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

[Reylah]

This same premise of rewarding auxiliary gameplay can be carried across all of the healers to add more flavor and interesting interactions. personally I wouldn't mind if casting malefic on AST reduced the cooldown on draw/redraw because I don't fine the amount of card drawing right now to be too overwhelming and it could help with fishing for seals/passing out more cards because the cards are what I signed up of on AST give me more pls. Also this way is sort of opt in because it doesn't require you to step out into dpsing to get more functionality for your healing gameplay core but rewards you if you do. Just like having heals procs freecure/blood lily prevents you from being forced to DPS for the extra stuff but If you do step out into the dps side you still get something from it.

I've never played scholar and will not comment on that and sage I simply cannot be given to care about as a healer right now. It stepped into a broken system and I only played it because it was shiny and new. After a while I realized it was the system itself that was broken and no amount of shiny floating lasers could save that (Nothing against it I'm just focusing my energy on what's nearer and dearer to me). [2/2] blasted character limit.

[Shurrikhan]

If we look at the distribution of buttons, I think its fair to assume that the devs think that healing should be the core of the role and dps should be auxiliary (disregarding how they have designed fights with enrage timers).

To be fair, there's no real mutual exclusivity here --Are we meant to heal OR are we meant to deal damage?-- except when those two things share a resource (be that Aetherflow or just sheer GCD time). Every kit is <long-term throughput> plus an assemblage of <short-term throughput capacities of capped or greatly diminishing returns> by which to less tax their <long-term throughput>. In other games, that <long-term throughput> might sometimes be healing, but every fight in this game is solely a matter of reducing the enemy cylinder's life-metric to 0, making it always damage.

Then we look at Lilies and we see that the reward for using 3 lily abilities to heal is dps neutrality/boost (I forget how the current numbers balance out). So its a auxiliary reward for performing the core role.
This feels super weird if you are using all your healing abilities then I would expect you to be in a part of the fight where you need more healing but instead you are throwing heals out and you get a shiny button saying "hit them hard" while you are focused on keeping folks alive.

Is it any weirder, though, than oGCD heals? An oGCD heal says "Here, use this so you don't have to spend would-be offensive time to heal." Both are ultimately just ways of making that healing cost no damage. Heck, this is true even for building up to a gigaheal (a la Undulating Tides) if such wouldn't involve waste. All bigger heals are designed to do more in less time, as to be able to --so long as you don't specifically need it for a heal check-- spend more time attacking.

The only differences are (A) that one doesn't care when you use it, so long as it still prunes would-be GCDs of healing (especially if those would be necessary during raid buffs) and the other wants to be specifically used during raid buffs and (B) that one consumes weave space and the other produces it.

WoW Holy priest have a Talent called "Surge of Light" that I think shows a much better reward system. The talent give a 8% chance for both your healing spells and your single target dps button to give you a charge for 1 instant free heal that stacks twice. Its everything Freecure should be.

How I would translate this to FFXIV: Freecure would give a 25% chance(to account for GCD difference) for any cure/cure II or Glare to grant a free, instant, oGCD Cure II. (balance numbers as needed)

That still would change very little, though, save in that this would

1. double Lilies' healing power by simply overbuffing it relative to the existing system,
2. gate much of WHM's free healing (in terms of not costing the WHM damage) behind RNG,
3. further punish downtime,
4. slightly further punish the MP efficiency of healing GCDs [SIZE="1"(all MP costs would be, in effect, reduced by 250 through the 25% chance of a free 1k MP spell so long as you would need to use that healing anyways, but that's a much bigger difference relative to natural MP gen for Glare III than it is for Cure II)[/SIZE]
5. cost WHM's their AoE free-healing option,
6. cost WHM 3 instant casts (for mobility and weave space) per minute,
7. cost WHM an average of 3 oGCD weave-slots per minute,
8. cost WHM a non-Glare offensive cast per minute, exchanging it for another Glare, and
9. lock normal Cure II casts behind having consumed all Freecure procs, as opposed to having a separate button for that purpose.

Time, itself, is a damage AND/OR healing resource. Lily generation doesn't care where that time was spent, only that it's been 20 seconds. At present that's every 8th GCD. Sticking an equivalent chance onto each spell would net a 12.5% Freecure chance. If the free Cure II itself no longer consumes a GCD, we don't even have to make room for those GCDs nor allow it to proc itself. But that's all it would be. Rather than getting your free 800 potency of healing per 20 seconds, you'd get it from an average of 20 seconds' uptime. Rather than getting weave space, you'd lose it. Rather than building towards a unique and impressive spell, you'd be building towards maintaining the ability to cast nothing but Glare and Dia.

That's the main problem here: There's simply nothing warranting further heals to be cast. Changing the impression those heals give off isn't going to make much difference so long as there is virtually no reason ever to sacrifice direct/clear-capped/long-term throughput (damage) for capped/short-term throughput (healing, in our case here).

[IvoryHawk]

This is effectively what the lead designer of this game told Healers in the latest live letter.

Consider if he had said that about your role (tank / dps) for a second and how you would feel.

Forget the leveling experience, it doesn't matter.

Forget dungeons up to 90, they don't matter.

Forget normal raids, EX's, and Savage, they don't matter.

If you want your job to be engaging, play Ultimate, the hardest content in the game that only a few percentage of actual players do.

Engagement shouldn't be either 0% or 100%. It shouldn't be either braindead easy in 95% of content or pull your hair out in the hardest thing the game offers.

Edit:

Yoshi-P's statement is about as tone deaf as the Lead Designer of WoW flat out saying they didn't want players playing a certain DPS spec. (Language warning)

Background: Instead of properly balancing a certain DPS spec, the WoW devs nuked it to the ground so people would play other things.

Sound familiar?

I think this taken way too personally, personally i feel like healing ex, savage, ultimates are all the same "engagement" you're literally doing the exact same thing across all content, i.e:

Figure the mechanics out
Figure out where healing is best placed
Kill

I don't see an issue with what he said, though it seems more like "if you want an actual challenge, go do ultimate" which is true, it's true for every job though, and people keep harping on about BLM because they got some PVP changes for a class Yoshida plays, healers are in a great spot, they dps and heal, they can do both, at high level no matter the content, you're doing the same thing.

[GrimGale]

That makes things less responsive already, but the real kicker is that you'll want to keep those empowered Broils for raid buffs and yet you'll need those healing skills when you need them.

Yeah I can see that being the main issue. Although I'd say that already happens with the current ED design, made worse with Dissipation being a DPS gain to align with raid buffs. Having ED being a charged action on 20s would still let you rack up 3 AF stacks at the very beginning of an encounter though.

But as for SCH's ability to trade excess healing for damage, I don't see it that way at all.

The Scholar skill floor is essentially using as little as your AF stacks on healing abilities as possible considering the fairy grants us abilities that alows the SCH to heal without losing DPS potential for it.

ED being a DPS gain means optimizing SCH gameplay, as cognitively interesting as that might be, is essentially trying to interact as little with your class defining healing oGCDs as possible. I will admit that having the "choice" to not interact with your healing kit is still a choice, as frustrating as it is for me.

You already want to avoid using GCD healing in favour of maintaining a steady stream of Broils and upkeeping your Dot, I just don't like having to avoid using the other abilities to maximize my contribution to party progress.

[Shurrikhan]

Although I'd say that already happens with the current ED design, made worse with Dissipation being a DPS gain to align with raid buffs.

Well don't double down on the problem; just fix Dissipation if you feel it needs fixing. And/or allow for a slightly higher maximum AF stack count so you're not as compelled to ED-dump before a fresh AF CD.

But as for SCH's ability to trade excess healing for damage, I don't see it that way at all.

It quite literally is, though. Over-sacrificing healing means losing 195 potency per GCD you're forced to use (or up to 210 if you, say, force your WHM co-healer to deal with it through a non-Lily GCD heal). Sacrificing healing correctly means gaining 100 potency per ED.

If that healing would not be excessive, it is a damage loss. It is therefore, if optimized, only trading the excess.

ED being a DPS gain means optimizing SCH gameplay, as cognitively interesting as that might be, is essentially trying to interact as little with your class defining healing oGCDs as possible.

But this only applies if and when those tools would have gone to waste. This can only then argue for the right to waste those skills.

If the SCH from the fastest Phoinix clear in the game still only has 7 Aetherflow heals and only a single healing GCD (Reci-Deployed Adlo) AND its cohealer still has zero GCD heals, that's not a problem of Energy Drain allowing you not to waste those heals. That's a problem with having way too little damage in the game.

Forcing fluff heals just to try vaguely to pretend your healing kit isn't stupidly excessive relative to incoming is not a solution for that. It's just another among the mandatory healing gimmicks that have already been shot down a dozen times over this thread, except that it'd come at cost: the one healer who always actually had a way to deal with that problem would now lose that option.

Or at least call it what it is, a pure nerf. SCH has this unique affordance and you want it gone.

ED being a DPS gain means optimizing SCH gameplay, as cognitively interesting as that might be, is essentially trying to interact as little with your class defining healing oGCDs as possible.

Which is a hell of a lot better than nothing (or, the ability to "engage with" those excess heals only through overhealing).

You already want to avoid using GCD healing in favour of maintaining a steady stream of Broils and upkeeping your Dot, I just don't like having to avoid using the other abilities to maximize my contribution to party progress.

And if we needed every oGCD heal, that might matter, but we don't. Not only can we skip all GCD healing, but also a decent portion of our oGCDs. That's not an ED problem. That's an issue of raids' low damage.

[MintnHoney]

personally i feel like healing ex, savage, ultimates are all the same "engagement" you're literally doing the exact same thing across all content

That's the problem.

[GrimGale]

[B]Forcing fluff heals just to try vaguely to pretend your healing kit isn't stupidly excessive relative to incoming is not a solution for that. It's just another among the mandatory healing gimmicks that have already been shot down a dozen times over this thread, except that it'd come at cost: the one healer who always actually had a way to deal with that problem would now lose that option.

Fair enough, this here convinced me.

I still don't like it, and I'd rather have ED be an MP recovery ability for AF stack dumps than it being a DPS gain.

[Shurrikhan]

Fair enough, this here convinced me.

I still don't like it, and I'd rather have ED be an MP recovery ability for AF stack dumps than it being a DPS gain.

And I'd love a healing context in which we'd need a strong MP recovery tool, even if at cost to more direct and free healing, because damage just gets that intensive. Alas. For now...

Funny thought, though: Energy Drain would then become your purest healing option, with all others being a way to try to wrangle an extra Broil X of DPS (195+ potency more than ED) with their increased offensive uptime (as oGCD heals).

[GrimGale]

And I'd love a healing context in which we'd need a strong MP recovery tool, even if at cost to more direct and free healing, because damage just gets that intensive. Alas. For now...

Funny thought, though: Energy Drain would then become your purest healing option, with all others being a way to try to wrangle an extra Broil X of DPS (195+ potency more than ED) with their increased offensive uptime (as oGCD heals).

If we had the Aetherflow action as the "AF dump", would that work better with my previous suggestion?

Aetherflow as an oGCD ability that burns all your current AF stacks into MP, restoring MP based upon the amount of stacks burned.

I'm trying to have SCH press different DPS actions that have resource involved mechanics, to break up the Broil spam. I guess the least upseting way to do that is to add another DoT to upkeep.

[Shurrikhan]

If we had the Aetherflow action as the "AF dump", would that work better with my previous suggestion?

Aetherflow as an oGCD ability that burns all your current AF stacks into MP, restoring MP based upon the amount of stacks burned.

Again, healers (including SCH) would need a reason to make MP worth sacrificing damage for. Otherwise you just end up with a tool about as useful (for MP-efficiency) as Physick.

But yeah, if raid damage was intense enough it to be worth trading healer damage for MP (since people not dying would net yet more damage and, in that very different from present case, we'd need the MP to keep people from dying), then AF would demand a bit more MP per Aethercharge consumed than ED (since it'd have zero potency) but would be more flexible due to not requiring a target.


Unfortunately, for now, that premise just harks back to the roots of this thread: Even in Ultimate, there's very little to heal / spend significant MP on.