Differentiating healer identities

[ty_taurus]

First and foremost, all healers are damage-focused healers. This is not a SGE thing; this is a FFXIV thing. This cannot be changed without literally redesigning the game's encounter design from the ground up and remaking every single fight in the game up to this point. It's like wanting to tear down the load-baring wall in your home. You can't do it or the house will literally collapse on top of you. You'd need to spend an exorbitant amount of money reworking the house's support structure to take down that wall.

That is just how this game is built. No amount of kicking or screaming is going to change that. Even with how neutered the healers are, DPSing is still the dominant metric of healer viability, and is still what healers spend almost, if not entirely all their time casting with the GCD. The only way to effectively move forward with healer design and give them proper identity is to acknowledge that and plan around it rather than trying to ignore it barrel through it by any means necessary. The road is curvy, but SE is driving the healer car in a straight line ignoring every curve and constantly driving over the curb--whatever curb is in the way of "pure healing."

By accepting the nature of how healers are designed to function in this game, we can start to actually address their GCD gameplay to have identity which none of the healers currently have in this regard outside of very occasional uses of Afflatus Misery, Phlegma, and to a lesser extent, Ruin II. You can even find alternative ways for healers to apply their damage rather than directly attacking enemies. The lilies is a very simple example of this, but more can absolutely be done and it doesn't necessarily have to be locked behind healing either. Other forms of support, utility, or unique mechanics can also accomplish similar solutions.

Overall damage output or overall healing output are not metrics that can easily offer an established job identity. Having higher healing output has never really mattered because all healers are expected to be able to heal through any fight. Having higher damage can get really dangerous in terms of balance if one healer starts dwarfing the other healers and pushing them out of viability for high end content. That said, there are some possible exceptions. AST's Macrocosmos shows how highly potent healing can substantially make specific mechanics easier, however, not all fights have mechanics like that and it can still be healed up by any other comp of healers even if it's more challenging to do so. BLM's relationship with SMN and RDM has generally felt healthy for a lot of players being the one caster who cannot raise or offer any other forms of utility outside of Addle which all 3 have anyway, and thus if offers a much higher damage threshold. There's less room for error for the party, but the reward is a notably faster clear. SGE could follow in this path theoretically, offering no other forms of utility outside of its normal healing output and necessary mitigation, but instead being a much heavier DPS healer. The trade off becomes whether you want more damage or more room for error. On the topic of Utility, this is where it's much easier to give each job a more defined identity. Expedient has been quite a blessing for SCH, offering it a very unique tool for increasing your team's margin for error on movement-heavy mechanics.

[elioaiko]

To echo was Ty said, healer design cannot be changed unless they change literally everything about the combat system which they will not do for the healer role because they already don't have time for us.

And there's no guarantee that changing the combat system to accommodate "pure healer" design would be better.

Truth is that tank and healer roles in any online game will always be small compared to the DPS counterpart. This is in part to how DPS is considered the easiest from a glance. Your job is to do damage because that's the only thing you need to do and mainly need to focus on staying alive to do that damage. It's stigma that DPS has no responsibilities because healers and tanks are the first to get blamed if anything happens.

DPS are in fact the hardest game because if you're not doing damage in an acceptable range, you're literally deadweight. You don't provide healing or mitigation like a tank and healer will.

Aside from that healer design dictates that healers need to push for more damage while keeping the party alive. You can't just heal over and over again because overheal is pointless and a waste of MP and time. Nearly all difficulty is reliant on a DPS check and a timer (enrage).

Healers can either do nothing and heal to their hearts content, adding 15-20 minutes extra to a run or they can spend the time they don't have to heal into pushing the damage so it can die faster because that is the best mitigation. If it dies faster, it can't hurt you.

Therein likes the problem. Healer identity is banking on gimmicks in their kits. But how meaningful is said gimmick is another matter entirely.

But a healer can't be too unique because it's either useless (pre-Shb AST) or too powerful (pre-Shb SCH). People want balance across healers and equal grounding so healers have to have a niche that is meaningful enough (Divination, Chain) or insignificant (Astrodyne) so they can't step over each other. It's a hard path, because you make a healer too unique and it's either DoA or too strong.

[Allegor]

I've never quite understood where the "high raw potency healing" image for WHM comes from:

- Lustrate and Druochole aren't that far below Afflatus Solace, Cure II, and Tetragrammaton.
- Indomitability and Ixochole are the same potency as Afflatus Rapture and Medica.
- Adloquium, Succor, Eukrasian Diagnosis, and Eukrasian Prognosis actually come out ahead of Cure II and Medica if you include the shields.

Or from a different angle, any combination of healers has to be able to deal with "oops, everyone's at 1% HP" mechanics in Duty Finder, so WHM's allegedly high potency heals don't set it apart in the exact scenario where high potency heals ought to mean something, because the party can't rely on having a WHM in the first place.

I wish WHM were the healer counterpart of BLM, but for me, WHM simply lacks in everything that actually makes playing BLM interesting and fun.

I have the feeling WHM's "strong burst healing" niche was only true for ARR and maybe while leveling in HW but the reputation stuck until today. If anything, WHM's only real advantage over SCH and SGE is that their heals don't have limited charges, even if they have to gcd to use them (which likely mean things took a nosedive, but I digress)

[KarmaYraeon]

I've never quite understood where the "high raw potency healing" image for WHM comes from:

- Lustrate and Druochole aren't that far below Afflatus Solace, Cure II, and Tetragrammaton.
- Indomitability and Ixochole are the same potency as Afflatus Rapture and Medica.
- Adloquium, Succor, Eukrasian Diagnosis, and Eukrasian Prognosis actually come out ahead of Cure II and Medica if you include the shields.

Or from a different angle, any combination of healers has to be able to deal with "oops, everyone's at 1% HP" mechanics in Duty Finder, so WHM's allegedly high potency heals don't set it apart in the exact scenario where high potency heals ought to mean something, because the party can't rely on having a WHM in the first place.

I wish WHM were the healer counterpart of BLM, but for me, WHM simply lacks in everything that actually makes playing BLM interesting and fun.

It isn't so much that white mage has high raw healing potency, and moreso that it feels like white mage could and probably should lean more into that style of play. A more straight forward healer that is at least neutral in terms of doing its gcd healing, perhaps beyond just the lilies feeding into afflatus misery. The idea of it playing as a mirror to black mage where it swaps between a heal-focused phase and a damage-focused phase that feed into eachother is kind of a stretch, but something along the lines of healing being at least net neutral for more than just 3 lilies would be nice. Like lilies taking 30 seconds to generate instead of 20, but then casting non-healing gcds reduce the time left to your next lily. Maybe using non-lily gcds improve the potency of following damage spells and vise versa along a similar vein as astral fire and umbral ice stacks.

The idea is general that it would be nice for the class to feed more into that long cast, high power fantasy as a healer, not necessarily that it currently sits there. Sage and scholar tend to focus more on mitigating damage than really healing it, and astro focused on its ogcd healing, so if only by that metic, it feels like white mage should be able to more reliably and better use gcd healing and benefit from it, rather than just spend a few lilies and get a net neutral out of it every now and then.

[KarmaYraeon]

Overall sage I wish people let sage be as this the same old whm/sch vs ast thing where ast was meme for weaker regens and shields till its buffs and ast is now a better whm clone cheaper spells and superior mobility which sge also have over sch high mobility.

Finally single or aoe wise I give good shields as a sage and my party barely suffers damage so idk this constant sage weak shields thing is irrelevant e dig or prog stack with holos pani hami and kerachole is plenty of damage reduction with regens to boot. Fun fact a crit e diag via zoe and physis and krasis is much stronger than crit alco because fey illum and dissi is only 30% heal increase vs the physis 10 zoe 50 and krasis 20% and i tried both where i fully cover my hp bar with e diag but alco crit only 60%. If they simple give pepis a rework to be like dt to spread e disg then issue fixed.

The idea isn't that sage shields are bad, its instead the fact that for something you need to interrupt your damage to do, they aren't as potent or versatile as scholar. You mention the crit zoe krasis physis diagnosis shield being stronger, but that's 3 cooldowns and the hope for a crit to get a shield that beats out what scholar can guarantee with 1 button. Not to say that is too strong or anything, and instead a matter that scholar's shield power is more reliable in terms of fishing for that insane shield strength. Meanwhile, sage has so many tools that enhance healing dished out, or reduce the damage allies take, that it would be interesting if they created a stronger separation between it and scholar, by making their tools prioritize reducing the damage allies take and improving the healing they receive, rather than blocking as much of it as possible with shields. Especially given the freedom to choose who you are healing passively with kardia, given you can freely change the exact target, unlike sch faerie that just kind of picks and chooses.

Looking at the shielding specifically, there's also the fundamental way sage and scholar interact with their shields. E.Prog for instance is 100 potency +320% shield, vs sch succor 200 potency +160% shield. On paper that's fine, they're basically the same, but when you consider how the likes of krasis or zoe work, they are modifying the basic heal. If we assume they both buff healing received by 10% from physis and fey illumination respectively, scholar's shield is going to become exponentially larger than sage's. Again, this isn't to say that sch shields are too strong or sage's are too weak, but instead that scholar is fundamentally designed to interact with its shield more than its mitigation. E.Dia and Adlo are the same potency and shielding, but scholar has far more interaction with it, thanks to E. deploy, T. deploy and even just guarantees the strongest available shield ever 90s thanks to recitation. Rather than giving sage similar abilities to try and compensate for any possible differences, it would simply be interesting if they focused more on magic sage a mitigation healer, rather than a barrier healer. Tank cooldowns it can dish out to party members. More tools that directly interact with Kardia, given how sge has much more control and influence over it compared to sch faeries.

[KarmaYraeon]

First and foremost, all healers are damage-focused healers. This is not a SGE thing; this is a FFXIV thing. This cannot be changed without literally redesigning the game's encounter design from the ground up and remaking every single fight in the game up to this point. It's like wanting to tear down the load-baring wall in your home. You can't do it or the house will literally collapse on top of you. You'd need to spend an exorbitant amount of money reworking the house's support structure to take down that wall.

Healers dealing damage was never the question, and instead the idea is giving each healer a better separation of identity. As far as it goes, they each do something that is interesting, but that rarely feels like the main function of the class, and instead something tacked onto a more general regen/barrier healer template. Meanwhile look at any other role in the game, and the jobs that make up that role feel far more diversified. DPS especially.

For sage specifically, it the idea for sage is that it fills the idea of healing by dealing damage, rather than just being a healer that can do damage. A pretty iconic idea that doesn't really feel utilized or explored for the most part, and instead just a means of imitating sch faerie. It isn't a matter of taking away how much damage or healing a class can do, and instead changing how they do so fundamentally. Sage has been the outlier in this regard, and it feels like they barely dipped a toe into the premise rather than better focusing on it. Imagine if more of their healing power was focused on the healing provided through kardia. If they had more tools that worked like Soteria - providing different benefits or functions through the use of kardia healing, rather than another copy-paste heal button. If kardia was instead a percentage of the damage the sage did, and that zoe instead increased the damage potency of the next ability instead, giving more interaction with other abilities like soteria or whatever since they would have a function based on the kardia healing, which itself is based on the damage the sage is healing. Abilities that would feel interesting to use in combination with one another, since healers can't very well have combinations of buttons like dps rotations given their need to be able to throw out a gcd or two at a moments notice.

[AmiableApkallu]

It isn't so much that white mage has high raw healing potency, and moreso that it feels like white mage could and probably should lean more into that style of play.

Okay, fair enough, but I'm still left wondering what niche that style of play actually fills. For White Mage to not be required in any content, content cannot deal out so much damage as to make high raw healing potency required. Which means the only way to make that potency uniquely useful is for the players to repeatedly take avoidable damage and/or tank the floor. Is that interesting? Can that be made interesting? (I don't have the answer.)

I could see White Mage leaning into a GCD-based, cast-times style of play, though. I mean, it already does. It's just not satisfying when the healing kit is so heavily biased towards "restore HP" and the DPS kit is… well, what I've been doing since I was a Lv.1 CNJ .

[KarmaYraeon]

Okay, fair enough, but I'm still left wondering what niche that style of play actually fills. For White Mage to not be required in any content, content cannot deal out so much damage as to make high raw healing potency required. Which means the only way to make that potency uniquely useful is for the players to repeatedly take avoidable damage and/or tank the floor. Is that interesting? Can that be made interesting? (I don't have the answer.)

I could see White Mage leaning into a GCD-based, cast-times style of play, though. I mean, it already does. It's just not satisfying when the healing kit is so heavily biased towards "restore HP" and the DPS kit is… well, what I've been doing since I was a Lv.1 CNJ .

Comparing to other healers, white mage focuses more on its gcd healing than the others. Looking at ast for instance, it has really solid ogcd healing, but its buttons usually require some kind of delay, planning, and/or a substantial cooldown. Looking at what sage could be, its healing would go hand in hand with its damage, rather than relying on it. And unlike scholar who is all about manipulating shields and health pools to preemptively inhibit damage, white mage would cover the grounds of being a solid option for clean up after the fact.

The idea is that white mage would perhaps play in opposing fashion to the other healers. Its niche would be consistency, not just raw power. Where astro can use earthly star or macrocosmos to cover sizeable healing, they each can only really be used once in a pull, and a handful of times in longer duration content like savage fights. Where sage can spot heal pretty well or reduce damage taken, white mage can better clean up a mess in a fight without having to lose out on its DPS to do so.

White mage, generally seen as the simpler, approachable healer for prog and newer healers, it would have a strong, reliable skillset focused on using its GCDs to cover healing. Its raw healing power would mean that using its GCDs would be more benefitial than the other healers using theirs. Exactly how or why can really be what sets WHM apart though, and I don't have a singular solid answer or idea. Looking at it as a mirror to blackmage, it could be that healing empowers its damage, and vice versa - bouncing between phases of healing and damage-dealing, where healing empowers follow up damage spells, and dealing damage empowers follow-up gcd healing. Alternatively, you could go the perhaps simpler route of making its pure healing and damage GCDs like cure 2, medica/2, glare and holy simply have a higher potency than what other healers bring to the table, but with a longer cast time. A single gcd on whm would be more substantial than what the other healers provide, giving it the same low skill floor it currently has as a new healer-friendly job, while also giving it the blackmage treatment of having a high skill ceiling, due to the nature of needing to know what to cast and when to maximize uptime during fights that might require more movement or mechanical know-how.

[KarmaYraeon]

Looking at it as a black mage equivalent, I imagine that in execution, it would be designed in such a way that healing leads to empowered damage so that it is almost always at least net neutral dps regardless of exactly what GCD the white mage is casting, meaning that it is a far more consistent and reliable gcd healer than the others when it comes to responding to damage taken. Healbotting would mean you aren't getting damage out, thus nothing is being empowered and so that still sucks, but for someone using both damage and healing, it wouldn't feel as bad to stop dealing damage to get any gcd healing out to cover any damage or simply as a safety net of sorts. As such, you can play safer by using your healing gcds more, without the concern of losing out on damage overall through a fight. The other healers would probably have ways to have a higher overall rDPS, or in sage's case higher personal dps given the idea of relying on that damage to heal, but the idea is that in terms of raw, personal damage and healing, white mage would sit on top. At least above ast and sch, in terms of personal dps and pure gcd healing.

[ForsakenRoe]

it could be that healing empowers its damage, and vice versa - bouncing between phases of healing and damage-dealing, where healing empowers follow up damage spells, and dealing damage empowers follow-up gcd healing.

cough cough

Alternatively, you could go the perhaps simpler route of making its pure healing and damage GCDs like cure 2, medica/2, glare and holy simply have a higher potency than what other healers bring to the table, but with a longer cast time. A single gcd on whm would be more substantial than what the other healers provide, giving it the same low skill floor it currently has as a new healer-friendly job, while also giving it the blackmage treatment of having a high skill ceiling, due to the nature of needing to know what to cast and when to maximize uptime during fights that might require more movement or mechanical know-how.

I'd be hesitant to add more healing with longer cast times. Not cos of 'more healing' that's whatever to me, the 'longer cast times' would make it harder to react to 'oops something gone wrong' fast enough. Lilies aren't there 100% of the time, and there's been several times where I've expected a certain amount of mit on a raidwide in P8S, it's not there, I try to Medica2 in time to start countering the bleed, and it just doesn't cast fast enough. On the DPS side of things, I sem to recall a lot of people wanted AST's 1.5s casts on all the healers so they could move, with a select few people wanting to keep the WHM cast times long, so that lilies were an interesting optimization tool. I don't think SE's gonna U-Turn on that decision any time soon, and personally I wouldn't want them to, moving for stuff as a WHM in SHB felt super janky because of those 2.5s casts. I guess the other half of the issue is, what's the point in 'more healing strength compared to other healers' when it's by design that the other healers have 'enough to clear the content'? They tried this in SB, saying WHM was the 'Pure Healer' and it was 'pure dogpoo', because AST had enough healing to clear stuff and also brought hella strong raidbuffs with The Balance.