Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

I don't focus on heals I focus on damage to meet the check. Because that's the way they're all designed. They're not designed to make sure I keep everyone healthy. They're designed to make sure I'm spamming my DPS almost as much as a DPS is.

This seems to be much more of an encounter design issue than anything. Encounters need more lax enrages, less big spikes of damage and more gradual but consistent damage that needs to be healed, and Healer oGCDs need to be nerfed majorly, probably as much as by half. Doing those things would take us back to the ARR/HW combat design.

...

Thing is, the wing spices actually exist all across the spectrum. They don't have the green mild section and have NO SAUCES IN IT. Your list looks to me a bit more like this:



It strikes me that (a) you seem to think that there's basically no such thing (at least in a realistic sense for what the Devs will implement) as spicy, and (b) that most things are just flavors of "medium". I think my issue with that is that it doesn't really make for a usable scale. Basically you have an absolute scale based on your belief on what is easy and hard, but it doesn't really have any meaning in the sense of what's realizable, and is thus not granular. It's like looking at only the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum when someone else is trying to lay out the whole spectrum for discussion and note the importance of having representation across the entire spectrum. Or, perhaps, you're trying to use the Rankine temperature scale while everyone else is trying to discuss normal Earth temperatures, or about -20 up to +120 F. Sure, you have stars at 5,000 K and you have absolute zero K at around -273 C, but including those ranges just to ignore them doesn't help the discussion much. Firstly, because it's still subjective (in this case) and so not really agreed upon. And secondly, because if we submit those ranges exist, then we have to address that some people may want them anyway, and need to fill them, as it were.

I'd also note that I'm not sure people realize how much things have changed over time. For example, how many abilities did WHM have in ARR? If you made an actionbar set of just ARR abilities (double use for ones that had multiple forms, like put Glare in two spots for Stone 1 and Stone 2), it's a bit less than we have now. And the chiefly used abilities were just a handful of them.

CNJ: Stone, Cure, Aero, Cleric Stance, Protect, Medica, Raise, Fluid Aura, Esuna, Stone 2, Repose, Cure 2, Stoneskin, Shroud of Saints, Cure 3, Aero 2, Medica 2
WHM: Presence of Mind, Regen, Divine Seal, Holy, Benediction
Cross-Class: Limit of 5 (with Job stone equipped)

That's 27 vs the 30 we have today. Moreover, some of those were not really used in combat unless things were very strange (Stone 1 and Protect being the big ones). And (someone) we still have Esuna and Repose today. We've added Rescue as another "don't really use", but the main spells consistently used could fit on one crossbar tab. I even remember having extra room (once I started using a second tab) so that I could have some key abilities on both tabs. WHM and SGE fall JUST short of being able to fit all their buttons on two crossbar sets today. SCH and AST can't do it unless they leave off some things entirely.

The mainly used abilities were Stone 2, Aero, Aero 2, Cure, Cure 2, Medica, Medica 2, Regen (and recall while DoTs were shorter, HoTs were longer), Shroud, and Stoneskin for Tankbusters. A lot of the CDs were "reserved" for "emergencies" by the average player still, Presence of Mind was often used as a healing CD not as a damage one, and WHM's oGCDs were mostly modifiers (PoM, Sroud) as opposed to healing oGCDs, of which it had exactly one, Benediction.

Even doing < level 50 stuff now on WHM requires a different approach as you don't have oGCDs or Lilies, especially if you have a relatively new DRK Tank.

[ForsakenRoe]

spice and temperatures

Again, I am not just saying 'this is where the healers should be, overall', I gave three separate 'player optimization levels' for each. The chart has those empty categories both to better represent the relative position of each healer to each other, as well as each healer's potential depending on optimization. I didn't put a single thing in 'I regret ordering this' tier, but it is there specifically to illustrate that 'Hot' is not the maximum level. If I were to rank other roles, I'd put something like Old PLD or MNK's Orange bars into 'Regret'.

You're looking at the grading system in a very different way from me. I'm looking at it as 'what if we have the healer red bars be 'Korma, Kofta, TikkaMasala, Madras', two are mild, two are medium. I don't want to get chewed out for 'attacking arguments that you didn't say' or whatever, but it sounds like you are trying to cram a healer into a category, just because the category exists. That one of them MUST be completely bland zero-spice and on the flip side, one of them MUST be 'I cannot feel my face this was a mistake' spicy. Not every curry place even does Naga Chili type dishes, some only do up to Vindaloo (which in my graph is 'optimizing SGE or AST'). But I put 'Regret' tier on there, to explain that Vindaloo is not the pinnacle of spice levels. There's pain beyond that too.

Maybe it's best to ignore the text I wrote, and just look at the graph. It's a lot more granular on the relative positions of things, where each healer falls within a tier, etc

[ataren3]

This seems to be much more of an encounter design issue than anything. Encounters need more lax enrages, less big spikes of damage and more gradual but consistent damage that needs to be healed, and Healer oGCDs need to be nerfed majorly, probably as much as by half. Doing those things would take us back to the ARR/HW combat design.

Oh 100% it's because of the fight design. The issue with their flavor of fights is it focuses on healers doing DPS than healing. When looking at it from an outside perspective, it'd be a nightmare to redesign old & current fights to make healers require more healing. It's much easier to give healers more oGCD heals so they can focus on making that DPS check.

It's just unfortunate that it's setup that way and I'd really love to see an attempt at making heal checks more active. But at the same time I'm not holding my breath.

[Renathras]

Oh 100% it's because of the fight design. The issue with their flavor of fights is it focuses on healers doing DPS than healing. When looking at it from an outside perspective, it'd be a nightmare to redesign old & current fights to make healers require more healing. It's much easier to give healers more oGCD heals so they can focus on making that DPS check.

It's just unfortunate that it's setup that way and I'd really love to see an attempt at making heal checks more active. But at the same time I'm not holding my breath.

I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it.

...why would they have to redesign old fights?

ARR fights all required more consistent healing (bosses could even crit randomly), and it was largely GCD healing since the only oGCD heals in the game were Benediction, Lustrate, and...Embrace/Whispering Dawn?

They changed the fight design over the course of HW to the point that SB was the modern design we have now, but they didn't go back and change the ARR fights. They still exist as they have. Most dungeons still are the same (the redesigns are almost exclusively a few layouts from the 1.0 dungeons like Thousand Maws, and adding the Trust system, which they already did with Squadrons they just wanted better AI and less "brute force" just making the NPCs absolute units so they could face tank their way through...)

That is, they didn't redesign old and current fights when they moved from the "more healing" to the current "less healing, mostly done with oGCDs" model. Why would they need to backdate changes going back?

Now, I would say it's definitely an expansion-level change. You wouldn't want to change mid-tier or part-way through a given expansion since the kits and the fights would be at odds with current content. But when going to 7.0, 8.0, X.0, that's when you'd make the change, largely like they did with 4.0 and, really, 5.0.

I think the issue is there are always Healer shortages, which is what prompted the "dumbing down" in the first place. A lot of Healer players don't like DPS gameplay and don't want to engage with it anymore than they have to, while others prefer the DPS gameplay and like being a balance/plate juggling/Support-Healer hybrid. If the game HAD a proper Support role, that might make things better by covering more bases (and some DPS players like Support roles as well, they just don't like Healer). In most of the polling for Pantheon of the playerbase - granted, a biased sample, but I think it's still somewhat instructive - on average, around 20% of the players want to be Tanks, around 20% Healers, around 30% Support, and around 30% DPS. But most games don't have a Support role, so Support players are shoehorned into playing either Tanks, Healers, or whatever DPS have Support abilities like RDM or DNC.

But as it is in FFXIV, if they lean towards either camp, they alienate the other and make the Healer shortage worse. So they're kind of stuck.

See how weird this sounds when it's flipped?

Not weird at all if your argument is "the spice is just a thing on the side and shouldn't influence people's ability to play as they want and clear content". If that's not your argument...then you're misusing the metric being discussed. That's my problem with your argument, I think. On the one hand, you say you just want the change so people can enjoy the role more and don't want to take away from people that enjoy it as it is today. But your prescription would take away access to content from them (if they play as they do today), and you don't have a problem with that, while pretending that you aren't trying to do it. That is, you're pitching your argument as "this won't affect people who don't want to up their game", but then you say "...and those people who won't up their game can't clear the content they can right now". Well, that's affecting them, so...

If this game were to have 'specs' I'd do a lot more with it than just 'different rotation for the same job', I'd use it for like, giving a different role to each job.

Maybe, but honestly I don't even think that's needed. Considering players can level all Jobs, and many Final Fantasy Jobs don't work that way. For example, Black Mage tanks...aren't a thing. Though Red Mage healers...sometimes are. A lot of that just comes down to design. Like FF11's Job/SubJob system allowed for some crazy stuff. NIN and DNC Tanks, SMN and RDM Healers, etc. Honestly, it's a game I really should get into sometime, but...maybe if they ever make a combination 11/14 sub and/or 11 update...

So, rather than the 'meats' (healers) being served in a sauce, maybe it's better to explain my mental image as like, serving the customer their 'meat' (in this example, wings) and a selection of sauces of varying spice levels.

lol, honestly? I think we should drop the meat/sauce/dish metaphor. We're all using it in different ways, so it isn't really that useful for trying to make sense of things. XD

So I don't understand why I'm the one who's being limiting in this situation.

Really and truly?

Hm...let me put it this way:

Suppose we went to play WoW and we had two designs presented to us. In one design, you're being told that 2 classes in the game play like you enjoy. You might not like the aesthetics, but you can play the game in a way you find fun enough. Maybe you don't like edgy, but Death Knight and Demon Hunter are the two that play the way you want. The other design, though, has no class at all that plays the way you want. Aesthetic or no, you literally have no place in the game and people tell you to quit because you're not welcome and that what you want to play is some other game.

Which of those is more limiting to you?

.

BTW: That's me, I don't like edgy. But in that case, I'd pick the one I like best of the two and roll with it.

It's like now, if the only Healer that got to keep a decent (and by decent, I mean current) system was AST (and they actually fixed the stupid card hyperweaving to lower it to present WHM difficulty and APM overall), I'd swap to it. A bit grudgingly, since it is literally the one I like least in terms of both aesthetics and how it functions, but I'd go with it if it played like WHM does today (so no oGCD cards, things like Earthly Star changed to Assize, etc etc). /shrug

Of course, given that many people LIKE those things about AST, that would just upset far more people than leaving WHM and/or SGE alone as they are today would, since in those cases, the people are used to the present playstyles.

[ataren3]

I see this argument a lot, but I don't get it.

...why would they have to redesign old fights?

ARR fights all required more consistent healing (bosses could even crit randomly), and it was largely GCD healing since the only oGCD heals in the game were Benediction, Lustrate, and...Embrace/Whispering Dawn?

They did go back and change ARR fights retroactively. No more crits from bosses means no more high damage variance. The tank's personal facing does not matter anymore as to whether they could "block" the damage or have a higher chance to be crit (this was a thing in 2.0). Not to mention all the changes that have been done to tanks in general, since it's much easier to generate and maintain aggro than it used to be.

For this example I'll use Ifrit EX. As a reminder Ifrit EX has these following damage pieces (unavoidable only):
- Tank autos
- Tank buster
- That debuff on a healer that's the big AoE + knockback
- Nail kills
- General raidwide damage
- Incinerate (basically tank cleave)

Keep it simple and just say that Ifrit now does more damage. More damage means more healing. Great right? The problem is that even with this more damage the healers still aren't healing a lot. Tanks are mitigating as normal and swapping as they should. DPS are doing their thing and paying attention to avoidable damage. The damage instances within a majority of this fight are few and far between. So we still have our current dilemma: if Ifrit does more damage but the actual damage instances are still too spread out how can we make the healers heal more?

Reduce their healing? That'd feel awful. Your (limited) heal kit does too little to heal and now the dps check is suffering because you're spending far too long doing these heals. On top of that these reduced heals still have that MP cost to them, so you're burning through mana far quicker than you used to.

Back to the drawing board. What if he did more unavoidable damage and we left the healing the same? Healers now heal more, but they'd still have the mana consumption issue that lucid wouldn't really be able to help with that much. On top of that the dps check is still suffering. Ifrit EX expects everyone to be DPSing most of the time, not healing. Plus we're already in the waters of altering an older fight. We don't want to do that if we can help it, so how can we solve this?

There's no change we can make that will require healers to focus on more healing without altering the fight. If we reduce the damage required to meet the check there's too much and we're skipping it. If we increase the healing in some way that means the dps check becomes more strict than it already is and may lock out other classes.

Now apply that to a more recent (but still older fight) like Titania EX. If I did very little damage or none at all then yes everyone would be healthy but we wouldn't kill it. My damage is baked into the check, and thus I must damage over heal.

[Renathras]

...

Some they've changed over time, but many were left alone. For example, Haukke Manor didn't have to be changed, nor did most dungeons. Guildhests haven't been touched since they were implemented. The changes that were made were global. For instance, the boss crit change was probably a global change applied to all "boss" class/flagged monsters in the game code, so wasn't them going back and individually changing it on each past enemy. Moreover, the Healing model was changed in SB, not HW, which is when many of the changes were made at which point the content hasn't been touched since. They haven't made continual changes with each change to the overall game paradigm for Healers, of which there have been roughly three (one part-way through HW, one with SB's launch, and one with ShB's launch). So the idea they have to keep updating old content to reflect changes isn't borne out in the game's actual history.

As to the rest:

Healing already feels awful. Nothing feels good about pressing one button and it fully topping off the party. The only time that feels good is if it's some really big CD (like old school MMOs that had 1 hour or more "big CDs") or if it's a combination of abilities to generate large effects (Recitation + Adlo + Deploy or in ShB, Plenary Indulgence + Think Air + Cure 3 x5). What feels even worse is when it's an oGCD weaved between damage spells, so you don't even feel like you're healing anymore, you just feel like a bad DPS.

On the DPS checks - the entire point of any change is that the Enrage model would need to be adjusted. It arguably already needs to be adjusted anyway, since a clear or not clear can sometimes be decided by if your GNB got Double Down crits or not, regardless of Healer damage output.

On MP consumption - same thing. You don't make changes like this in vacuum. If Healers were designed to GCD heal, then MP management would actually be an important feature of the design, including having MP regeneration tools and having a tradeoff between more MP efficient but less HPS efficient heals vs more MP expensive but more HPS heals.

And we wouldn't be doing any of this with Ifrit EX. The number of people that try to no-echo sync the fight is already a tiny subset of the playerbase as it is. Moreover, that's what traits like Maim & Mend are designed to address.

Devs have - to date - never once said that Healer DPS is "baked into the check". The only time we have a statement from them, it was from HW and them saying it was not. You can argue it is, but you cannot make a statement of fact that it is. And that is, again, a tuning issue, not a design issue. If Healers were expected to heal more, than DPS checks - if they're based on Healer damage contribution now - would be reduced to account for that. "But what happens when Healers don't have to GCD heal anymore?!", I hear you ask. "You mean when content is two patches old and people outgear it? How's that different than now?"

.

you could argue that a lot of jobs at this point have little, if any, risk/reward system. DRK had Dark Arts and Darkside, but that's been thrown out for the skin of a Marauder. SAM's Kaiten gave you a little flashy animation that lead into the iajutsu animation really well AND made it more damaging as a reward for even attempting to do the rotations properly, but now it's Shiten spam with no sort of damage feedback aside from "you're doing damage". and that's just the more obvious examples, barring Healer's themselves. there's not even a feeling of a reward, it's just empty in the end.

Pretty much this. Yes it's especially bad on healers and has been for 3 years now, but this is an issue that is gradually creeping into all job design.

SE clearly hates risk/reward and for there to be any gap between someone mastering their job and someone just spamming buttons, so they slowly rework every job to just spam buttons.
Call me cynical but I expect this to only get worse in 7.0, after all there can't be a skill gap if the ceiling is also the floor.

Basically these, yeah. People act like Healers are bad and every other role and Job is so much better. They...really aren't.

We seem to be at the point where we may have to just accept the direction the devs have taken healers and how the role clashes with the game's design. They really could just remove healers and spread some of the abilities across the support DPS classes like Dancer and Red Mage at this stage, sadly.

I feel like there is the hybrid solution, but outside of that, yes. People seem not to get that, and so actively fight against the solution that might give them some of what they want. I can't see them ever removing Healers, though they could arguably replace them with an overall Support role (since, god forbid an MMO adds an actual fourth "Support" as a full on role... <_< ), but there's no way they're going to do that.

I think Yoshi P has no idea what a good solution is, either, since they get all the conflicting feedback and there's no way to square that circle when one side of the equation is actively insisting the other side either doesn't exist or shouldn't be playing the game (or parts of it), which the dev team obviously doesn't see as an acceptable answer.

[ataren3]

Healing already feels awful. Nothing feels good about pressing one button and it fully topping off the party.

Devs have - to date - never once said that Healer DPS is "baked into the check".

Healing absolutely feels bad because it's such a major departure about what a healer "should" do and what a healer currently does, even in most savage. Healers in FFIXV aren't meant to keep everyone "healthy", but to keep everyone "alive". And that's a major difference between healers in other MMOs and this one. Other MMOs you best be near or at full health because there's a lot of damage going out regularly. You're relying on the healer to keep you healed and the support(s) to mitigate that damage. Sometimes you might have your own mitigation but that's not very common.

While it's true that devs haven't explicitly stated that a healer dps check is baked into the enrage check, we can easily see that from the current savage P8S part 1 & 2. It is expected that the healer is contributing damage to the check, because the design is setup in such a way where the healers need to be pressing their one damage button most of the time. I can't focus solely on healing, because regardless of how good our tank and dps class play I'm still supposed to contribute my damage to the kill. It's an unfortunate way they've designed the fights.

On one hand it feels good as a dps or tank. I'm helping kill the boss with my complex rotations and/or weaving in mitigation. But on the other hand it just feels really awful to play a class that spams one button and really doesn't need to think: "How am I going to keep everyone topped off for the next thing?". There's just not a lot of instances where you gotta keep everyone very healthy for X mechanic. Rather it's "keep them alive and go back to spamming Glare III".