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

[Thoosa]

It's a bit trickier to determine how hard healing is in an ultimate, because I've never done one and probably because the skill level of your average healer in an Ultimate will probably be much higher than a standard dungeon healer, but if an Ultimate healer is saying the healing isn't very intensive, then it doesn't bode well for future normal content.

[MintnHoney]

It's a bit trickier to determine how hard healing is in an ultimate, because I've never done one and probably because the skill level of your average healer in an Ultimate will probably be much higher than a standard dungeon healer, but if an Ultimate healer is saying the healing isn't very intensive, then it doesn't bode well for future normal content.

I've never done one either, but, in my mind, Ultimate just screams "OHKO" out of every nook and cranny. That's likely not really the case but I can't help but feel like it would be.
For now, I'm going to wait and hold off on forming an opinion until I see more testimonies of the difficulty (we'll likely see more after this weekend). If there is a consensus on what Maltothoris says, then... I mean, it's Yoshi-P and his crew. We should have seen it coming.

[HyoMinPark]

I've never done one either, but, in my mind, Ultimate just screams "OHKO" out of every nook and cranny. That's likely not really the case but I can't help but feel like it would be.
For now, I'm going to wait and hold off on forming an opinion until I see more testimonies of the difficulty (we'll likely see more after this weekend). If there is a consensus on what Maltothoris says, then... I mean, it's Yoshi-P and his crew. We should have seen it coming.

It depends. There are a lot of OHKOs in the 3 older Ultimates, and in DRU that I’ve seen thus far (I’m in Phase 2 with my group right now), but not everything will outright kill you. There are things that you can get hit by and survive, things that OHKO, and then others still where party members (or you) causing mechanical mess ups usually result in a party-wipe.

Most of the healing requirements come in the form of huge raidwides that require multiple types of mitigation (e.g., tank mitigations like Reprisal, Heart of Light, Dark Missionary, Passage, or Divine Veil; DPS mitigations like Addle/Feint, Samba/Troubadour/Tactician, and Magic Barrier; sometimes GCD shields or other healer mitigations like Sacred Soil, Kerachole, Holos, or Temperance) in order to reduce the overall damage, and therefore allow things like HoTs and oGCDs to tick the party up. I’d say that Ultimate healing relies more on your party using proper mitigations, since missing just one can sometimes outright kill you. For reference, one of our tanks missed their Reprisal last night, and myself, my cohealer, and our physical ranged all died due to damage variance (I have a little over 56,000 HP in there with food, and took a little over 58,000).

So far in DRU, I am casting safety shields sometimes while the bosses are actively targetable—but otherwise, most of my GCD shielding is during downtimes. My primary healing is coming from my oGCDs and Pneuma. My cohealer is using GCDs (AST), usually with Neutral Sect active for that mitigation I mentioned above. We’ve already mapped out our mitigation and big heals for Phase 1 and most of Phase 2 in a spreadsheet, so we don’t trip over each other and end up without a valuable resource during a critical moment. If party mitigation is on point, we don’t have to do too much extra healing outside of our healing plan. Honestly, I find that aspect of healing extremely fun. I like the planning a lot.



If I were to compare the four so far based off of the first phase alone—I would say that Living Liquid definitely had the highest and hardest in terms of healer checks (I did heal up to Gavel on AST when it was current; I just cleared later on DNC since the group I was in at the time needed a phys ranged). Garuda cleanses could be spicy, but timing for those is everything. Once the timing is down for cleansing, healing up, and then cleansing again, it isn’t that terrible, in my opinion. Adelphel/Grinneux aren’t terrible: mostly they do an AOE, knock the party to low health, and we heal up. Twintania is a snooze fest, though. I barely had to heal during her outside of spot healing the tank and/or the physical ranged baiting Liquid Hells with a regen or an oGCD.

[Thoosa]

Watching the Xeno stream, and damn the 3rd phase looks really tough. :P

[Recon1o6]

Watching the Xeno stream, and damn the 3rd phase looks really tough. :P

does look like a server tick will snag a lot of kills at the two inner towers+pointblank

still not much healing. Lot of mitigation though

[SeverianLyonesse]

It's about right. One shot mechanics have always been the laziest design possible. Oh, you're not perfect? Dead.

I will even go one step further and say that debuff stacks are also quite lazy design.

There are so many different ways the devs could create "difficulty" with respect to mechanic dodging. Even if we just limited it to debuffs, players could be punished for failing mechanics with various status effects (which could also encourage more healer reactivity--at minimum encouraging more status removal but imagine if healers had a suite of esunas that cured different categories of effects).

But practically every boss just has a generic "damage taken increased" stack with a 1min cooldown that doesn't add any particular flavor or engagement to fights. It just makes the game lean even harder into a scripted memorization exercise and, along with it, the "you're not perfect" design mentality. Not to mention seem like perhaps the laziest way to create "healer engagement".

[MintnHoney]

Most of the healing requirements come in the form of huge raidwides that require multiple types of mitigation (e.g., tank mitigations like Reprisal, Heart of Light, Dark Missionary, Passage, or Divine Veil; DPS mitigations like Addle/Feint, Samba/Troubadour/Tactician, and Magic Barrier; sometimes GCD shields or other healer mitigations like Sacred Soil, Kerachole, Holos, or Temperance) in order to reduce the overall damage, and therefore allow things like HoTs and oGCDs to tick the party up. I’d say that Ultimate healing relies more on your party using proper mitigations, since missing just one can sometimes outright kill you. For reference, one of our tanks missed their Reprisal last night, and myself, my cohealer, and our physical ranged all died due to damage variance (I have a little over 56,000 HP in there with food, and took a little over 58,000).

So far in DRU, I am casting safety shields sometimes while the bosses are actively targetable—but otherwise, most of my GCD shielding is during downtimes. My primary healing is coming from my oGCDs and Pneuma. My cohealer is using GCDs (AST), usually with Neutral Sect active for that mitigation I mentioned above. We’ve already mapped out our mitigation and big heals for Phase 1 and most of Phase 2 in a spreadsheet, so we don’t trip over each other and end up without a valuable resource during a critical moment. If party mitigation is on point, we don’t have to do too much extra healing outside of our healing plan. Honestly, I find that aspect of healing extremely fun. I like the planning a lot.

Well, it sounds to me like, rather than healing requirements being higher, the issue is more to do with planning out mitigation overall, across all jobs. Which is fine, but it also kinda sounds like the healing isn't all that much more "intense" or necessarily more engaging than what we're usually faced with. It also seems like it might be more fun just because you can plan things out for a lengthy encounter. I'm hearing that from a few people, actually, but it's nothing I haven't heard before regarding FFXIV battle content.

I can't comment on the creation of a healing plan because I tend to avoid such things (I agree that it can be fun, but I'm too much of a loose-canon), but it kind of sounds a bit like maybe Yoshi-P's statement was a little misleading, so it's probably a good thing that it was such a dissatisfying answer and that I didn't expect it to resolve the general issues of the role as a whole.

[Semirhage]

It's funny, because they already have debuffs that punish failure without outright killing the target. The generic damage downs. Paralysis. Sleep. Silence. Pacify. Mini. Stun. Any one of these punishes your output pretty severely without causing death.

With respect to Ultimates, I've healed UWU. It does have some scary heal checks...the first few times through until you figure them out. And not very many of them. In my experience, you have a few pockets of intense healing maybe once a minute or every two minutes optimistically. I pulled grey damage numbers on my last clear because I wanted to make damn sure we hit the end of the fight and it got sloppy. We cleared. With grey damage output, you know what I spent about 70% of my time doing? Stone stone stone stone stone stone stone stone stone.

[AziraSyuren]

It's funny, because they already have debuffs that punish failure without outright killing the target. The generic damage downs. Paralysis. Sleep. Silence. Pacify. Mini. Stun. Any one of these punishes your output pretty severely without causing death.

If you get hit by the expanding AoEs in Thordan Ultimate and survive you get hit with a heavy debuff. I think it's a great punishment for failure because it means you have to make a slow, agonizing walk of shame over to the wall in order to reset the fight.

It's pretty hilarious.

[Nethereal]

It's funny, because they already have debuffs that punish failure without outright killing the target. The generic damage downs. Paralysis. Sleep. Silence. Pacify. Mini. Stun. Any one of these punishes your output pretty severely without causing death.

Yoshida come next response to healers: "You think you want this but you don't."