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

[Sebazy]

As for the popular opinion on dots. They have potential, add in things like thundercloud style procs, mismatched durations or range/aoe considerations. Easy busywork to keep track of that breaks up the 1111 monotony with a dash of unpredictability. There’s more to than just slapping a second dot on and leaving it at that FYI.

[Renathras]

I'm not really sure how you can actually put that down as a valid point TBH. Name one piece of casual player friendly content in recent years where an otherwise entirely average but competent group wouldn't be able to clear if they had a healer that wasn't DPSing at all.

Are we talking about casual players or casual content? Because no one's going to be worried about healing OR damage in normal modes or MSQ.

I'm talking about "casual player in the content where the extra healing would matter".

The big problem with BarbEx isn't the damage, which is pretty consistent. It's that the damage spikes themselves are a bit too high (it's really frustrating when you get paired with THAT healer - the one who you say "You use your big CD on 1/2 Knuckledrumb and I'll use mine on the other" and they reply with "No, I'm using mine when I want to!!"), but it's more that the damage comes in while also not allowing any stationary time. This means you can't actually hardcast (GCD) heals. You can ONLY heal by oGCDs. Which makes it fantastic for people that love oGCD healing and miserable for everyone else.

Hell, I like some oGCD healing, but it really sucked a lot because I'd often get a PF hero Healer who did not and just wasn't pulling their weight, and since the fight was so mobile, I couldn't make up the difference with my GCD heals because I couldn't use them. And THEN the body checks become a problem.

Though it is kind of amusing the color sections later aren't body checks, so if you have just a Tank and Healer up, you can potentially get a Healer LB3 in and only the two of you are actually having to deal with any mechanic during the "quiet" phase.

BarbEx was a fight that works great if you have a Static/coordinated team (e.g. like Savages/Ultimates), but works poorly until you way over gear it if you're trying to PF it with randoms. Which is why it was murder after Week 1 since all the Raiders had cleared it and weren't running clear parties, so you got all the people who...........aren't that...in your PF groups until you could edge out your clear.

There's a part of me that thinks Ex5 should have an "Ultra" version where he keeps doing mechanics during the maze section, since that would be a pretty crazy fight if you were having to deal with other things at the same time as the maze game.

I'll also note:

As for the popular opinion on dots. They have potential, add in things like thundercloud style procs, mismatched durations or range/aoe considerations. Easy busywork to keep track of that breaks up the 1111 monotony with a dash of unpredictability. There’s more to than just slapping a second dot on and leaving it at that FYI.

One of the big pushback answers I've seen some of in the survey (often from WHM players, go figure) are people complaining about "busywork for the sake of busywork". People saying they don't like "busywork", and don't understand people that want it, and don't want it themselves. People want meaningful buttons to press, but not buttons "so they can feel busy". This is also the number one complaint about AST that I've seen overall, that it has too much busywork/feels too busy.

I'll also had thundercloud style procs aren't bad, though I'll reiterate for the 100th time that the native client - for all of us who don't use add-ons - does NOT have a good way of telling when something has proced, especially if you have a HD monitor with high res, even with the buttons at 200% size on the bottom of your screen, where hotbars are normally kept. Play WoW and when something procs, even in the native client, you have flashing graphics all over your screen. Frost Mage will have some big ice formation somewhere around the center of their screen, Holy Priests will have white-gold slashes, etc. In FFXIV, when something procs, you get a tiny buff that forms at your character and drifts down (easy to miss if you're paying attention to literally ANYTHING else on your screen) and a tiny lit up border around a button that is also tiny on the bottom of your screen, which is also easy to miss, and USUALLY a tiny little icon that appears in your relatively small Party frame by your character's health bar. I'd like procs better if the HUD displayed them more prominently without you having to sumo wrestle it into vague submission.

On the other hand, mismatched duration DoTs is one of the worst things to do. They're one of the hardest things to keep track of - DoTs in general are because of how you can't get the native HUD to show them off by themselves somewhere to make them easy to track or see when they've fallen off (a tiny icon with even tinier green number that's only a shade off from being the same white as all the other tiny icons with tiny numbers) under a boss health bar doesn't really help. Having multiples and with different durations would not be "Easy busywork to keep track of". I would argue DoTs are the hardest thing possible to keep track of. Even self-buffs are easier to track since you at least always know right where those are and can see them in both your Party list and on the top of your own screen (which you CAN easily move to somewhere it's highly visible without trading off important information - you can't do this with DoTs because if you enable "show only my buffs/debuffs on the target", you lose important information like when party debuffs from other players are on the boss that you need to know about, like Addle or Chain Strategem). In fact, the number one source of damage lost by casual players is their DoTs falling off.

DoTs are probably the most un-casual friendly form of DPS, and it's really weird to me how hardcore players don't understand that... Not saying you specifically, but I've seen a lot of hardcore players VERY MUCH overestimate how easy DoT tracking and reapplication is, but when you look at low parsing players, outside of "Not ABC", DoT falloff seems to be the biggest lost damage output source, indicating it's hard for lower skilled players to do. It's probably the big reason in the damage variance of Old SMN being so wide (massive gap between the 1% and 99% player moreso than any other Job) since it was so heavily DoT focused.

Multiple DoTs with different durations are VERY exciting for players that want to juggle a lot of plates and be extremely busy.

But those aren't casual players, generally speaking.

[Sebazy]

Are we talking about casual players or casual content? Because no one's going to be worried about healing OR damage in normal modes or MSQ.

I'm talking about "casual player in the content where the extra healing would matter".

I assume you're referring to casual players yeah. When is said casual player ever going to see an enrage where the healer fumbling their DPS rotation will make the difference between enrage and a clear? Rather than viewing it in a negative light, consider tweaks that would make more sense. Why would anyone add a 10 potency dot? Do you genuinely think that's what people want or that Yoshida will impliment? (Mind you, never say never with SE!)

The solution is to chuck more potency on the extra kit and then quietly nerf MND scaling so overall DPS stays about the same but people don't get outraged over something else taking a nerf. Endwalker has already demonstrated this with how severely healer single target DPS regressed relative to other roles despite potency going up but very few people cared.

Re BarbEX, Knuckledrum does about 700k raid wide over 15 seconds, RubiEX's Inferno does about 1.2 mill over 30 seconds, however people spend a lot of that at max range and out of reach for Indom etc. RubiEX is actually spikier with fewer but bigger hits vs Knuckle being more akin to rapid smaller AOEs with one big hit. The key reason why Inferno is a snore and Knuckledrum is great is the pace, both in how little time it gives you to setup but also exactly as you mention, you can't just bank all your CDs for it.

Agreed on an EX5 ultra, stopping the puzzle phases from being a target dummy once you learnt the pattern would have transformed the fight into something much better.

I'll also had thundercloud style procs aren't bad, though I'll reiterate for the 100th time that the native client - for all of us who don't use add-ons - does NOT have a good way of telling when something has procced

As things are I use a jumbo scale vertical pair of unbound hotbars that place important cooldowns and procs right next to where my character is on screen. As you say, hotbars off in Narnia aren't great for tracking things, but icons next to your character? That's the good stuff. However the ideal solution would be for SE to integrate key procs into a visual effect on the job gauge.

On the other hand, mismatched duration DoTs is one of the worst things to do. They're one of the hardest things to keep track of - DoTs in general are because of how you can't get the native HUD to show them off by themselves somewhere to make them easy to track or see when they've fallen off (a tiny icon with even tinier green number that's only a shade off from being the same white as all the other tiny icons with tiny numbers) under a boss health bar doesn't really help.

Perhaps this is something that will improve now that Yoshida has accepted that they need to take better inspiration from various plugin tweaks such as enlarged dot and debuff icons and clearer timers. Good use of focus target also really helps in this regard.

DoTs are probably the most un-casual friendly form of DPS, and it's really weird to me how hardcore players don't understand that.

I'm glad you said this as I managed to dig up some math I did a few years ago on this exact topic. Having a larger portion of your damage come from Dots relative to your nukes actually raises the skill floor and lowers the skill ceiling when it comes to overall DPS. The TLDR is that dropping GCDs or simply spending more GCDs healing vs DPSing hurts a more dot centric job less than it does a more nuke centric job. It's much easier to do a reasonable job of maintaining dots than it is to min max GCDs on Glare. Have a closer look at those bottom percentiles of SMN back in the day, I'd assume they were just players that were mashing ruin2 because they didn't care and weren't interested in doing any more than that. You can't really balance anything around that sort of player.

A more helpful and grounded way to look at this is to look at how the value of slamming every last GCD diminishes slightly when our dots carry more of our potency per tick vs our nuke.

Here's a couple of super basic timelines, the first potency is the complete potency so far over the timeline, the potency in brackets is dot damage only. 10 GCDs total, We're going to miss the 5th and 7th GCDs with a heal on both occasions.

Example A: What we have now - 290 Nuke, 70 Dot - 3310 potency over 10 perfect GCDs

1 - Dot - 70
2 - Nuke - 430 (140)
3 - Nuke - 790 (210)
4 - Nuke - 1150 (280)
5 - Heal - 1220 (350)
6 - Nuke - 1580 (420)
7 - Heal - 1650 (490)
8 - Nuke - 2010 (560)
9 - Nuke - 2370 (630)
10 - Nuke - 2730 (700)

Example B: 210 Potency Nuke, 140 Dot - 3290 potency over 10 perfect GCDs

1 - Dot - 140
2 - Nuke - 490 (280)
3 - Nuke - 840 (420)
4 - Nuke - 1190 (560)
5 - Heal - 1330 (700)
6 - Nuke - 1680 (840)
7 - Heal - 1820 (980)
8 - Nuke - 2170 (1120)
9 - Nuke - 2520 (1260)
10 - Nuke - 2870 (1400)

It's super simplified but hopefully it gets the point across. Example B has 20 less peak potency in a target dummy style setting, but yet comes out 140 potency ahead in the end with 2 GCDs missed. The more GCDs you miss, the more example B pulls ahead.

More emphasis on dot damage over nuke damage absolutely raises the skill floor for healer DPS and makes using GCDs for something other than a nuke less 'wasteful'. SE are absolutely missing a trick by not taking one of the healers down this route. Load them up with dots, add a 2.0 Bane style cooldown for good measure and you've got something that'll feel legitimately different for very little work.

[Renathras]

I assume you're referring to casual players yeah. When is said casual player ever going to see an enrage where the healer fumbling their DPS rotation will make the difference between enrage and a clear? Rather than viewing it in a negative light, consider tweaks that would make more sense. Why would anyone add a 10 potency dot? Do you genuinely think that's what people want or that Yoshida will impliment? (Mind you, never say never with SE!)

You misunderstand.

My point is that if there's a significant DPS difference between "barely doing the rotation" and "doing the rotation optimally", that's going to cause problems for Jobs that don't have red icons. The only way to have "more damage buttons" and "a more interesting damage rotation" THAT IS FRIENDLY TO CASUALS - the supposed reason we should add more damage buttons instead of upping the healing requirement - is if the DPS gap for dropping those extra buttons is negligible. Otherwise, you aren't doing it for the casuals, you're doing it for the hardcores to chad on the casuals.

Which is fine, if that's the argument you'd want to have. My issue is more people being...less than honest...about their intents.

Or, maybe, they genuinely do believe that it would be easier for casuals to juggle 3 DoTs with different timers and keep near 100% upkeep on them than to have fights where they have to press Medica 2 four times a minute and a Cure 2 or Regen in there to taste. I can't imagine HOW anyone would believe that, but maybe some people do...

EDIT:

However the ideal solution would be for SE to integrate key procs into a visual effect on the job gauge.

Oh yeah, totally agreed. There needs to be something.

Unfortunately, that ONLY works for procs. DoTs are still something impossible to make easy to track unless they completely redo the way enemy bars are displayed, especially for multi-target fights. Maybe have that "SCH shield breaking" sound effect or something when one falls off...something like that would at least alert to "Oh yeah, check your DoTs."

[Sebazy]

You misunderstand.

My point is that if there's a significant DPS difference between "barely doing the rotation" and "doing the rotation optimally", that's going to cause problems for Jobs that don't have red icons. The only way to have "more damage buttons" and "a more interesting damage rotation" THAT IS FRIENDLY TO CASUALS - the supposed reason we should add more damage buttons instead of upping the healing requirement - is if the DPS gap for dropping those extra buttons is negligible. Otherwise, you aren't doing it for the casuals, you're doing it for the hardcores to chad on the casuals.

Which is fine, if that's the argument you'd want to have. My issue is more people being...less than honest...about their intents.

Or, maybe, they genuinely do believe that it would be easier for casuals to juggle 3 DoTs with different timers and keep near 100% upkeep on them than to have fights where they have to press Medica 2 four times a minute and a Cure 2 or Regen in there to taste. I can't imagine HOW anyone would believe that, but maybe some people do...

So wait hang on a second....

We have 2 casual fights for mr casual Timmy:

Fight A) Timmy is maintaining 3 dots. Timmy fails. He gets some grey logs. The boss takes a few seconds longer to die. Nobody cares.

Fight B) Timmy has to maintain Medica II uptime (aka 4 times a minute) as well as some single target healing ala Cure 2 or Regen. Timmy fails to do it. People die. The boss takes significantly longer to die and everyone's angry.

Do you not see how awful your example is? Are you seriously trying to tell me that example B is better for a casual player that's going to struggle to press ~6 buttons a minute than option A? Or are you trying to suggest that there's a way to make us have to press medica II 4 times without the damage killing us when we don't?

I legitimately mean it. You keep saying repeatedly that it's a bad thing if this casual player has the potential to fail at dealing damage, yet that's exactly what we have now and you almost never see people complaining about it until it gets to extremes which have such lenient DPS checks that Healer DPS still isn't a requirement whatsoever unless the rest of the group is pretty damn bad. Why is a non issue suddenly going to become a problem? Are you assuming that SE are going to suddenly allow parser toxicity in random content with this? Are you assuming that they will add in enrages to casual content along side revamped healer dps kits? What angle are you coming from here as I just can't get my head round it, sorry.

To clarify I do think that throwing more damage out in mainstream fights would be a good thing for sure, but enough that we genuinely need to maintain Medica II uptime round the clock or assumedly someone dies?

Do you genuinely feel that that's going to be less problematic than more dps complexity?

[Renathras]

...

Well, I wasn't talking about keeping full Medica 2 uptime, but that's aside.

I mean that casting GCD heals is far more straightforward than maintaining DoT uptimes are with multiple DoTs with different durations and cast times/applications.

Pressing Medica four times is, in no way, harder than making sure to keep checking the boss for your DoT falloffs and reapplying them. FFXIV, WoW, whatever game it is, I have way easier time keeping my party alive by picking applicable heals than I do keeping DoTs up. It may be partly how people's brains work, where some people are amazing on DoT timings, but others who aren't? DoT upkeep is ridiculously harder. I have no trouble seeing when party bars start dropping and picking between an AOE or single target heal or from my oGCD heals to address the problem. But I have to watch my DoT like a hawk (to the point I miss health bars going critical or mechanics) to never have my DoT fall off at any time during a fight. I think it's because health bars are always there and in the same spot, so they aren't something I have to "search" for, they also don't disappear when they need to be addressed (imagine if the way you could tell the Tank needed heals/was below 50% health was his name just vanished from your party bar and all the other party members slid up instantly so you don't even notice the name/healthbar vanishing, you just have to see out of the corner of your eye the bottom party member move up a touch in your peripheral vision), and it's far worse for multi-target situations.

There are probably some add-ons that make it easier to track - I remember in WoW an add-on called something-Auras (Weak Auras, maybe?) where you could have it give you an alert when your DoT dropped or was within so many seconds of dropping, and that made it super easy to keep up with. "RUN AWAY, little girl! Run away..." or whatnot. But the native FFXIV client has nothing of the sort as far as I'm aware of.

Conversely, I can see a big light-blue bar with a chunk missing, and in super heavy combat, I can see it up and to my right, a place my eyes frequent from 20 years now of playing MMOs as a healer. It's second nature to glance at the party bars every few seconds or after a big mechanic or before specific mechanics (like tankbusters), and I've been playing FFXIV healers long enough, I know what my abilities do and where all my GCDs and oGCDs are on my bars by feel. If I need Divine Benison, I know where it is without having to take a second thought. Cure 2 is just a target (easy with controller using the D-Pad) and button push away. And when it's needed, it's obvious, unlike the DoT which just slips away into the night with no fanfare or notice.

.

And yes, I feel DPS complexity will be more problematic. I lived through HW. The reason Cleric was removed was because it was causing massive fights in the community - from both sides - where you had both people complaining about Healers not using it AND people complaining that Healers DID use it (if people died due to someone being in Cleric, which happened frequently enough to generate the ire). The high end players weren't like "Oh, this is a 4 player dungeon, who cares if the Healer isn't using Cleric at all?", they would actively harass and kick people. And likewise, a high end or midcore player messing up their Cleric timing causing wipes generated a lot of toxicity as well.

SE didn't remove Cleric for fun. They did it because it was actually causing a major schism in the community.

It's like the fabled Cure 1 spammer now (almost no one does that, but there ARE a lot of people that don't maintain ABC uptime or sit around doing nothing if there's not needed healing, etc); those generate considerable hate. While it'd be nice to live in a world where "Oh, the Healer let all their DoTs fall off or maybe doesn't have this new DPS ability on their bar/doesn't want to use it - that's cool" is the standard way people behave, that's not the world that we live in. Even in content where it literally doesn't matter.

Wanna test that? Go into a Savage raid as a healer, don't tell anyone you are planning to do this, but don't use any DPS abilities. Watch and see if anyone comments on it. Or go in as SCH and only use Ruin 2 and no other damage ability. I was in a 24 man the other day where someone wanted to kick someone because they were doing something weird, and saw someone complaining about a NIN only using Throwing Knife. People absolutely do notice those things. Right now, things are generally benign because there's really not much difference, but I'm not sure that would hold up if we had Cleric 2.0.

So yes, I absolutely believe the more dps complexity ends up more problematic, because we had that happen before in HW, and it got really toxic, which is why it was removed in the first place. It's yet another case of "this is why we can't have nice things". Though it DOES depend on what said complexity is.

Maybe everyone has suddenly mellowed and is totally chill about it now, but after the 4.3 launch insanity...I kind of have my "Press X to doubt" on that.

...

Let's flip that on you:

The Devs have said they want Healers to have super simple DPS rotations, which is why they got rid of Cleric and gutted Healer DPS abilities. So the devs themselves refuse to add more DPS complexity. It's the very reason we don't have complex dps rotations RIGHT NOW on Healers.

So what's your proposed fix to the downtime?

Remember, you can't say "more dps complexity", because the devs themselves refuse it.

[ASkellington]

Let's flip that on you:

The Devs have said they want Healers to have super simple DPS rotations, which is why they got rid of Cleric and gutted Healer DPS abilities. So the devs themselves refuse to add more DPS complexity. It's the very reason we don't have complex dps rotations RIGHT NOW on Healers.

So what's your proposed fix to the downtime?

Remember, you can't say "more dps complexity", because the devs themselves refuse it.

1. Then give us buffs and debuffs to manage. That isn't a cop out of Feint and Addle. They don't add a single thing to healers other than shutting up other players who think they know our job, but can't even do theirs (actually use said abilities).
   
2. Man up and give actual MP management. All oGCDs should have a cost.
   
3. Screw off with this 60s, 120s BS. My strong oGCDs should not properly line up with tank busters or raid wides.

All of which they refused to do over the course of 2 expansions by the way. Now answer your question.

[Sebazy]

Well, I wasn't talking about keeping full Medica 2 uptime, but that's aside.

Medica II has a duration of 15 seconds, 4 casts is full uptime. This is basic healer stuff man =(

You're completely glossing over the fact that the price of failing to maintain your dots is somewhere between negligible and non existent. IT DOESN'T MATTER. And seriously, what on earth does going into a Savage raid and doing literally nothing for the majority of your GCDs have to do with casual Timmy struggling to maintain his dots?

Are you honestly sitting there with a straight face trying to compare 3 dots to ARR/HW Cleric Stance? Again, flubbing Cleric Stance was a pretty common cause for a wipe at all levels of play, even in dungeons. Failing to maintain 3 dots isn't going to cause a wipe in any casual relevant content. If a player is in Savage or higher where DPS really starts to matter, I'd argue that they should be capable of maintaining dots.

These contrived points really aren't helping. So no, I won't test it by going into a Savage raider and standing there doing nothing for 70%+ of my GCDs. That has nothing to do with this discussion so stop trying to pretend that it does. You're just making yourself look bad.

Failing to keep up with healing that's significant enough to warrant the sort of healing you're suggesting is going to be an actual calamity when casual Timmy struggles to keep up. Is it easier to roll Medica II? Sure why not. Will casual duty finder players still manage to fail at it? Absolutely. It's routine to see players in 24 man with a sub 40% uptime on their GCD.

Again, in case A, failure doesn't really matter even if someone did start getting toxic over it, a quick report takes care of that. In case B, failure potentially means wipes. There is no glossing over this point.

Let's flip that on you:

The Devs have said they want Healers to have super simple DPS rotations, which is why they got rid of Cleric and gutted Healer DPS abilities. So the devs themselves refuse to add more DPS complexity. It's the very reason we don't have complex dps rotations RIGHT NOW on Healers.

There isn't one that's truly sensible.

One change has the potential to greatly increase the rate of full party wipes at all levels of content.

One change isn't going to change much of anything given how little damage actually matters below Savage.

Of course the 3rd and 'correct' option is to simply do nothing and ignore the problem.

[Icecylee]

SE didn't remove Cleric for fun. They did it because it was actually causing a major schism in the community.

I feel like it is important to note that using or not using Cleric's stance could *easily* quadruple the amount of damage you were doing. It also came with the draw back of making inexperienced (be it in general, or just with any given encounter specifically) feel *very* unsafe because it also completely neutered your ability to fill up HP bars (which also used to drop faster more frequently!) while having a timer before you could turn it back off. And there is absolutely no way in hell any amount of added dps buttons are going to increase your maximum potential dps that much. So the toxicity potential is VASTLY lower than that memory/comparison would make it out to be.

[ForsakenRoe]

Cleric swapped your INT and MND stats, and also iirc had 'increases damage dealt by X%', something low like 10% maybe. So the main issues with it were that A: it removes your MND when you use it, making your heals really weak, and B: it locked you in with a 5s CD. But who says it has to be exactly the same as before? Why do we need it to also swap INT and MND, now that our damage spells scale from MND? If it were just a toggle of 'increases damage by 5%, decreases healing by 5%', the 'punishment' for being in the wrong stance is that your Medica goes from 400 potency to 380. Damn. We can also adjust the 'lockout' period to something more fitting of the modern era like, idk, the 1 second recast of 'most of the DPS's gauge spenders', like how you can back-to-back Hellfrogs or Bloodstalks or god forbid, weave Bloodletter-Empyreal-Bloodletter for whatever reason.

Let's flip that on you:

That was as weak as 'I know you are but what am I'.

As for what we should get if they're not gonna give us damage, start putting esuna-able debuffs to cleanse, start having adds to CC with repose, start having boss buffs to Dispel with a new role action, start having less reliance on the melee taking their finger out of their backside and pressing Feint (or casters with addle) and make healers more in control of mitigation, start having more mini-burn phases where the incoming damage is constant but lower (Barb EX, any enrage from final fights in most previous tiers EG Tumults), start making moves to remove the stupid pure/barrier split that means that 'mitigation > everything' because it doesnt matter if you heal 500 or 50000000, you cannot save a party from a raidwide that deals 130% of their HP without mit, start having actual MP management so that Piety vs not is an actual gearing choice instead of 'idiot insurance' as it is right now...

and all of that starts with: start having overall HPS requirements be higher throughout the whole game including story. Because if you want to have 'more healing' as the change that will 'make healer more interesting', you'll have to make sure people are used to it from earlier on. If you do it just out of the blue, you get the Abyssos whiplash reaction of 'wait what this hits so hard I cant keep up fk this I'm going back to maining DRG'. But that'd mean making it more likely casual players cause wipes because 'its harder now' and we cant have that

Again, if SE's trying to do things, Abyssos can be considered a 'test run'. It didn't seem to go well. If SE wants to try plowing ahead with it, fine by me, the extra HPS didn't stop me. If they want to try a different tack, that's fine too, maybe they'll find one that works. If they want to just throw their hands up and say 'well we tried boys pack it up' and go back to Asphodelos because 'thats where people complained a little bit less' then that will be very disappointing for many players.

Oh well. Its moot. I don't want cleric stance back. I WOULD like a stance dancing class *eyes AST*. Doesn't need to be healer either. It sounds fun if a pita to make.

I'd nominate AST too, for obvious reasons, but if not, then SCH (call them Tactics) or WHM (cycle elements or seasons akin to BRD songs) could work too