The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[Seraphor]

So, before Shadowbringers came out, I remember there being some interviews and such where Yoshi-P dropped hints that with GNB being added to the game as our 4th tank, we'd likely see a split in the tanks, where two would be more MT focused, and 2 would be more OT focused. This, however, did not happen, and all 4 tanks are now capable as MT or as OT equally, with the playerbase being the ones who have made decisions on which tank suits which role better (EG GNB prefers OT because moving a boss inside Continuation windows was not a fun time)

However, we look at healers, and the same dichotomy got applied, two 'main healers' (or Pure), and two 'off healers' (or Barrier). You can even divide them up in a 2x2 table like so:



As we go through the tier though, people get more gear, and we run into the eventual issue that seems to occur every raid tier: the two healers with raid buffs, SCH and AST, scale off of not only their own gear, but the gear of other people due to Chain Stratagem and Divination/Cardspam. This leads to them pulling ahead in RDPS, the metric that everyone cares about. It's all well and good saying 'oh well you see, WHM has a lot of powerful healing tools to save a run when things are going badly' but healing is a very binary thing in this game, you either have enough healing to clear, or you wipe.

I'm not opposed to this way of categorising healers. I think they could make healers more 'unique' and break down more of that 'homogenisation' yet still maintain these dichotomies of Pure/Shield and Personal/Raid DPS. I don't think that's a bad way of doing things.
However as you rightly say, there is currently a problem with how raid dps or 'party utility buffs' are calculated.

These buffs need to be impactful for both Light Parties and Full Parties, the problem is the more players you add the more impactful they become, so you either end up with OP 8 man or weak 4 man buffs.
The solution could be introducing some form of scaling system.
Something like it calculates the buff according to how many players it affects.

AST is better in this regard because it buffs one party member most of the time. Maybe SCH could have Chain Strategem nerfed to make way for a single target player buff.
And/or their party wide buffs could scale. Something like +10% for a Light Party and +5% for a Full Party.

Then, once dps contributions are more consistent, you can go to town with diversifying healing kits without as much risk of forming meta comps. Baring the issues with shielding of course, which they have the tools to deal with already, they just need to tweak them so that SCH/SGE doesn't become either too good at mitigating or inefficient at healing.

[Supersnow845]

I'm not opposed to this way of categorising healers. I think they could make healers more 'unique' and break down more of that 'homogenisation' yet still maintain these dichotomies of Pure/Shield and Personal/Raid DPS. I don't think that's a bad way of doing things.
However as you rightly say, there is currently a problem with how raid dps or 'party utility buffs' are calculated.

These buffs need to be impactful for both Light Parties and Full Parties, the problem is the more players you add the more impactful they become, so you either end up with OP 8 man or weak 4 man buffs.
The solution could be introducing some form of scaling system.
Something like it calculates the buff according to how many players it affects.

AST is better in this regard because it buffs one party member most of the time. Maybe SCH could have Chain Strategem nerfed to make way for a single target player buff.
And/or their party wide buffs could scale. Something like +10% for a Light Party and +5% for a Full Party.

Then, once dps contributions are more consistent, you can go to town with diversifying healing kits without as much risk of forming meta comps. Baring the issues with shielding of course, which they have the tools to deal with already, they just need to tweak them so that SCH/SGE doesn't become either too good at mitigating or inefficient at healing.

The problem of this system is that it’s never balanced

SCH is dominating the other healers right now and the tier has barely started and it will only scale more strongly later on, if square won’t dynamically adjust the selfish healer DPS over the course of the tier then this type of box chart is never going to be properly balanced and will always bias the buffers in 8 man and the selfish in 4 man

[Seraphor]

The problem of this system is that it’s never balanced

SCH is dominating the other healers right now and the tier has barely started and it will only scale more strongly later on, if square won’t dynamically adjust the selfish healer DPS over the course of the tier then this type of box chart is never going to be properly balanced and will always bias the buffers in 8 man and the selfish in 4 man

I mean, I literally covered this.
SCH is dominating because of it's party damage buffs.

I basically said "fix this one aspect and the system is fine" and you reply with "but the system can't work because of this one aspect."

[Supersnow845]

I mean, I literally covered this.
SCH is dominating because of it's party damage buffs.

I basically said "fix this one aspect and the system is fine" and you reply with "but the system can't work because of this one aspect."

You mentioned scaling of buffs between light parties and full parties but nothing about how in full parties buffs always dominate and that causes SCH to be endlessly meta, it would honestly be easier to make all or no healer buff healers than trying to have aDPS healers because square has shown that they have never got it right ever with healers is more my point

[Zolvolt]

Just my two cents here but I think separation of barrier/pure has fallen short a bit. SCH/SGE requires the least GCD healing as a combination and work quite well in top content. This creates a scenario where every healer combo is valid except for double pure healer despite astro having neutral sect. (becomes a problem when you're doing the difficult fights only)

I miss that last expansion any combo was valid, even regenAST+whm.

[SylvAlternate]

I see 'make energy drain not use healing resources", I ignore all other opinions presented
people constantly complain about healing being too simple then say "let's remove one of the only 3 interesting pieces of dealing damage as a healer" (the other 2 are cards and whatever the ast stickers you redraw for are called)

the Fey Meltdown thing sounds interesting on paper, but in reality it's just gonna be something you press every 3 or 4 minutes (btw with dissipation, you gain 120 PP every 3 minutes, meaning you can't even fit it in 4m raid buffs without overcapping or holding onto those stacks until after the 4m window, aka griefing for damage)
storing abiilites in your Faerie also sounds cool, but in the end you only get 1 per fight, so that's either a 100p gain or a 295p gain through the entire encounter, which isn't very much
Dot's are cool, btw I think scholar's third DoT is Shadowflare or smth

[ForsakenRoe]

I'm not opposed to this way of categorising healers. I think they could make healers more 'unique' and break down more of that 'homogenisation' yet still maintain these dichotomies of Pure/Shield and Personal/Raid DPS. I don't think that's a bad way of doing things.

believe me, i'd like to see the split work too, but as the tank 'split' and subsequent backtrack showed, they cant balance it. it'd have been interesting to see a world where 2 of the tanks (probably GNB PLD) were 'enforced OT' and had a lot of 'help mitigate the other tank' stuff like cover, intervention etc, but since the fights are designed with tanks swapping in mind a lot (debuff forces you to etc) it just wouldnt work out. in a similar way, the healers are being forced into 'does most of the healing (tanking)' and 'supports the other healer (tank) by helping mitigate the damage so there's less to heal (tank)', but healing is a very binary thing, once you survive a raidwide, you dont need more shield/mit, once you have enough healing to get someone topped before the next raidwide you dont need more healing, etc. so as we get more gear, the pure healers fall out of 'required' more and more, because the 'slightly more limited' burst healing of the shield healers becomes more and more capable of keeping up with the fight's requirement

and eventually we get to the point where it can be healed with zero 'damage-loss GCDs' and it descends into glarespam once again

AST is better in this regard because it buffs one party member most of the time.

a healer who's gameplay mostly revolves around maintaining buffs on allies instead of spamming a new variant of glare could be quite cool, quick example: new GCD action, gives 5 stacks to an ally. when the ally does a weaponskill or spell, that weaponskill or spell deals an additional 60 potency (totals 300). then have their filler spell be, idk 260? then you want to maintain the buff on your dps, but maybe the 5th application is kinda a dead choice cos it'd be on a tank or healer, so it's actually more dps to just throw out a spamskill, but in other cases (raidbuff window coming) it's better to buff the tank cos they're a DRK and they're about to pop off

SCH/SGE doesn't become either too good at mitigating or inefficient at healing.

as long as everything in their kit is able to stack except galvanise and prognosis, SCH SGE is going to be a very powerful combo, i really dont think SE thought about how these two healers can have 10% mit and 100p regen constantly ticking by just rotating kerachole and sacred soil in sequence

the main issue is, again, SCH and SGE have too much burst healing to justify being called 'the barrier healers', but the game's content is designed around having at least a certain amount of burst healing so they cant take it away. hence, the suggested solution to give the other healers barrier options

SCH/SGE requires the least GCD healing as a combination and work quite well in top content.

I miss that last expansion any combo was valid, even regenAST+whm.

i dont miss regen-AST and WHM being valid, i miss AST and WHM being valid. i want to bring back the shield side of AST not just because of the lore, or the aesthetics, but because i saw people in this forum disappointed that the class they love was going to be destroyed, so they were forced onto a different one. i've been in that situation 3 times now, i loved 4.1 WAR then it got the IR ungabunga change, i loved 4.3-4.5 DRK but people complained it was 'dark arts spammy' and now it's WAR-lite (or WAR-dark, i guess), and i was a WHM for most of SHB and then they made it's MP economy a disaster at the start of EW (this one's been sorted out though, ty SE)

ideally i'd want the game to be in a state where it's equally likely for the world first for the new ultimate to be WHM AST, SCH SGE, SCH AST, or WHM [new healer] whatever it is, chemist or necromancer-but-not-called-that or arithmetician idk

I see 'make energy drain not use healing resources", I ignore all other opinions presented
people constantly complain about healing being too simple then say "let's remove one of the only 3 interesting pieces of dealing damage as a healer" (the other 2 are cards and whatever the ast stickers you redraw for are called)

if we say 'i see one change suggested that i dont like, therefore im gonna ignore everything else', then nothing's ever going to get changed. personally i think energy drain has had it's run, it's a vestigal piece of design that leads to PF 'epic barse gamers' griefing and choosing 100p damage over '10% mit and 600p regen' and causing wipes, and it's removal would allow hotbar space for other complexity in the gameplay to emerge

besides, it got nerfed from 150 to 100 already, so i have to ask, at what point of the devs nerfing it would you agree it should just be removed? what if they nerf it again to 75? to 50? 10? would you argue to keep an energy drain that deals only 5 potency, because it's 'one of the only 3 things about doing damage as healer that is interesting'? not trying to start an argument im just curious where people's line in the sand is

the Fey Meltdown thing sounds interesting on paper, but in reality it's just gonna be something you press every 3 or 4 minutes (btw with dissipation, you gain 120 PP every 3 minutes, meaning you can't even fit it in 4m raid buffs without overcapping or holding onto those stacks until after the 4m window, aka griefing for damage)

then press the button early, imagine you've got 20 gauge already and you've worked it out already, you're going to hit 110 gauge if you get to that 4min window, you'll overcap. so instead, you press the Fey Meltdown now, dump out that 20 gauge, then reach the 4min window at 90 gauge and everything is good. kinda sounds like optimisation right? besides, unless my maths is wrong, at a GCD of 2.40 you'd get 6 GCDs in a 15s buff, 8 in a 20s buff, the only buff that would let you get a full 10 GCDs from 100 gauge is Searing Light, so you'd have some leeway on how much gauge you'd need before going into the raidbuff window, the thinking is that it'd be similar to old 4.1 WAR, you'd dump out gauge outside of raidbuffs, so that you have the perfect amount of gauge going INto the raidbuff window to have the most optimised burst window you can, since you're, y'know, 'the genius tactician' class

storing abiilites in your Faerie also sounds cool, but in the end you only get 1 per fight, so that's either a 100p gain or a 295p gain through the entire encounter, which isn't very much
Dot's are cool, btw I think scholar's third DoT is Shadowflare or smth

This one isnt for damage, it's entirely QOL because i just dont think applying a shield with a GCD, then spreading that shield, feels good, it feels kinda clunky and interrupts the flow of combat (to me at least). over the time since i made that first post though, ive definitely gravitated to the other idea, that you'd buff your next skill to be also cast by the fairy, as deploy>succor would be similar to the current adlo shield, but as mentioned originally, it'd give scholar the tactical advantage over sage. again as example, ruby light 5: sage can pneuma and zoe it to get it to 900, but SCH would be able to deploy>indom and hit not only the team on it's side, but also the far side by telling the fairy to go there, for 300x2. also since it's 2 seperate instances of healing, i guess it's double the chance for a crit to occur?

im not sure about how busted and OP it'd be to allow recitation > deploy > indom, maybe only the SCH's indom gets the recitation and the fairy's copy would have regular crit chance (or zero chance to crit if the devs feel like it idk it'd be up to them)

[Kele_Star]

Ill be up front, I don't know alot about the technical stuff and background calculations of the jobs so my opinion is going to be mostly on there ability to create job uniqueness, I do think that trying to sandwitch healers into Pure/Barrier does limit how creative they could make the healers playstyles. Astrologin for examples has twice been on the cusp of being its own unique style of healer (full disclosure i am a bit AST bias because i love its aesthetics). For a smaller example back when it had Nocturnal and Daiurnal it was basically the Red Mage of healers able to do either or, that made it unique on its own all be it still sandwitched in the Pure and Barrier box.

A more unique example comes with stuff like Macrocosmos, Earthly Star and Horoscope. Not only do these lean it more thematically into the cosmic seer asthetic but if they emphasized the delay healing aspect and the pre prep healing placements, instead of the healers being

Astrologan, White Mage = Pure Healer
Scholar, Sage = Barrier Healer

it would look more like

White Mage = Direct Healer
Scholar = Pet Healer
Sage = Damage Healer
Astrologan = Delay Healer

If the layout was more like this then adding shields or regens to certain jobs wouldnt really matter because it would be less of 'what' skill they have and more of 'how' they use those skills.

Just to go a bit further and throwing some ideas out there for new healers they could then do stuff like maybe a "wish healer" loosely based on the ability in FF tactics where the healer uses its own hp to heal its allys and its other abilities could revolve around keeping its own hp up since its hp would effect its heals, or they could do like a "react healer" loosely based off of Excogitation where it leans alot more into placing "heals" on allys that dont activate until that allys hp drops below a certain amount, or even something like a "trap healer" that could like place heals on the ground that dont activate until an ally steps in them and then they could focus more on dps until the traps are activated and can be used again

Im not a game dev so I have no idea how they would balance this, but it does feel like the pure/barrier typing really does just hinder how creative they can make the healing role.

On a very personal side note oviously we dont want all the healers to play the same but i think a little homogenization isnt a bad thing. it lets people play the class they want without worrying about weather or not it will be viable in harder content. I personally started playing astro purely because of its space theme, just my opinion but i think picking a class because you like it is better then picking one because you have to in order to do certain content.

[ForsakenRoe]

Added an idea or two about Sage

On a very personal side note oviously we dont want all the healers to play the same but i think a little homogenization isnt a bad thing.

Exactly what my thinking is, by accepting a little bit of homogenization in the parts that NEED to be homogenized (the basic healing kits), we can afford to differentiate the healers with their more specialized healing kit skills and their DPS actions. The tanks all have a 120s, 30% mit. They all have Rampart. They all have a short 25s (except DRK, who has it on 15s but limited by mana), they all have a raidwide mit on a 90s CD. The 'base tanking mitigation kit' is very homogenised, because it has to be so that any tank can take on any of the bosses, without the devs having to think 'okay this boss is very physical based, which means DRK can't actually tank it because their Dark Mind doesn't work on physical'. On healers, that means we accept every healer has a Cure, Medica, 'upgraded ST heal' (Cure 2, Benefic 2, Adlo, E.Diagnosis), 'upgraded AOE heal' (Medica2, Asp.Helios, Succor, E.Prognosis). SCH and SGE are incredibly similar as it stands, and while we grumble about it a bit, I can see why the devs would do what they did for balance's sake. Where we can differentiate the feel is with the DPS actions. Tanks feel different to one another not because of the color of their 30%s, but their DPS rotations. Okay, DRK and WAR are kinda on thin ice here, but GNB and PLD have very different feeling rotations from each other, and from DRK/WAR. Even within the DRK WAR pair, DRK does have a different feel due to having so much doubleweaving to cram into the 2min window, whereas WAR goes slower, but has the whole 'guaranteed crit' thing.

As such, and as previously mentioned, we can differentiate the healers as so:

WHM - Burst damage
SCH - DOT specialist
AST - Delayed effects
SGE - React-2-Procs or Chemist/Dancer ripoff

This way, the healers would feel different from one another, despite Ixochole and Indomitability being 100% copies of each other. Or Lustrate/Druochole. Besides, we're doing DPS things for like 80% of our time, so if the DPS is the part that is not homogenized, then the 20% where we actually heal being homogenized will not be as noticeable

[Rithy255]

I wanna say firstly, I'm not a healer main, nor do I find any appeal of bringing a healer into savage, I will say I've leveled all healers to 90, I also would be more interested in playing healers if they were actually more fun for me, I generally enjoy "support" jobs in a game, but I also do enjoy if im expected to do "damage", I should at least have some buttons that engage me dps wise, which lets face it job design even on the hardest content healers are meant to deal damage a lot of the time, just from the DPS checks in harder fights alone, but I have general reasons why I'm pretty "meh" on healers as a whole.

I really dislike sage, Not that it isn't particularly fun, but it ruins how old astro used to function, now I think sage is generally just "fresh scholar" I really don't think sage is different enough from scholar to be justified, in it's current state at least, sure scholar "gives out buffs" but it's also not anything like astro, you just give out one raid buff every 2 minutes it's really not unique enough for me to care (I do actually find Scholar alright? likely my second most liked healer..), again The problem really comes from 1. Removing something from astro 2. sage "design" was to copy a lot of scholars homework, where you somehow replace a healer stance with something that is less inspired then that stance...

Old Astro with being able to "choose" between two stances or effects outside of combat was really interesting and worked pretty well, I feel like barrier Astro played way differently from both SCH/Sage, So it being removed for sage really annoys me... I generally prefer barriers to pure healing but I also really like astros playstyle, I don't know what they expect to do when they introduce a "5th" healer, My guess is give back astro sects? I don't know but they really didn't *have* to remove it for sage... Sure I guess you'd have 3Bhealers vs 2pure healers, but is that really a big deal...? I am genuinely just am really disappointed with the idea that we had to remove it outright.

I'll also mention I'm glad theirs a small distinction in game between "barrier" and "pure" healers, I wouldn't want every healer to play the same even from a healing standpoint, I don't mind them classing the healers separately, just not at the expense of jobs like Astro.