Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[T-Owl]

exactly what we've been saying, adding more healing requirements excludes the less skilled players who will struggle to keep up. adding more dps intricacy during the downtime allows those less skilled players to keep up in terms of 'not causing a wipe due to not healing enough' but they'll just do a little less damage. on the flipside it lets the skilled gamers express their skill. literally noone loses if we add more dps intricacy, but there is plenty of people who stand to lose if we make savage slap like Living Liquid TEA version

I think with the majority of players, it isn't even just that less skilled players will indefinetely struggle to keep up, its just that sudden spikes in difficulty will catch them offguard immediately, especially since the game already has little in terms of difficulty progression, you basically jump from very casual roulette levels of content right into savage already. Increases in difficulty should be done carefully to creat a proper difficulty curve, in my opinion possible even from the leveling content of a new expansion onwards. Like, how often do healers have to deal with hart hitting dots, really? But yeah, ultimately the first goal should be to creat a proper skill curve inside a role, which currently is very scarcely given to healers.

[Absurdity]

I think with the majority of players, it isn't even just that less skilled players will indefinetely struggle to keep up, its just that sudden spikes in difficulty will catch them offguard immediately, especially since the game already has little in terms of difficulty progression, you basically jump from very casual roulette levels of content right into savage already.

Even within savage this happens, we have seen it this raid tier. People who have joined as a healer in ShB and had to deal with nothing but snoozefest damage for over 2 years have suddenly hit a brick wall because they weren't at alll prepared for savage mechanics that can't just be solved with 1-2 oGCDs. Then again the same goes for dps and tanks who rarely ever needed to use their raid mitigation before and are now probably wondering why the party gets oneshot all the time.

[Leonerdo]

The only consistent complaints I've heard are that PF parties make everything hell (both from the side of healers complaining about party mitigation, and from others complaining about healers not keeping up with the bleeds). Meanwhile in coordinated statics, the primary complaint is that healing is too easy/predictable/reliable, and that becomes incredibly boring after the initial prog. Giving healers more interesting tools (especially damage focused ones) is the obvious solution for veterans in statics.

But I think it's equally important to recognize that PF healers are subjected to wildly different experiences based on their party members, and that what would be a hard healing check for a static becomes overly-stressful and possibly disastrous in PF. To put it plainly, tanks and DPS have too much control over the healing experience. If anyone messes up, healers have to res them and use single-target resources to top them up again. If there's a lack of mitigation (or even just inconsistent mitigation) healers have to compensate with more shields and GCDs to be safe. And if a healer dies (potentially not even their fault), recovery becomes incredibly difficult compared to a DPS death.

Let me elaborate. DPS jobs all have a 10% (or 5% in the case of Feint) mitigation at minimum. When combined, they can turn a 3600-potency heal check like Spark of Life into a 2800-potency one. Add in extra stuff like Magick Barrier, Curing Waltz, and RPR Crest heal and this can be as low as 2000 potency required from the healers. But of course, absolutely none of that can be relied on in PF, so healers often have to heal as if it's a 3600-potency check anyways. And that's looking only at the contribution of the DPS.

Tanks as well contribute 10% mit at a minimum, and potentially a heal+shield or additional 10% mit depending on the job. In a static, you could easily assume Reprisal is applied on almost every single raid-wide, but in PF this doesn't get discussed or coordinated, so it's basically a 50-50 on any given heal check. And the extra mitigations are, once again, completely unreliable.

On top of that, if you don't know your co-healer, there's another huge pile of question marks for "How much will my party cover for this heal check?" Too many question marks to list here.

Some of this variance is acceptable of course. That's just part of playing a team game. You have to coordinate your cooldowns if you want to have safe and efficient runs. But I think the amount of healing/mit that is out of healers' control is too much, with all the additional mitigation in EW (Feint buff, Magic Barrier on RDM, Crest on RPR, all the tank buffs), and considering how big of an effect they can have on the large heal checks this tier. The difference between an optimized static with a RDM+WAR, and a PF party where none of the DPS mitigate and the tanks use Reprisal randomly, is the difference between literally never using GCD heals, and using 1-2 of them on every single raid-wide and tankbuster (sometimes out of necessity, sometimes just for safety because you don't know what other people are doing).

For the sanity of PF healers, some of these extra mitigations and heals from DPS roles needs to be cut back or nerfed. And heal checks need to be decreased slightly to compensate. (It will still be harder in statics where the mitigation nerfs matter more.) I don't know if I would include tanks in that culling initiative, because I think a core part of their job is to mitigate for themselves and for the team, but I would at least take a look at WAR whose HPS can be half as much as healer when optimized.

And as a final semi-related point, I think healers suffer way too much when they die. The remaining co-healer has to rezz them and hold the fort while they get up, they lose most of their mana and resources like lilies, and weakness decreases their healing by 25%. It's too much punishment for an already punishing role. At least allow lilies and such to be saved through death.

TL;DR: If the devs want people to enjoy healing in PF, they don't need to make healing any easier, but they need to make it less dependent on random party members (and job balance) and less snowball-y when things go awry.

[Nizzi]

There wasn't Healer shortages during Asphodelos and Healer shortages this tier only for P8S. Do the math.
People asked for more stuff to heal and they listened, now no one want to heal lmao.

Correlation does not imply causation. A lot of people healed last tier to see how EW was compared to ShB, and once they saw that it was no different, they hopped ship. I'm an example of one of those players, and even if healing requirements are more intense this tier, it's too little too late for me at this point. I'm not hopping back onto healer when I can play a role they actually care for. I'll come back when I don't spam Broil 150+ times a fight.

[Bookkeepper]

And as a final semi-related point, I think healers suffer way too much when they die. The remaining co-healer has to rezz them and hold the fort while they get up, they lose most of their mana and resources like lilies, and weakness decreases their healing by 25%. It's too much punishment for an already punishing role. At least allow lilies and such to be saved through death.

An interesting point. I wanted to do some numbers, so:

DPS do damage. If one DPS dies, then the party's total damage drops by about 4% during their weakness debuff (counting damage from tanks and healers).
If two DPS die, this doubles to 8%.
If three DPS die, I'm not gonna calculate that because then it comes down to MP ticks and cast time since both healers used swiftcast and we can't assume one of the DPS can rez (All party comps are viable!). So DPS have a large margin for error.

Healers heal. If one healer dies, the party's total healing drops by 9% for the duration of their weakness debuff (counting mitigation from tank/DPS).
If both healers die, then things are bad and there's a good chance of a wipe unless a DPS can raise or there's a godly tank.

By this objectively terrible and poorly thought-out metric, a healer has roughly double the personal responsibility of a DPS.

I don't have any argument or point to make actually I don't know why I did this.

[NobleWinter]

An interesting point. I wanted to do some numbers, so:

DPS do damage. If one DPS dies, then the party's total damage drops by about 4% during their weakness debuff (counting damage from tanks and healers).
If two DPS die, this doubles to 8%.
If three DPS die, I'm not gonna calculate that because then it comes down to MP ticks and cast time since both healers used swiftcast and we can't assume one of the DPS can rez (All party comps are viable!). So DPS have a large margin for error.

Healers heal. If one healer dies, the party's total healing drops by 9% for the duration of their weakness debuff (counting mitigation from tank/DPS).
If both healers die, then things are bad and there's a good chance of a wipe unless a DPS can raise or there's a godly tank.

By this objectively terrible and poorly thought-out metric, a healer has roughly double the personal responsibility of a DPS.

I don't have any argument or point to make actually I don't know why I did this.

Even if you can't do the numbers on your own it's easy to feel the difference in personal responsibility. I joined a practice party for the newest extreme as a Scholar and it was innumerable deaths across the board. The one thing that stood out to me though is that the only time we wiped was when I personally died after about 12 pulls and 6 of which reached enrage. I was able to carry the party through almost the entire fight rezzing tanks, cohealer, and DPS over and over. It's a crazy amount for power to have in one player and very daunting too. I can see why people get overwhelmed with healing when everyone's mistakes are yours to fix and people are quick to notice they weren't "healed enough" but stay very quiet when they receive their fourth or fifth revive.

[Renathras]

Correlation does not imply causation. A lot of people healed last tier to see how EW was compared to ShB, and once they saw that it was no different, they hopped ship. I'm an example of one of those players, and even if healing requirements are more intense this tier, it's too little too late for me at this point. I'm not hopping back onto healer when I can play a role they actually care for. I'll come back when I don't spam Broil 150+ times a fight.

Correlation does not PROVE causation, but things that ARE causally related are going to be correlated as well. I know healers who have quit in 6.2 that healed from 5.0 to present or even started back before ShB. They exist as well. It seems overall that the drop off is, at least in part, due to the change in encounter design difficulty/"challenge".

There wasn't Healer shortages during Asphodelos and Healer shortages this tier only for P8S. Do the math.
People asked for more stuff to heal and they listened, now no one want to heal lmao.

This.

This is the elephant in the room that people don't want to admit because it...kinda weakens their argument.

Saying "people were coddled and so aren't used to it" is a deflection, not a counter, since it doesn't change the fact those people are quitting healing and, if the pattern continues, won't come back. And clearly, this pool of healers wanting a challenge and to "not be bored" are not filling the gap.

Meaning Square is very likely going to revert the change in the next tier.

The only consistent complaints I've heard are that PF parties make everything hell (both from the side of healers complaining about party mitigation, and from others complaining about healers not keeping up with the bleeds). Meanwhile in coordinated statics, the primary complaint is that healing is too easy/predictable/reliable, and that becomes incredibly boring after the initial prog. Giving healers more interesting tools (especially damage focused ones) is the obvious solution for veterans in statics.

I think the problem here is those last three words.

TL;DR: If the devs want people to enjoy healing in PF, they don't need to make healing any easier, but they need to make it less dependent on random party members (and job balance) and less snowball-y when things go awry.

...and thus I agree with basically EVERYTHING else that you said.

As a non-static (I sometimes sub in for the C static in my FC if they have a person out for the week) PF healer, I feel this post in my soul. People talk about never using a GCD heal, and I'll looking at the DRG who died after the RDM died after the BRD died and BarbieEx is about to throw out a raidwide while they're low on health and I have Cure 2 as the only tool to get them back up while I'm waiting for the other healer to finish raising since the Bene already went on the tank who I raised after the failed tank swap.

It's a VERY different environment than coordinated groups.

[Renathras]

exactly what we've been saying, adding more healing requirements excludes the less skilled players who will struggle to keep up. adding more dps intricacy during the downtime allows those less skilled players to keep up in terms of 'not causing a wipe due to not healing enough' but they'll just do a little less damage. on the flipside it lets the skilled gamers express their skill. literally noone loses if we add more dps intricacy, but there is plenty of people who stand to lose if we make savage slap like Living Liquid TEA version

How much less?

If it's so much less their parties aren't making Enrages, then it's still causing wipes.

If it's only a tiny bit less, then the people working their butts off for that extra smidge will be pissed their work isn't being rewarded.

They would have to redesign the entire game. Every single encounter. Every single dungeon, trial and raid.. The encounters were (are) made with healers constantly doing damage in mind. It would make a lot more sense to give healers a more interesting (not overly complex) dps tool kit. Or at least some of them.

This isn't true.

Healers were GCD focused (and WHM had no functional oGCD heals to speak of) for all of ARR, and in HW, their oGCDs were few and far between. So the ARR and HW encounters are already designed based on this, as are all the dungeons. ALL dungeons in the game can be cleared without healers doing any damage, and in ARR and HW, encounters were supposedly outright designed for healers dealing no damage. This probably changed (ironically) in ShB. But everything without an enrage can be cleared without "healers constantly doing damage", so that was hardly what was "in mind" when they were designed, tuned, and balanced.

First off, aren't you claiming to be just as skilled as I am the entire time?

No.

Since you brought it up originally to attack me, I looked up your numbers just as you did mine and found they were comparable. You did it to try and insist I have no place in this conversation (which I countered by noting my skill is more akin to the average of the playerbase and so is actually the better basis to use for Job decisions), but the irony is you're just as "bad" as I am, so to speak.

And to have played a discipline priest?

And RIFT Chloromancer. Don't forget RIFT Chloromancer.

The answer is simple: I don't like that type of gameplay. Even back then, I did it as a side class and neither were my mains. In WoW, my mains were Resto Druid and Holy Paladin, and rarely Holy Priest as well as Protection Paladin and (Guardian) Feral Druid before they made the split.

At this point, the way I see it is, if I'm going to DPS, I'm going to get on a DPS Job. Or I'll play WAR, since if you get your way, SMN and WAR will both be more fun, easier, and with less blame and punishment than what you want to make healers into. Why would I punish myself by playing the horrible Jobs you want to force on me when I have those other options? WAR's 30 sec refresh is actually LESS PUNISHING than Dia since you can stack it twice and not overcap it on the refresh. Not to mention the Devs have clearly shown they favor DPS players as the first-class citizens that are given the easier, more enjoyable gameplay and not punished for it. Their communities don't constantly plot ways to make the Jobs more miserable to play like the healer community does for god only knows what reason.

And no, healing isn't easier than a DPS rotation. Yet again you confuse your subjective feeling with objective fact, not realizing other people feel differently. And I don't mean this as an attack, I mean it as a statement of fact: Other people feel differently. MANY DPS players will tell you they can't heal. Maybe they have the capacity, but they believe healing is far harder. Difficulty is almost entirely a subjective thing. SMN and WAR are both as easy or more easy to play than healers to me, and BRD, MCH, DNC, GNB, RDM are all roughly comparable. I just don't like the focus and mindset. But if you're forcing me to be a DPS player, I'd rather do it on a Job designed for it like SMN or on a tank like WAR that has an easier rotation than what you want for WHM and the other healers.

The healer shortage WILL get worse. We can already see it now.

which is why i'm saying make the healing simple and intuitive, and add depth to the dps side of things, so people can ease themselves into doing more and more damage as they get more comfortable

The problem with this is that UNLESS the gap between the flawless DPS healer and the lowest DPS healer is very small, then the lower ones cannot clear content. They won't be able to "ease" themselves into anything.

We're looking at a healer shortage because healing became "more exciting", and the people calling it boring are still refusing to play it while the people who liked it before are quitting - that is, all the stuff I've warned you might happen we're seeing in real time. It's not "people got used" to how things were. It's "people LIKED" how things were. This forum is not representative of the FFXIV playerbase as a whole. At this point, that's very clear.

Mr Happy was asked a question on Monday's With Mr Happy yesterday. I think his answer is instructive:

https://youtu.be/bfU5J6OQdwA?t=555

The super short answer was that he said Gordias nearly killed the game - a second time - but check his comment out yourself and listen to his reasoning.

yeh i cant imagine doing such a thing that would be crazy...looks at SHB release

Which should be instructive and a lesson in what not to do...

first off, you know what, lets do it. lets have a simple healer that is just 'press 1 to apply 30s dot, press 2 to spam nuke for 13 GCDs, repeat'. you know, for the people who enjoy the current design. BUT, lets make it a new healer,

Why?

We already have one that does this perfectly. If we introduced a new one, it would basically be "copy and paste WHM right now, but make people level up a new Job and it would start at level 80 so wouldn't be available for entry healers". How does that make more sense? Especially since, as I've said and I think most people here DO agree, WHM is in better shape right now than it was during any prior expansion.

It would make far more sense to add a new healer like GEO and make it fill in that spot for you.

after all, if we're meant to be trying to compromise here,

The part you're having trouble with here is the compromise is CHANGING THE HEALERS AT ALL. Your side is "change them all", the opposed side is "change none of them any", so the compromise is anything in between. Changing 3 and leaving 1 alone and adding a 5th to your liking would not only be a compromise, but a compromise STRONGLY favoring your side/position. I wouldn't mind it being SGE, but WHM is the logical and rational choice. Doing anything else is illogical when you consider WHM is already the "simple" one, is the most played BECAUSE it is the simple one (most played at level cap, so the "starts at level 1" doesn't apply as a counter), and is available for entry and learning healers from the start. It's the only choice that makes sense, honestly.

it's also going to be viewed by the community as 'the idiots play this one'

Only by idiots. WHM and WAR are already looked at that way, and are not locked out of PFs. What locks things out is if they do low damage. If they do comparable, they aren't locked out. RDM wasn't locked out in ShB when it was doing passable damage because most people on RDM could pull better numbers than the average BLM or SMN could, even though they had a higher theoretical cap...not every player could actually achive it, so most PF groups were better off bringing a RDM instead. Indeed, in FFXIV's history, Jobs have never been blacklisted for being "too easy". They're only ever blacklisted for having low damage. 6.0 WHM was different because it had to focus on damage alone to do comparable damage, making its co-healers do all the damage AND didn't have MP to last through longer fights even with everything going perfectly. Its difficulty didn't change from 6.0 to 6.1.

again as others have said, if you take a simple class you can only play it simply.

And what, EXACTLY, is the problem with this?

If people don't like that the Job doesn't "have room to grow", they...play a different Job. Just like if someone doesn't like the playstyle. This isn't a problem.

but anyway, the other reason we're asking for a little more interactivity on healer is

...is kind of irrelevant considering I'm saying let's make 3 of the healers more interactive. You don't have to convince me that some healers should be more interactive and complex. You're arguing a point I'm not contesting. What you have to convince me of is why ALL of the healers have to be made that way. A position you even already abandoned when you said "let's make a new healer that's that instead", which means you already recognize having one that isn't complex and "interactive" would be fine. I think the issue here is that you want your complex gameplay to be available on all 4 of our healers because you like their aesthetics and want to have your cake and eat it, too, basically...but if we introduced a new healer, what happens when you decide you like it's aesthetics and want it to be tailored to your liking, too?

At some point, when dealing with communities of people you have to compromise.

And, as I've noted, WHM is already more or less comparable to WAR in terms of complexity. WAR just presses its other buttons more because of the nature of melee "filler" having 1-2- combos, which is just needless busiwork, to the point many people want that to go away and be like PvP where it's just press one button 3 times. Indeed, we've already seen this in some cases, like RDM's finishers and PLD's magic phase finishers.

On the topic of WAR, though, a lot of people, it turns out, actually LIKE that. The ones that don't mostly play DRK, as it has a very similar playstyle but...different.

if they are grey on PLD, they're grey on WAR.

This is absolutely incorrect.

I can play WHM and get blue parses. I hop on SGE and get greys. The "fundamentals" are presumably the same, but what's different? Whatever is is different enough to make that distinction. Take a SAM player who parses 40-60 and stick them on BLM. They probably are going to parse gray. Put them on NIN instead if you think Melee to Caster is an unfair comparison...and they'll probably also gray on NIN. Fundamentals are the difference between clearing and not, but not the difference between blue and gray. (For the record, I think the difference is that SGE has so many oGCDs, in parts of fights I tend to triple weave, and I also tend to forget Plegma exists or am not in melee range so it overcaps; I believe people who parse higher as a whole manage those things better, but WHM doesn't have those issues for...whatever reason. Or, at least, I don't have those with WHM. Probably because Misery is tied to Solace/Rapture instead of its own independent thing, and that Solace/Rapture don't have a CD per se like Pneuma does. Even Dia uptime is simplier since it doesn't require a prepatory command - much as I like the Eukrasia system for hotbar economy, it's juuuust different enough, especially for weaving and such. And those differences allow SGE mains [I'm more SGE adjacent - I can play it well enough and clear stuff with it, but I play it a lot less] to get green/blue where someone who isn't is getting grays.) The irony is, I do greens on SCH fairly consistently. So you'd think that would translate to SGE, but for whatever reason...nope.

Also: Remember that gray is COMPETENT - "A clear is a clear", as someone, I think Misshapen Chair, has said. But it doesn't mean they're AS competent nor that they're putting out the same performance as they would be on their main.

yeh, we dont want the bad lilies back, which is why, as mentioned above, when people say they want SB healers back, they are referring mainly to the DPS side of things. Aero 3,

I'm honestly not sure. Aero 3 was not some god-tier ability. It would change nothing if we got it back. I feel people saying that are more a "foot on the door" kind of thing that once they get that, they still likely won't be satisfied and will ask for more and more. In practice, Aero 3 shouldn't be a gain on single targets anyway, and in modern AOE fights in dungeons, I'm not sure it would be a DPS gain since you want to open with 3 Holy casts anyway (for the mitigation of the Stuns), and after that, they aren't going to live long enough to make Aero 3 worth using. And why even Aero? WHM isn't a CNJ. Hasn't been for ages.

i already did in a thread i made.

That question was more to Ty since he likes theorycrafting Job ideas.

You're welcome to do it as well, if you like. But I was more tossing it into his court to see what he might do with it.

as an aside, i personally don't think a GEO would ever be done right in this game, as it'd have to sacrifice too much of what makes GEO a GEO to make it function here. no terrain based attack modification because of the 'ley lines dilemma' and boss mechanics forcing you to certain locations at certain times, so it'd likely end up as a bland, caster-role, earth-wind-water flavoured reskin of BLM or something.

Eh, I could see that, but you could argue the same thing for RDM, and it plays distinctly from both BLM and WHM.

[GrimGale]

It's a VERY different environment than coordinated groups.

And yet Jobs in a coordinated group share the same kit than jobs in an uncoordinated one.

This situation feels like the game, especially healers classes could benefit from Talent trees and freedom to customize certain parts of a class's kit to serve specific purposes.

Then we could actually make everyone happy. Veterans that don't need additional healing tools could slot in strong flashy spells or utility to make filler dps more interesting, while less experienced or PF healers could slot it more emergency heals and better recovery tools.

[Renathras]

And yet Jobs in a coordinated group share the same kit than jobs in an uncoordinated one.

This situation feels like the game, especially healers classes could benefit from Talent trees and freedom to customize certain parts of a class's kit to serve specific purposes.

Then we could actually make everyone happy. Veterans that don't need additional healing tools could slot in strong flashy spells or utility to make filler dps more interesting, while less experienced or PF healers could slot it more emergency heals and better recovery tools.

Honestly, I don't disagree.

It's been a few expansions since I played (and the OG Vanilla through Wrath talent trees will always have a special place in my heart), but the modern WoW talents tend to have, per each row, an active use option (new ability), a modifier option (something that changes or adds an effect to an existing spell), and a passive option (something generally up all the time on its own). The latter two, obviously, don't add any new buttons but allow the player to somewhat tailor their playstyle. Generally, all three are balanced to provide roughly the same throughput, with the active abilities working better for burst, the passive abilities for sustain, and the modifier abilities to shift the playstyle a bit (for example, the Holy Priest has one that has a proc chance for their Flash Heal, which can basically be thought of as a better Freecure as it procs of their spam damage spell as well; they have another that echos the healing of their single target heals on the last person they healed with a single target heal, effectively letting them get "cleave" healing on party members)

It's a useful alternative since GENERALLY no one option is "the best" (when they are, there can be problems, though...), so all of them are equally viable and players just gravitate to the ones that they like better. This lets some players choose to have more buttons and others choose to have less while both deal the same general damage, generate the same healing, and for a third type of player, they can modify their playstyle to be something a bit different than the other two as well. And, of course, players can mix-and-match, picking the passive from one tier, the modifier from another, and the active ability from a third.

...but, FFXIV is......not built for that, to say the least. The Cross-Class system was supposed to allow that, but ended up being too limiting in some ways and too freeing (ARR MRD builds) in others, so was nerfed and then replace with the Role system, which originally allowed some choice...except there was always a "right" choice, so that was eventually discarded as well.

.

EDIT: I suppose this is why we have more of a "You play the Job you like best" mentality instead. It DOES help that you can have all Jobs on a single character, so you aren't locked to classes like in WoW. One could argue that our Jobs are our specs, in that sense.

It should also be noted that not even everyone feels the same in these categories. I know people who are PF heroes that love AST. I can't imagine why since I would wanna pull my hair out, but they are the kind of people that revel in the chaos. On the other hand, I know Static healers that love WHM because it's simple, effective, and rocksteady. They trust their heals and they know that they have a straighforward rotation they can competently execute in Dia/Misery/Glarespam, and they enjoy that.

So even with us looking at these groups like this, we have to realize that both kinds still exist within those groups. People that want complex and chaotic healing play AST in PF and people that want simple and straightforward gameplay still play WHM in coordinated groups.