Healers need an overhaul

[novamare]

Big disclaimer: I am not a game designer, and this may be a terrible idea; feel free to (preferably kindly lol) tell me why or suggest improvements.

Personally when I play healer, I want to heal. Obviously I dps as well, but when I think of a more engaging healing job, I don't really think I want a beefier dps rotation as much as I wish the healing itself were more complex. In addition to additional incoming damage (which is a step in the right direction), I want my heals to mean something more than just "party not dead" I guess lol.

So could a healer job have a similar feature to ninja's mudra system? As in, a healer is rewarded (with a fat dps attack proc, for example) if they string together the correct series of healing abilities (or categories of abilities like shields, pure heals, buffs/debuffs, etc.). Or if they use X many unique healing abilities within a given time frame. Or another system that prioritizes strategic combinations of abilities beyond what's needed to manage the fight mechanics.

The idea would be to reward healers for hitting a "rotation" of some sort--for healing if not dpsing--in such a way that encourages players to strategize beyond merely reacting to fight mechanics (or party mistakes). And sometimes those priorities may be in conflict: A series of raidwides is coming up, can you map that rotation around it or can the rotation cover the damage, or do you need to give up the rotation bonus attack to keep everyone alive? Are you willing to overheal if it means you get your big dps button? Are you willing to drop your dps gcd if any of the requisite abilities in the rotation are non-dps spells on the gcd, but the finisher an overall dps gain?

That way, yes, healers get more dps, but they get it by engaging more deeply with their healing kit.

[IDontPetLalas]

Big disclaimer: I am not a game designer, and this may be a terrible idea; feel free to (preferably kindly lol) tell me why or suggest improvements.

Personally when I play healer, I want to heal. Obviously I dps as well, but when I think of a more engaging healing job, I don't really think I want a beefier dps rotation as much as I wish the healing itself were more complex. In addition to additional incoming damage (which is a step in the right direction), I want my heals to mean something more than just "party not dead" I guess lol.

So could a healer job have a similar feature to ninja's mudra system? As in, a healer is rewarded (with a fat dps attack proc, for example) if they string together the correct series of healing abilities (or categories of abilities like shields, pure heals, buffs/debuffs, etc.). Or if they use X many unique healing abilities within a given time frame. Or another system that prioritizes strategic combinations of abilities beyond what's needed to manage the fight mechanics.

The idea would be to reward healers for hitting a "rotation" of some sort--for healing if not dpsing--in such a way that encourages players to strategize beyond merely reacting to fight mechanics (or party mistakes). And sometimes those priorities may be in conflict: A series of raidwides is coming up, can you map that rotation around it or can the rotation cover the damage, or do you need to give up the rotation bonus attack to keep everyone alive? Are you willing to overheal if it means you get your big dps button? Are you willing to drop your dps gcd if any of the requisite abilities in the rotation are non-dps spells on the gcd, but the finisher an overall dps gain?

That way, yes, healers get more dps, but they get it by engaging more deeply with their healing kit.

Let me just ask one question, how would this apply when there is no series of raidwides? Because that's the case in normal content, and unless all of the existing normal content is reworked and the future content, there's fairly long intervals between raidwides, so this rewarding DPS isn't come around very often. So there isn't much payback at at all, and where is the value in overhealing in the meantime?

OK, sorry that was two questions, my bad

[ty_taurus]

Big disclaimer: I am not a game designer, and this may be a terrible idea; feel free to (preferably kindly lol) tell me why or suggest improvements.

Personally when I play healer, I want to heal. Obviously I dps as well, but when I think of a more engaging healing job, I don't really think I want a beefier dps rotation as much as I wish the healing itself were more complex. In addition to additional incoming damage (which is a step in the right direction), I want my heals to mean something more than just "party not dead" I guess lol.

So could a healer job have a similar feature to ninja's mudra system? As in, a healer is rewarded (with a fat dps attack proc, for example) if they string together the correct series of healing abilities (or categories of abilities like shields, pure heals, buffs/debuffs, etc.). Or if they use X many unique healing abilities within a given time frame. Or another system that prioritizes strategic combinations of abilities beyond what's needed to manage the fight mechanics.

The idea would be to reward healers for hitting a "rotation" of some sort--for healing if not dpsing--in such a way that encourages players to strategize beyond merely reacting to fight mechanics (or party mistakes). And sometimes those priorities may be in conflict: A series of raidwides is coming up, can you map that rotation around it or can the rotation cover the damage, or do you need to give up the rotation bonus attack to keep everyone alive? Are you willing to overheal if it means you get your big dps button? Are you willing to drop your dps gcd if any of the requisite abilities in the rotation are non-dps spells on the gcd, but the finisher an overall dps gain?

That way, yes, healers get more dps, but they get it by engaging more deeply with their healing kit.

It's tricky to lock damage behind healing. It can be done, certainly, but it's not a good idea to encourage overhealing just to get your damage buttons. We see Afflatus Misery suffers from some of this, especially in fights with multiple instances of downtime like DSR where WHM is pressured to save and burn 3 lilies for downtime windows to gain a significant amount of DPS. Damage taken is also something most content significantly lacks, and if there's too much pressure to use healing in the pursuit of damage, a lot of that isn't going to be used for actual healing, and that's not going to produce a result that I think you'd actually enjoy as a healer. I think your example of chaining healing together wouldn't exactly work that well because it requires multiple instances of healing be done in a short period of time, which most instances of damage only require a single instance of healing.

That being said, there are ways we could be creative with how DPS is returned through healing. I've done a fair amount of theorycrafting on healer reworks over on the healer forums (here if you're curious). Why I bring this up is I've taken some time reworking AST to be a healer that spends most of their GCDs on support instead of Malefic spam by making the cards GCD actions that allow you to essentially "lay trap cards" on your party, then activate them all at once for the card's respective buffs, all while passively generating stars that deal Malefic-potency damage that you can cause other party members to activate for you. The DoT also got replaced with a button that just gives you multiple stars. In any given minute, you have 24 GCDs available before Spell speed is calculated, and every minute at max level, this card system would use 13 of those casts minimum, not including when you activate your buffs. Having a job like this could give players one healer that provides a more support-oriented gameplay style with less focus on offense so that anyone who really dislikes the shear amount of DPSing that healers do in FFXIV has something that may provide a better experience for them, especially with the other healers getting more offensive tools.

[ForsakenRoe]

At the end of the day, having a more engaging healing kit first requires more stuff to heal. The damage in this game is so scripted and so predictable that it's more or less impossible to have an engaging healing kit with the current fight design. They would need to revamp fights to do more periodic damage to more people more often. And I don't see them revamping their entire fight structure for one role. For comparison's sake, check out this video from a high end boss in WoW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooraW9sZVuI It's from a healer PoV. This video has the player health bars in the bottom middle, note how much damage the group takes and how that compares to a raid in FF14

Because of that, in my opinion, the only cost effective way they could make healers fun is to give them a few more dps buttons to worry about in the down time between heals. Nothing crazy, just 1-3 more then currently.

Even then, they're playing holy priest in this POV, the 'simple healer' analogous to our WHM. But I can also see a Holy Paladin on the meters, who generates Holy Power (kinda like aetherflow, stacks to 5, costs 3 to use a heal skill). How does that Healer Paladin generate Holy Power? By hitting the enemy with a very large hammer. Crusader Strike, Judgement, Holy Shock (which can be used as a heal or a damage skill!), weaving building Holy Power with these attacks vs spending on healing is an integral part of the gameplay. Discipline Priest we all know about, do damage heal ally we've heard many times. Mistweaver Monk has HOTs that can have their duration extended by using Rising Sun Kick, and RSK's 10sec CD can be reduced by Blackout Kick. And BOK can be in turn be made to strike multiple times, by using Tiger Palm. In a sense, a 123 combo, but it interacts with your healing.

Heck in WOW healers are expected to do damage, you don't see it as much in that vid because there's enough healing required to keep the healers healing instead of throwing damage, but you do see them put Holy Fire (DOT) up at the start while they have the chance. In M+ healers are expected to contribute to damage if they can because it's a timed mode. In Vanilla WOW, Paladins had to Judgement the enemy to keep Judgement of Light on the boss, for people to get a passive 'you hit the enemy, you get a bit of hp back' effect from. Priests could throw wand shots to get Judgement of Wisdom procs to restore mana, Shamans contribute more support than actual damage with totems (Windfury, Grace of Air, Strength of Earth, etc).

I hear lots of people say 'healers should ONLY heal' but never WHEN this was the 'accepted truth'. It's not true here, it's not true in Retail or Classic WOW (As long as the boss dies and it's not overly burdening the other healers, I doubt anyone's getting kicked from a Naxx 25 for doing damage as a healer). I've even made a character just to test this back in SHB, and when I started as CNJ, the very first solo instance I hit (where you see the sword in the tree trunk), it was not completeable. Adds came in, and I was told to hit them by Yda/Papalymo. If I left those adds alone, Yda/Pap just softlocked after killing the 'non-adds' that were there at the start of the fight. It was not possible to complete the instance by 'only healing'. Furthermore, the adds DID attack Yda/Pap, but they did not fight back, which implies to me that they were coded specifically to not interact with those adds, forcing the player to use damage spells. It's intentional that the player is forced to use damage skills in that solo instance, it's meant to teach the healer player 'Do damage as part of your role as a healer'. But apparently some players saw this tutorial and said 'that won't stop me, because I've already decided what 'being a healer' means in my mind, and this tutorial conflicts with that mental image!'

So someone who believes that 'healers should only have to heal', can you show me where that's the case, AND my damage as a healer is not 'helpful'? That is, if the 'expectation' is that I just heal and afk, but I can make the boss fight end faster by autoattacking too, it doesn't count. Examples where I'd Heal, Buff allies and afk only! Targetting the boss is forbidden!

Hope healers roll up to FanFest in droves.

If I knew it'd get into the game, I'd do all the potency balancing and stuff for my WHM and SGE ideas at least (SCH and AST ones aren't so solid atm) and just give it to him for free. But Fanfest is likely too late in the dev cycle to affect any massive changes so I doubt it'd help. All I need for WHM is 2 more buttons (4 if we're removing the pure/barrier split), which can easily be reclaimed by just having cure upgrade to cure2, and medica upgrade to medica2. Doing so would let me add a new damage GCD, retune the potency/duration on the DOT so we use it more often than just twice a minute, and add a new 'reward' for doing damage, in the form of a powerful AOE heal, which refunds it's lost damage via Quake Tornado and Flood (which lots of people seem to want to see)

I can't find where someone said 'we cant really have 'damage causes healing' type healers because XYZ reasons' but while I'm shilling, I believe my SGE idea gives an idea of how we could have the beginnings of one, by shifting the MP costs from the GCDs to the Augments like Zoe, Soteria, etc. This would also align more with that slide at Fanfest that said 'Able to temporarily augment their abilities', Eukrasia doesn't do it for many of us, and 'the next GCD' doesn't really seem like a good use of 'temporary' (even if it's technically true). Rather, my idea would allow the next 4 skills to be augmented with each augment, giving the class a set of selfbuffs to juggle durations of. It only needs one new button too (PanKardia or whatever you'd call it, AOE Kardia for 4 GCDs)

That being said, there are ways we could be creative with how DPS is returned through healing. I've done a fair amount of theorycrafting on healer reworks over on the healer forums (here if you're curious).

If everyone who's displeased with healers atm, came up with ideas and we stick em all together we could probably cover all 4 healers pretty easily. I've got fairly solid ideas (i think) for WHM and SGE that I'd refine if SE wanted to use em, Taurus got an AST idea I'm 100% on board with (because my idea has about as about as much meat on it's bones as I do IRL). Lets prove SE wrong with their 'we didnt really know what to do with SCH' and come up with ideas to change that up too, and then we've got all 4 covered

[Shurrikhan]

Even then, they're playing holy priest in this POV, the 'simple healer' analogous to our WHM.

And even Holy Priest has, since Legion pre-patch, often had some of the highest % of GCD uptime spent on attacks in Challenge or M+ due to damage suppression and/or CDR per attack, with what GCD healing that can be saved to be used on the run between fights saved for those times (likewise for CDR on nuke heals). Regardless of which healing spec you look at, there's a decent bit of cross-over, with some designs better hitting sweet spots than others. That being said, it's important to see also what hasn't worked or has been made otherwise suspiciously absent from damage<->healing crossovers.

I can discuss that more if anyone wants to take the conversation in that direction, but I'll be brief for now:

For instance, one thing you won't see there is big damage spells locked behind heals; it wasn't lost on most other MMOs that if there's little to heal, and those heals have uptime costs, you'd just end up with this kind of awkward playflow wherein heals are popped pre-fight just to build the nuke for said fight. As far as existing extremes go, too, Discipline priest is largely uninteresting imho (especially before it was given Sins of the Many) because it had so little swing in its healing output available to it; its crossover was excessive to the point of leaving the experience feeling flat and its healing basically a passive offshoot of a Shadow Priest knockoff. And even it still has more direct options available to it for good reason. Tools like Divine Star, old Chi Torpedo, Chi Burst, and especially Divine Prism, on the other hand? Awesome. (Yes, I'd say the same about Pnuema, Assize, etc., if there were frequently a reason to hold onto either at refreshed CD/capped-charges specifically for their burst healing or damage.) Smite (or later, Mind Blast) damage suppression, or Denounce (WoD Holy PLD spammable spell attack) preventing crits? Really nice. Holy Power generation? Sometimes a little clunkier than just the baseline CDR lines of Legion Holy, but positive on the whole. There are a handful more good example from GW2, and likely from many other MMOs.

Given the abundance of examples that would create a playflow more interesting that what we have now without introducing any particular problems, I'd agree that'd be a good direction to go further in. I just hope they don't try to copy-paste without any analysis, take the most barebone route as usual, or just slap some arbitrary irritant atop it just to spin an "XIV style".

That being said, I agree with Rolder50 that the still-larger issue (especially if/after having given, as they suggested, some 1-3 more dps actions than current) is just how little and how scripted incoming damage is in this game. Even having fixed damage, XIV healers will still be comparatively dull healers so long as the healing experience is itself painfully unengaging.

[Rolder50]

Personally when I play healer, I want to heal. Obviously I dps as well, but when I think of a more engaging healing job, I don't really think I want a beefier dps rotation as much as I wish the healing itself were more complex. In addition to additional incoming damage (which is a step in the right direction), I want my heals to mean something more than just "party not dead" I guess lol.

At the end of the day, having a more engaging healing kit first requires more stuff to heal. The damage in this game is so scripted and so predictable that it's more or less impossible to have an engaging healing kit with the current fight design. They would need to revamp fights to do more periodic damage to more people more often. And I don't see them revamping their entire fight structure for one role. For comparison's sake, check out this video from a high end boss in WoW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooraW9sZVuI It's from a healer PoV. This video has the player health bars in the bottom middle, note how much damage the group takes and how that compares to a raid in FF14

Because of that, in my opinion, the only cost effective way they could make healers fun is to give them a few more dps buttons to worry about in the down time between heals. Nothing crazy, just 1-3 more then currently.