The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

There are 3 realities about gamers that game designers need to understand and recognize:

You're forgetting the groups between 2 and 3 - those that research and learn about the game, encounters, mechanics, and their classes and party composition, but don't chase the meta or strive for "perfection" they work for "what is fun for our group that is 'good enough' to achieve results." You know, the people that took MCH's in their group or that run double caster. And there are a lot of these people. Basically, "the midcore". (1) is a very small fraction of the playerbase. (2) is often seen on PF, but not the majority of it, and not most friends and midcore players and groups. These people are all (4). Or perhaps we should call it 2.5. The people that read about the meta and the Balance and YouTube guides and so on, but not all of it, and they aren't slaves to it. They don't swap to flavor of the month/patch Jobs, theykind of just go with whatever they and their friends always use/bring and make it work. That is, people who are somewhat skilled and somewhat researched, but aren't chasing the meta. This is probably the majority of non 1%ers who still engage with the endgame (3) don't really engage with the endgame and may not even know how to unlock Savages or Extremes, much less do anything with them.)

And you can argue people are "still supporting" but that isn't what's relevant.

What's relevant is what is the focus of the player. It's a distinction that has meaning, and I think by not grasping that...that may be the key you're missing to understanding the people who don't think as you do, honestly. If you can understand its significance, you might understand the problem and why your proposals aren't quite fitting.

The main reason Dedicated healer/Support healer split would not work is super easy to foresee: in the format this game has for encounter design, healing is binary.

Yeah, but that's making a lot of assumptions. For example, perfect play. You never need a SMN or RDM Raise with perfect play. With adequate gear and perfect play, you shouldn't need Pots, and players should be able to clear all encounters the first time in min ilevel gear.

Yet we find in the field, that isn't the case. People often like having spares. I was in an Ex5 group earlier where someone swapped to a SMN so we'd have a third Raise to push prog. Many groups even on farm make occasional mistakes. People continue to equip better gear despite the min ilevel gear being sufficient. While healing is an either you have enough or you do not, many groups want the added comfort of having more. For progression and for early clears with a group, I often layer more shielding than I do once we have played the fight a lot and have sufficient gear to not be inches from death if a mitigation is missed.

Some Tanks do complain. And complain a lot. When we went from SB to ShB, Tanks complained about losing their agro tools, which didn't do as much damage (e.g. they were, in effect, asking to do less damage). This was as big of a bombshell with the community as the SCH and AST changes were. To this day you can skim through any Tanking forums on this game and people wills till bemoan not having agro tools and agro management not being a part of a Tank's core identity anymore, and many Tank players complaining they feel like a "Blue DPS".

So, in fact, yes, that is happening, and has been for 4 years. Surely you're aware of it? If you've seen the legendary 0 DPS healer that runs away from enemies before using Assize, you must have seen the far more common Tank who complains about being a Blue DPS and not doing "Tank things" like managing agro and positioning bosses? It is not "Only healer" which has this split. If you'd like, I could probably find you some posts on the Tank section of this forum of Tanks complaining about not having agro (and others telling them they're dumb to complain about it), as well as on r/ffxivdiscussion and YouTube. Very much an active thing.

So are DPS players who want a more support focus and are annoyed there's not more of a Support role in FFXIV, though that's far less because they actually have options (DNC, BRD, and RDM all kind of scratch that itch to varying degrees)

GNB is kind of an exception to this rule since it was a Tank specifically designed to appeal to DPS players.

...oddly, SGE was supposed to be this for healers. I don't understand how they got it so right with GNB and so wrong with SGE, though...

once the 'Dedicated Healer' is at the point where their healing is causing big amounts of overheal, the questions come up: Do you force them to swap to a Support healer for more damage? Do you ask them to do damage when they don't need to heal (completely negating the point of them being 'the dedicated healer')?

What is your party?

Are you a 1% hardcore static party pushing world firsts and trying to set speedrun records? Then you'll ask players of ALL Roles/Jobs to switch. "I know you like WAR and it was good for the clear, but now we're pushing speed runs and you have to swap to GNB or DRK..." "I know we had you on RDM for clears and you love the rotation, but you have to swap to BLM now or get out of our one Caster spot..." The 1% do this. The rest of the community doesn't.

If I'm on SCH or SGE and my FC asks me to sub in for one of the statics and I join and see the other Healer is a SCH or SGE, I swap over to WHM. If it's WHM, I swap to SCH or SGE.

You can ask your party to do whatever you want, and depending on if your static/friends group are hardcore min-maxers and meta-chasers or just a group of friends where most only have one 90 (or one geared one, anyway), you kind of make do with what you have. So the answer to this question depends on your group.

I've long noted min-maxers are going to min-max. It's what they do. The price for min-maxing is you don't always play what you "like", you play what the meta is. And this is true regardless of Role. As noted, MCH's were asked to change. PLD/WARs were asked to change. RDMs were asked to change. RPRs were asked to change. And even in the healer role, WHMs and sometimes ASTs and SGEs were asked to change. This is no different than the current live game.

As I noted before, at its worst, this paradigm produces no worse results than what we have today with the live game.

If it's possible to remove some healing GCDs from their load, by having the Support healer throw out some occasional heals like Indom or such (tools they would need to have, in order to get through solo-healer content like a 4man dungeon), then the Dedicated healer does what with the newly freed up GCDs?

Whatever they feel like, honestly.

If the party is doing risky things, they may use healing or mitigations. If everyone's on the ball, they can Glarespam with ease, fluidly moving back to healing as soon as the damage picks up again. An Ex5 party I had earlier the BLM consistently was ploping his Ley Lines just far enough away from the boss he was outside of my Assize. Well, I devoted a few GCDs to keeping him alive. If I didn't, he'd die. (BLM's always been a "healers adjust" Job, and "adjusting" with GCDs if it increases their damage contribution is better for the party anyway, to a point.)

So not necessarily damage, but if they do some 1 button spam damage (you know, they kind they already have to do today? Again, this is no worse than what we already have live...), where's the problem here? They aren't going to get "bored" since they aren't the Support/Damage oriented Healer, that's their co-healer. Who is getting to do more damage as healing needs are less with fight practice and better gear. Everyone wins here. As I said above, Dedicated Healer archetype people aren't opposed to pressing damage buttons. They're opposed to their mental energy having to be expended on damage rotations instead of healing needs and boss mechanics. That is, their enjoyment of the game comes from boss mechanics and managing party health and mitigation, not performing an "exciting" and "fun" rotation. To them, 1 button spam as their filler isn't just acceptable, it's what they'd prefer to the alternative.

So, here's the kicker: with this idea, the point of failure

No, it remains unchanged from today. Overall, because mitigation abilities don't JUST exist on Healer Jobs (and Healer Jobs don't have enough of them for min ilevel or near min ilevel runs), it's a party-wide responsibility. You can argue people would blame the healer instead of the DPS who didn't use Feint...

...but they already do that today. Again, at its worst this idea is no worse than what we have live right now.

But all in all it sounds like a design being written for a FFXIV that doesn't exist, and cannot exist, because people have formed a perception of how it plays.

Who?

This is literally how the game is played in high end speedruns now. How little pure healing can we get away with? Can we swap to SCH/AST? Can we solo WHM (or AST) heal so we can swap in another DPS? People were doing this in SB, ShB, and EW, as well as obviously in HW and ARR, where the paradigm was pioneered.

And for casual content, where a single healer can already provide for a 24 man party without needing a co-healer in live, this would be no different than it is today. Right now you can solo heal 24 mans if your party are doing the mechanics correctly. At that level of tuning, it doesn't matter if you get the good party with the meta SGE/AST healers or if you get stuck with the SGE/SGE or WHM/WHM party who can't even get Atamos platforms right.

The only thing that would need to be "changed" is for the Support based Healers to have more Support functionality and the Dedicated ones to have tools for sustained healing. Right now you can go into Ex3 and probably have one healer solo heal it with the other as just an emergency backup. People were solo healing ZodEx in 6.0. In 6.0, "selfish" WHM Glarespam was considered a liability to their party if they were doing actual healing, so (in an odd twist on this paradigm), their co-healer was basically solo-healing P1-4S with the WHM just doing support and suplemental healing with their oGCDs. The high damage bleeds are far more easily handled by having your WHM or AST use HoTs on the afflicted party members with additional support from your SCH/SGE's oGCD supporting heals.

There's no "the game can't do this" because the game is, quite frankly, already functioning this way in all but name, and has for 2 Savage raid tiers (unintentionally or otherwise) and 4 patches worth of Extremes now.

Over 8 years of 'healers need to pump as much damage as possible' is not going to be undone.

Well, first off, not 8 years, but that aside - as I noted above, it's already been undone.

Even if the gameplay is changed to try and enforce one healer to be 'the HPS bot' and one to be 'on standby to spotheal', people in this game will find ways to try to reduce the GCDs used by HPSBot, so they can do damage too.

Some will.

...and we'll be no worse than we are today. Again, at its worst, this idea is equal to the present day. "But the Dedicated Healer might have some people play it where they cast Glare" isn't much of a counter when that's...what we have right now. If the "worse off" argument is "things will be like today", then that means this is already a better paradigm.

if SupportHealer is able to heal through the EX roulette (and they'd have to be able to by design), HPSBot Healer's HPS is going to be redundant.

Sure, but roulette doesn't work by letting you pick your party members from a pool. You get stuck with what you get, just like now. Again, this is no worse than the game is right now...

So while I can appreciate the sentiment behind the idea, I think it's just not feasible in execution.

Fair enough. I'm just looking at your critiques and all of them support the position that, at its worst, this solution is no worse than/more or less identical to what we have now. And at its best...it's better and more interesting, pleasing more types of players.

.

But, it was a thought experiment moreso than a proposal.

Sorry to intrude,

No need to apologize. Discussion is great. I want to thank you guys for having this nice one.

I think this depends on the player. You say anchor, but that's only true if there's no drift, no boss mechanics causing you to miss or delay things, no untargetable phases, and you consistently use all CDs on CD. If any of those things are not met, it isn't an anchor. You also get into those issues of abilities that are tied to a resource and so break on death regardless.

I think it's important to note here that what I'm describing there is "flavor of ice cream". I wasn't telling you one is better than the other. I was telling you which one I like and don't like vs which ones you like and don't like, and how that's part of our impasse. I wasn't saying either was better or either was wrong. I think the ice cream analogy is apt. If I like vanilla and you like chocolate and Ty likes strawberry, none of us can - or should, anyway - tell the other(s) that they're wrong. It's a flavor, and we like what we like and don't what we don't. I don't like tomatoes and onions but I like pickles. Maybe you love tomatoes but dislike pickles. Maybe someone else loves them all and yet another person hates them all. Taste isn't "right" or "wrong". It just is and is individual.

So here, what I was more saying is you guys like those kinds of abilities. To me, they're annoying upkeep things I just have to remember to press with a periodicity, but are otherwise boring. Dia for example. I could put a dipping bird by by keyboard to press the Dia button every 30 seconds and Presence of Mind every 60. To me, that's not enjoyable or interesting gameplay, while fitting in Glares where I can and smoothly transitioning to Lilies or the odd Medica 2 I find enjoyable.

On the other hand, you see the Glare as the dipping bird button and the CDs as things you're actively considering how to use, and you also like being punished for sub-optimal play. So you prefer those CDs. I don't derive joy from being punished; but again, this is taste. I could make some joke about "don't kink shame", but basically it's that. We all like our own things.

And to my way of thinking, that's fine - takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.

That's the very basis of why I think each type should have a Healer that matches that. Instead of having all vanilla healers and swapping all healers to chocolate, or even variations of chocolate (cookies and cream, moose tracks, chocolate chip, and standard chocolate), why not just stick with one vanilla, another chocolate, another strawberry, and another coffee...for those people who chose the wrong taste buds growing up.

If you play FFIV, it's true that Rosa's offensive options are quite limited, having access to Aim and Holy and that's about it. But you as the player are not controlling only Rosa.

Yes, but also no. FF9, FF6, and I think FF4 allows you to set individual controllers to different players. It was, in fact, possible to control only Rosa. You can argue about how common this was, but I played several of those with my cousin and other times with a friend where we split the players and I generally played the healers (e.g. Garnet and Eiko) while he played the offensive characters (Zidane and Stiener). The party shifts during the game move things around (I also played Freya and I think Quiena, but we tended not to have Quiena in the party more than necessary because neither of us could figure out h/she's gameplay/mechanics), and it depended on the game.

FF6 because of the Magicite system lets you basically entirely build your characters, and I tended to make heavily support/buff/defensive/healing focused ones to support my friend's offensive ones. I'd often have a few offensive options because of the nature of the game (e.g. the Summon for the equipped Magicite), but it was more ancillary or vestigial, and I also often focused on the healing or defensive Summons, anyway.

One thing to remember is that some players in MMOs like to fully dedicate themselves to a single focus while others like to spread. For example, Mage specs when I played WoW were all offensive focus. There was a TINY bit of Control-support in the form of Polymorph and some Ice abilities if you were Frost spec, but that was about it. Me personally, I preferred Balance Druid since I could shift and provide some support healing (or even emergency spot tanking) if needed, but many players enjoyed being wholly dedicated to their role. Holy Priests back in the day were not played offensively at all. Most Mage specs, Rogue specs, and Warlock specs were almost entirely, or outright entirely, DPS focused. I think it was Prot Paladin and maybe Prot Warrior that were tanking focused. Ran into someone recently on Reddit who commented he loved FFXIV Tanking because WoW tanking is boring as you only have 4-8 (some as few as 4) damage buttons on your tanks and their focus is almost entirely on threat, positioning, and defensives. Granted, to me, that sounds like what I enjoy when tanking, but this person had the opposite taste - again, taste isn't right or wrong. It was just interesting hearing how in Shadowlands/thenewone that WoW tanks are so heavily narrow focus in tanking.

But, WoW also has a lot of hybrid or hybrid-adjacent classes/specs. Ones that aren't pure damage, healing, or tanking and dabble a little in providing spot support of the other roles.

A good game appeals to both types of players, in those given roles.

Right now, FFXIV only does this for the golden child role, DPS. DPSers have options from pure selfish (SAM, BLM) to heavy support (DNC, BRD, RDM), to somewhere in between (everyone else). Healers don't have this option to focus on their desired playstyle and are forced to kind of straddle several, whether they want to or not, leading to dissatisfaction. Bereft of the option to pick one Healer class to go deep healing or another to go deep support, we're all forced to be half healing, half supporting, and this makes most everyone unhappy other than the people that like that exact mix. Which sucks because we have 4 (arguably 5 if noct was brought back) healing Jobs, so we could actually have ones that more closely lent to that.

Also: The FF1 meta was an all WHM party. I learned that from 8-Bit Theater.

Summary: Don't underestimate how some people DO want to specialize and NOT be hybrids.

And in FF9 Garnet and Eiko both have access to Summons, and in FF10 Yuna had access to Summons (and if you played on Expert Sphere Grid, anyone could be the 'WHM'. Wakka WHM lets go), and in FF5 you could choose anyone to be a WHM but also give them any other job's actions once you'd levelled it, to complement what the WHM lacks, list probably goes on but those were the extra that immediately came to mind

While true, most characters in games are built with stat growths in mind. OG FF7 the characters had base stats but also different rates of stat growths. This means while you COULD make any character into a Black Mage, some were much better at it and some much worse. Even in games with pretty free character building, like FFTactics, most true hybrid/jack-of-all-trades combinations were weaker than specialized ones. For example, a Black Mage + Summoner was better than a Knight + Black Mage or Knight + Summoner. While you COULD do those, they were generally poor options.

Often, there are some kind of niche "things that shouldn't go well together, but go together like peanut butter and jelly!", but you also get a lot of duds and find that you get stronger combinations by paring like-things together. For example, paring a White Mage and Time Mage as a healing and support buff character.