Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Payotz]

In any case - "the only thing that can make the healing gameplay interesting"? That's not a statement of fact. You need to add two words on the end of that sentence "...to me." Many others would find the changes I outlined would make healing fun and interesting. Many people - as you note - like healing as it is now and would find a complete overhaul to make it LESS fun/interesting.

I disagree. I did say that many people like it now sure but not because it's "more engaging" than what I proposed, but rather because healing in this game is the easiest and most braindead healing has been across many MMOs.

It's accessible, and it's very easy to find success in it, and there's not much of a skill gap, so new players won't feel too bad for actually being mediocre, so they can feel better about themselves and act like they actually know what they're doing or are talking about. It's very much in line with Yoshi-P's entire mindset of "Pick Up and Play", where you don't really have to master anything to find success in the game.

The problem with healing is the same the problems with tanking. It's both low skill floor and low skill ceiling, and the "complexity" is derived from DPS Rotations, which has nothing to do with their roles.
This is akin to Samurai not having to build stickers to Midare and turning Midare to a GCD you can spam every 2.5 seconds, but then making it so that Third Eye actually gives you stacks of "Recovery Midare", and then you'd have to position yourself near the tank because now, every stack of "Recovery Midare" would heal the tank. It's nonsensical.

I think a more measured approach to thread the needle is the answer, and to actually do things like make Ultimates a completely different, much more intensive healing experience. That's absolutely necessary for "Go play Ultimate" to actually be an answer of any kind.

It wouldn't, because we would go back to the initial problem, wherein healers will now have a high skill floor, but the skill floor is also the skill ceiling. Sure that's a lot more interesting than the current state of healers, but that's not really the goal here. The game needs the skill ceiling, and it won't get there with healers with the current design, regardless of how many numbers you crunch.

The overhaul I suggest would introduce ramping and healing rotations to healers, similar to how SAM ramps up to a Midare/Tsubame, Instead of having powerful healing spells available 24/7 like Medica 2/ Medica and Cure 3, the healers would have to do their healing rotations properly in order to gain access to those spells. It would require you to think about healing itself, rather than it being an afterthought like it is now (and it always has been) wherein you optimize your dps more and you relegate your healing abiltiies to a spreadsheet; And this will in turn make healing engaging, because everytime you have to think in a video game is the time where you are engaged.

A good example that I have is Disc Priest healing in a raid setting, wherein the spec heals through the buff called Atonement that lasts for 18 seconds, as 40%(give or take) of all damage you deal to a single target would be transferred to anyone with Atonement as healing:

Weak single target heals would apply as much Atonement to as many peopel as possible without the buff running out
Power Word: Radiance(can only apply Atonement to five people and you only have 2 charges every 20 seconds) would be used to apply Atonement to everyone else
then you use a cooldown to extend/buff Atonement or you forgo it completely for an emergency ramp
then you DPS the living shit out of the target just so you can heal everyone through the massive multiple raid wides that are coming out.

It's simple in concept yes, but there's multiple ways to fulfill every single step in that series of events, including the DPS portion.

That's what I think the game needs for healers. Engaging healer-related gameplay that's not simply just "extra DPS buttons", and that's what I personally want in a healer overhaul.
And frankly I don't think this is feasible as it will need every encounter in the game to be reworked, and will result in everyone else to be too scared to heal resulting in lower healer numbers.

A lot of people would complain about this, not because it's less engaging, but simply because it's too hard.

[Milus]

https://twitter.com/imJillTime/statu...642611206?s=20

They will end nerfing summoner's ress have the same cd as blue mage's after this haha.

[ForsakenRoe]

3) Show me where I said she was "Not Real Healer"? Can you show me where I said that? I said that SHE SAID HERSELF she enjoys DPSing and non-healing support (she's mentioned loving classes like D&D Cleric and Druid for their NON-HEALING utility abilities), and her description of what she considered a healer was in that same vein:

I see I said that 'dealing damage is part of the healer responsibilities, after all other priorities are taken care of'. That is to say, if the game actually demanded we spend 75% of our GCDs on healing because the incoming damage was so high, this would not make me 'like healer less', since the implication seems to be that I enjoy DPSing and non-healing support, and not the 'actual healing' portion of the role. I don't mind actually healing, I do it pretty often, you can see from my medians that I often say 'actually, fk this, I cba wiping because I greeded a damage GCD, I'm just gonna play safe so I can get this stupid weekly clear out of the way'. No, there's one thing that does piss me off more than anything in MMO design, and that's the idea that the best action to take at any point is 'no action at all'. Waiting around for 5sec rule for mana in Vanilla WOW was what had to be done, yes, but it was also trash design. The gaps in some class' rotations, like when I mained Ret in BFA and had up to 6 seconds of 'sorry everything is CD, just autoattack and wait for the fun buttons to light up again idiot', is terrible design. It's like driving a car that can go 70mph, but at seemingly random times the brakes apply and it locks itself to going 25mph for a few seconds. So in the same vein, if there was constant damage coming out that needed healing, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to having to spend every GCD on healing. In fact, it might make MP management an actual aspect of the game again. However, in the game's current state, that cannot happen without alienating an incredibly large portion of the playerbase, they won't be able to keep up. As we have been through many times, the amount of extra damage, or amount of healing kit pruning required to make it 'feel good to have to heal more', to the extent where it 'feels good' to someone like ME, is going to be too much for many other players to handle.

But to clarify my stance on what makes healer fun for me, because I didn't actually say it anywhere in that quote (only what I believe the healer role's duties/responsibilities in content are): It's actually the act of juggling everything, of making sure people live, making sure the mit goes out at the right times, making sure the debuffs are applied to the boss and damage buffs to allies, and keeping all of the plates spinning, and deciding that if one plate has to fall off because I can't keep up, WHICH plate has to fall so the others can keep spinning, those decisions are what make healer 'fun' to me. I didn't find it fun back in SB to be wholly focused on whether I mitigated damage correctly as a tank. I did find it fun to do so, while in damage stance (taking more damage cos no tankstance), making up the lack of defense with well timed mitigation, straddling the line of 'do I have enough aggro to outpace the DPS', occasionally dropping one GCD to apply tankstance as a pseudo-mitigation, making on-the-fly decisions about the current game-state and what the best course of action was in the moment. It's also why I don't actually enjoy DPS as a role that much, they don't have as much spinning plate gameplay going on, being almost wholly focused on 'just do as much damage as possible'

That's what I think the game needs for healers. Engaging healer-related gameplay that's not simply just "extra DPS buttons", and that's what I personally want in a healer overhaul.
And frankly I don't think this is feasible as it will need every encounter in the game to be reworked, and will result in everyone else to be too scared to heal resulting in lower healer numbers.

A lot of people would complain about this, not because it's less engaging, but simply because it's too hard.

I suggested a WHM change that included a new 0-100 gauge that fills by 1 point per Glare, 1 per Dia, 1 per DOT tick if there's at least one Dia present (multidot does not increase rate), and 5 per cast of a new Banish skill with a 15s CD. This gauge would be spent on a new GCD AOE heal skill with 500p (more than Rapture, less than Cure3), and has a system attached to make it damage neutral. The fact that I made the gauge only build via doing damage was an issue in Ren's eyes. There was also some other stuff like returning Stoneskin as a lily spending shielding tool (and an aoe equivalent).

I don't necessarily agree with your stance re: Disc, as it's notoriously punishing if you mess up the ramp. Rather, I think something more like Evoker would be better to aim for, where it does have a ramp of sorts (echo spreading), but in a pinch it has powerful, fast-access tools, Emerald Blossom, Spiritbloom, the 2min divebomb breath, that one cone breath heal I forgot the name of. In this game's systems, it'd be like what some of us have said about SGE: Give it a highly rewarding and technical damage>healing conversion system so that a fully optimal player can heal the team via just doing their damage rotation, but still have the fallback tools if things go sideways, like Prognosis. In fact, I put forward the idea that Prognosis (in the rework) should be 0 MP, because it's already costing you damage, and it should be an always-accessible, reliable 'everything is going wrong oh god oh shit' button for more casual/panic prone players to be able to spam.

The first thing that has to change about the healing model imo is the Pure/Barrier split. Either fully commit (so, remove Neutral Sect, remove Benison, remove the regen from Soil/Kera, etc), or write the split off as a design failure. Personally, I'd do the latter, it opens up so much more design space. For example, we've all seen 'you need to heal everyone to full' HPS checks like Seat of Sacrifice, right? What if we had every healer able to apply shields in some way, and there were 'shielding checks'? There used to be one, the original way to deal with Vulcan Burst in UWU was to shield enough that the damage didn't cause any HP loss. Now imagine stuff like that is added to the more casual parts of the game like dungeons. Imagine a boss in an EX roulette that applies a esuna-able bleed, and when you look at the description, it says 'Bleeding due to lacerations caused by boss's sharp tentacle tips. Fully negating the damage of the attack that applied this debuff will also negate the debuff's application.' Now you have two ways to deal with that bleed. Either shield beforehand so it never applies, or Esuna afterwards to remove it. Three in fact, if you also consider 'ignore it and heal through the damage'

[ForteNightshade]

I mean, the answer is "some/many did, some didn't have an opinion either way, no one was really saying at the time it was a bad idea", or something akin to that. And yes, I agree people didn't see it coming - I've literally said this, what, 2 or 3 times now? - perhaps try reading my posts before hitting the reply button...

Perhaps you should try reading mine.

You have a horrible tendency to ignore context. In three separate posts you directly put the blame on raiders or the "1%" as you kept insisting on calling them about the two minute meta and not the development team.

This whole debated started because you essentially said "the 1% didn't think about what they were asking for" despite it being impossible because they had zero frame of reference to even draw that conclusion.

Bluntly stated, you responded to me claiming these complaints only happened "after the fact" because "these people DID ask for this BEFORE hand." Putting aside the ridiculous notion SE would make sweeping changes based on parsers, you're putting the blame on raiders for not being clairvoyant.

The casual players didn't ask for this while raiders (SOME raiders, but RAIDERS did). You can't blame the change on casuals for what raiders wanted. Yoshi P said "skill floor", not "casuals", and while you think of the two as synonymous, what you call casuals aren't the skill floor as they aren't running high end content. What he's talking about are mid-core raiders.

And you're still doing it.

What's comical is you use a modifier only to make an absolute statement in the very next sentence all while missing the point completely. I never said causals asked for this:

"All of that aside, no the casual players didn't ask for this but they are the reason it happened."

If you're going to accuse someone of not reading your responses, maybe you should actually read theirs.

That statement isn't trying to make casuals and skill floor synonymous. You're conflating two different things (again). What I said isn't an opinion, it's fact. They made these changes with casual players in mind because those were the players having perceived difficulty utilizing buffs correctly.

It isn't blaming any player demographic but simply acknowledging the root cause for why it happened. Casual players can be raiders who... play casually. Midcore players aren't struggling with buff timings nor does it change anything I said even if they were. The two minute meta was made for accessibility purposes not because any one demographic demanded it.

[Saraide]

The overhaul I suggest would introduce ramping and healing rotations to healers, similar to how SAM ramps up to a Midare/Tsubame, Instead of having powerful healing spells available 24/7 like Medica 2/ Medica and Cure 3, the healers would have to do their healing rotations properly in order to gain access to those spells. It would require you to think about healing itself, rather than it being an afterthought like it is now (and it always has been) wherein you optimize your dps more and you relegate your healing abiltiies to a spreadsheet; And this will in turn make healing engaging, because everytime you have to think in a video game is the time where you are engaged.

A good example that I have is Disc Priest healing in a raid setting, wherein the spec heals through the buff called Atonement that lasts for 18 seconds, as 40%(give or take) of all damage you deal to a single target would be transferred to anyone with Atonement as healing:

Weak single target heals would apply as much Atonement to as many peopel as possible without the buff running out
Power Word: Radiance(can only apply Atonement to five people and you only have 2 charges every 20 seconds) would be used to apply Atonement to everyone else
then you use a cooldown to extend/buff Atonement or you forgo it completely for an emergency ramp
then you DPS the living shit out of the target just so you can heal everyone through the massive multiple raid wides that are coming out.

It's simple in concept yes, but there's multiple ways to fulfill every single step in that series of events, including the DPS portion.

That's what I think the game needs for healers. Engaging healer-related gameplay that's not simply just "extra DPS buttons", and that's what I personally want in a healer overhaul.
And frankly I don't think this is feasible as it will need every encounter in the game to be reworked, and will result in everyone else to be too scared to heal resulting in lower healer numbers.

A lot of people would complain about this, not because it's less engaging, but simply because it's too hard.

Yea it is strange that you never build up anything in terms of healing abilities. At most it's 'is this skill on cooldown or not'. The darkest dungeon devs have massively revamped their approach to healing for the second game by making almost all dedicated heals need some kind of condition met first (target has to be below a certain threshold, target has to have another buff applied to it first).

[ForsakenRoe]

Yea it is strange that you never build up anything in terms of healing abilities. At most it's 'is this skill on cooldown or not'. The darkest dungeon devs have massively revamped their approach to healing for the second game by making almost all dedicated heals need some kind of condition met first (target has to be below a certain threshold, target has to have another buff applied to it first).

The one heal that has a condition like that (beyond MP or gauge costs) is Essential Dignity's healing being scaled based on missing HP. Which just incentivizes players to ignore the HP of the ally for as long as possible. Why heal them for 400p when they're at 80% HP, when I could wait until they're at like 10% and the move has scaled to be like 1100p strong, that's three times as effective!

[Payotz]

I don't necessarily agree with your stance re: Disc, as it's notoriously punishing if you mess up the ramp. Rather, I think something more like Evoker would be better to aim for, where it does have a ramp of sorts (echo spreading), but in a pinch it has powerful, fast-access tools, Emerald Blossom, Spiritbloom, the 2min divebomb breath, that one cone breath heal I forgot the name of.

I agree, but I don't necessarily agree that every option needs to be as forgiving as Evoker. Evoker is considered the "easy M+ healer" precisely because of the easily available tools relative to other healers. I think a healer with that design is important however, as there needs to be an "easy" option (and a hard but rewarding and unforgiving option) for all the roles to focus more on the role itself rather than the rotation, and honestly I think WHM should be that healer.

I would have to think about your proposed skills and stuff a little bit more because I'm not really a game designer, I'm just a nerd who really likes talking about video games and has played a lot of video games and my only insight is what those other games do well and what they don't.

I would say that too many "oh shit" buttons for a healer or a tank makes the role less engaging because you feel like you're always safe, and that contributes a lot to the "sleeper" gameplay that those roles have across all content. There needs to be a little bit of friction in the design to increase engagement.

(Also I'm sorry. It's hard for me to read your walls of text in one sitting so I've just been reading it chunk by chunk and pressing Like on the thing. This one's a little bit shorter tho so here's a reply lmao)

[fulminating]

Now imagine stuff like that is added to the more casual parts of the game like dungeons. Imagine a boss in an EX roulette that applies a esuna-able bleed, and when you look at the description, it says 'Bleeding due to lacerations caused by boss's sharp tentacle tips. Fully negating the damage of the attack that applied this debuff will also negate the debuff's application.' Now you have two ways to deal with that bleed. Either shield beforehand so it never applies, or Esuna afterwards to remove it. Three in fact, if you also consider 'ignore it and heal through the damage'

Is the point that this is just esuna-able scamiglione’s cursed echo or not?
Maybe a tank vuln would work here too, shield through it or chuck a regen on to counter the increased auto damage. Also put autos back on bosses.
Similarly it would be interesting if doom was cleansable by healing to 100% inclusive or esuna to provide choice to the player. Except the one you stand on glowing things to fix.

[Renathras]

We have. I recognize you...

Posting on an alt? Don't recall you at all. And if that's your take on my posts, you didn't read them.

Considering I have considerable "game-know-how" and don't advocate "to lobotomize Job designs further".

But if there is one thing I'd like to request like I did back in the DPS-Subsection...

Oh wait, no, I remember you know. Yeah, I definitely remember you...
Give me no post cap and sure, I'll make all posts shorter instead of bundling replies to several people. Make it happen and I'm game.

I think the real takeaway is the seeming agreement that there is a problem in need of fixing. Unsurprisingly, the solution one favors colors how one describes what the problem is (tanks/DPS are busted with their mits and heals! no, it's the encounter that's busted for not dealing enough damage! no, healers need more interesting downtime! etc. etc. etc.).

Yeah, this is true. As Sebezy said:

Rather it's a lot of different perspectives on what the problem is.
...
It's a combination of the above and more that's gotten us to this point.

Speaking of: I agree with that. It is a multifacited problem.

I disagree. I did say that many people like it now sure but...

Many people do find it fun, interesting, and engaging.

And no, a more measured solution wouldn't be "high skill floor also the skill ceiling". That's not how that would work.

And for the record "ramp up" healing is a higher skill floor. That's why many games don't do it and just give Healers access to all their heals directly.

I do think it would be neat to see different variations on Healers, like SGE being a Disc Priest was honestly what I was thinking when they announced it. The problem is FFXIV's fight/encounter design and balance don't allow for it well.

EDIT:

...

When group A has members asking for a thing and group B has no members asking for a thing AND the thing doesn't actually benefit group B, trying to say it was done for group B and not admitting it was done at all for group A is kind of missing something.

As I said to you - that you didn't read - the midcore is who it was done for. Not "casuals". "casuals" doing Praetorium don't need buff alignment and may not even be using buffs. Same for "casuals" in Lapis Manalis or "casuals" RPing in Limsa or "casuals" farming NMs in Eureka. Those people aren't who these changes were for.

[ForsakenRoe]

(Also I'm sorry. It's hard for me to read your walls of text in one sitting so I've just been reading it chunk by chunk and pressing Like on the thing. This one's a little bit shorter tho so here's a reply lmao)

On the one hand, here's the full list of my proposed skills/changes/stuff for WHM. The SGE one is okay too, but you can ignore the AST and SCH ones, they're kinda bad. On the other hand, it's less a 'wall of text' and moreso a barricade so you might need to take a break or two part way through. If nothing else, I think the most important thing is to check the two linked videos, as they demonstrate that even two relatively small changes (shortening Dia duration, adding a 15s GCD) can actually have quite a large shakeup on the rotation, thank in advance

Is the point that this is just esuna-able scamiglione’s cursed echo or not?
Maybe a tank vuln would work here too, shield through it or chuck a regen on to counter the increased auto damage. Also put autos back on bosses.
Similarly it would be interesting if doom was cleansable by healing to 100% inclusive or esuna to provide choice to the player. Except the one you stand on glowing things to fix.

Scar is one example, sure. Also, bringing up the doom is an interesting one, because we could also have that be blocked by shielding. For example, if you were to shield someone enough to take zero damage from the doll in Lapis, under this idea, it would block the doom. You'd also be able to Esuna the doom, or as you suggest, brute force heal through the doom and get the player to 100% to remove it. But I'm also thinking about the harder content where 'shielding blocks certain debuffs/effects' can be leveraged more. Vulcan Burst is the tip of the metaphorical iceberg on what it'd allow for, I think