Healers need an overhaul

[ty_taurus]

Holos buff put it closer in available mitigation, already an excellent skill in itself, and we knew Scholar expedient would not make it into ultimate as-is because of how mechanic breaking it was. Fact that Sage is pretty good in DSR says a lot of how well the job is out of the gate. Details are useful like people don't need to be refined inside of bubbles like in the other jobs, hit everyone in yalms range, which is useful for many savage/ultimate mechanics where party splits up across arenas for damage. Plus gap closer to make this work. If you use all the buttons available, very comfy.

I want nothing more than to main Sage purely based on its style and aesthetic. That said, you can buff it’s healing tools into obscene levels of power and add even more OGCD heals, but none of that will even add a single point in favor of making me want to play SGE.

Make me stop spamming Dosis III. Give me a real selection of offensive spells that feels like a DPS lite. Make me the GNB of healers. Give me healer Continuation. Playing SGE feels like laser hair removal simulator with how often I have to see the same animation. I want my nouliths flying all over the place releasing all types of other attacks, not doing the same exact zippy-zap more than every other action combined.

[technole]

I want nothing more than to main Sage purely based on its style and aesthetic. That said, you can buff it’s healing tools into obscene levels of power and add even more OGCD heals, but none of that will even add a single point in favor of making me want to play SGE.

Make me stop spamming Dosis III. Give me a real selection of offensive spells that feels like a DPS lite. Make me the GNB of healers. Give me healer Continuation. Playing SGE feels like laser hair removal simulator with how often I have to see the same animation. I want my nouliths flying all over the place releasing all types of other attacks, not doing the same exact zippy-zap more than every other action combined.

The canned YoshiP response would likely be "But Dosis is the best one of them all them because if you don't keep doing damage, you're not healing the tank"

In all seriousness, healer DPS is a larger issue they haven't outcome since the Post HW dismantling. Like this thread been eluding if you're not going to replace damage buttons than there needs to be more heal buttons you must press in all types of content, not just saving it for the last savage floor or DSR (which is arguable too as it's mostly do have enough mitigation game).

[ty_taurus]

The canned YoshiP response would likely be "But Dosis is the best one of them all them because if you don't keep doing damage, you're not healing the tank"

In all seriousness, healer DPS is a larger issue they haven't outcome since the Post HW dismantling. Like this thread been eluding if you're not going to replace damage buttons than there needs to be more heal buttons you must press in all types of content, not just saving it for the last savage floor or DSR (which is arguable too as it's mostly do have enough mitigation game).

I think the response would fall more along the lines of "We want to avoid expanding on DPS related healer tools because we don't want players to feel obligated to deal damage."

Which is and equally bad response in all seriousness. The demand for healer DPS has nothing to do with action volume and everything to do with party damage taken, like with what you mentioned, and also because isn't dealing damage the point of SGE?

On forcing more healing buttons to be pressed, this is a failing solution also. Healers still press their DPS button more than all other buttons combined in Savage. It would take an astronomical increase to outgoing damage frequency to resolve that issue in Savage, and what about everything below Savage? How does healing stay fun in a dungeon run if Savage can't even output that much damage? What about a treasure map dungeons? FATE grinding? The MSQ? And even if we did increase the rate of damage taken to something like 500% or greater (not an exaggerated number), what do you do about the 10 years of content that's currently available? Let it rot?

The solution of "change content to demand more healing" is such a convoluted and excessive attempt at fixing what is very easily fixable by just giving healers a gameplay loop that is always applicable whether you're in an MSQ instance or progging Ultimate. If you come across a river, do you turn back, hop in your car, run to the nearest boat store, purchase a kayak, strap the kayak to the roof of your car, drive back to the river, drag your kayak over to the river, and paddle your way across, or do you cross the bridge that's 9 feet to the left? Because that's effectively the difference between the choices of changing content vs changing healers, respectively.

[AmiableApkallu]

The solution of "change content to demand more healing" is such a convoluted and excessive attempt at fixing what is very easily fixable by just giving healers a gameplay loop that is always applicable whether you're in an MSQ instance or progging Ultimate.

I think it's possible to approach this from both angles. The DPS angle is well-covered. The healing angle… well, I think there are relatively simple changes that could help. My favorite suggestion of the ones I've seen so far:

IMHO the easiest solution there is to lean more on auto attacks persisting through casts with the ability to crit whilst also giving bosses short cooldown non-telegraphed tank busters and cleaves again.

Kaliya from Coil T11 during prog was a great example of how bosses should hit. It wasn't the hardest hitting boss of the time, but you needed both tanks to soak those cleaves initially and it was nothing like as predictable as what we have now because the bulk of the damage didn't have a huge long telegraph announcing it's arrival.

https://youtu.be/1WwRDVQotgo?t=15

In the same way that no one is really asking for a top-tier melee DPS rotation for the healers, we can ask for a bit more healing without jumping all the way to 90% healing uptime.

[Dreamsoap]

Having a couple of extra dps buttons does not mean the role will be harder. New players can just... ignore the dps buttons. Which most new healers already do anyway.

Players on every role have been ignoring important buttons for the life of the game now. Let us have a skill ceiling, it won't affect those that don't care.

[ty_taurus]

I think it's possible to approach this from both angles. The DPS angle is well-covered. The healing angle… well, I think there are relatively simple changes that could help. My favorite suggestion of the ones I've seen so far:



In the same way that no one is really asking for a top-tier melee DPS rotation for the healers, we can ask for a bit more healing without jumping all the way to 90% healing uptime.

We can certain increase outgoing damage to some degree, and this is a desirable outcome. Having more reasons to use the cooldowns we have, especially in casual content--not by making lethal raidwides and nasty bleedbusters or anything, but by just having damage be more frequent, would really provide a healthier experience for most healers. My point though is just that doing this won't have any noticeable impact on the fact that we'll still spend most of our time mashing 1 button more than every other button on our hotbar. It would take a gargantuan increase in outgoing damage to make any significant impact, like unavoidable raidwides every 5-10 seconds levels of increase, in order to shift the focus away from DPS, which is too drastic of a shift from the rest of the game.

So yeah, adding more reasons to heal is desirable, but it is in no way a solution to the DPS concerns.

[LeonKeyh]

For the people saying that healing requirements should be increased to fix healer engagement issues, think for a moment, how much increase would the healing requirements need in order to fully engage a veteran healer and remove a large portion of downtime? Would the average healer be able to keep up at all?

In the end, wouldn't such a move be much more destructive to the healer population than just giving something more to do during downtime?

It also requires every single encounter being reworked. Every encounter from the base game and 4 expansions. I don't think that healing requirements will ever be increased, as you allude to.

Making a more robust DPS "rotation" for downtime is MUCH easier and can be done without any changes to encounters. You just need to make an "optimal rotation" with the new abilities deal the same amount of potency as 1 DoT and 12 Glare/Broil/etc. Maybe a bit more to reward good play and make room for mistakes.

ALSO, changing up the DPS abilities means that you're not raising the skill floor for the healer. Bad healers can still just sit there and focus on healing and not touch DPS. "OK" healers can maybe fumble around with it, etc.

[AnotherPerson]

It also requires every single encounter being reworked. Every encounter from the base game and 4 expansions. I don't think that healing requirements will ever be increased, as you allude to.

Making a more robust DPS "rotation" for downtime is MUCH easier and can be done without any changes to encounters. You just need to make an "optimal rotation" with the new abilities deal the same amount of potency as 1 DoT and 12 Glare/Broil/etc. Maybe a bit more to reward good play and make room for mistakes.

ALSO, changing up the DPS abilities means that you're not raising the skill floor for the healer. Bad healers can still just sit there and focus on healing and not touch DPS. "OK" healers can maybe fumble around with it, etc.

DPS abilities also help to improve the average level of healers who can't manage high DPS uptime as well. Having more DPS skills that hit harder means needing less optimal Malefic / Dosis / Glare / Broil hits to reach a similar level of DPS output as a top-tier healer -- which in turn grants more leeway to average or below-average healers to keep up with the best ones.

The only healers that suffer from this is the healers who refuse to DPS at all --- if SE is trying to balance 0 healer DPS with top-tier healer DPS rather than average healer DPS with top-tier healer DPS, then they're trying to make someone who does nothing for over 90% of the time comparable with someone who do DPS 90% of the time.
An actual fallacy in itself. No wonder healer role is in shambles.

[Aravell]

I also really dislike that the dev team's idea of "more to heal" is adding mitigation checks to literally everything, being hit from 100 to 0 when the melee forgets to feint isn't exactly a great idea of more engaging healing.

Bring back stuff like the prey from A12S (heal target at least once or they die) or the autos that can crit from older content, or better yet, bring back tankbuster cleaves that have no castbar and can crit like in A9S. Just bring back more random damage and better designed fights. Take Neo Exdeath for example, he doesn't autoattack, he doesn't even move, but he was so much fun to heal.

Bring back all the random damage and expand our downtime kit and the healer role gets to have fun again.

[Deceptus]

I also really dislike that the dev team's idea of "more to heal" is adding mitigation checks to literally everything, being hit from 100 to 0 when the melee forgets to feint isn't exactly a great idea of more engaging healing.

The FFXIV dev team is, sadly, so bereft of ideas that this is their idea of "difficulty". One shot mechanics. Either you do it right or you die. It's lazy design IMHO because it dis-incentivizes gear acquisition. What's the point of getting better gear if said mechanic is going to kill you no matter what?

Back on healers, IMHO every single DPS action gained by healing should at a minimum be DPS neutral. They finally did it with Misery after so many years but Sage Toxikon needs looked at. It only becomes available if you use a healing action so at a minimum each hit should be at least 600 for the first mob + dropoff for AoE

Scholars need the Healing decoupled from the Damage of Aether pact. Put Energy Drain on it's own separate charge system. Again, Sage does this right (Phlegma not requiring Addersgall stacks) but the Devs didn't think to update SCH? What's funny is SCH and SMN have the Arcanist base job and SMN has the right model in Painflare (short CD charge AoE move) which Sage Phlegma literally mirrors.

Just shows they don't fully think things through when designing healers, but that's been a major problem for multiple expansions spanning multiple years at this point.