Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[HyoMinPark]

It's not pointless because it replenishes MP which gets you back to doing damage. So you are always casting with a purpose.

Your MP regeneration on forced healing is an arbitrary system. You are tacking it onto the system to attempt to justify the unneeded healing. And your system is, again, designed with the sole purpose of forcing healers to use healing abilities regardless of whether or not that healing is needed or if that healing is useless. In this game, it is a far more likely possibility that the healing would be useless due to the nature of encounters and just how little healing is actually required. Even in the highest level of content. Not even Ultimate has as much damage as one would think: a healer’s nuke is still their most pressed ability by a mile. Even if you combine every healing cast to use against it, there is no competition.

You haven’t actually given any thought as to how to improve the gameplay of healers, or how to make them more engaging. You’re just trying to force healing onto them so that they live up to the healer name. Meaningfulness and usefulness of the system be damned. And you don’t understand how encounters in this game are designed, nor how healers actively function within them. Before you ever make suggestions for any role, you need to have an understanding of how the role functions within this game. I just don’t think you have that. Which isn’t inherently bad, but it becomes an issue when you start discussing gameplay. If you don’t understand healer gameplay, then you shouldn’t be offering suggestions. Familiarize yourself with how healers play within the current game design, and then we can talk.

So there is an exception and there can be more such cases.

Except Technical Finish delivers a potent attack from the DNC upon execution that makes up for the seconds spent prepping it. Your healing combo buff doesn’t. That is the difference there.

Encounter design can change moving forward, though I'm still not clear how my idea wouldn't work with the current design, and the point is to change how healers functions.

Except it isn’t going to change in a way that would make your proposal functional. Your system only works if the incoming damage to a party is increased in terms of amount and in terms of intervals. And hopefully those intervals line up with what seems to be a rigid “healing phase” if you are using BLM’s Umbral Ice as a template. Otherwise, you’re overhealing and not doing anything meaningful.

The developers have gone on-record stating that healing requirements will not increase because they don’t want to “stress out the baby healers”, so systems for healers need to be designed with this in mind. Forcing pointless healing is not the way to go.

Then again, I'm fine with how healers work now. My idea is simply based on the complaints I see from the players as well as what the devs have said they have in mind for the role.

You are not actually reading the complaints if you think healers are asking for a system like the one you’ve concocted.

EDIT: Adding in a second response instead of double posting—

So the fact that abilities have extra utility and don't always optimize the ability doesn't automatically mean the ability is poorly designed. The utility of adding MP to do anything in theory justifies overhealing--especially since needing MP as a decent healer really only comes down to two situations where you *need* to generate MP regardless of your skill as a healer: 1) Time going long (DPS are sucking) or 2) Players not doing mechanics and asking you to overheal/rez (again out of your control). So in the hands of a flexible healer, having a utility ability like this *could* in theory be a safeguard for healers to salvage runs that would otherwise wipe.

I disagree. In the proposed system, the healing rotation is implemented with the sole purpose of forcing healers to heal via a “healing combo”. It does not take into account if said healing is actually needed, nor does it take into account if this kind of gameplay will be rewarding or engaging for the person playing a healer. User linayar then attempts to justify an unneeded “healing phase” by tacking a completely arbitrary MP regeneration onto it. They would be removing the current system of mana recovery (Lucid Dreaming) and shoving it onto a new system that is both unengaging and does not contribute to the party as a whole.

Take into account how much damage actually occurs during a fight. Now think about how scripted each of these raidwides are. Also think about how infrequent they are. Using BLM as a template, Astral Fire and Umbral Ice are particularly rigid in terms of when one goes into each phase, so it stands to reason that linayar’s system would be equally as rigid. They stated that all offensive attacks would have high MP costs, so we can also assume it would be likely for healers to constantly be dipping into this healing phase to recover MP. The issues arise when we stop and ask ourselves, “How often will these healing phases line up with actual damage output from the boss?” I feel relatively safe in saying “hardly ever” given my 6+ year experience healing in this game. Every time a healer goes into a “healing phase” to regenerate their MP, if they are healing a party at full HP, then they are contributing nothing to the group. This is a poorly designed system because when would any job in any role ever make use of something that is not actively contributing to the group?

Healer recovery as it stands is already immensely powerful. With the exception of WHM, all healers have decent mana pools and are MP positive with proactive Lucid and other mana recovery tools usage. Healers already have a ton of healing at their disposal—a ton of tools that they can use to salvage a wipe or scuffed run. I don’t foresee this system adding anything to healers that they cannot already do. I also believe that there exist runs where it’s best to just wipe and start over versus struggle bussing through the rest of the fight.

Now, I haven't put enough thought in as to whether this is actually the case here, but I don't believe in simply dismissing the possibility of using an MP-regenerating heal for suboptimal healing at face value.

My dismissal isn’t one made at face value—even though I could tell by just reading the proposal that the system is completely arbitrary and not needed in this game. It would not function in terms of content design, nor would it give healer mains what they actually want, which is engaging gameplay. Would healers like to heal more? Absolutely, I think they would. However, overhealing is not meaningful—and healers want meaningful healing; not wasteful healing. Overhealing is a waste of your GCD. And it is known at this point that the developers will not be upping healing requirements, so healers are turning to their secondary function of damage dealer, and asking for more engagement there.

My dismissal comes from considering all of these factors, and from my healing experience in this game. It’s not me brushing it off without actually thinking about the functionality of the system.

Again, on the topic of utility. I agree that E. Diagnosis is best used for downtime. However, when a tank is...ahem...tanking, and forced me to expend all my OGCD shields, I may throw out a E. Diagnosis for the shield value. And then I get a bonus Toxikon for mobility/mobs. With a tank that knows what they are doing, I don't need it, but for random matchups, it's a versatile verb.

That doesn’t change that it’s still a damage loss, which was what I was discussing as a part of the snippet you’re responding to. Linayar wanted to buff the potency of the next damage ability after coming out of a healing phase in order to make the healing phase DPS neutral in a sense—and I was pointing out just how much they would have to buff that first hit by to make the healing phase actually damage neutral, or otherwise healers are going to be unhappy with it. Misery and Toxikon were just two examples illustrating how things already exist in this game that are not DPS neutral, and how they are often ignored or criticized as a result. Afflatus Misery being a DPS loss is one of the myriad of complaints WHM mains have, and making Toxikon an actual DPS neutral ability is the most common thing I see SGEs ask for (and one of the few “complaints” the job actually has).

I resort to E.Diag spam only when necessary when I have a paper tank. But I don’t touch it outside of downtime otherwise. There’s no point in breaking my Dosis/Dyskrasia spam to farm for an ability that results in me losing damage. Especially if the shields aren’t even needed. The irony of being a shield healer is that I use my barriers quite infrequently.