The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[ty_taurus]

I find the bosses in Dead Ends are actually pretty fun to heal for dungeon bosses. Ra La actually uses a fairly hard-hitting raidwide between nearly every mechanic, has a mechanic that's somewhat easy to get clipped by (Prance), has a mechanic that inflicts doom when failed that requires healing the target to full, and overall feels like a very well-balanced offensive boss for easy content. I would love something along those lines become the gold standard for "easy" content bosses because while it doesn't actually demand that much healing, there are more reasons to use more than the bare minimum, and I think that envelope could also be pushed just a little further by perhaps adding light bleeds to those raidwides, add a light bleed or poison to the tankbuster, maybe consider adding more non-esunable dooms that require fully healing the target for failing other mechanics. It's really not that much to deal with truthfully, especially when the mechanics themselves aren't particularly hard to execute on.

Do that and also improve the GCD rotation of healers, whether that means directly dealing damage or indirectly dealing damage while setting up something else for support, and healing even in easy content could be a lot more fun.

[ForsakenRoe]

Been awake too much and so I'm now wondering, is tank invulns part of the issue? In P4S there was a very hard hitting double TB, Heart Stake, with each hit applying a bleed. But this was invulned, and the bleed overwrote itself, so we didn't ever really care about it (PLD and GNB could even block half of the duration because of their 'true invuln'). This tier however, we see some fights have the same thing (Chelic Synergy), but others force the tanks to swap (Venomous Mass, whatever doorboss's laser thing is called) or they get a bleed that ticks for their entire HP bar per tick. I also recall that one of the opening moves in DSR includes two tethers that the tanks have to invuln, essentially the devs designing a 'okay we know for sure the tanks wont have invuln after this point so they can't cheese things'. I remember how disappointed I felt when I saw Titan in E4S, with his double-swap TB, reduced to 'invuln lmao', or in the case of WAR, 'use your 25s for the first hit, then invuln the second and third lmao'. I wonder if it'd be more interesting for gameplay if tanks were not able to cheese things quite so much with the invulns

Do that and also improve the GCD rotation of healers, whether that means directly dealing damage or indirectly dealing damage while setting up something else for support, and healing even in easy content could be a lot more fun.

Open question to gamers in this thread, not just Taurus since I'm quote replying to them: You're in this thread, I'd like to assume you read the ideas I posted on the first page (if you didn't then I'm sad but it is what it is), if you did, I'd like to ask: Would the WHM idea make healing a dungeon more 'fun'? Whether it's 'this would be absolutely 100% poggers', 'this would kill healers forever you suck' or just 'it's the bare minimum to make it a tiny bit more fun I guess', I'd like to hear it. If you could explain why it'd be good/'ok i guess'/actually detrimental to the role, that'd be even better.

I'm just kinda curious if the idea is on the right track for 'making healer role more fun' or if the 'add more healing required' angle is the way to go. Based on what we see in the current tier, I'd like to assume it just proves my point that 'more healing needed' doesn't really work and just alienates, shall we say, 'not-so-hardcore players', and we should try 'more DPS interactivity in downtime'/'more interplay between healing and DPS sides of kit'. But hey, I'm biased towards the idea on the first page, since it was me who posted it, hence I'm asking for second opinions. Maybe 'more healing needed' is the way to go, and we haven't done the 'right version' of 'more healing needed'?

[ty_taurus]

Open question to gamers in this thread, not just Taurus since I'm quote replying to them: You're in this thread, I'd like to assume you read the ideas I posted on the first page (if you didn't then I'm sad but it is what it is), if you did, I'd like to ask: Would the WHM idea make healing a dungeon more 'fun'? Whether it's 'this would be absolutely 100% poggers', 'this would kill healers forever you suck' or just 'it's the bare minimum to make it a tiny bit more fun I guess', I'd like to hear it. If you could explain why it'd be good/'ok i guess'/actually detrimental to the role, that'd be even better.

I'm just kinda curious if the idea is on the right track for 'making healer role more fun' or if the 'add more healing required' angle is the way to go. Based on what we see in the current tier, I'd like to assume it just proves my point that 'more healing needed' doesn't really work and just alienates, shall we say, 'not-so-hardcore players', and we should try 'more DPS interactivity in downtime'/'more interplay between healing and DPS sides of kit'. But hey, I'm biased towards the idea on the first page, since it was me who posted it, hence I'm asking for second opinions. Maybe 'more healing needed' is the way to go, and we haven't done the 'right version' of 'more healing needed'?

One thing I'll state right out of the gate is that I'm someone who is moreso in Semirhage's camp of wanting to see the healers actually have tools that feel cohesive and play off one another rather than a bunch of independent buttons that exist in the same house but don't touch eachother. I want something creative and exciting, which is why it gets under my skin when I see responses like one on the "Healers need an overhaul" thread over on general where someone suggested a cosmetic 1-2-3 combo on every healer to fix everyone's problems. The damage is the same across each hit so you can 1 button spam or do your 1-2-3. That'll solve all the problems, right? I feel there's a significant amount of disrespect for healer gameplay for a lot of people, whether intentional or not, and that gets deep under my skin. I bring this up just as a guide for what I actually look for in healer design concepts.

Additionally, I've posted more in-depth theorycrafts in my initial post in the [Echo Chamber] thread for each of the healers under the spoilers section. I'm not sure if you've taken a look at those at all, but I would genuinely love more feedback on those as well if you have the time. But I will reference them very lightly as there are some similarities with your ideas and mine.

Having said that, as you stated with AST, SCH, and SGE, I definitely feel like those ideas aren't well fleshed out enough to really feel sold on them, but I see good ideas here nonetheless.

The idea of a delayed DPS tool is something that has come to mind many times myself for AST since it fits in incredibly well with AST's lore both on its astronomical side and its astrological side. Having said that, my mind has been pushed more toward wanting AST to be the healer that can better satiate players that want to focus as little on attacking enemies as possible. I'll get back to this.

Your ideas on SCH are quite similar to some of the ideas I have as well, although it's a bit reversed in some ways, but generally restoring SCH back to being a DoT focused job is the goal here, and I feel your concept has a good starting point to build off of.

On SGE, there's not much to go off of here really, but while it's very different to my concept, I personally would be totally fine with SGE becoming proc based. I really love DNC, I like luck and chance elements in gameplay as that makes your gameplay less predictable and structured and require more in-the-moment adaptation, and I would be glad to have procs control my gameplay. That said, I don't know if everyone would love that, and since Kardia is already very similar to Closed Position, I wonder if it ends up feeling a little too similar? It's hard to say without a more in-depth concept though.

Onto the bigger point: WHM

My head is a little foggy on exactly how the elemental gauge would play out, but trying to integrate Quake, Tornado, and Flood into WHM is something I would love to see. I ended up not doing that myself, but it's a concept I've thought about many times to try and make work. I like the core structure and I think it does a lot more of what I mentioned earlier about trying to create something that creates more interplay between tools, though I think it feels too disconnected from the lilies. It feels a little more like Old WHM vs New WHM but together, or maybe I'm overthinking that a little. Something I do agree with is adding in earlier versions of certain cooldowns like Divine Seal as an early Temperance and Protect as an early Aquaveil. That's something I'd do also, though I didn't really go into detail on the leveling experience in my builds.

Having an answer to mitigation is an important thing that WHM needs though as it's become such an important tool for savage. I actually took the route of adding more max HP increase in place of barriers since those are effectively refillable barriers, but you brought up a good point of the rare mechanics that actually require barriers, or how some older fights have barriers negate knockback or things like that. Though that's something that could perhaps be piggybacked onto max HP buff effects.

Another thing that I think could be a good direction for pure/barrier healing on the reverse category that I didn't actually go into much is allowing pure healers to access barriers and vice versa, but at a greater opportunity cost. So it's ideally better to avoid those and let your cohealer handle that, but if they can't, then you aren't dead in the water.

Generally, I think you and I have similar thoughts on the general approach we want to see for healer adjustments. The goal is to have something that plays cohesively and offers consistency regardless of whether the content is easy or hard while tying healing and DPS together so that when you are DPSing effectively, you can swap to healing as needed with optimal healing tools, or vice versa.

Like I said earlier, if you do have time to check out some of the builds I had suggested. I think you'd have good feedback or maybe find some of those ideas interesting, but of course it's totally up to you if you wanna take that kinda time.

[ForsakenRoe]

Thanks for the reply (so much detail!), and while I have seen your theorycrafts, I have also forgotten the details of them because it's been a while, so I'm gonna go look at them again in a few minutes. As you say, my AST/SCH/SGE ideas are less clear because I don't play those as much (though I do seem to be playing SGE more and more recently, and so it gets more brainworms, like the page 3 idea). Let me see if I can take this piece by piece (and not make too much of an essay of it). AST being the 'I want to buff more and DPS less' healer does sound like a nice idea, not just to satisfy the 'I play healer to heal not to do damage' players, but also as it's a concept that isn't in the game yet really. I did see an idea someone made a while back of a buff skill for AST that would essentially apply 5 'stacks' to an ally, and each time the ally attacked, a stack would be consumed to deal additional potency scaled based on the AST's stats. I guess the idea would be that they'd use Malefic to get through solo stuff, but in a raid their gameplay would be to keep rotating this buff across allies, and since it's scaled to the AST's gear, it wouldn't matter which ally you apply it to as long as you don't overwrite stacks?

SCH is partially me thinking 'I miss the DOTs' and partially 'I hate when my cohealer doesn't use Soil because Energy Drain is damage'. Trying to come up with a way to make the Aetherflow system not eat into your damage, while also keeping some semblance of 'decision making' (since I've been helpfully reminded several times that ED is the only complexity healer has left) is a tough one, but I'd like to think I came up with something 'passable' at least with the PixieTricks gauge. At the very least, we can agree it's criminal that we promised our lovely branch we'd call on them in times of need, and have done so exactly zero times since, right?

SGE, the original idea (the 4 OGCDs, Dosis causes the procs) was that the OGCDs be GCDs, and stronger than Dosis, and it could well be, but I wondered 'how fun/bleh would it be to have a GCD rotation that just alternates Dosis and a proc every other hit?' Would it just be a 1-2 combo, but your 2 keeps changing place on your keybinds? Or is that the reason people find DNC fun? So I went with OGCDs instead, to create a more frantic, 'constantly singleweaving after every GCD' idea. Maybe too close to being Healer-Continuation though. Honestly, my current favourite idea is my one on page 3, about making the GCDs MP free, and making the augmentations be the MP spenders, as it'd be completely different feeling to the other healers. The MP gauge itself would become a 'Job Gauge' in a sense, and with the addition of MP management as a thing SGE has in it's gameplay, having the current DPS rotation of nuke, DOT and 45s Phlegma might make sense, since 'when do I Zoe' becomes a part of the decision making. While writing this, I also just had the idea of changing Krasis's effect from it's current '20% increased healing received' into a selfbuff for the SGE, of 'The next 4 attacks will restore X% of the damage dealt to anyone affected by Kardia (only the first target counts in AOE, no bloodwhetting memes here)'. Would give us some actual 'DPS to heal the party' flavour, by throwing this up before Phlegma for bigger bursts of healing? Going 'Dosis > AOEKardia > Dosis > Krasis > Dosis > Soteria > Dosis spam' could put out a lot of AOE healing. but I'd also have to see the design in action to say if it'd be good or not. At the least, having our GCDs be free means anyone who's in a panic and needs AOE healing now can spam Prognosis, for free! (Eukrasia will still cost MP, terms and conditions apply)

WHM, the beloved, what a rocky road she has walked over the years... I think while you responded Taurus, I was adding small dungeon-related details to the idea, and working out potency comparisons, so you may have missed that (not that it matters much). Either way, what you see as the disconnect between gauge and lilies, I see as a kind of 'cycle of nature'. You'd be using your DPS to fill the gauge, using lilies as needed, and when the lilies run out (or your Misery's up and you want to hold it for raidbuffs), the gauge would be there to cover that gap. Conversely, when you run out of gauge, the lilies would likely have prepped themselves in the meantime. You'd alternate between the two tools as needed, in the same way that as AST you don't just Star everything, you Star one raidwide, then CU/CO the next, then Star is back on the 3rd, etc. Also, since the 'bonus damage' of Quake, Tornado, Flood in this idea is so low compared to Misery's potential inside raidbuffs, I think it'd be fairly acceptable to just... overcap on gauge if you don't need it to heal? Like, yeh, moving them inside raidbuffs along with Misery would definitely be 'better' compared to not, but if you're at 100 gauge and the next raidbuff window is 40sec away, it's not a 'you must spend now, overcapping is a SIN' kind of design. I want the WHM to feel powerful, but also be super easy to access that power for new players, with zero punishment (or close to it) for 'inefficient play'. That is, overcapping this gauge is not a dps loss, spending it not a dps gain. You could theoretically ignore it entirely, and DPSwise nothing would change. This means the hypothetical newer player doesn't need to worry about 'should I spend this on damage or healing' in the way that eg. Star for AST is now, or ED vs Indom on SCH. Lastly, let's be real, a huge burst of healing feels very cool and powerful as a healer. Doubly so, IMO, if it were followed up by being empowered by the elementals to 'tear their flesh with biting winds, crush their bones with pressure of oceans deep, and rock the very foundations of the earth'. Sorry, got too into it lmao

It feeling like 'Old WHM vs New WHM' is pretty funny, because that's kinda the intention. Seeing how some of us old fogeys miss Aero3 or Cleric Stance. Seeing some other players here preferring the current form of healers. It made me think, 'is there a way to bring back Old WHM feeling, while keeping fairly adherent to the design of New WHM? To keep it's baseline gameplay fairly simple and accessible, but give complexity and a bit of variety to those who are looking for it?' I would like to think I struck a fairly comfortable balance here, of course some might argue 'this does not go far enough it still looks boring' and others might go 'no I do not like this I want to keep pressing Glare' but I think what I made is a fairly good middle-ground. And if some people think it's not enough complexity, I'm already on thin ice for suggesting Banish as a new button on the hotbar...

Max HP, or 'Bubble' as some call it, was an idea I had too, but one I'd only rely on as a last resort, design-wise. Having the ability to negate the UWU knockback is part of the reason I chose shields rather than 'Bubble', but also partially because of 'fill to 100% or die' kind of mechanics, extending someone's HP bar with 'Bubble' would potentially make it harder to meet that check. Also, having it as a shield means it shows as the yellow bar on the UI which is just nicer for working out at a glance 'can we live through this' compared to raising max HP, which doesn't make the HP bar graphically longer so it's kinda vague at a glance to work out. Maybe a new healer could take the idea though. Perhaps one that doesn't mind having a longer HP bar to fill, because it works with percentage based healing, like the old SCH Lustrate being 25% of a HP bar instead of a flat potency?

Opportunity cost is a very important thing, and one that could have it's own topic/thread/whatever. But yes, it's part of the design that while, in my crazy fantasy world of 'all healers can shield and pure', there is opportunity costs. WHM can AOE shield, but only by spending a lily. SCH can AOE burst heal, but it costs Aetherflow. SGE can AOE heal slightly better, but Pneuma's a 2min CD. AST is the one that is a bit dicey, because it's 'kinda good' at both roles, but it's limitation is that it's only able to access one side at a time (unless lmao Neutral), meaning in a heal check like, say, J-Waves in TEA, it'd have to keep bouncing between Diurnal to refresh the HOT, and Nocturnal to apply shields and mit. I didn't want WHM to be close to SCH in terms of how strong it's shields are, as if I made Afflatus: Sanctuary (the AOE one), say, 300p strong, well SCH's Succor is 320p. So for any mechanic that says 'mit and shield this to live', the WHM would become the shield bot, because their shield costs a lily which is refunded by the Misery system. On the flipside, the 'more of a Barrier healer' SCH would avoid using their barrier, as it's a GCD with no compensation system, making it a straight damage loss. I never got round to working out how to make the GCD barriers more attractive to use for SCH and SGE, did I? I guess it means even with weaker shields, WHM would be the one to use them and SCH/SGE would compensate with more %-based mitigation tools. But then, maybe that's okay, having these two healers working together to mitigate like this?

Now it is time for me to revisit those theorycrafts, and oop my message is over 9000 characters again, so I have to kick myself for making another essay. Sorry not sorry

[ForsakenRoe]

Okay, I've now added two video examples to the post on the front page, one is of current WHM rotation on a dummy (boo) and one is my very bad attempt to mimic what my pitch would create, using Lost Banish in Zadnor in place of my pitch's Banish. Annoying, because it's not instant cast like my idea pitch, it doesn't have the 15sec CD so I have to manually time it against the instance timer, and I had to refresh Dia by counting GCDs to mimic the 12sec duration from the idea. In the video example, that'd mean aiming to refresh as close to 18s remaining as possible. Check em out, hopefully they give an idea of what the WHM rotation I envisage looks like in practice, and uhh, sorry about the button mashing in the 'slightly more fun healer gameplay' vid, I was nervous.

[Anxin]

No. But I want it to. Its kinda ridiculous that wall to wall pulls use more of my kit than boss fights in EX and Savage.

My favorite thing to heal in this game is the wall-to-wall pulls. I have far more fun with these than the boss fights. Can we have dungeons without bosses? Just a giant hallway without any gates and with randomized hordes of mobs so we can see how many we can pull at once? Make the damage scalable to ilevel so the hallway never becomes outgeared! We only need one dungeon like this. I would heal nothing else .

[Sebazy]

My favorite thing to heal in this game is the wall-to-wall pulls. I have far more fun with these than the boss fights. Can we have dungeons without bosses? Just a giant hallway without any gates and with randomized hordes of mobs so we can see how many we can pull at once? Make the damage scalable to ilevel so the hallway never becomes outgeared! We only need one dungeon like this. I would heal nothing else .

Even better, give us something like Aurum Vale or Brayflox (Specifically the room between the 1st and 2nd bosses). Dangerous wandering adds, no gates. Make us have to actually communicate and judge what we can get away with pulling again. Maybe even actually dust off the CC abilities for once!

[ForsakenRoe]

Maybe even actually dust off the CC abilities for once!

Careful, that'd require the healer to target the enemies to apply the CC, and from there it's one small step away from 'oh and it does damage' like old Stone 1 or Stella, and from THERE it's only one more small step away from 'well actually healers can do damage too', we wouldn't want our poor precious healer players to feel too stressed with responsibilities beyond 'heal this raidwide that happens once per minute' now would we

Sarcasm aside, this game really just is not built with CC in mind, and trying to force it now would just cause the same issue that befell Cataclysm Heroics: A playerbase completely un-used to the idea of needing CC skills, suddenly told they MUST CC things or they wipe, and so rather than learn and adapt, they just complained it was too hard.

[Raikai]

THE FIFTH HEALER...? (not clickbait)

Now, while we have 4 healers, and we could arrange them like in the chart above, the question still remains, what if we have a 5th healer? Well, with the old stinky 2x2 grid SE's enforced on us we're out of room and out of luck, but with the spectrum we can slot a new healer in anywhere we like! Furthermore, since Sage was added as a Barrier healer, I believe the perfect location to put a new healer would be...



With a spectrum of Pure vs Barrier Capability, it's pretty simple to just slot in a new healer wherever, and tune their Pure vs Barrier outputs accordingly. Since we have already got the paradigms we've got, I think a fair amount of people are crying out for a HOT based healer (Time Mage?), especially in this game where damage comes in waves and is staggered by such long amounts of 'nothing's happening for X seconds'. As for their mitigation side of their kit, I doubt the engine could handle it but I'd love to see a healer that slows the incoming damage from a burst down into a DOT, 'staggering' it if you will. This would synergise with both Pure healers (because they can easily Pure heal through the DOT) and Barrier healers (because the Barriers would block the DOT ticks while they hold, and their mitigations would make the DOTs tick for less), and they'd synergise with themself because they'd turn the burst of damage into a DOT, place a HOT, and the two would counteract each other quite nicely. Add in some ways to manipulate the HOTs by extending them, instantly collapsing them for burst healing if needed for White Hole, etc and there we go, new healer

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you made it here thanks for reading, I don't expect anyone to agree with all of my ramblings (or any, to be frank), but I needed something to do while waiting for PF to become alive for the day. Leave some comments, suggest changes, tell me my maths is off, complain that SE needs to listen to healer issues, yadda yadda

Join me next time when I complain about BLU and suggest how to make it a real class (nobody's done that one yet I'm sure)

ps sorry for bad art, I thought it'd be a quaint joke but I really can't draw and after the first I just committed to the bit

This makes a lot of sense.

They literally made healer balance not be future-proof by defining those binary roles. They will have to change a lot by adding a fifth healer. It kind of makes me wonder if AST and possible 7.0 healer changes are going to observe that.

[ForsakenRoe]

This makes a lot of sense.

They literally made healer balance not be future-proof by defining those binary roles. They will have to change a lot by adding a fifth healer. It kind of makes me wonder if AST and possible 7.0 healer changes are going to observe that.

I dunno what the future holds (which probably explains why I'm not so good at AST), but I was thinking recently, and this bump to my thread gives me a good opportunity to air the thought: Ranged and Casters are suffering behind Melee atm, due to the Melee having higher potency to account for loss of uptime. But there's no uptime lost this tier, every boss has almost 100% uptime (Carb dashes lose you maybe 1 GCD whoa end of the world). So, the solution to address that imbalance would be either A: Add potency to Ranged and Caster to compensate for the fact that the Ranged Tax is not really justified anymore, or B: go back to designing bosses with Melee downtime, causing Melee players to be annoyed because they can't hit the boss. Personally I'd prefer to see B, as optimizing the strat to remove downtime is a huge part of the optimization process (eg, Uptime Unreal for Hello World vs regular Unreal being safer for PF), but there's every chance SE goes with A moving forward.

If we do end up with 100% (or close to it) Melee uptime on a boss, what reason would there be to not have a Melee Healer? That is, a healer that attacks with Melee hits, but has some Non-Melee backup skills to fall back on when the boss is not targetable/ it's not safe to be in melee. Medica equivalent and such. But building gauge to spend on OGCDs could be done via Melee attacks, there could be a gauge spender that, IDK, does damage and applies a 'Judgement of Light' effect to the boss, making anyone who hits the boss receive a heal for a duration (or a number of attacks, JOL lasts 25 attacks now I think). Or we could have the class have a focus on HOTs and DOTs, with the melee strikes manipulating those effects. I wonder if we ever saw a character who has ways to manipulate the flow of time, who also uses a Melee weapon. Maybe a hammer...?