White Mage Attraction

[UkcsAlias]

If you never needed to use those GCDs by the time those alternative abilities could’ve achieved the same result, then THOSE healing GCDs are meaningless, period. Maybe they’ll keep your party ‘happier’ cause they like seeing that GCD spellcast on your name and/or seeing their HP healthy, but that’s it. It doesn’t contribute toward the duty’s objective as good as those alternatives.

Until that clown fiesta happened and you wasted all your oGCDs already and are forced using GCD heals, and an aoe targets you. Suddenly this turns into an issue. This while such aoegcd could have mitigated a lot of damage (especialy with bosses that show when they are about to do a strong global aoe). Saving some panic heals can do a lot.

Not every team is equaly fluent. And especialy in 4 player content, you do not have a backup healer.

Now you might say, if you had to resolve to that, its still the team that made the flaws, which is true. But your mistake could have still caused the wipe to happen. While your 10 cycles of not using a dps ability barely made any dent to begin with, and the wipe wasted a lot of time.

Sure, not all content requires you to use these (most doesnt). But there are those cases which arent standard. Also, those aoe healing over time abilities can provide a lot of health over time. And 1 gcd for such buffer can be very much worth it. And the less organized a team is, the more you are forced to rely on GCDs (and the higher the difficulty, the less usage they will see since those demand organized teams).

Keeping people on lower health will influence their decison making, since at safe health a lot more things can become viable as tactic. And those things can also result in a higher damage output. But most important: no matter how much GCDs you saved not using those abilities, the moment 1 dps dies, that dps loss will exceed every single dps you saved. Trying to keep them alive is nearly always more viable for dps output (the only case when it isnt, is when the dps was bad anyway).

[Supersnow845]

Until that clown fiesta happened and you wasted all your oGCDs already and are forced using GCD heals, and an aoe targets you. Suddenly this turns into an issue. This while such aoegcd could have mitigated a lot of damage (especialy with bosses that show when they are about to do a strong global aoe). Saving some panic heals can do a lot.

Not every team is equaly fluent. And especialy in 4 player content, you do not have a backup healer.

Now you might say, if you had to resolve to that, its still the team that made the flaws, which is true. But your mistake could have still caused the wipe to happen. While your 10 cycles of not using a dps ability barely made any dent to begin with, and the wipe wasted a lot of time.

Sure, not all content requires you to use these (most doesnt). But there are those cases which arent standard. Also, those aoe healing over time abilities can provide a lot of health over time. And 1 gcd for such buffer can be very much worth it. And the less organized a team is, the more you are forced to rely on GCDs (and the higher the difficulty, the less usage they will see since those demand organized teams).

Keeping people on lower health will influence their decison making, since at safe health a lot more things can become viable as tactic. And those things can also result in a higher damage output. But most important: no matter how much GCDs you saved not using those abilities, the moment 1 dps dies, that dps loss will exceed every single dps you saved. Trying to keep them alive is nearly always more viable for dps output (the only case when it isnt, is when the dps was bad anyway).

Designing a class around the thought experiment of “what if everyone in your team except you is dogshit” is not really a valid design strategy nor a sustainable one, if we designed a DPS around “gets an 900% DPS buff when it becomes the MT because the MT died nobody would say it’s good game design because that situation is rare and to be avoided

People still played like garbage in legacy->HW and our tools were fine to get people though, you don’t even need oGCD’s to heal anything, you can survive spamming GCD’s, so if that’s possible then why design the healers like we are both somehow idiots but also prepare you for a massive gigabrain save when everyone else is garbage

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Until that clown fiesta happened[...]Saving some panic heals can do a lot

I personally very rarely see this happening for following reasons:

• If it's a casual content, you (general you, not you UkcsAlias) will rarely run out of those oGCDs & your GCDs are powerful enough for any crutch healing to prevent deaths in case you DO run out of it. Lv syncing is a bit of a different story as it limits our access to more oGCDs. My favorite ly syncing range is at lv60-70 where I think it's close to the balance between just enough to slightly excessive oGCDs to handle the unavoidable damage, but with moderate amount of mistakes (about the amount you expect from DF folks) GCD heals becomes required. This in turn makes the Ivalice Raid my favorite AR series in the game. Enough degree of mistakes to fix from DF folks, enough amount of unavoidable damage to at least use most of your free tools, and should shit hits the fan your GCDs are there to be used. Compare this to NieR and even the mockingly easy Aglaia. Not once you're needed to touch those GCDs even with clown fiestas because the abundant additional oGCDs you learnt and ridiculously less frequent damages coming out.
• If it's a higher end content, clown fiestas shouldn't even be allowed to happen due to one shots and how it often leads to wipes, either from missing players for upcoming mechanic or the dreaded Weakness/BoD crippling DPS. Mistakes like these are signs of morbidly flawed gameplay which can be exhibited by any roles, and they should honestly try to improve. This goes for both casual and high ends but in high ends that flawed gameplay is more apparent than anywhere else. The more you plan to save a panic heal moments, the more that panic heal will happen. Plan to mitigate that from happening instead.

"Strong global AoE" also rarely happens in casual content (the only one that comes to my mind was 5.2 E8n Absolute Zero spam before power creep and O11n or O12n or both... couldn't remember). In higher end it's more of a mitigation game rather than healing, which is not a secret that it's party's responsibility rather than healer's alone, the shielders particularly.

[...]Keeping people on lower health will influence their decison making, since at safe health a lot more things can become viable as tactic.

If being lower in health influences them to actively move out from danger zones more, then I will do it.
If being lower in health influences them to pop their second wind, bloodbath, and any other lossless self sustenance abilities, then props to them & I thank them for that.
Bonus point on not being on max health: My Eos/Selene can keep casting their Embraces!

At bare minimum, people tend to expect players to at least try move out of danger zones. If they willingly stood in the line of fire, they better know what they're doing because if 'forcing' their healer to adjust to their 'eat vuln stack'-strat without consent is not soft griefing in a team based game, then I don't know what is that.

Don't get me wrong, we have abundant tools to facilitate that sort of 'tactic' (remember E6S soccer strat?) but once the free tools are out, they better own it up if some oopsies happens.

[ToodlesElNoodles]

In terms of Aglaia and (Alliances): Nald’thal is a well-designed fight for healers in casual content.

You have about 60-70 sec of 6 AoEs to handle (4 As Above, 1 AoE stack, and 50% chance 1 line stack). So using your 1 min or 30 sec cooldown heals initially sets it up for being used at the end. Not dealing with the damage will most likely be lethal to your DPS every other AoE. And the stack/cleaves -> As Above and the red/blue -> As Above can kill folks (usually the ranged or caster dps who decided the optimal location is the furthest away from healers so they get no heals and eat it hard on the second As Above they receive).

All healers will go through their kit by the time this is over and then theres two DDR rounds and an Add phase with a copious amount of time from a long (yet amazing) cutscene. It guarantees that healers should have their whole kit back up again for the next onslaught of AoEs (3 As Above, AoE stacks, Hells Trial). After that, when it goes into the next (but randomly selected) DDR phase, the fight should be over.

Other good design is probably (Hollow)/Diabolos from Dun Scaith. Hollow Camisado is used often and deals lots of damage to the tank where both healers casting a heal at the same time is just about right. And it happens often enough that you’ll need to use GCD (but it’s also level 60 so…ya). There are AoEs that need to be handled otherwise things can get out of control. There’s also the mechanics that has orbs slowly drift across which has happens simultaneously to whatever the boss does and has pretty devastating effects.

A not good design is Ultima’s bubble phase where you sit, contemplate the meaning of life, and wait before considering using your AoE ability while your cohealer spams AoE heals while everyone’s at full HP. Or worse: a SGE that continuously spams E.Prog while their shields are still intact…

Also Her Eminence. For the final boss of an Alliance raid series…holy crap is she boring and dull for healing.