How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[Renathras]

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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.

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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.