The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ForsakenRoe]

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.

We're back to the original problem, that is, prog is fun-ish for us. We're learning new mechanics, people are dying to stuff, we're triaging as well as triage can work in this engine. The issue arises when we're trying to reclear. Knowing the fight lessens our healing required, and ups our Glare time. Not standing in bad lessens healing required, and ups our Glare time. As we improve at a fight, the variance in what we press actually goes down, in an inverse relationship. We drop safety shielding, we drop spot heal GCDs on tanks, we drop that Regen I used to use for Natural Alignment, and replace it with another Glare. This idea doesn't fix that, is my point. I'm not saying it's a 'bad' idea, I'm just saying that I don't believe it'd work in this game for various reasons. And that even if it DID work, the gain would be so little, SE wouldn't consider it a viable use of resources to implement. Which is why I aim at other, smaller scale stuff.

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.

I'll save you the trip: I miss aggro and positioning as tanks. One of my favorite bosses in WOW right now is Kurog, who has 'the quarter of the arena he's stood in gives him a different moveset'. Fire drops puddles of lava, Ice has 2 stack markers, Earth has adds, concentric circle AOES and heal absorbs, and Storm has TwinBolt from O1S, and Towers to soak. Basic in theory, but very fun to execute. But I'm not saying 'find a tank who wants to have aggro as a mechanic', because a lot of them do, myself included. Back then 'pushing more damage' felt like a reward, for skating the line between defense and offense. Even if DPS checks were made with 100% DPS stance uptime in mind

What I mean is, a tank who wants ONLY aggro mechanic, all of their moves converted to say 'generates X potency' instead of damage, etc. I don't doubt there's someone out there who would want that. But like healing, aggro is binary. You have 'enough' and therefore are the one with the attention of the mob, or you don't and you don't have the attention of the mob. Likewise, you have enough healing and you're alive, or you don't, and you wipe

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...

By playing it safe to avoid upsetting people who would panic if the kit didn't contain a Medica analogue, is my guess

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.

The community love to hear one thing said by one 'big name' and run with it. MCH cleared Week 1, even with the scuffed HP values, but people still go 'dead job omegalul'. Yeh it needed some buffs because it was behind a little compared to DNC or BRD, but a clear's a clear. Doesn't stop some tools in PF locking MCHs out of their week 16 P5S 'going for clear uwu' party. Same has happened in the past. WAR dead this tier, DRK dead in UCOB and then magically getting worldfirst, MNK dead at various times because the NIN DRG BRD MCH comp was too good, people never seem to understand that 'viable' and 'optimal' are very different beasts. Anyway, the point is less about how some groups say 'swap from SGE to SCH cos it's 100 dps more', this idea runs the potential for people to say 'swap from Dedicated to Support, cos it'll get us literal thousands more DPS'

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...

You really wanna see toxic midcore players who have no idea how to understand what caused a wipe, throwing shade at a 'Dedicated Healer' after a wipe even harder than they currently do? Because I can almost guarantee they will. I reckon I can even predict what they'd say, something along the lines of 'your only f*** job is to heal us and you cant even do that right', something like that? Doesn't matter if 'people blame healer already', more responsibility for HPS lumped onto one healer will mean more blame when things go wrong. Like I said, if we die to lack of mit, first blame thrown is at the shield healer, even if they use 3 mits and a Deployment.

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.

Laughs in Panhaima, but yeh, the main reason people bring 2 healers for a lot of EX farms is not actually for the healing, or the 'safety' or whatever. It's because mechanics target certain players. People did 1 tank 1 heal runs of EX2 not just because it's faster, but because it was consistent who the stack marks for Water would go on. If that went random because of missing a healer, it'd have stayed as a 2heal fight. It'd be hella funny to see a curveball raid that required 3 tanks or something, though people would probably just do it with 2 tanks and have a DPS as the third, like a RPR or something

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...

Yeh, we get our party members from a random pick. Set aside the Savage for now, lets use Normal mode raids. If we want to have the roles really stand out, I'd estimate Dedicated healers would have to be 2x as strong on HPS output as Support Healers. Any less and you'd probably just run 2x Support and be fine. So, if the game throws you, idk, a new level 93 trial, which is designed with the new paradigm in mind, It gives you 1D/1S, and it's working how it should, cool. But what if it gives you 2 Supports? The equivalent of 2 SCH now, HPS checks have to be built to factor that in and be clearable by that comp. So the healing is 'tight but they can do it'. On the flip side, 2 Dedicated healers is going to be like WHM/AST paired up against a HPS check now. You just don't need that much HPS, most of it is wasted, CDs are left unused, Gauges are left capping. So the change only really affects High End, which, again, doesn't help solve the issue that veteran healers have of 'this EX roulette is pain'. Heck I did one earlier as SGE, and I decided 'you know what, once the barrier goes down, I'll keep track of which buttons I never press', and this is the result:



And I get the feeling that, as a Dedicated Healer class, this would be the average EX roulette too. Stuff just doesn't hit hard enough to justify it. It can't, while SE is on their 'oooh we have to protect the healers from stress' thing. Oh, and also while it's on my mind, we had this idea with the MT/OT split. That never went through, and I think the same logic applies here.

I played through some dungeons and trials as a healer recently and, regrettably, I realized that so long as there is a plethora of tanks who single pull and/or don't cycle cooldowns in level 90 content or teammates who consistently mess up mechanics, Yoshi will continue to perceive healers as fine because their role of cleaning up after people is being fulfilled. He genuinely believes peak healer gameplay is when teammates are constantly making mistakes.

Give us big unrestricted pulls, I wanna see some Algethar Academy tree-boss roomwide pull in this game, at least that'd force us to GCD heal (probably)

[Renathras]

We're back to the original problem...

Not really, though. If you are a person that likes being a Dedicated Healer and, when you aren't healing, is fine with 1 button spam, then you're no different than today, and you (presumably) knew this when selecting a Job in that sub-role, so that's getting what you signed up for. In other words, someone like me that would pick that healer and be perfectly content just as I more or less am today.

On the other hand, there's a second option now for players that aren't happy with that, where they can play the Support Healer instead. They start the prog having to do a lot more healing (when it's fun for you), and as your group masters the fight, you shift more and more into your damage and party buff optimization. So you have something fun for you to do early in the fight learning process, and as your party gets better and healing needs are lower, you now have your dps and support kit that you're now flexing and trying to push out more performance from. So you're now better off than today.

Again, this is a case of "At its worst, this is still no worse than what we have."

In other words, what this is for "Dedicated Healer" is what it is for all healers in the current game. So this makes it better for Support Healers (people that want to play them now have something else to push and try to master once the healing picture is down pat), while it's equal/no worse/the same as today for the Dedicated Healers, who presumably would be the people that prefer that.

I'll save you the trip: I miss aggro and positioning as tanks.

I appreciate it. Noticed you post in the Tank Role here as well, so figured you'd probably seen some of it there as I have, if not elsewhere.

Pushing DPS wasn't the only reward, though. Doing things like pushing defensives to solo tank was also something people would try to do, or to tank mechanics in ways that increased party uptime (that is, party dps but not necessarily the Tank's personal dps)

What I mean is, a tank who wants ONLY aggro mechanic, all of their moves converted to say 'generates X potency' instead of damage, etc.

Oh, I agree that there are probably VERY few people that want that (if any), but this is true of Healers. There are VERY few Healers who are arguing to have no damage buttons. Hell, I'm not arguing for that! Can you point out a single poster who has suggested that here? Anyone? Anywhere in this thread?

It's kind of a boogieman. It either doesn't exist or is so small in number that it in effect/statistically/for the purposes of this discussion doesn't exist.

By playing it safe to avoid upsetting people who would panic if the kit didn't contain a Medica analogue, is my guess

Yeah, but that honestly doesn't make sense. It would have been easy to do something like "let's make a Job that appeals to those people that like playing RDM because they want to Vercure the party". I dunno, it seems so simple with Kardia to just make Kardia do roughly the healing of Cure 1 and then give SGE a DPS rotation like RDM level where Kardia heals. It just seems so "no brainer". You can give it Medica as a fallback, but surely having Medica doesn't mean you can't have any other spells...

Anyway, the point is less about how some groups say 'swap from SGE to SCH cos it's 100 dps more', this idea runs the potential for people to say 'swap from Dedicated to Support, cos it'll get us literal thousands more DPS'

Two things:

1) People are going to do this anyway no matter what. Seriously.

2) The gap probably wouldn't be literal thousands more DPS. It would probably be something like 5-10%. Enough to be noticeable, but not enough to be the difference between clearing Enrages or not.

You really wanna see toxic midcore players who have no idea how to understand what caused a wipe,

I know I sound like a record at this point but -this happens in live all the time, it just happens to all healers.

Again - at its worst, this idea is no worse than/is equal to what we have in live. If healing fails, it'd still be due to both healers (if the Support is greeding instead of helping heal, then that's on them, just as it would be today if Healer 2 was greeding damage while the party was dying and Healer 1 isn't able to keep them all up alone) as well as the party.

It's because mechanics target certain players.

Note Ex1 I specifically pointed out because...it has no such mechanics. And for the others, I think a lot of those are hardcoded to pick a Tank if one Healer is dead or not present. I believe Ex2 does this as you note, which is why it could be solo healed (and solo tanked).

As for the curveball - one thing I do envy WoW for (there are a few, but this one in particular) is that large raid sizes allow them to do things like make the assumption you'll have 4-5 healers or you'll have one of each class present (in cases of class unique buffs/abilities) and so on. And specs allow a player to swap (I think their armor now works, too - once upon a time PLDs had to have STR gear for Protection-Tank and Retribution-Melee, but INT plate for Holy-Heal, but I think now when you swap spec it has that other stat on it and you just get to use it now), so you can have a 3 or 4 tank fight since it's expected someone in the party can swap to their tank spec and off-tank/add tank one of the adds.

It allows for some interesting variation in fight mechanics and design and stuff that FFXIV sadly can't do (netcode and the rest aside)

Set aside the Savage for now, lets use Normal mode raids. If we want to have the roles really stand out, I'd estimate Dedicated healers would have to be 2x as strong on HPS output as Support Healers.

I don't think that's actually necessary. You COULD make it that way, but that seems a little odd to me. I'd do it more like 1.25-1.5x, and have it where the Support (like SCH with Energy Drain vs Lustrate/Soil/Indom/Excog or like SGE using any GCD heal vs Dosis-Kardia) using a lot of healing cuts into their damage output. In this way, if you had 2 Support, you'd be doing slightly less healing than a Dedicated AND low damage. Note the "a lot of". Some healing would be "free" and easily accessible, but a Support having to bulk heal would be inefficient at it by comparison. Plenty for clearing dungeons and 24 mans, but in highly tuned encounters, would ideally want to use its oGCDs and refrain from using its resource or GCD heals. So you could run 2x Support, but they'd be bringing almost no damage to the table (imagine a SCH spamming Succor and Lustrate), and they'd both have to be doing this to meet the healing that could be met by 1 Dedicated + 1 Support's off-healing suite.

For a ballpark, a Support's offhealing suit should supply about 50-75% of what a Dedicated's heals do, where getting that other 25% would require cutting into their damage and support at a strong diminishing return. Two Support using just their off healing set would do less healing than a Dedicated, but 2 Support using ONLY healing (foregoing damage entirely) would be able to heal more than a SINGLE Dedicated. So something in the ballpark of 1.25-1.5x, not 2x, is more where the tuning should be.

The reason you wouldn't do this is you'd rather your Dedicated cover most healing and your Support be able to add their damage and buffs to the party's overall output. You also want to ensure Support have the healing they need for stuff they might solo heal, like 4 mans or roulette 8 and 24 mans.

Likewise, in damage, a Dedicated going full damage, no heals outside of random oGCDs (e.g. 6.0 WHM) should do roughly 80-90% of the damage of a Support. Note that this isn't their standard damage while healing, this is if they effectively forego all healing. Their damage during periods where they heal would be much lower, because their GCDs would be more devoted to healing and they'd have a smaller oGCD heal kit than the Support since they'd be designed more for active healing rather tan occasional weave healing. This means if they're soloing content or doing content they don't need to heal much (4 mans, etc; casual stuff), they can still contribute enough DPS to now slow their party down much over taking a Support instead, but when doing high end, more tightly tuned content, their normal damage contribution would be lower until their party learned fights enough to not need much healing.

I dunno the magic numbers, but I think basically Dedicated doing 1.25-1.5x healing of a Support (when both are going full on healing, and the Support there would be losing a lot of DPS to do so) while the Support does roughly 1.25-1.5x damage of a Dedicated (when both are going full on damage, and the Dedicated would be losing a lot of HPS to do so). Yin and Yang, mirror images in symmetry.

But again, I'm not sure it's the best solution. It was just a thought experiment.

a new level 93 trial,

...would be casual content, so designed where it could be solo healed by any healer, which is MORE OR LESS how casual content is designed today.

You can solo heal Ex1, I'm pretty sure you could solo heal the MSQ story trial version of it.

CDs are left unused, Gauges are left capping.

And this matters in casual content...why?

And I get the feeling that, as a Dedicated Healer class,

Yes. And that's literally the point.

I'm a bit confused why...you're confused on this?

We've talked a lot about the two (realistic, not the Assize runner 0 DPS legend, and not the "Green DPS" healer that spams Glare even as the party dies because they refuse to do any healing and really want to be a DPSer; these are two edge cases that do not, for practical purposes, exist) types of healers. One time is perfectly content spamming one spell over and over and over again. They would be perfectly happy with this outcome.

As many times as we've talked about it, it's so strange to me that I'm still having to say it. And I don't mean this as a "herp derp you no get easy thing Krunk smash get!"; I mean more in a "I get that we think differently, but it's kind of astonishing to me how differently, and I wish I could figure out how to bridge that communication barrier."

The whole point of this exercise was to see how a healer that would appeal to you (Support) would work under such a paradigm. A healer that would appeal to me (Dedicated) is already more or less what we have in the game right now and what I and people like me are content with. We wouldn't be upset to play them in this scenario since we're not upset to play them now, and what you cite as boring here is exactly what we'd be perfectly fine with, if not even actually want.

The point is, you would have a different option that would entertain you, and the interplay between the two would create more dynamic healing in high end play (where it mattered and where you'd want 1 of each at least while progging), which would be an improvement over what we have today of "Oh, some healing, here's some oGCDs, go away now and let me Dosis...", which I understand you find terribly dull. Right now, there's no give and take. Each healer is perfectly interchangeable with the others. Which, if nothing else, is kind of boring.

Aside: You use Krasus? I use Zoe more than I use Krasus. Huh. And you didn't use Panhaima on the second pull? I tend to use Haima for one and Pan for the other. I also can't believe you didn't use Holos. Not because you need it, but it's just such a gorgeous animation, I always use it in stuff. Then again, I tend to use more buttons because I like to use more buttons to see how much I can get away with, especially on SCH.

this would be the average EX roulette too. Stuff just doesn't hit hard enough to justify it. It can't,

BarbiEx has entered the chat.

Seriously, people were wiping routinely to Knuckle Drum. Clearly the Devs aren't tuning things the way you think they are. Go to Barb in min ilevel and try to solo heal it. You might be able to, but I don't know if you can. I remember trying at the time (because PF consistently graced me with healers that liked to be floor tanks) and it wasn't really doable, and that wasn't even min-ilevel. And if I did manage to drag the party through one set of insane mechanics, I didn't have CDs left for the next. And I can't tell you how many times I had other healers say "No, I'm using THIS CD here because I say so, I don't care what lines up or what doesn't" and so on. When they didn't just stay silent and do wth ever they wanted to anyway.

Yeah, Ex content, current Extreme content, very clearly doesn't have the "have to protect the healers from stress" thing going for it all the time. Ex5 is quite a bit more lax (because 80% of the healing for the entire fight is crammed in about a 40 second window and the other 20% is spread across the entire rest of the fight...), but Ex4 wasn't like that at all.

I wish I could figure out how to express to you what the people who don't like your playstyle do and don't enjoy. I'm not sure how, and there's definitely a concept/communication barrier there, but if we could bridge it, it would probably go a long way towards understanding.

I guess maybe think of the 4 Healers we have right now in FFXIV, in the live build of the game...in PvP:

If you haven't done so (I figure you have, but not sure), try PvP with WHM, SCH, and SGE. Note how different they are. I RARELY top healing on SCH, but I get a ton of assists from Adlo spread/Consolation and Bio spread (and Mumification sometimes). I can barely play SGE in PvP. If I'm a squishy, I prefer being towards the back, and on SGE, half the time I can't hit any enemy, which makes healing allies hard. I've seen a few do it, but SGE's tend not to top healing, either, though they do get some kills and do good damage, and their LB has some neat tactical uses.

On the other hand, WHM (the one I prefer) has NEAR spamable heals between 2x Cure 2, its short CD, its bulk healing (Adlo heals a lot less, Seraph is a LB CD, and SGE has to hit enemies to heal), and if I can get in a quick/safe Seraph Strike, a Cure 3 and Protect (from Seraph). WHM LB also generates a combination Temperance and Medica 2, and has the shortest Healer LB CD, making this kind of a CD limited "Medica 2 with benefits". I'd honestly prefer swapping Seraph for just Cure 3, but every now and then I get a kill with it. Miracle can also be good for preventing those annoying DRKs (DRK is the meta right now because their LB is kinda busted) from doing that annoying "I have 1 HP but am going to live" thing, as well as some other classes (NIN by running, WAR by being WAR) from recovering even with my entire team bashing on them. Oh yeah, it does Stun and does enough damage (it's always hilarious to me when I get multiple Knockouts from it - I think my record Knockouts from a single one was like 9 or 11...S rank in the middle on Nadaam and I was able to line up and basically nuke BOTH enemy teams ), but the healing and mitigation is the selling point outside of chokepoint denial uses, which SGE is better at with Mesotes.

For outright attacks, WHM has two, a spam (Glare) and a ranged AOE on a CD (Misery). Seraph is a meleeish (because it forces you into melee) attack, but I rather think of it as "Cure 3 + Protect", and an LB which is "Medica 2 + Temperance + Stuns bad guys". Cure 2 as a powerful on demand heal, Aquaveil as a frequently available and strong barrier (plus Esuna), and Miracle of Nature to round out the kit with a little bit more crowd control. I know you might be inclined to focus on its damage kit, but its healing kit is what is more the draw here.

It's 7 buttons yet has a pretty complete kit. Again, only change I'd really make is to make Seraph just a Cure 3 + Protect so I don't have to engage in melee as a squishy and have an AOE heal (I miss that from before 6.0), but that's a relatively minor quibble. A part of me would like old PvP Cure 1 back (spamable, no MP cost, no CD) and Rapture (AOE), but honestly, the cure 2 CD is short enough it's ALMOST always up when I need it to be, and if Seraph was changed for Pro-Cure 3, that would be the AOE heal that's missing and basically fix all the issues I have with it...

Despite PvP SCH only having THREE attack buttons, I've seen it pretty widely praised by people that like to play a Support/Healer hybrid role, and it has some pretty neat button interactions and player decisions such as whether to use Deploy on an Adlo to buff the party or on an Bio to debuff the enemy team. PvP SGE has roughly 5 damage buttons (if you count Eukrasian Dosis), does damage by healing to the point of not doing any direct healing at all, and has a bit of a combo thing going between Eukrasia, Eu Dosis 3, into Toxicon 2. Both SCH and SGE want to watch the CD interactions of their abilities, for example SCH making sure they have an Adlo or Bio up when they use Expedience so they can boost it and then a Deploy up so they can spread it, or SGE wanting to pair Eukrasia CDs with Toxicon ones after using Eu Dosis to empower Toxicon 2.

.

Point is, in PvP, WHM is a Dedicated/Pure Healer (more or less), SCH is a Support (Buff/Debuff) Healer, and SGE is a Support (Damage/Mitigation) Hybrid Healer. I haven't played it, but I think AST is even stronger in the buff side of things (SCH has some but also plays to the debuff side of the table), and even with few buttons, they have pretty well rounded kits.

In a game with a more varied combat system (Everquest, early WoW before they themeparked it, etc), I would love to see those four sub-roles actually used. But them being flavors of ARR Dedicated and Support would be neat to see.

Definitely since 6.0 there have been a lot of people praise the PvP healing model.