How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[Renathras]

You may not recognize it (somehow?) but it's been true for 20 years, if not longer; as long as the Trinity has existed (which is from AT THE LATEST 2004) it's been true in some form or another. Even before then, before there were clearly defined roles in gaming, there were often setups that had leanings. Baldur's Gate in the 90s, for example, often would have people specialize in healing since it was strictly necessary to have available. While you had an option of how much you wanted to lean into it (Cleric vs Druid, for example), it was still present. And that's based off tabletop, which as you say was the inspiration for MMOs. MUDs, likewise, had class and skill setups that allowed people to focus more on healing or buffing or utility or damage. Indeed, TANKING, if anything, is one of the newer things to come on the scene, not Healer as a role. Back then, it was a thing you tried to force (e.g. having your Paladin or Warrior in full plate run into the room first to try and be the first thing enemies saw), but you often didn't have clear ways to generate, force, or keep agro. It was kind of a chickens with their heads cut off thing as to whether the enemies made a bee line for the healer in the back hurling Sling rocks or not.

For most of MMO history, healing was not a "side gig". In WoW, Vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cataclysm, and Mists (after that I can't say since I pretty much left the game), there was consistent, unavoidable damage, which required consistent healing to counter. Healing wasn't a side gig or optional. Druids would roll HoTs across the party because if they didn't, people would die, and combat raises were rare (only Druid had one, and it had a long CD on use, with Shaman having a self-only combat raise). And that was the gold standard of MMOs for a decade and a half. "End the encounter first. Patch people up later." only makes sense on trash fights, not 10+ minute boss fights. There is no case where you can output enough damage on a Healer to bring fights to a significantly earlier end, and if all of you are to be believed, the encounters and boss HP are designed around Healer damage, so you're ending the fight on time, not early, by using them.

And what do you do when not casting heals? Well, in Baldur's Gate, Clerics and Druids would use Slings. You would...literally be autoattacking, with your autoattack being throwing stones. In Everquest, you'd /meditate (/sit, basically). In WoW you'd basically always be casting a heal - Holy Paladins in Wrath would Beacon one Tank, target the other, then spend the next 10-20 minutes pressing Holy Light, breaking it up occasionally to use Judgement of Light/Wisdom if in 10 mans. In 25 mans, you'd usually have a Prot and Ret Paladin doing both of those for you, and the other Judgement (the one that did a heavy or stun or whatever) was useless.

I think the issue is more you're used to games where Healers aren't all the same (and often where they had customization - in BG, for example, you had the choice of spells to use from your spellbook in your various slots, and in BG2, you had Kits, or basically specs), so you could pick one that was more support and combat focused. In other words...my "4 Healers" idea you constantly attack because you want what it offers, in effect, but you want it for the one Healer you suspect would be the one that wouldn't have the gameplay you wanted.

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

We are going in circles. People in Vanilla WOW did not 'just' heal because the healing was more demanding. Classic WOW proved very much that actually, people back then were just bad at the game. I was able to get plenty of attack time in during levelling. Discounting that time as 'oh wands don't count cos that's like autoattacks' is absolutely ridiculous, because casting a spell interrupts your wand's swing timer. If you are 0.2 seconds away from using a wand shot, and you cancel to cast Flash Heal, you're reset back to whatever your wand's timer is. Maybe in raids, it's a lot tougher to get healing out and there is less time for damage. Or maybe it is not, I wouldn't know, because Classic WOW has this amazing system where, if you don't need as much healing, you can respec a healer to a DPS and push more damage that way. Makes it a bit harder to work out when there's flexibility like that. If the raids were locked to a comp of 2/5/33, then we'd likely see some of the healers doing some damage, especially considering, again, Omen of Clarity (autoattacks make your next resource spender free, including your heals), Judgements (autoattacks refresh the duration), restoring MP via Judgement of Wisdom, etc.

This also proves part of the issue. I had time to damage stuff in dungeons. I might have had time to in raids, IDK I burned out at level 48 in the vanilla version (Feralas sucks ass), and got tired of running daily heroics in Wrath for a trinket that never dropped (and I was Enh because a friend wanted to go Resto Druid). So we could say 'raids require big healing' sure, but 'dungeons kinda don't.' In fact, I saw a 'Enh healing guide' where you'd basically play Enh the regular way, but spend Maelstrom on instantcast Healing Wave or Chain Heals, allowing you to do like 50-60% of the damage of an 'actual DPS' while still keeping up with the healing the dungeon required. Sound familiar? It's the problem we have here! Raids need heals during prog, and dungeons absolutely do not. The devs of WOW saw how little challenge healers had in WOTLK's end, and made it 'more challenging' by ramping up healing requirements. We got Cataclysm. You know the effect Cata had on the healer population. You should therefore know, that 'increase healing requirements' is an absolute death knell for the role's playerbase. This game used MOP design to steer it's design for the remaking into 2.0, so I would argue it should take lessons of 'what to definitely not do, under any circumstance ever' from the absolute decimation caused by the Cata healing changes.

And if we DON'T use our DPS tools, as you claim should be the case, we don't clear the fight at all. So every fight in the game thus far has to be rescaled in HP to factor in this sudden drop in healer DPS, or it becomes harder/potentially impossible to clear at minimum ILVL. I know the DPS checks on old Ultimates like UCOB aren't exactly... demanding, anymore, thanks to the stat squish, but the mere possibility that they become impossible due to a change like this should be reason enough to pause and consider the ramifications of such a gamewide shakeup. Also, if you're saying that only the 'healing' OGCDs should be made GCD on tanks/dps, Arcane Crest/Riddle of Earth would never get pressed, for a start. Tanks would get 'globalled', that is, in the time between an ability like a TB hitting them and the next autoattack getting to them, they would not be able to react due to Equilibrium and the like being GCD'd out. It feels clunky. It'd also screw up the loop for some jobs. I heard somewhere that GNB has only 3 seconds of leeway in it's 60s loop, or it does not get enough Cartridges to do it's full burst. So, any downtime and it's immediately on thin ice. Adding a forced -2.5s to that because they need to use Aurora to help stay alive, means there is zero flexibility left.

Oh, and you'd have the Holy Paladin doing the Judgement of Light in WOTLK, to my knowledge. More than anything, it needs to judge something, because the talent Judgements of the Pure gives them 15% cast/melee haste for 60s whenever they use Judgement.

Actually nvm I was looking into JOL and it seems that, while it scaled off of spellpower originally, in 3.2 (and therefore WOTLK Classic too, being on 3.3.5a) it was changed to a flat 2% of the attacker's health pool. Guess it was scaling way too hard because of the Holy Paladins stacking SP gear. So yeh, theoretically anyone could put it up, now. But the Holy Paladin gets an additional bonus of haste for doing so. And with that revelation, now I understand why this is here:

If everyone's going to heal for a flat 2% whether it's a Holy, Prot or Ret putting the Judgement up, I guess it doesn't matter which judgement the Holy uses, just that they use one of them for the haste buff. But this part also makes sense to me, because the only other way to get back mana is potions (oof), Divine Plea (halves your throughput while it's active), AFKing (lmao), or attacking with Seal of Wisdom/Judgement of Wisdom up (having both means two potential procs of mana). I'm too used to the vanilla renditions of things I guess

Also I've asked before but I don't recall getting an answer, what would you do on Vanilla Loatheb, the Naxx boss who, when you cast a heal, locks you out of casting any more heals for 60 seconds? Stand around for 60s? Or actually hit the boss with whatever you have, be it autoattacks or Smite casts? Even in the remade version for WOTLK, where it's 16s of 'cant heal' and 4s of 'can heal', what are you going to do for those 16 seconds? And a question to you Semi, if you are playing D+D as a cleric (or other healer), and you don't need to heal anyone, do you skip turn or whack the nearby enemy with your mace? (I've never played D+D I wouldn't know)

edit:

...in other words, stuff like Zoe and Pepsis would still be oGCDs considering they're modifiers, not direct heals themselves.

This.
It's why the "real healers" thing comes up so often, because people who insist they want to heal are actively hostile to the idea of...healing instead of doing more damage.

I've done comparative analysis before and, depending on which patch and how you're counting, WHM in EW has as many or, at most, one less, damage action than they did in ARR. Their oGCDs (other than Benediction) were also modifier abilities (Divine Seal, Presence of Mind - at the time used almost exclusively on heals) or utility abilities (Shroud of Saints, Swiftcast - then used almost exclusively on Raise). Their damage actions realistically consisted of Stone 2 (even then Stone 1 was not beneficial to use unless you liked the animation better and didn't mind doing less damage; for the record, I like the Stone 1 animation better, but we have to be honest), Aero 1 (Dia), Aero 2 (cast + DoT like Miasma), Holy for AOE (Blizzard 2 was lower damage, I think?), Thunder for another DoT, but ONLY in patch 2.0 itself (this was removed in either 2.1 or 2.2 and traded for Blizzard 2, I think), and that's pretty much it. Oh, and Aqua Veil when it did damage. EW WHM has Glare (Stone), Dia (Aero 1, though pressed less often), Misery (less often than Aero 2, but we're just talking number of abilities), Holy is still Holy, and Assize in place of Aqua Veil. As Thunder was removed in 2.1 and Blizzard 2 wasn't ever used in most any combat applications (since Holy didn't require a target, it didn't even have a niche use for targetless damage), the number of damage abilities of WHM now is comparable to most of ARR.

1: Excluding 'modifiers' reduces the number of non-damage skills that are being considered as 'GCDs' in my maths, essentially increasing the percentage of the total that the 'damage skills' constitute. I purposely included those modifiers (despite saying I wouldn't if I was doing the design) to show the absolute 'best case' of how low we can push the 'damage skills as a percentage of total GCDs used' value.

So, let's be generous and say that EVERYthing is GCDs now, because the objective is to mix up how often we press our filler spell (Dosis). Personally, I'd keep stuff like Soteria, Krasis, Zoe as OGCD but we're taking it to the extreme for the example. We can see that, aside from me being kinda trash (one Soteria in an 8min fight, what are you playing at), around 60% of my skills used were just Dosis. Removing all of my damage GCDs (Dosis, E.Dosis, the Eurkasias for those E.Dosis, Toxicon, and Phlegma) leaves a total casts of 48. 48 x 2.50 (GCD) is 120 seconds worth of GCDs that would be spent on these healing tools. Exactly two minutes of extra encounter duration would be needed to fit it all in. So lets fit it in, by pruning the worst skills from our damage (that'd be the filler, Dosis). We take 48 casts of Dosis out to sub in these healing skills that we needed, leaving 83 Dosis. We then use an online calculator to find out what percentage of the total 213 casts that 83 is (because I'm lazy) and get:

/sigh

Did you even read my post?

2: 'Real healers' have no issue with doing healing. We throw out Medica 2 for Aionagonia, and safety shields on every raidwide during prog. Our issue is that as we get more gear, we don't need to do that anymore, and we replace it with one of our many OGCD tools, which feels cool. Reducing 'useless healing' and getting that overheal % as close to 0 as we can feels fun. The problem is that the reward is 'press this level 1 skill more times'. If you want a WOW example, imagine your reward for practicing as Priest so much that you get time to fit 30 GCDs into the fight that you otherwise wouldn't have, and you're told 'you can cast Smite 30 more times'. Not Mind Blast, not SW:P, not Penance. Just Smite, and it's absolutely terrible animation god I hate it it looks so weak. Back to FFXIV, I have no issue with 'healing'. You can look at my logs, I won't care. I have some good ones, sure, but you can see that I also have a fairly 'meh' median on later fights. You know why? It's not because I'm not skilled, the fact I have some purples shows I'm at least 'sort of competent'. No, the reason I have those medians is because in a lot of runs (I PF) I make the active decision:

'Sod this fight, and sod wiping to stupid mistakes, I am going to purposely overheal, play safe, do whatever is necessary to get the clear so I can get out of this hell.'

And if we clear anyway, me doing 10 less Dosis casts (replaced with E.Prognosis or something) is worth it to make sure we absolutely definitely have enough mitigation for the raidwide. IDK who you're aiming this 'no true scotsman' bullshit at when you say 'real healer' but it sure as hell shouldn't be me at least

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.

[Silver-Strider]

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.[/HB]

I would count Cleric Stance as a detail as well. Regardless if people liked it or not, it was a DPS tool at the end of the day.

[Deceptus]

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.

From an old 2.0 veteran I'd just like to point out that Blizzard II was amazing on healers in ARR because it allowed access to AoE at a **VERY** early level (WHM didn't get AoE until Holy), and at 50 potency per mob was a DPS increase on 4 or more mobs (might have been 3)

[Sebazy]

For most of MMO history, healing was not a "side gig". In WoW, Vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cataclysm, and Mists (after that I can't say since I pretty much left the game), there was consistent, unavoidable damage, which required consistent healing to counter. Healing wasn't a side gig or optional.

FFXIV by design will struggle to replicate that for a couple of reasons though.

In 'healer centric' MMOs (And even other RPGS such as Baldur's Gate TBH) like WoW and Everquest, you are always scaling yourself to the content. You're not forced to bring X amount of healers, instead you bring what you need. First time I killed Zlandicar in Everquest for Sleeper's keys we had a literal army of dorf clerics. When I killed him years later with some casual friends, we didn't even have a full group, I as the debuffing Shaman was also the sole healer and as such, I had plenty to do.

The other issue of course is that WoW and Everquest both worked on an attrition focused model. You didn't wipe to a 1 shot, you wiped because you ran out of resources or even just bodies.

IMHO the true solution needs to be tackled from multiple angles at once.

Just switching to attrition isn't great by itself as our healing kits aren't that much more satisfying than our damage kits, they are really just a vomit box of cooldowns that heal and little else. Even 3.4 AST with it's time extension mini games gives the current healing kits a run for their money IMO.

Chopping our oGCD heals into GCDs amplifies that issue making significant portions of the kit completely redundant without significant reworks. Why would a somewhat casual WHM press any of it when they could just press Medica II?

As I mathed out earlier, upping incoming damage alone isn't the answer either. With how things work in this game there's a very fine line where healing goes from being trivial to one shotting randoms and there's too little in between to get some satisfaction for healers outside of this tiny band.

If you ask me the solution is as follows:

Switch to an attrition model, at least double our HP, maybe even triple.

Revamp our kits top to bottom with a focus on ability consolidation, interaction within abilities in our kit and emphasising the importance of cooldown usage vs just pressing Medica II be it by resource limitations, accumulative buffs from cooldown usage or just raw throughput limitations. We have 4 healer jobs, try something different on each of them and see what sticks.

Come down hard on the availability of combat ressing. Forcing people to play a little safer is a good bump to lessening the value of raw damage above all else and will be a step in helping ease off the current need to set a fights difficulty by its enrage timer.

Obviously this isn't without it's problems. It's basically going to render old content almost entirely obsolete but frankly, I think it's something that needs to be done for the long term health of the game. The healing situation in FFXIV has progressively gotten worse and worse with every expansion post HW. Either they course correct and deal with the pain or they accept that healing in this game is forever condemned to be unsatisfying and unenjoyable outside of the narrow little window that is early Savage prog.

*Edit* Also, your Everquest comparison claiming that healers just sat isn't particularly fair. As a Cleric in a serious raid? Sure. But you could almost guarantee that said cleric in said serious raid was multi boxing another character. And as a Shaman main, I had enough to do that I generally couldn't multi box and I spent very little time sat down. Depending on the situation I could be baby sitting a mod rod team, pulling bodies, handling debuffs and potentially even CC or even fetching and queuing up mobs.

[Renathras]

...

Yeah, the argument of "We can't change healing! That would require changing all old content and that's impossible! But we can change DPSing and that wouldn't change anything!" seems, at best, likely incorrect, and at worse, a fig leaf to cover for the lack of a counter-argument. They've made so many changes to healing and not gone back and changed old content at this point as to prove the argument wrong. And even when examples can be cited to tweaks to old content, all that proves is that they can easily do that with a healing change now.

I think the issue is Roe REALLY wants more damage buttons, not more healing requirement (that requires the GCD), and so will oppose any change that would do the latter rather than the former. There's a real fear that, if they did the healing change, and it worked, they wouldn't get their more damage buttons. It's always couched as a fear for the casual player, but considering how often casual players are derided, it's unlikely that's the genuine intent.

I make no claims about what that means for the type of healer they want to be, only as a matter of what the fear is and why such animosity to a different kind of change is expressed.

What are you talking about? Baldur's Gate required healing?

Yup, it did. You could sub a lot of healing with potions (and later, more powerful abilities and some wacky stuff like Thieves being able to Use Any Item), but until you were well equipped and leveled, you had to heal from time to time in some way or in some form. 100% yes. No one was making their first playthrough on a solo Kensai.

And the rest I also addressed.

"World of Warcraft...and Everquest...and Star Wars: Galaxies...and Final Fantasy XI...and Wildstar...and RIFT...and Everquest 2...and Vanguard...and Final Fantasy XIV 1.0...and Final Fantasy XIV 2.0...and largely Final Fantasy 3.0..." sounds a lot like "MMO history" to me.

It's NOT as true in Action RPGs, stuff like TERA. But mainline MMOs have long used this model, and the ones running still do in at least some form. You're trying to give your argument more weight and authority than it has. For years, games tried to DEVIATE from it, BECAUSE it was the dominant paradigm of the entire genre. The only argument is that in some cases, it was a Quaternity rather than Trinity with a Control/Support element, like arguably Everquest games and games like Guild Wars (1) and stuff like what Pantheon's trying to make now.

Guild Wars 2 tried to completely break from it, but ended up accepting it at higher levels of play. I saw a YouTube video once of why the Trinity is so prevalent that made the argument Humans/players tend to slot themselves into roles over time anyway, even in games that allow a lot of free building and customization. Role systems largely just streamline this process. The creator noted that games often do this (soccer was an example of having your normal DPS and having your Tank goalie), and video games are no exception. Roles in multiplayer games allow players to quickly and intelligently sort themselves. Even with BLU groups in FFXIV, they sort themselves into Tank, DPS, and Healer roles, they don't just yolo it for the most part with all of them carrying tank, healing, and dpsing abilities and using all of them. They slot themselves into roles and use Ethereal Mimicry to signal their roles in the party.

I get you DON'T LIKE IT, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been the prevalent form of the healing role for more than two decades.

It's also WHY the 4 Healers Model is so important - because it's why those other games didn't have the problems FFXIV healing has today where there's no release from the playstyle if you don't like it. Don't like WHM? You can play AST. It plays like WHM. Or you can play SCH. It plays like WHM. Or you can play SGE. It plays like WHM. For instance, if you didn't like the Cleric's healing spam in Everquest, you could (once they were viable, anyway), play a Druid or Shaman if you preferred more of an offensive side-focus or a buff/debuff side-focus. In WoW, Holy Paladins had a slate of side-buffs with a simple healing model while Druids were all about consistent uptime on HoTs. Shamans had a buffing side-game that leaned more towards offense over time. Disc was for leveling until 40 (when you got Shadowform in Shadow spec) and Holy was a "dabbles in each of the other styles and combines them" healing model. The point is, you could pick a different one if you didn't like the type of healing you were getting from one of them because they didn't play identically.

I think that's the important piece in all of this: That our Healers all play identically to one another. You heal damage with an oGCD that may differ on paper but largely has the same effect, in extremis a GCD that has the same or similar effect to the other's GCDs (in the case of AST and WHM, EXACTLY the same as they directly ripped off WHM's GCD kit minus Cure 3 for AST), and your attack rotation is identical across all of the Healers as a DoT + spamnuke + either an oGCD on CD (WHM), GCD on CD (SGE), oGCD on resource generator CD (SCH), or...uh...Earthly Star (AST).

It's the homogeneity of kits that's the problem. In WoW, if all the Healers had played like Holy Priest, it would have been a problem. Same if they all played like Holy Paladin. But it was fine for the "one button wonder" Holy Paladin to exist since there were three other Healers, and they all played differently.

...

I always find it dubious when people say "this won't work" when it literally has worked in this same game.

ARR healing WORKED THIS WAY. And as Icecylee said, was fun and enjoyable. And we've talked about this before that most of you enjoyed SCH during that era as well. Not only would it work, we know it would work because IT HAS worked.

Moreover, we have the more DPS option in our history as well. We know that DIDN'T work. We know it didn't because of Gordias and Cleric Stance and how it almost killed the game. We know it would be the more massive of the two changes in truth. We know that it would alter how the community views Healer dps because it already DID. We know people would be attacked and toxicity would increase because it already DID.

All of these things are knowns, not hypotheticals.

IMHO the true solution needs to be tackled from multiple angles at once.

This - specifically this - I agree with. It's why I think the 4 Healers Model is the way to go, because it hits several at once just by virtue of how it works. Secondarily, the oGCD weakening/culling and GCD focus by Healers, removal of free healing by Tanks and DPSers, and shunting mitigation to Healers would all be parts of the solution. The 4 Healers Model would also include giving several of the Healing Jobs more robust DPS kits, appealing to those types of players. The commonly mentioned encounter design changing to more consistent, but smaller, amounts of damage over the current big spikes separated by large amounts of dead time change also comes in here. That slate of proposals, taken together, would probably fix most of the healing issues we have now.

And the casual WHM spamming Medica 2 isn't a good counter - you've argued yourself, regarding the more DPS buttons changes, that casual Healers would just not engage with those buttons and nothing of value would be lost. That would apply here in the case it worked, anyway.

If you ask me the solution is as follows:

Switch to an attrition model, at least double our HP, maybe even triple.

Revamp our kits top to bottom with a focus on ability consolidation, interaction within abilities in our kit and emphasising the importance of cooldown usage vs just pressing Medica II be it by resource limitations, accumulative buffs from cooldown usage or just raw throughput limitations. We have 4 healer jobs, try something different on each of them and see what sticks.

Come down hard on the availability of combat ressing. Forcing people to play a little safer is a good bump to lessening the value of raw damage above all else and will be a step in helping ease off the current need to set a fights difficulty by its enrage timer.

I don't think our approaches are entirely incompatible here, though. I mean, reading this, it's not too dissimilar from what I've suggested, other than you want to focus more on CDs while I think general healing should be more GCD focused but CDs should be more rare to accommodate them being more impactful. Which...maybe be us saying the same thing in two different ways, honestly? Heck, you even mention your own version of 4 Healers.

I'm not sure there's as much daylight between us as it might sometimes appear if you really hold these positions.

[Icecylee]

ARR healing WORKED THIS WAY. And as Icecylee said, was fun and enjoyable. And we've talked about this before that most of you enjoyed SCH during that era as well. Not only would it work, we know it would work because IT HAS worked.

Moreover, we have the more DPS option in our history as well. We know that DIDN'T work. We know it didn't because of Gordias and Cleric Stance and how it almost killed the game. We know it would be the more massive of the two changes in truth. We know that it would alter how the community views Healer dps because it already DID. We know people would be attacked and toxicity would increase because it already DID.

This feels a little disingenuous since it seems *far* more likely that Gordius being massively overtuned on account of the devs listening to the top 1% of coil raiders saying it was too easy and then overcompensating on Savage, while making normal undertuned as hell for the people that thought Coil was at a good difficulty level, were bigger issues than healers getting more more DPS button (which also came with more free healing, as well!). More interesting dps kits don't necessarily have to come with higher damage requirements from the group.

FWIW the stuff I liked most about ARR healers is the stuff you seem to hate tho - the juggling act of trying to eek out every last bit of dps while party HP bars dip down to 10% before addressing them, and playing around Clerics (i'm one of the weirdos that liked clerics stance) with timely precast regens and stoneskins, and knowing when you needed to back out and play a little safer, The higher healing requirements and need to dip into GCDs wasn't the main draw, it was all the context surrounding it and adapting on the fly. The most frequent and varied damage buttons were kind of important, too.

all this

I mostly agree with all of this, though, and it mirrors a lot of ideas I've had towards potential reworks lately too. I think we'd probably be better off limiting Phoenix Down's to 1 per person in savage rather than just outright removing them though? It felt like it worked pretty well in the criterion dungeon, anyway (and maybe we wouldn't need caster rez insurance taxes either if PDs were something everyone had access to). Spreads the burden of fucking up a bit more around the party, but also places a cap on how often you *can* fuck up in total.

[Silver-Strider]

This feels a little disingenuous.

That's their entire MO.
It's ok for him to use Hyperbole but is quick to call others out for the same. There's no real good faith argument to be had with him.

He wants to suggest that Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions and completely disregards that SB existed with more DPS actions as well. The mental gymnastics they do just to faceplant would be almost hilarious if it wasn't so persistently wrong

[Sebazy]

And the casual WHM spamming Medica 2 isn't a good counter - you've argued yourself, regarding the more DPS buttons changes, that casual Healers would just not engage with those buttons and nothing of value would be lost. That would apply here in the case it worked, anyway.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Being able to use Medica 2 as a crutch to the point where it renders the rest of the kit invalid is like having a DPS kit that does less DPS than simply mashing the Glare button. Neither is a good situation in my eyes. It's just not good design nor does it make for compelling gameplay in the long term.

I don't think our approaches are entirely incompatible here, though. I mean, reading this, it's not too dissimilar from what I've suggested, other than you want to focus more on CDs while I think general healing should be more GCD focused but CDs should be more rare to accommodate them being more impactful. Which...maybe be us saying the same thing in two different ways, honestly? Heck, you even mention your own version of 4 Healers.

I'm not sure there's as much daylight between us as it might sometimes appear if you really hold these positions.

I do agree, it's why I find it funny when you've pulled the 'you just want to DPS more' card at times. I genuinely don't. However, thanks to my time working at EA/Bullfrog, I gained a pretty good insight into how much game design is steered by the bean counters and top brass rather than the actual game designers.

I genuinely don't think we'll ever see even remotely challenging healing in FFXIV at this point because from a commercial perspective, it just doesn't make sense. We have a model in mainstream endgame content where our aoe heals are powerful enough to keep up with single target damage on a tank, and aoe damage is so low that we can easily cover it with our single target heals. Basically it's pretty hard to actually fail at healing. Rather it's failing at mechanics and avoidable AoEs that kills people. If you're pressing buttons and dodging the bad, you're almost certainly healing plenty enough. Pulling that rug out from underneath the casual player base and going back to a time like early ARR where people had to get through Titan HM just for a basic relic weapon would cause a riot IMHO.

This coupled with how dull solo content is as a healer is why I'm resigned to thinking that better downtime gameplay is the path of least resistance all told. It doesn't even have to be pure DPS either. Both Warhammer Online and The Old Republic managed to offer up meaningful and enjoyable healer gameplay in spades even in those times when your HPS wasn't being pressured.

I totally agree that going with 4 completely unique and diverse healers to see what sticks is the best move SE could make to start getting out of this corner, but again as I've mentioned elsewhere, I honestly don't think Yoshida has the resources on hand to actually pull it off. IMO they would need to hire another studio to brainstorm ideas for them, then have Sato's team pick and choose what to implement and integrated into the game proper.