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.

[Rilifane]

Barbie Ex, hands down.

I think this "casuals can't have more incoming damage, too difficult" falls apart the moment you stop thinking that what was done in Abyssos is the only way to do it.
Not to mention that casuals are not stupid. What mainly separates them from highend raiders is that they panic more easily, have a tendency to play reactively and to forget strong cooldowns/ holding them for emergency.

Abyssos increased incoming damage by channelling all the extra damage into massive hits with huge gaps between them.
This caused several problems:

• it is now more a mitigation check than a heal check because your priority is surviving the initial hit, not healing through it. The gaps are big enough that it doesn't matter how you heal it and how much time you take
• this in turn pushed the responsibility for surviving them AWAY from healers and on tanks/ dps because a single mitigation was never enough to survive e.g. Ruby Glow, Hemitheos Dark, Light of Life etc.
• it also enforced bringing a SGE and/ or SCH as both WHM and AST don't have enough mitigation to reliably cover the hits
• which in turn gave the rest of the party an easy way out by saying "y no gcd shield? :c" for failing the hard requirement
• hard hits are far more restricting in how you initially deal with them as they require higher HP thresholds in AND stacking mitigation/ shields to survive
• which in turn also causes them to cause panic from healers more easily
• gear alleviates the reliance on the rest of the party, removing the sense of danger and turning them into regular, random "moves HP to left" hits - but the long gaps remain, making dealing with them incredibly boring and leaving long downtimes
• it pushes for a very strict spreadsheet and timetable approach as surviving is the only concern here
• it has almost no room for error since the hits are designed to kill you; any heal spam will not help you pass a binary mitigation check

What people criticized about the Abyssos approach was disguising "more healing" as hard, binary mitigation checks that enforced a reliance on people who until now had no reason to put Feint, Addle or Heart of Light etc. on their hotbars let alone use it. If the party wiped because they didn't stack enough mitigation (and I want to stress that you needed to stack mitigation, a single Reprisal was not enough), the focus turned on the barrier healer and "y no gcd shields?".

Naturally, many people were displeased with the result of "moar damage". If you implement something poorly than it's not the system itself that is bad, it's the execution.
So interpreting the Abyssos-approach getting a lot of criticism as more incoming damage not being a viable and casual-friendly solution is flawed because it was poorly executed.

Consistent but lower damage has several advantages:

• it's a true heal check as healing can be used as the only solution to it
• the responsibility largely remains with healers while tanks and dps can play a supporting role but they are not a hard requirement to solve it
• it makes all comps equally viable, full stop. WHM/ AST no longer has a signifcant weakness over regen/ barrier or even double barrier
• consistent but lower damage offers multiple solutions: mitigation, shielding, regen and burst healing. All are equally viable and contribute equally as opposed to creating a "mitigation/ shield > raw healing" divide
• it is less prone to causing panic as there's no wild HP bar ping-ponging
• gear makes healing itself easier but keeps the consistent engagement for that part of your role
• it allows more flexibility for when you use skills and more dynamic gameplay overall
• it has more room for error because GCD heal spam is a viable solution to make up for mistakes

Increasing damage in all content is viable for both highend raiders and casuals.
But channelling it all into unforgiving mitigation checks isn't.

[ForsakenRoe]

Barbie Ex, hands down.

True and real, big real and big true, couldn't have said it better myself. I even at one point did have a situation in P8S where we died to DogJumps, when I put out Shield and Kerachole. First line in chat after the wipe? 'Did you use shields SGE' Yes, thank you, I did, and a Kerachole to make sure. What wasn't used, however, was a Feint or a Reprisal, you might wanna double check who's using those and at what times. It's sad that the 'mit > everything' format of Abyssos meant that the first assumption from everyone when a wipe happened was that the barrier healer didn't do their job, and it's doubly sad that because of how recent it was, people assume that 'more healing required' immediately just means 'Abyssos everything'.

Look back at any final tier Savage fight's enrage. Ion Efflux, Tumult/Earthen Fury, double Akh Morn (3 sets), Quietus detonations/Shockwave Pulsars, Curtain Call. It wasn't just 'mit this hit or eat shit', it also had smaller, faster hits in between that had the dual effect of forcing you to reapply shields, and pump HPS to counter the steady HP drain they were causing, before the next 'big hit' came in. Guarantee, if E12S had no Quietus hits, and just Shockwave Pulsar once every 15 seconds with nothing in between, it'd have been considered an absolute joke to deal with even at min ilvl. But that's kinda what Abyssos HAD, just with a bleed attached to some of the hits. Aionagonia is just Pulsar with a bleed, and Dominion is, admittedly slightly interesting in that it is Physical and therefore means we had to think about when to use Heart/Missionary/Fey Illum.

People didn't find Barb EX hard on release because the damage is overwhelming per se. They were surprised by the speed it came out at, because FFXIV doesn't usually DO that kind of speed. And I'd say it's telling that so many players reacted positively to it (the speed). Also, as Ril says, lower, more frequent hits, allow for 'pure healing' to be a solution, whereas 'this deals 130% of your HP' only allows for 'mitigate or die'. And I have to say, I'm kinda onboard with anything that breaks down the disastrous 'pure/barrier' split we have. Imagine a world where it's equally possible that WHM AST takes world first as SCH SGE, or WHM SGE, or AST SCH, or whatever comp.

[Iedarus]

Barbie Ex, hands down.

It does boggle the mind; if Barbie Ex was so well received, why did SE do what they did with Rubi Ex? How did we go from high paced chaotic damage where the healers are ACTUALLY HEALING to the boss sitting there with his thumb up his arse for 45 seconds while we mash 1? I've yet to try Barbie Ex but man I was flabbergasted when I watched a video on it. "Wait...was that...an AOE auto attack!?"

[Renathras]

Imagine a situation where a casual player is struggling to keep up with the incoming damage of the fight. Now imagine we have two universes, and in each one, one of the two suggestions was put in place. In the 'healers now have more tools to do damage with' universe, the casual player feels no difference between the 'Source universe' as it were, that we have now, and their hypothetical universe, because they're busy fighting for their lives to GCD heal through the pain. In the other hypothetical universe, the healing requirements were increased, and as such the casual who was already struggling to stay afloat versus the oncoming damage, now is unable to keep up and the party wipes. When I say 'casual friendly', I mean that 'in an emergency, this change can be ignored for the sake of keeping the party alive'. You can't ignore an extra 20% (or however much) HPS requirement, or people drop dead.

There are two problems with this scenario:

1) In the more DPS scenario, now the party wipes because they didn't meet the enrage check when the casual player dropped their DoTs and DPS rotation.

2) In the "more healing" universe, the casual player shifts to spamming more GCD heals while the hardcore player would be using their oGCD toolkit more fully and sprinkling a some GCD heals into the mix. The whole reason we have the GCD heals right now (in theory) is as backups in case you run out of oGCD resources. Take P5S, for example. You can deal with the bleeds by using Regen (a GCD) and some oGCD. If you burned all your oGCDs and Lilies, you can fall back on Cure 2. This system works because the hardcore player can be efficient while the casual player isn't outright punished, they just are quicker to fall back on the "easy to use" tools. MP is so free that it's not an actual limiting factor.

The only way the more DPS buttons isn't unfriendly to casuals is if the amount of increased damage is negligible. "Yeah, you have a second DoT! It does...10 more potency than Glare! Woo!" Where it's so negligible dropping it isn't going to make or break any clears.

As for old Ultimates: That's already true. WHM doesn't get its first semi-spamable on the move heal until Afflatus Solace. While Ultimates require more care than "use on CD", Assize and Asylum are still not up all the time, and Tetra is single target. Moreover, many of those GCD heals have 1.5 sec cast times, allowing for ample slidecasting, a skill Ultimate raiders can't get by with not having. But if that was REALLY an issue, we could just make it where casting heals does not break on movement and the problem's solved. Or conversely, make all GCD heals instant cast like Lilies. I'm sure you'll reject all of those, but those would settle the issue.

And as you note, this is ALREADY a problem with old Ultimates, and hasn't been this huge issue garnering national attention or Dev changes. So it seems unreasonable to suggest that a change would force it to when it already is a problem that is already unaddressed.

oh, and if you had asked people 'which would you rather SE design fights like more, regular design where things hit like wet noodle, Abyssos with harder hitting raidwides and bleeds after to emphasize mitigation, or Barbariccia where it's not the damage that's the challenge, but the frequency it comes out at',

Probably Abyssos. I haven't seen anyone in the replies mention Barbaricca. I know a lot of hardcore players like Barbaricca, but it was murder in PF after week 1. Though part of that might have been the pretty punishing body check with the stack + 2 meteors bit.

Are you at all familiar with the concept of the "day crowd" and "night crowd" relating to the Jesus story? Not a religious thing, but the concept? The idea is that Jesus seemed to be beloved by the people, then all the sudden, they were demanding his execution. The theory goes "well, they were two different groups of people". Basically, the normal people out in the daytime loved him, but the aristocrats and elites out at night and their hangers-on hated him.

I think there's a similar concept here where the hardcore and high end raiding community likes certain things but the playerbase as a whole isn't in agreement.

But we all play the same game. So the way to handle the problem is to make the differences in the kinds of content we clear (something not shared) not in the Jobs (something shared). That is, if they add a DPS rotation to WHM, that DOES affect everyone. Remember Cleric stance? Remember casual Healers getting witched at for not using it (and hardcores getting witched at FOR using it)?

On the other hand, if the change is to CONTENT, that's far less of a problem. For example, if P9S is made like Barbaricca and Ex6 is made like Ex2 (granted, Hyd was a bit harder than the normal launch Ex) and normal/MSQ is made like it always is, then everyone wins, since the content doesn't bleed over. Savage isn't MSQ pushover easy and midcore Extremes aren't Savage hard, and people aren't witching at each other for using or not using their full DPS toolkit.

We are (I think...?) in agreement that damage should be more consistent and not 10 second of huge spike then 60 seconds of downtime.

[Renathras]

It does boggle the mind; if Barbie Ex was so well received, why did SE do what they did with Rubi Ex? How did we go from high paced chaotic damage where the healers are ACTUALLY HEALING to the boss sitting there with his thumb up his arse for 45 seconds while we mash 1? I've yet to try Barbie Ex but man I was flabbergasted when I watched a video on it. "Wait...was that...an AOE auto attack!?"

I'm not sure if BarbEx was as well received by the general playerbase as it was by the hardcore playerbase.

Extremes are the closest thing the game has to a step between Normal and Savage at this point, and something that mid-core players tend to treat as most of their endgame. I didn't do any Savages (at level) until EW, but Extremes have been my endgame since SB, and I'd probably be classified as a mid-core player. BarbEx was really too rough for most PF groups. RubEx may be a bit TOO soft, but Barb was definitely more than a lot of people at that skill/content level could consistently handle.

EW Extremes have been REALLY hit and miss this entire expansion. ZodEx was rather easy as long as you had a good danger dorito, though the stupid snakes still get most people (something about that specific type of pattern recognition and projection with the camera angle of the game makes it difficult for a lot of people). HydEx was roughly P1S level of difficulty. While P1S was easy for a Savage, HydEx was more or less near-Savage or low-end-Savage level of difficulty at current gear levels. Bluebird was kind of in a weird place, then Barbie was again at Savage level (which is why Savage raiders liked it so much - it was a Savage fight that was a bit more random than most Savage fights), and then we get RubEx which is at or below ZodEx level and once again has a strong danger dorito showing.

Extreme difficulties have been all over the place.

[Sebazy]

1) In the more DPS scenario, now the party wipes because they didn't meet the enrage check when the casual player dropped their DoTs and DPS rotation.

...


The only way the more DPS buttons isn't unfriendly to casuals is if the amount of increased damage is negligible. "Yeah, you have a second DoT! It does...10 more potency than Glare! Woo!" Where it's so negligible dropping it isn't going to make or break any clears.

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. The only one I can think of is E8S, and that's most certainly not casual player content even if it wasn't exactly the most difficult Savage turn either. If someone can do Lights Rampant in PF, I suspect they can maintain dots too.

To further expand on this point - Having more of a healer's DPS come from dots vs nukes actually makes things more forging and less impactful. Reapplying your dot a GCD late is much less impactful than missing a Glare GCD. I did a fairly in depth breakdown on this in another thread some time ago. Let me see if I can find it.

I'm not sure if BarbEx was as well received by the general playerbase as it was by the hardcore playerbase.

BarbEX is actually a more interesting case study than many seem to realise.

The big kicker is that if you look at the numbers, RubiEX is actually a bigger heal check on the 2 occasions where it genuinely requires healing. It also spaces the group out around the arena at this point making it difficult to reach people. If SE just cut out the portal puzzles it would actually be a pretty respectable healer check IMO, but as is, it just allows you to dump all your big cooldowns and lolstomp the aoe output without really thinking about it.

Meanwhile, BarbEX gets the thumbs up from me not because it hits especially hard because frankly it doesn't. Where it wins out however is the pace of the fight. It feels hectic, it doesn't have huge long sections of downtime with big nothing burger animations and sequences. Instead it's just relentlessly chipping away at you and it feels great for it.

It's the same secret sauce that makes fights like TitanEX so beloved IMO.

[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.

[Aravell]

I'm genuinely curious what piece of content that a casual player would engage in also has a check so strict that the healers can barely drop GCDs on.

[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.