How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[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.