Paired Threads: What would it take to make Heaker kits "complex/interesting"?

[Rilifane]

It’s why I said that the more ppl cry for solutions, the dumber it gets lol. I couldn’t make solutions even if I tried. I just look at why the devs made these kits the way it is and why they thought it was a good idea.

Which is on the devs for being out of touch and not properly listening and filtering.
I personally believe that they put the cart in front of the horse here. They saw that healers generally got fast invites (not as fast as tanks, by the way) and wanted to make sure that it's more even between tanks/ healers and dps so dps players don't have to wait for so long. So far, so good. But the solution wasn't to make them accessible but more fun. The solution wasn't adding incentives to give it a try to reel people in that will then get hooked because of the gameplay.
No, the solution was pancaking the skill ceiling against the skill floor, making everything as failsafe as possible so people who don't want to play healer and would never main it even when held at gunpoint would fill queues - alienating veteran healers in the process and trading a good portion of their stable, dedicated healer playerbase for a constantly rotating playerbase of non-healers.

BLM is and always has been one of the least played dps classes in endgame content.
But BLM enjoyers are BLM enjoyers and loyal. Now imagine if they decided "Yo, time to make more people BLM. What do we do?" and their solution is to nuke everything that non-BLM players dislike ("turret", has to plan movement, requires fight knowledge, has several timers to watch etc) - making the casts instant, making Ley Lines be attached to you like a hoopskirt, making UI/ AF into a buff with stacks and thus eliminating timers. It would still have Fire IV, Ley Lines and all, so it's still a BLM ... right?
I imagine there would be an outrage if they ever did this.
But it's exactly what they did to healers. And I can say with certainty that the veteran healers weren't the ones asking because they were around and healer players before the big pancaking happened. Just like the BLM veterans wouldn't dream of asking to making Fire IV instant and AF a 6 stack buff.

[ty_taurus]

It's a major concern regarding job design as a whole. There is a serious issue of the design team looking at a candle and seeing a house fire, where they look at something like cone AoEs on WAR and SAM, and instead of seeing nuance like they would with BLM's cast times, or DRG's animation lock, they see a a fire that needs to be put out, unaware that there are players who appreciated that candle's ambiance.

It's like filing a nail. There is importance and value to proper nail grooming--keeping them smooth, trimmed, and removing hangnails. But we've gone past that point on many jobs, and the design team seems to be filing away down to the skin on a crusade for anything that stands in the way of their vision of "accessibility."

There's a lot of talk about the state of job design as of EW, and I sincerely hope that the design team is listening because if things only continue to worsen, more and more people are going to throw in the towel.

[Rilifane]

More healing doesn't automatically mean increased difficulty to the point of putting people off from playing the role.
Let's say we have an aoe that hits for 80% of the HP every 50s. It's a massive hit, it might very well scare new healers into thinking that everyone is about to die from the huge damage spike, they haven't learned the damage patterns yet and press several cooldowns at once. The same thing happens 50s later but now a few of their skills are still on cooldown and they panic even more.

But what if you instead have a 50% hit at 0s, a 20% hit at 14s with a 2x 10% dot tick following until 20s, a 40% hit at 35s and a 25% hit at 45s and then loops (or not, just giving an example)?
You'd have 155% damage received in total but it's spaced out, it's manageable even if you mismanage your oGCDs, the individual hits enough to make sure even beginner healers will likely not panic over regens feeling too slow. You could probably pump those numbers up to 150% damage received which is more than twice as much as the hard hit-spaced out example without making it "scary".
Although I personally think a bit of "scary" isn't even wrong as long as the content gradually introduces it instead of going from "nothing to heal" to "constanty damage everywhere and pure carnage".

This focus on huge hits on long intervals give the impression of "more damage too scary for baby healers :c" but really, people are asking to feel like healers, no? That is why there is such a backlash when someone suggests more dps options.
So give us more to heal. Just drop this massive jumpscare hit into straight nothing for 60s crap.
Because frequent damage with lower individual hits is easier to manage for baby healers as well because someone collecting stacks like pokemon will not suddenly topple over. The way I see it, it's a win/ win here. Especially dots can be used to significantly increase incoming damage while still giving a lot of wiggle room on how and when to handle it.

But also give us better downtime kits. There are so many ideas they could pull from other days and would work here with some tweaks, even supporting and matching certain class fantasies to a T.
I've seen so many skills and talents on healers, tanks and dps lately where I thought "Oh, if adjusted a bit in this way that would be great in FFXIV". But I admit I'm too lazy to type it all out right now, sorry

I also strongly dislike this "wipe = end of the world" mentality that SE seems to have fostered.
So effing what if a party wipes? Rep costs are next to 0, you have a shortcut after every boss, you can't even get lost in a dungeon because they're all corridors, you don't get a debuff and your cooldowns reset. If they're so worried about "Oh no, players have to take a short walk, it will hurt their feelings " give them a chonky speedbuff when respawning after a death with invisible "checkpoints" that add duration the closer you got to the next boss before you got deleted.

[Osmond]

……..I now come to wonder why ppl want healers to have so much dps buttons, only to put so much responsibility on oneself lol. Oh man, I got 5 dps buttons, 5 oGCD buttons, 3gcd buttons, a speed/gap button, all these buttons to make healing fun again.

[Rilifane]

Define "so much".
How many buttons do we want?

[Nizzi]

SCH has a grand total of 2 optimal DPS GCDs and is probably the most oGCD bloated job in the game, so yeah I want a few more GCD DPS buttons like it used to have to break the cadence of Broil Broil Broil. If wanting more than 2 is "so much" I think we should reduce every job to only having 2 GCDs in their DPS rotation.

[MintnHoney]

Define "so much".
How many buttons do we want?

Personally? I want all of the buttons. For every time that someone rolls their face across the keyboard, or a family pet decides it's time to destroy someone's online life, I want something totally different to happen if the player is a healer.
But realistically, I think a 40/20/40 DPS/Support/Healing split, for this game, is alright, across 20-30 hotkeys, with adjustments to the split being made depending on the job within the role (for example, I suppose a 20/40/40 split for AST would be more appropriate).

So give us more to heal. Just drop this massive jumpscare hit into straight nothing for 60s crap.

But, Rilifane: what about the emergency heal buttons! You know, those abilities and spells that we save for moments that we don't actually need to save them for in XIV, but would have to save them if it were another game? What about those? Don't forget about those! ;_;

[ty_taurus]

……..I now come to wonder why ppl want healers to have so much dps buttons, only to put so much responsibility on oneself lol. Oh man, I got 5 dps buttons, 5 oGCD buttons, 3gcd buttons, a speed/gap button, all these buttons to make healing fun again.

So that we can play the game.

The GCD that exists in some examples of MMORPGs exists largely to hide lag and equalize the playerbase's capacity for skill, effectively capping how much you can actually perform per second in battle. This makes it easier to balance jobs and allows players of varying skill thresholds and internet connections to feel on-par with one another. A significant consequence to this system is that it slows down the rate at which a player can actually engage with the gameplay since you often have to wait seconds at a time between actions before being able to actually do things. Have you ever seen this meme? That's the downside of GCD gameplay. Most people don't want this in their gaming experience.

In order to offset this, there are 3 main pillars of design that classes/jobs in these types of MMOs need to consider:

1. Encounter Design: challenges and mechanics that cater to each individual fight.
2. Class/Job Design: Resource management and priority systems that span across a variety of tools each class or job can perform at any given moment.
3. Adaptability: The ability for a player to respond to unpredictable circumstances.

Difficulty is ultimately relative to the player, but how you approach each pillar can make a game easier or harder depending on what you've designed. In an effort to make FFXIV as approachable as possible, pillar 3 is largely non-existent. Very little is unpredictable in this game, and that which is unpredictable is largely just player mistakes. This, I would argue, is the least important pillar and the easiest to get away with not deeply investing in. Having something very predictable is fine provided that the other two pillars are able to provide enough engagement value. Encounter design varies from very simplistic to very complex depending on the difficulty of content. Dungeons deploy very simplistic and usually well-telegraphed mechanics that players can afford to mess up over and over. Savage has far more complex mechanics that aren't as transparent and rarely allow for error at all. Again, this does a good job at making the game very accessible, because the only encounters that really start to push the player's performance are not associated with any story-driven content. If you never engage with extreme, savage, or ultimate content, the only thing you miss is gear that exists only to make that same content easier (something unnecessary for the average player), and a few mounts/glamour, and thanks to the unsynch system, you can eventually brute force that content for those rewards at a later date.

While this creates an environment where most of the game and all of its story content is approachable and easy to engage with at any skill level, it also means that moderate to advanced MMO players won't have a whole lot to lean on for that same content. This means the pillar of job design needs to be extra sturdy in order to support a fair chunk of the playerbase, and an issue EW is running into for all jobs, not just healers, is continuing to shave off more and more elements of complexity and nuance in that pillar, but this effect is something the healers have been suffering longer than any other role. Because encounter design is so gentle, there are massive gaps between instances of damage in most content, and even modestly decent healers are often standing there DPSing most of the time because there just isn't much to heal. Its been discussed how the healing gameplay of the healers isn't all that engaging to begin with, and they have even less to outside of those brief moments of healing.

Ultimately, for many of us, it feels like wearen't allowed to play the game because most of the time spent in most content is just tapping a button waiting for something to happen. I know it's easy to look at FFXIV and just see clears and rewards, but this is still a video game at the end of the day, and I want to play the game. That means engaging with a priority system of tools and resources that I need in order to get through content. And while most content is quite easy for me as someone who's played this game for 10 years, I still find it fun to try and optimize and perform my job as a DPS as perfectly as possible in a dungeon no matter how unnecessary it is for me to do so. I can't do that as a healer because I have nothing to press other than Dosis for 80% of the fight, and the other 20% is largely Eukrasian Dosis, Phlegma, Kerachole, Kardia, and Ixochole.

[Semirhage]

……..I now come to wonder why ppl want healers to have so much dps buttons, only to put so much responsibility on oneself lol. Oh man, I got 5 dps buttons, 5 oGCD buttons, 3gcd buttons, a speed/gap button, all these buttons to make healing fun again.

If I am spending more than half an encounter going Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare, what I have is not gameplay. I'm making no decisions, managing nothing, and not interacting with my kit at all. I'm a Trust NPC. And I'm spending *well* over half my time doing that.

[Osmond]

Define "so much".
How many buttons do we want?

That’s a question the post have to answer themselves. What’s the limit of hot bars a job needs for it to make it fun to play. Solutions are a lot, but becomes bloated. Solutions are little, but becomes boring.