A summary of healer issues

[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.

[ForsakenRoe]

Right, but let's take me as an example. I find EX roulettes boring as sin, they're not fun they're not challenging and I can do them with just 1/3 of my skills. Not just 'I don't need any GCD heals' but 'I don't need half of my OGCDs either'. I'm not the only person who feels this way about EX roulettes, I'm sure. So we have a quandary.

To mangle a quote from an ex-SE IP (they sold it to try and get into NFTs, that went well):

'Consider a two-sided coin. If the coin lands heads side up, SE make the EX roulette more challenging on healing, to keep me and players like me on our toes, with the side effect that some of the less skilled players in there get blown up and wipe (causing player friction). On the other hand, if it lands on it's reverse, they leave it alone because 'thats casual content', and me/players like me who do Savage and sometimes Ultimates are forever damned to only find enjoyment in 4 instances every 8 months, interspersed with one instance on a separate staggered 8 month interval.

But suppose you flip the coin enough times, that one day, it lands on it's edge...'

Even with something as obviously 'there are only two ways it can go' as a coin flip, there's actually a third option. So, will SE take the 'third option' here, is the question

[ty_taurus]

Right, but let's take me as an example. I find EX roulettes boring as sin, they're not fun they're not challenging and I can do them with just 1/3 of my skills. Not just 'I don't need any GCD heals' but 'I don't need half of my OGCDs either'. I'm not the only person who feels this way about EX roulettes, I'm sure. So we have a quandary.

To mangle a quote from an ex-SE IP (they sold it to try and get into NFTs, that went well):

'Consider a two-sided coin. If the coin lands heads side up, SE make the EX roulette more challenging on healing, to keep me and players like me on our toes, with the side effect that some of the less skilled players in there get blown up and wipe (causing player friction). On the other hand, if it lands on it's reverse, they leave it alone because 'thats casual content', and me/players like me who do Savage and sometimes Ultimates are forever damned to only find enjoyment in 4 instances every 8 months, interspersed with one instance on a separate staggered 8 month interval.

But suppose you flip the coin enough times, that one day, it lands on it's edge...'

Even with something as obviously 'there are only two ways it can go' as a coin flip, there's actually a third option. So, will SE take the 'third option' here, is the question

Giving every job the optional Auto-Battle (Single Target) and Auto-Battle (Multi Target) button would at least address the DPS side of that coin. You have the freedom to expand healer DPS tools to around 8~10 buttons or so, and anyone who does not feel comfortable performing that manually will get everything they really need to clear content with Auto-Battle. Certain jobs may not compliment Auto-Battle very well, like AST probably wouldn't regardless of whatever they might do with its cards, but each role would have at least 1 job where their combat loop is relatively friendly to Auto-Battle, and the difference between an Auto-Battle using Warrior and a manual-play Warrior might just be the difference between something like Dragon Kick Combo Monk and normal rotation Monk currently. Even with something like 8~10 DPS buttons, WHM would probably end up in that same spot. You still need to manually heal since the Auto-Battle is just for GCD attacks, but now every healer of either camp has 4 healers to choose from.

Some might not like the pandering to the lowest common denominator that this system does, but I would much rather have the jobs actually grow and expand on their moment-to-moment gameplay if the bargaining chip is letting players have access to an easy button that does a bulk of the work for them than watch each expansion continue down this warpath of homogenizing and aggressively simplifying everything.

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

Giving every job the optional Auto-Battle (Single Target) and Auto-Battle (Multi Target) button would at least address the DPS side of that coin. You have the freedom to expand healer DPS tools to around 8~10 buttons or so, and anyone who does not feel comfortable performing that manually will get everything they really need to clear content with Auto-Battle.

Sorry for the tangent, but... does anyone have any sort of mental picture of how this would look in the game -- specifically, without it feeling 'tacked on' and out of place?

(Not saying it would necessarily be the result; just constraining the ideas that seem worth mentioning. If it wouldn't possibly feel right, it's probably not a route worth going with, after all.)

For instance, I... wouldn't necessarily hate it if there was literally an Auto-battle mode in the game, for everyone... at least, assuming it'd only have a very basic, fight-agnostic AI for handling a long-term, bank-stuff-for-as-long-as-possible approach. But at that point the sort of natural state of things would look very different.

It'd make no sense then, for instance, to still have a unique button for each action, only for each fork, so to speak. You'd be looking at points of intelligent departure for optimization, not the maintenance of the basic flow of 1-2-3 or glare-glare-glare.

Sorry, just food for thought.

[ty_taurus]

Sorry, just food for thought.

I think we talked about this a while ago, but basically they’re just 2 buttons that you can set to your hotbar that automatically change to one of your GCD attacks based on a priority system. Using RDM as an example:

Auto-Battle (Single Target) starts as Jolt and automatically changes to Verthunder/Veraero while Dualcast is present or Acceleration, picking the one associated with whichever you have the least mana for. If you do not have Dualcast, it will prioritize Verfire/Verstone if they are present, and again picking the one with the least mana if you have both. If you have even mana, it will prioritize black mana. The Multi Target version would just swap for the appropriate alternative spells.

Now, a very important question the design team would need to talk about is if the system should stop there, or if it should continue to add in the melee combo and finishers as the following: If you are within melee range and have over 50 mana, it will switch to your melee combo. After, it will prioritize your finishers in the proper order following the same mana rules with Verflare/Verholy.

If we talk about fighting games that use this system for button mashers, your A button auto combo is the same basic combo every time, but it is not your strongest or most effective combo. It exists to ensure button mashers feel cool rather than feel like a goofball doing a ton of stiff jabs and kicks. Each move used in that combo is also usable outside it as well. In practice, a button masher won’t just rely on only that, but will fall back on it when other buttons aren’t working and lets the player feel powerful against the AI as well. Against other players, though, any skilled player can turn it against you as it makes you incredibly predictable, but that’s not an issue in XIV.

The major caveat to this system is that it is optional. I do not want the game to play itself for me, but I have seen many people resist change and clash against the idea of expanding on simple jobs because they don’t want to interact with more DPS buttons. Now I do not support that mentality, I think it’s antithetical to wanting to play an MMO like FFXIV in the first place, but it doesn’t seem like that mentality is going to leave, and that job design likely won’t evolve further in order to avoid pushing those players out of FFXIV, so this is a bargaining chip.

[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?