A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

All of which is to say, asking for 'can we be forced to heal more' is probably never going to work out, SE's too worried about losing their bottom line because the Limsa AFK squad would have to demonstrate a modicum of skill in their roulettes

This argument doesn't make sense, though. Yoshi P is already on the record saying the reason they gutted the Healer DPS kits was because they thought it was too stressful, the same logic they gave for reducing healing requirements. You can argue that one is more stressful (or you think it would be), but it makes no sense to say "They won't do (A) because they said they won't do that, but they might be convinced to do (B), which...they...also said they won't do."

That doesn't make sense.

Speaking personally as a dirty casual - I'd enjoy spamming Benefic 2 more than Malific any day of the week, twice on Saturdays, and three times on Sundays. "But people can die and-" that's no different than wiping to an Enrage because of not enough Malifics. People will get over it.

EDIT:

Right, but at the same time, we said similar things when DSR got solo healed. At what point do we see all these 'hardest content in the game' fights being cleared with 50% (or in this case, 0%) of the recommended number of healers

Just out of curiosity, how many people are doing this?

How many teams have solo healed DSR after the first did it?

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EDIT2:

Roe's point is that, regardless of what the design team thinks, failing to keep up with increased healing requirements results in wiping. Failing to perfect your damage output results in...

...wiping in any encounter with a moderately tight Enrage check.

So same thing.

If someone dying to a missed Benefic 2 and getting Raised means you're not clearing Enrage, then that fight is tuned tightly enough not having optimized DPS such that you do 5-10% less DPS (common proposals around here) would result in a wipe as well.

And in casual content, neither one would result in a wipe, so nothing changes there, either.

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EDIT3:

I don't know, and I don't think it matters.

I think it matters a lot.

If one group does a thing, that means it really isn't true of the vast majority of players (like...literally everyone else, in this case), meaning that one group could do it is completely irrelevant.

On the other hand, if dozens of groups have done it, if 25+% of the clears now are solo healer (or even 10+%), then that's a pretty different argument, since it suggests just anyone (or, at least, most people) could do it, leading to groups dropping healers going forward - which is the argument people here are making.

That's EXTREMELY relevant.

[ty_taurus]

This argument doesn't make sense, though. Yoshi P is already on the record saying the reason they gutted the Healer DPS kits was because they thought it was too stressful, the same logic they gave for reducing healing requirements. You can argue that one is more stressful (or you think it would be), but it makes no sense to say "They won't do (A) because they said they won't do that, but they might be convinced to do (B), which...they...also said they won't do."

That doesn't make sense.

Speaking personally as a dirty casual - I'd enjoy spamming Benefic 2 more than Malific any day of the week, twice on Saturdays, and three times on Sundays. "But people can die and-" that's no different than wiping to an Enrage because of not enough Malifics. People will get over it.

Roe's point is that, regardless of what the design team thinks, failing to keep up with increased healing requirements results in wiping. Failing to perfect your damage output results in a marginally longer fight duration. You cannot compare the amount of wipes that would be caused by a lack of healing in all forms of content across the game to the amount of wipes that would be caused by a savage healer parsing green instead of purple.

[ForsakenRoe]

Speaking personally as a dirty casual - I'd enjoy spamming Benefic 2 more than Malific any day of the week, twice on Saturdays, and three times on Sundays. "But people can die and-" that's no different than wiping to an Enrage because of not enough Malifics. People will get over it.

Difference is, your team can more easily make up the difference if you're missing DPS because the healer is not able to DPS as much, compared to non-healer healing.

Just out of curiosity, how many people are doing this?

How many teams have solo healed DSR after the first did it?

I don't know, and I don't think it matters. The fact of the matter is that the first DID do it, and THAT is the problem. It shouldn't have been doable in the first place. The fact it was, shows there's a design failure that needs fixing. The fact it was done for TEA, DSR and now TOP, not only shows that the design failure has persisted for over two years, but TOP removing both healers instead of just one means the design is going further in the wrong direction.

Imagine an Ultimate gets cleared, on content (remember, we're on patch 6.35, TOP came out 6.31), by a team of any composition of your choice, as long as no member of the 8 is any kind of a DPS. 4/4 tank/heal, 2/6, 1/7, doesn't matter, just no DPS. Would that be fine, that the enrage check is so lax that it's possible to clear without any DPS at all? Of course not. I don't know for sure, having paid very little attention to the minutiae of the fight, but I'm under the impression that you're almost hardlocked into having 2 melee because the melee LB is so important in the final DPS check. Additionally, you're hard-locked into a physranged and a caster because you need to have those LBs. Yet somehow, the 'you need Healer LB for this' mechanic was bested, and a group did not in fact need healer LB. Or a healer at all. So rather than asking 'oh how many other groups did a run like this after the first', ask 'why was it possible for a group to even do this'

[ty_taurus]

And in casual content, neither one would result in a wipe, so nothing changes there, either.

If you're increasing healing requirements so much so that in group content, from dungeons to ultimate, damage would come out frequently enough that even a skilled healer would need to spam spells like Benefic II and Helios in addition to using their healing cooldowns, you believe that that would not increase the amount of wipes that any given group of players would experience?

[BRVV]

If you're increasing healing requirements so much so that in group content, from dungeons to ultimate, damage would come out frequently enough that even a skilled healer would need to spam spells like Benefic II and Helios in addition to using their healing cooldowns, you believe that that would not increase the amount of wipes that any given group of players would experience?

ULTIMATEs should require that healing. And well... practice parties would die to it. Sure. Just like you die when your tank forgets to invuln or a failed mech. Or an enrage.

[ty_taurus]

If someone dying to a missed Benefic 2 and getting Raised means you're not clearing Enrage, then that fight is tuned tightly enough not having optimized DPS such that you do 5-10% less DPS (common proposals around here) would result in a wipe as well.

Hold on, actually. 100 seconds of Weakness on a DPS is absolutely more significant than a healer doing 5%-10% less damage than they normally would. So even in this magical land where your average players would be perfectly capable of keeping up with that level of intense healing requirement in easier content, like when doing their roulettes, even the groups that are doing Savage are penalized far more by steeper healing than they are modestly improved DPS loops not being optimized.

Weakness is a 25% reduction to your offensive stats, and Brink of Death is a 50% reduction. And even week 1, you can afford a death or 2 if the team is otherwise on the ball (assuming the fight is actually balanced correctly *cough* P8S). But also remember that the type of healer who probably has a hard time managing healing and keeping up with their DPS is also not a week 1 raid clearer. If damage is so frequent than even a skilled healer needs to spam Benefic II/Helios instead of Malefic, gear's ability to slow down the severity of damage taken by the party likely would not ease up enough to make the healer that would struggle day 1 have that much less of a struggle on day 54. Meanwhile gear would make it easier and easier for that same healer to worry about their DPS less, because DPS jobs have greater returns from gear than healers do and add enough padding that gives teams a lot more room for error.

No matter what way you slice it, even if you want to pretend casual healers wouldn't drown in their roulettes from this much damage output, you'd still see less wipes going the DPS route.

[Sebazy]

Yoshi P is already on the record saying the reason they gutted the Healer DPS kits was because they thought it was too stressful, the same logic they gave for reducing healing requirements.

Hiya, a fairly important clarification here. I'm fairly confident that the 'healer DPS is too stressful' thing was in response to removing Cleric Stance specifically leading into Stormblood.

The real healer dps kit culling aka Shadowbringers was in the name of balance and homogenisation and a quick search of interviews can confirm this:

https://twinfinite.net/ps4/ffxiv-sha...ers-interview/

[size=1]Yoshida-san wants any healer to contribute equally to DPS/Healing or specialize in one of the other with little issue. This standardization across the healers is also reflected in the changes made to tanks.

With the removal of hate combos and DPS stances, every tank is better suited to focus on maximizing their DPS and whoever is the main tank at the time can just flip on their tank stance to hold the enemies’ attention.

It feels a bit like they are surrendering a bit of job identity and specialization with these changes in Shadowbringers, but the goal is a noble one: total job balance across the board and 100% viability no matter how difficult the content is.

So no, Shadowbringer's healer DPS kit culling was *NOT* because Yoshida felt that healers were getting too stressed. It's because that as the link above shows, he was still somehow clinging to the belief that WHMs were doing all the healing and SCH was doing all the DPS right through Stormblood. This was to simplify and speed up the process of balancing healers.

[ForsakenRoe]

but the goal is a noble one: total job balance across the board and 100% viability no matter how difficult the content is.

Looks at PLD and WAR at the start of this tier
Looks at WHM at the start of last tier
Actually, looks at WHM any point after week 8 when AST SCH invariably ends up the 'meta' again because of the raidbuffs

We are down to one dot, one nuke, maybe one extra thing like Assize. And they STILL can't balance WHM vs AST because they're inherently not comparable. How much more needs to be sacrificed to make the classes 'balanced'? Do we need to remove the DOT too? And yet somehow, despite having different raidbuffs, or none at all, the DPS output of the melee is more closely balanced. Looking at 'overall across the tier, 95th percentile' on the verboten site, the difference between the top melee (DRG) and the bottom (SAM) is about 300 dps. Comparing the healers, the difference between top (SCH) and bottom (SGE) is also 300.

'So what's the problem, that's the same difference!'

The problem is that the DPS are doing twice as much damage as the healers, so the difference between their top and bottom as a percentage of their total output is lower. In essence, despite being 'the same integer value', the difference between the two healers is actually TWICE as large as the melee! Bearing in mind the melee have much more intricate rotations, Raidbuffs vs not, different positional bonus strength, etc, I think we can safely say that the presence of raidbuffs, or the intricacy of the rotation, should not and/or does not have a significant impact on the amount of output a player can get from a class. Or if it DOES, it's the LACK of damage rotation that's causing the wider gulf, which would be the opposite of their intended outcome, either way the question remains:

Why do the healers need to keep getting lobotomized for the sake of 'balance', when we can see that it's clearly not working? Why not, instead of kneecapping AST way back when, increase the power of WHM to be more competitive?