General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[Deceptus]

We spent basically a whole expansion circling around "You could get AOE shields!....but weaker than the shield healers, definitely weaker because never ever forget that Scholar needs to be more powerful than you in every single way.

If the regen based healers were to get stronger shields than the shield based healers what is the point of the shield based healers?

AST's problem long ago is they had stronger shields that were instant and cost less mana than SCH's casted Adlo / Succor. And then they brought card buffs on top of that.

[ForsakenRoe]

If the regen based healers were to get stronger shields than the shield based healers what is the point of the shield based healers?

AST's problem long ago is they had stronger shields that were instant and cost less mana than SCH's casted Adlo / Succor. And then they brought card buffs on top of that.

Which is why I tied my pitched WHM shields to the Lilies. SCH's 'pure healing' via Indom is gated by Aetherflow stacks, so it'd make sense for WHM's to be gated by Lilies. This way, the 'pure healers' have direct access to 'pure healing', with access to shield healing having an opportunity cost, and vice versa for the 'shield healers'. We're already seeing that it's possible to clear stuff with SCH/SGE even week 1, because they have enough 'pure healing' between them to clear any HPS checks, while also bringing mit in spades. AST WHM on the other hand, cannot remotely keep up because they have (by my count) 3 mitigation tools between them, and two of them are 2min CDs. It works later once people get gear, but SCH SGE works even at week 1 gear, which kinda proves that SE beefed it with the whole 'Pure/Barrier split' thing.

Would 'WHM can apply GCD shields with no damage loss, thereby increasing the DPS of the cohealer as they no longer need to GCD shield' be a valid niche for it to occupy?

Give WHM some movement speed when using some Wind-type skills. Return Aero III as a 2-charge line AOE and make it leave a trail for 8 seconds to increase the movement speed of players who step on the trail.
Give WHM some stagnation enemy debuff that procs on Dia and makes their next Dia hit harder (BLM thundercloud effect).
Return Stoneskin as a 10% HP AoE shield - but tied to lily gauge for levels 51 to 70. Give a lower level Afflatus Misery at Heavensward after unlocking the lily gauge so the gauge isn't obsolete for 2 expansions before unlocking Afflatus Misery.

Give SCH AoE cleanse and DoTs that can be spread through Deployment Tactics / Bane.

Give SGE more DPS skills that can affect Kardia / addersting gauge in different ways, apply AoE kardia, and give the Icarus skill a second charge.

Give AST interesting card choices and make their Gravity AoE pull nearby enemies closer to the target, thereby making it easier to group the enemies up together.
That's really all I ask for tbh.

I don't think they'll be giving WHM movement speed stuff because they already had to nerf SCH's sprint to 10s. It was considered too strong, and that's a 2min CD. Having it tied to Aero 3 also means you'd be using it for damage rather than it's 'cool unique effect' which is kinda... yeh. DiaCloud procs is something many people have said and it's probably one of the simplest additions to spice up the rotation that SE could make, which makes it even more confusing why they haven't done it. Personally I'd like to see more but y'know, small steps. Stoneskin, we're on the same page, though I had it upgrade to 'twinkly lights mode' at the same time as getting Glare, and an AOE version at the same time as Rapture. Small Misery (which I named Tragedy) would also make sense though I think I stuck it somewhere in the 60's because there's a gap there atm. We could always throw Thin Air back into the 60's where it came from to move Tragedy down to 58 though. I doubt anyone's gonna miss Thin Air in their Sirensong Sea levelling roulette.

SCH AoE cleanse is cool, they used to have it, but that'd require SE actually having debuffs to cleanse in the first place, it's a mechanic that's woefully underused. Imagine a final enrage sequence (Curtain Call, Terminal Relativity, etc) where everyone is slapped with an esuna-able debuff, with a timer of, say, 40 seconds. When the debuff is removed or when it times out, you all take big damage and get magic vuln, so two going off at once is death. The gameplay for it would be that you have to alternate between cleansing a debuff, and healing the damage that it causes. Of course, a SCH AOE esuna is not going to help here, but it'd help in other situations like Throttle in TEA, where it's just 'quick remove these debuffs now!'. It just needs SE to actually utilise cleansable debuffs as a mechanic. Something tells me they saw how few people used esuna as a role action in SB and forgot that we have every role action by default now. Oh yeh, and 'SCH DOTs' are a given, come on SE we know they're still in the game files, hand em over

SGE, well, I'm sure people here are tired of seeing me shill my trash ideas, but here I go shilling again, not quite 'DPS actions affect Kardia differently', but 'augment skills cause Dosis to have various additional effects', which does include a different interaction with the Addersting gauge and a way to AOE Kardia. I didn't give a 2nd Icarus charge but I did give a way to convert MP into an augment that makes the next 4 attacks instant, a sort of mini-lightspeed. Maybe that'd help alleviate movement issues enough?

AST my ideas suck, I don't play it enough to put effort into thinking of them. I like the idea of Gravity sucking things in though, it'd work as a cool counter to WHM's Holy stun, as I'd assume that sucking the enemy in would interrupt it's castbar? So where WHM's mitigative effect works on everything but has diminishing returns, AST's would not suffer diminishing returns, but would only affect castbars and not autoattacks. Though I heard about a funny issue where the boss in A4 could be knockbacked and launched out of bounds, so there'd probably have to be some checking to make sure it's not possible to suck a boss into a weird position

[Deceptus]

Which is why I tied my pitched WHM shields to the Lilies.

The original design of Devine Benison was exactly that and it was implemented terribly and the players hated it.

A 15% of max health shield (strong than current) and the ability CD was tied to how many lillies you had currently and it used them all up.

SCH AoE cleanse is cool, they used to have it, but that'd require SE actually having debuffs to cleanse in the first place, it's a mechanic that's woefully underused. Imagine a final enrage sequence (Curtain Call, Terminal Relativity, etc) where everyone is slapped with an esuna-able debuff, with a timer of, say, 40 seconds. When the debuff is removed or when it times out, you all take big damage and get magic vuln, so two going off at once is death. The gameplay for it would be that you have to alternate between cleansing a debuff, and healing the damage that it causes. Of course, a SCH AOE esuna is not going to help here, but it'd help in other situations like Throttle in TEA, where it's just 'quick remove these debuffs now!'. It just needs SE to actually utilise cleansable debuffs as a mechanic. Something tells me they saw how few people used esuna as a role action in SB and forgot that we have every role action by default now. Oh yeh, and 'SCH DOTs' are a given, come on SE we know they're still in the game files, hand em over

The problem with party wide cleansable debuffs is what happens when the SCH isn't there?

Are the debuffs potent enough to kill people necessitating the aoe cleanse, or are they a minor annoyance where it's not necessary so what's the point?

If it's the former, a SCH is then mandatory in the group and that's a bad precedent to set.

[ForsakenRoe]

The original design of Devine Benison was exactly that and it was implemented terribly and the players hated it.

A 15% of max health shield (strong than current) and the ability CD was tied to how many lillies you had currently and it used them all up.



The problem with party wide cleansable debuffs is what happens when the SCH isn't there?

Are the debuffs potent enough to kill people necessitating the aoe cleanse, or are they a minor annoyance where it's not necessary so what's the point?

If it's the former, a SCH is then mandatory in the group and that's a bad precedent to set.

WHM, yes original Divine Benison was bad in SB, but that's because Lilies were bad in general. Generated via chance when you cast Cure or Cure2, and the effect of 'minor CD reduction' so you hoped it'd get used on Assize but if it didnt you shrug and go 'well whatever I guess'. Play on like the system didn't exist. Now however, Lilies are generated every 20 seconds. A theoretical Shielding Lily spender would be simply that: a shielding alternative to the Pure Healing option of Solace and Rapture. If you need BIG healing you'd use Rapture, if you need to top up and apply shields at the same time just before a raidwide (like how Succor/E.Prognosis has a small heal component) you'd be able to use Plenary > AOE Shield, and get the heal from Plenary and the shield from the Lily. Also I'm not asking for % based shields, because yes they would scale too strongly. Instead, I suggested 200p AOE shields, 400p SingleTarget. This is in contrast to current SCH/SGE shields, which are 320p AOE and 540p ST (and the crit interaction). Using WHM shields would be 'not as strong' as the SCH/SGE ones (because they're the 'shield healers'), but they wouldn't cost damage, because they'd be refunded via Misery. It'd also mean every healer having access to shields, allowing you to have more mechanics that function as 'shield check', like the Vulcan Burst on Ifrit from UWU. An alternative style of 'heal check' beyond 'pump HPS'.

SCH, if SCH had AOE cleanse in TEA, would it be insta-locked for that reason? For being able to save 6 total healer GCDs in the first phase of a 17+ min fight? SCH isn't instalocked for Expedient despite it being a very good tool, so I'd assume AOE cleanse would be in the same boat, doubly so considering how averse SE is to actually using 'cleanse this debuff' as a mechanic in a fight. Or we could give the AOE cleanse to WHM, since Esuna is a White Magic usually. If any healer was meant to be good at removing debuffs I'd assume it'd be WHM. I know SCH had the tool originally, but if we go by what who had what in the past, well I'm still confused on Divine Seal being taken and reworked into Largesse, then THAT taken and reworked into Temperance. Or DRK losing Reprisal as a sort of raid mit, then people in SB saying 'DRK has no raid mit so it sucks' like shocked pikachu. Mad

[ty_taurus]

If we're talking about barrier dynamics, I'd argue it's backwards for WHM and/or AST to have the DPS neutral barriers while SCH and SGE have opportunity cost barriers. It should be the other way around.

Barrier healers should have access to both regular, opportunity cost barriers and DPS neutral/OGCD barriers. In order to make barrier mitigation an essential element, pure healers could have access to opportunity cost barriers, but only opportunity cost barriers to reinforce that it's more ideal to allow your cohealer to manage barriers, but allows you to rely on them in a pinch.

At least, that's how I feel in particular about reinforcing the pure/barrier dynamic. The inverse would also be true, mind you--burst healing available on barrier healers at an opportunity cost whereas pure healers have both opportunity cost burst healing and DPS neutral/OGCD burst healing.

[ForsakenRoe]

If we're talking about barrier dynamics, I'd argue it's backwards for WHM and/or AST to have the DPS neutral barriers while SCH and SGE have opportunity cost barriers. It should be the other way around.

Barrier healers should have access to both regular, opportunity cost barriers and DPS neutral/OGCD barriers. In order to make barrier mitigation an essential element, pure healers could have access to opportunity cost barriers, but only opportunity cost barriers to reinforce that it's more ideal to allow your cohealer to manage barriers, but allows you to rely on them in a pinch.

At least, that's how I feel in particular about reinforcing the pure/barrier dynamic. The inverse would also be true, mind you--burst healing available on barrier healers at an opportunity cost whereas pure healers have both opportunity cost burst healing and DPS neutral/OGCD burst healing.

That's where our thinking differs, where you're looking at 'how much DPS do they lose by using their barrier' I'm looking at the opportunity cost/variety available, the DPS neutrality is just a side effect. In my mind, AST would have access to barriers via Nocturnal Sect (and stance-dancing to change sects midcombat) but it'd require a GCD still. WHM would be the outlier here, and only because it's tied to Lilies, to force a 'soft CD' on the shields. If they wanted to just make it a flat GCD with an MP cost, that works too but it'd be a bit more boring imo. And it'd blur the lines between the split even more. Maybe they could make it have a seperate, internal timer, like how Sonic Break is a 1min CD GCD, but that seems kinda jank too.

WHM would, in this idea, have a 200p AOE shield each 20s, at the cost of 'the same resource as their 400p pure healing'. They'd rather use the Rapture after the damage, but the versatility would be there to, eg, cover a raidwide with WHM shields, and have the SGE pureheal the damage after with Pneuma, because Pneuma's up at that point. On the flip side, where WHM has only this one option for applying a shield (and it's limited by the Lily timer), and one mitigation in the form of 2min CD Temperance, SCH has Consolation and Succor when it needs to fall back on GCD shielding, and for mit it has Soil, Expedience and Fey Illumination. SGE has Haima/Panhaima, Holos (and the new shield they added to it), Kerachole, and if it needs to rely on GCDs, it can even Zoe a E.Prognosis to boost it's strength. It could be argued that it'd suck for the Barrier healers to have to lose damage doing their job of Barrier Healing, but I'd argue that they have so many more tools to avoid that situation. Besides, healing a raid is a 2 man job, and I don't think it's completely insane for two healers to work together in this way, with WHM using it's damage-neutral shields to boost the cohealer's DPS indirectly. Also, if we were to say 'WHM shields have to be damage-loss because its a Pure Healer', then why is SGE damage neutral in so much of it's Pure Healing kit? SCH loses damage when it uses Indom (because energy drain), but recently that's been more and more addressed via stuff like Recitation, or the damage nerfs to ED. SGE though, it's Pure Healing is all damage neutral. Ixochole doesn't lose you damage (it even restores MP!), Physis doesn't lose damage, Pneuma has a damage refund built in. Surely, it'd only be fair to make Pneuma cost a GCD of damage, because 'Pure Healing is the Pure Healer's job'. Unless the opportunity cost is the 2min CD, in which case, why doesn't WHM have a way to apply Barriers on a 1min CD as a mirror to how SGE/SCH have a way to apply a party-wide regen with Physis/WDawn? Why do the Barrier Healers get so much Pure Heal (with opportunity cost) but Pure Healers have little to zero (In WHM's case for AOE shields, literally nothing)? The system is flawed, and I personally don't trust the devs who got us into the mess, to get us out of it. If anything I expect they'll double down and make it even worse, with WHM's Benison and Aquaveil turning into direct heals, while AST gets to keep their shields for some reason. If Neutral Sect's continued existence, and the addition of Pneuma doesn't show us how little the 'split' matters, I don't know what will.

From what it looks like, SE's current definition of what makes a healer a Pure or Barrier is that they have access to a GCD that applies a Regen/Barrier, at the cost of one GCD of damage. The fact that SCH has Whispering Dawn, or AST has shields via Neutral Sect, doesn't change their categorization. So based on that, I'd assume giving AST access to Barriers via Nocturnal Sect (or even just reducing Neutral's CD to 1min maybe), or WHM Barriers via Lilies, wouldn't necessarily do anything to the Pure/Barrier categorization.

Some might want to reinforce the Pure/Barrier split dynamic, I see it as a failure and the longer it sticks around the harder it'll be to fix the mistake. I say we remove it ASAP, and build on healers as just 'healers'. Some can lean more one way or the other, but having them split would be like splitting tanks into MT and OT. Oh wait they wanted to do that, and immediately reneged on it. The whole paradigm is scuffed, and heavily favors the mit healers, because mit can save you from a oneshot, pure healing can't. And the one way they have where pure healing COULD save you easier compared to mit (bleeds), the mit makes the bleed do less damage per tick, so it's still king. When it was first announced, I was brought back to an idea I had back in HW, where Indom would apply a shield instead of directly healing, and Emergency Tactics would 'in an emergency, turn all shields into healing equal to remaining shield strength'. A way to apply shields that doesn't cost a GCD. Well, I guess I got what I asked for with Pepsis, but even then, that doesn't affect OGCD shields. SE can't make a healer that plays around Barriers more than what we have now, I think, because the hypothetical 'new player' will not be able to keep up on damage, and will cause a wipe if they don't have a reliable healing GCD they can fall back on and spam, like Succor or Medica. In a crazy world, we could have combos like Recitation > Adlo > Deploy > Indom > Emergency, to put big AOE shields on everyone, then break it to cause huge healing. Instead, Recitation > Indom just does big burst healing. I also wanted Virus, E4E and Disable to return, but instead we have to rely on the DPS players to remember to please Feint the jumps, PLEASE Feint the JUMPSaaand we're dead again

[ty_taurus]

I just feel that if you're going to sell me the notion that SCH and SGE are "barrier healers," then they need to consistently rely on barriers regardless of the content you're playing. It should define their universal approach to healing, and that means making their most efficient and optimal tools barrier-based. Not literally every cooldown would need to be a barrier tool, but it should feel like an optimal SGE or SCH is still regularly utilizing barriers. In a dungeon, why am I reactively healing the party with Ixochole when I could instead be putting up a barrier before a raidwide instead? Recitation and Deployment Tactics allow SCH's barriers to feel like, in more challenging content, that their opportunity cost is worth while, but this doesn't apply to all other instances of content in the game. And SGE's barriers feel awful to use even when they're needed because you know you're scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel to keep your team alive. Inversely, though, SGE does have Haima, Panhaima, and Holos, giving them more OGCD barrier opportunities.

If barrier mitigation becomes very important, then allowing WHM and AST to stand in for that role should feel like you have to make a sacrifice in order to accomplish that. I do see the point of "if the HP recovery options are better, you're not going to use the barriers most of the time anyway," which is a valid point, but I just don't think either of them should be able to apply barriers without eating into their overall optimization. And the same is true for barrier healers as well with burst healing. I think SCH and SGE should, in this environment where we're further investing in the barrier/pure dynamic, have access to suboptimal burst healing tools for emergencies--something you want to avoid but will catch you in dire situations.

I don't necessarily think the pure/barrier split concept is necessary or effective at making the healers feel better, but I don't see the point in having it if pure healers have access to more efficient barriers while barrier healers are more often forced to drop DPS in order to accomplish the same task. It should be built into your standard gameplay, not something you pretend doesn't exist until you decide to do savage.

EDIT: The general "you" or more aptly, SE selling me on barrier healers

[AnotherPerson]

The original design of Devine Benison was exactly that and it was implemented terribly and the players hated it.3d

A 15% of max health shield (strong than current) and the ability CD was tied to how many lillies you had currently and it used them all up.

I'm pretty sure that's because the original Divine Benison wasn't worth utilizing. There was no Afflatus Misery damage refund. Now, if you had the decision between healing or pre-emptively shielding -- and both choices reward a damage refund, that would be better.

Now that lilies generate at a rate of 20 per sec, if you had Stoneskin be an additional resource spender for lilies, you at least have a reason to use them instead of overcapping and throwing excess healing away to prep up. It will feel at least marginally better in dungeons and in downtime / movement phases where everyone's already topped off and you're not just burning lilies to access Misery because no one needs the healing.

I think putting shields on the lily gauge over just making it a oGCD ability is actually worthwhile is because it creates more of a small opportunistic cost for the WHM. Between choosing healing or shielding, a big number of their healing skills is tied to the GCD, may it be for lilies or if they need to fallback on GCD healing due to a lack of oGCD healing variety. In that sense, WHM really starts to cement itself as a healer that has a more reliant playstyle over GCD healing than the other healers and doubles down on increasing effective GCD potency with Confession and Temperance. If you need to heal a lot over the course of several GCDs in a row, you're going to be using Afflatus Rapture instead of Stoneskin just purely for the additional potency that Afflatus Rapture offers under healing pressure. An AoE shield doesn't take away anything from the shield healers.

Plus, out of all the healers currently, WHM has no AoE tools for shielding. All they have is temperance. Its pure-healer counterpart - AST - at least can turn on Neutral sect and apply AoE shields while healing when they need to. Between needing a bit more HP buffer, WHM loses out considerably compared to the other 3 healers due to how inflexible it can be. There should be no reason for WHM to feel utterly weaker in comparison, unless they're getting maximum HP increase skills.

I don't necessarily think the pure/barrier split concept is necessary or effective at making the healers feel better, but I don't see the point in having it if pure healers have access to more efficient barriers while barrier healers are more often forced to drop DPS in order to accomplish the same task. It should be built into your standard gameplay, not something you pretend doesn't exist until you decide to do savage.

That's honestly an encounter design problem, where healers are not forced to need to heal consistently to keep people alive because damage is high enough to require shields constantly. It's not so much of a pure-healer vs shield-healer problem. That's more of an inconsistency to how healing in FFXIV works in general due to the general playerbase being unable to handle the increased difficulty. That's pretty much why the difference between pure-healer and shield-healer only really matters in savage content and not in casual content. In casual content, shields and pure healing are treated as flavor instead.

If you take this on the opposite spectrum - shield healers will not be given any efficient ways to recover HP (so nothing like Recitation Indom, no lustrate, no Taurochole, no regens because that's a pure-healer GCD regen thing, no Excog, etc.) -- which makes certain mechanics like Doom nearly impossible for them to heal up alone without a pure-healer. That would cause issues for a lot of the general playerbase, especially in normal content where such mechanics happen to exist (final boss of The Dead Ends, for example - will screw shield healers quite easily once any player takes a couple of vuln stacks). Not to mention, it's not compatible for the game if shields can continuously stack and invalidate the mechanic and a pure-healer will not be able to do the same.

[Valmaxian]

I’ve healed in FF14 since 2.0. AST became my main in HW and remained so until EW. I’ve barely touched any other games because of how much I used to enjoy 14. But the homogenization of healers, lack of interesting DPS rotations/general ability interaction has me bored to the point where I’m now playing a Preservation Evoker in WoW. Some of its job aspects I find interesting: bending time to reduce damage, copying healing/DPS effects, lots of procs, charge-up abilities, plenty of movement and utility cooldowns, etc.

WoW may have issues when it comes to job balancing, but they definitely design interesting jobs, and prove that it is possible to have seven unique healing classes. The dev team really needs to step up their game because the player base is simply bored.

[SargeTheSeagull]

I’ve healed in FF14 since 2.0. AST became my main in HW and remained so until EW. I’ve barely touched any other games because of how much I used to enjoy 14. But the homogenization of healers, lack of interesting DPS rotations/general ability interaction has me bored to the point where I’m now playing a Preservation Evoker in WoW. Some of its job aspects I find interesting: bending time to reduce damage, copying healing/DPS effects, lots of procs, charge-up abilities, plenty of movement and utility cooldowns, etc.

WoW may have issues when it comes to job balancing, but they definitely design interesting jobs, and prove that it is possible to have seven unique healing classes. The dev team really needs to step up their game because the player base is simply bored.

This 100%. I started playing wow about a year ago and I love healing in it. 14's devs really don't have an excuse for their lack of creativity in job design. WoW has five tanks that all feel totally different and seven healers that all feel totally different. Yeah, balance issues and whatnot but I would happily trade balance for fun at this point. 14 has me just plain bored with its gameplay.