in some fashion or another, even if on a very simple scale.

One day, we'll likely need to see some kind of healing rework, and while it may not pan out the way most of us here might want, how MP is utilized would probably be one of the most likely things that could be addressed, probably including the casters in on this aspect as well. In this case, Lucid Dreaming would likely die, and jobs would have their own built-in ways of handling MP like BLM does, and perhaps Piety just might evolve to no longer being a dead stat?

[Shurrikhan]

To be quite honest, I don't think any of FF14 has any room for MP management.

MP hasn't mattered for a while, no, but I don't see why that would indicate that XIV, conceptually, has "no room for" MP management, even if present circumstances haven't left room for player agency via that mechanic.

there might as well not be any MP costs on damage spells.

While I agree with this, if not for an awkward further way of punishing Spell Speed, there is already, effectively, no MP cost on damage spells. They're net-MP-positive, though the passive MP generation in that equation includes a button's worth of bloat (Lucid Dreaming) that can lead to some rather wonkily uneven punishment for death.

Consider: If damage spells truly cost nothing, and MP gen was adjusted accordingly, you'd just have, in effect, less MP gen during true downtime (nothing to do whatsoever, such as between fights in dungeons) and lower maximal healing resource.

Now, just as far as personal preference goes, I'd rather go the opposite way, making MP an actual mechanic (rather than simply removing it for its being a pretense on 80% of jobs).

• Remove Lucid Dreaming, as it's mere variable death punishment in ways that provide no further agency (outside the very rare occasion that you're some 5s from its CD refreshing and know you won't survive to claim its benefits).
• Have it tick per-player instead of on a global tick, matching player GCD speed.
• Give MP-consuming actions scaling costs. The less MP one has, the less those actions cost but the less potent they become. Players cannot be starved out of action, but they can certainly be badly starved out of power. It's damn near impossible to drop below 50% MP as anything but a healer, though, without having died. (A rez, for instance, might always consume just 30% of your current MP, though to a minimum of 10% of maximum, but would thereby restore an ally with that much more/less health and mana based on MP thus consumed.)
• Replace Weakness and Brink of Death altogether with just... MP's potency-and-cost scaling. Having rezzed with almost no MP, they're badly potency-starved. This also gives more relevance to rez caps in general as, the lower healer MP gets, the longer, effectively, the penalty lasts.
• Return to variable MP maximums, rather than a consistent 10000 MP. Players would still regain MP as a percentage, but that in turn curtails non-healers' rezzing capacity without having to rely on CDs or the like.
• Finally, if we wish, we can give MP cost to healing abilities, giving more reason (burst healing aside) to perhaps hold onto them and to, from the time, actually use GCD heals.