Must All Healers be Casters?

[Atmaweapon510]

Chemist could work, it just involves a different mindset involving mix. The thing is:

Mix should not be complicated

Do you mix random items in a bossfight to see what works? Do we really want a healer whose main mechanic can fail or be dumped into DPS every chance they get? No, you find or look up a good mix beforehand, and Chemist will be the 5th DPS if they can dps with Mix. And if you can't dps with Mix, well there's only so many ways you can heal, Direct, Regen, Mitigation, AoE. The main limiting factor to Mix isn't actually the complexity, it's the scarcity, the best mixes tend to require specific items that are hard to acquire and the only way to mimic that scarcity with MP.

Thus we have our straightforward Mix system: four buttons, Add regen, Add Shield/mitigation, Add increased AoE, Mix. Every ingredient can be stacked and each one costs more MP than the last. Add a damage recapture for mixing and we're good to go for a baseline.

[Semirhage]

oh no (appreciate the history lesson, thank you)


So WHM was always built around having tight MP management, which is weird coming from ShB because it didn't really quite feel like that, unlike BLM, PLD (at the time), and DRK spending mp fast but also having utilities/phases built-into their rotation for recovering it fast. Healing's more dependent on your party's performance + the boss' rotation so I get they can't make it quite as extreme as them, but the result seems to be a diet version stuck in a rift between power/mp recovery that's ended up not having either of those.

MP in general just seems to be a really odd resource at this point since it's a minor nuisance at best outside those four jobs and an RDM having to mass-raise a raid.

Thing is, MP management is only an interesting or fun mechanic if you get to make choices with it. Cure versus Cure 2 is the closest thing there's ever been to MP "management". Otherwise, you stare at Stone 3, wishing you had more MP but realizing your choice is between casting Stone, and taking your pick of a /dance emote. I've met several people on these forums who want MP management to be a thing. But it's yet another mechanic I think would be grossly unfun on kits as currently designed. We'd need a huge overhaul for it. Because you can't have a healer specifically designed to just sit with a thumb up their butt for a quarter of an encounter not casting anything while the other three can press anything they want as often as they like.

I agree, MP is a really weird vestigial resource at this point. It's very binary. You either have enough or you don't.

[Risvertasashi]

Thing is, MP management is only an interesting or fun mechanic if you get to make choices with it. Cure versus Cure 2 is the closest thing there's ever been to MP "management". Otherwise, you stare at Stone 3, wishing you had more MP but realizing your choice is between casting Stone, and taking your pick of a /dance emote. I've met several people on these forums who want MP management to be a thing. But it's yet another mechanic I think would be grossly unfun on kits as currently designed. We'd need a huge overhaul for it. Because you can't have a healer specifically designed to just sit with a thumb up their butt for a quarter of an encounter not casting anything while the other three can press anything they want as often as they like.

I agree, MP is a really weird vestigial resource at this point. It's very binary. You either have enough or you don't.

And this is why SE just flat out deleted TP. That sort of resource management doesn't fit a game where uptime is the focus. It might be different in a turn based game, where resources don't reset between encounters and so on. But FF14 is not that...

[QooEr]

And this is why SE just flat out deleted TP. That sort of resource management doesn't fit a game where uptime is the focus. It might be different in a turn based game, where resources don't reset between encounters and so on. But FF14 is not that...

i think MP management is done decently for BLU tanks because diamondback costs insane amounts of mp and they often have to resort to using blood drain. that concept could in theory work for a kind of bursty playstyle for a healer where they use something like bozja seraph strike and then slowly get back mp with a weaker blood-drain like ability, but they would probably never experiment with something like that since it would be incredibly high risk/high reward and healers apparently have to be designed so its near impossible to fail at them

[ty_taurus]

i think MP management is done decently for BLU tanks because diamondback costs insane amounts of mp and they often have to resort to using blood drain. that concept could in theory work for a kind of bursty playstyle for a healer where they use something like bozja seraph strike and then slowly get back mp with a weaker blood-drain like ability, but they would probably never experiment with something like that since it would be incredibly high risk/high reward and healers apparently have to be designed so its near impossible to fail at them

A very simple solution to that would be to create a GCD spell that restores your MP, or perhaps make Lucid Dreaming GCD with no cooldown. This gives you endless MP in theory, but you need to sacrifice uptime to get your MP back making it suboptimal. It's technically a button that would never get used by a skilled player, but it's there to catch the casuals and the newbies when they fall.

[Bsrking5]

healers apparently have to be designed so its near impossible to fail at them

Skill ceiling the thickness of a piece paper. Its why healers have no combos at all. Sage is them experimenting with a high risk in their minds.

[deadman1204]

So the healer would need to be next to anyone they heal? Horrible idea

[IttyBitty]

I agree, MP is a really weird vestigial resource at this point. It's very binary. You either have enough or you don't.

Current MP is just TP 2.0. Why it remains is beyond me outside of the shaky grounds of "class fantasy" or just...punishing healers/casters for dying I guess? Or just to ensure that you can't just raise forever? It's not like casters get much of anything else in compensation for being bound by a resource compared to phys classes.

[AnotherPerson]

Current MP is just TP 2.0. Why it remains is beyond me outside of the shaky grounds of "class fantasy" or just...punishing healers/casters for dying I guess? Or just to ensure that you can't just raise forever? It's not like casters get much of anything else in compensation for being bound by a resource compared to phys classes.

So people can't infinitely raise without repercussions, but they are given the flexibility to do so even if it's not optimal. Gives some feeling of decision making, even if it seems like an illusion based on meta. I mean, RDM's class fantasy is basically that - limited innate MP but powerful red spells through using black and white magic. If they had unlimited MP, they basically have no issues with just spamming red magic over and over again. It puts a dent in verraise if suddenly MP is no longer an issue, but you also have a limited number of times you can raise as a RDM if it becomes an ability / charge resource. Pretty much rendering it useless when no one is dying, but doesn't feel like you're gaining anything without being able to use it. MP being the shared resource sort of removes that issue.

[ty_taurus]

So people can't infinitely raise without repercussions, but they are given the flexibility to do so even if it's not optimal. Gives some feeling of decision making, even if it seems like an illusion based on meta. I mean, RDM's class fantasy is basically that - limited innate MP but powerful red spells through using black and white magic. If they had unlimited MP, they basically have no issues with just spamming red magic over and over again. It puts a dent in verraise if suddenly MP is no longer an issue, but you also have a limited number of times you can raise as a RDM if it becomes an ability / charge resource. Pretty much rendering it useless when no one is dying, but doesn't feel like you're gaining anything without being able to use it. MP being the shared resource sort of removes that issue.

One thing we could do for more than just RDM is put a cooldown on effects rather than abilities. The example fitting in this circumstance would be making it so that Verraise can only be affected by Dualcast once per 60 seconds, but can otherwise be cast as normal. This is something we could expand on with other jobs as well.