TOP cleared with no healers

[Renathras]

Trying to suggest that one facet of the issue is entirely responsible is just plain false. The problem is that these two pillars of game design are wildly misaligned.

I disagree with the first - one side of the argument IS entirely to blame; encounter designs are simply not what they used to be, and not at all for the better. The puzzle is fun for people that like to solve it, but the problem with encounters that are puzzles and nothing more is when the puzzle gets solved, people get bored. There are no interesting choices anymore once it's "doing it this way is right, working towards this is 'improvement', and doing anything else is wrong". Moreover, it means people NEED the extensive healing kits...but only until they solve the puzzle, at which point they no longer do.

I do agree with the second quoted sentence, though. There very much is a big misalignment. It's not even just Healers, it's just most noticeable with Healers.

Isn't this more of an issue with the battle design than healer design? You could have a healer job with 1 button that was Cure I and you could still design a fight that would require that one button to clear

I still don't see how changing healers would suddenly make these parties not able to clear content without those said healers? You would have to design the battle differently or hit the other jobs that dip their toes into healers job

Exactly, it doesn't.

Encounter design is the problem, and must be addressed first, otherwise nothing else mattes. "give healers more dps buttons"; okay, that makes players that enjoy DPSing happy (but we already have 11 Jobs exclusively for that...), while making those who play Healers because they don't enjoy dps very unhappy (which is a problem), but still ends up with 1/0 Healer clears, doesn't it? How does that fix the problem?

It doesn't.

Suppose WHM had 3 DPS buttons. Would that have prevented this TOP clear? No, it would not have, since the issue wasn't that this party was able to make the DPS check, it was that they were able to make the DPS check while also healing without a Healer and cheesing mechanics. No amount of DPS buttons on a Healer would change that unless you made Healers do 10x the damage of DPSers and tuned enrages for that. But at that point, no one would bring DPSers.

Its not about them clearing without healers. The issue is not that content can be cleared without healers (not entirely)...

...but that's the entire argument happening now. "TOP cleared with no healers", not "TOP unclearable with healers having kits without depth". People can complain Healer Jobs are currently boring, but that's irrelevant to whether or not TOP can be cleared without Healers.

The most logical answer to this issue is to just remove Ultimates they cater to a small Community and only cause issues

At this point...this may actually be the correct answer.

Of the last several Ultimates/Ultimate related topics, which DIDN'T have controversy or throw people into a tizzy?

TOP has - 0 Healer clear, people found it either too hard or boring, people using zoom hacks
Prior one did - 1 Healer clear
Prior to that did - in the sense of the "dropped/missing" Ultimate from ShB

Several have had people "uncongratulated" for cheating or doing funny business for clears, etc.

They seem to drive a lot of strife and controversy, all to please an extremely small portion of the population...that gets endlessly pissed off and triggered by them in various ways.

We're getting to the point Yoshi P may just throw his hands in the air and say "Forget the whole thing."

...

Efficiency is an argument, but not this one.

This argument is "what roles are not needed for content" (usually "Healers aren't even needed for 4 mans, much less harder content!"), but we've had all Tank clears of Pandaemonium raids, all Tank clears of Ultimates (not on patch, but still synced), no Healer, no DPS, and no Tank clears of 4 man Experts, and both no Healer AND no Tank clears of Extremes.

The no Healer clear of TOP here was most definitely NOT efficient. <_<

[SynGrell]

My personal feelings on this entire thing is simple.

-Grats to the group
-this shouldn’t have ever been possible in the 1st place especially for on patch ultimate content, design of jobs change every expansion and there is no way to account for everything when said design changes(sometimes a buff for endgame content will suddenly allow a job to solo old content they previously couldn’t)
-I hope the devs take to heart that they need to adjust how they both view job design and battle content. Both are out of whack, job design has caused too much self healing and mitigation on non healers while giving healers too much honestly speaking it is the healing side of the current healer toolkit that needs a pruning while being replaced by more debuffs/support/damage options, and battle content is not incentivising healers enough, dungeons should only be non healer able by the extremely skilled players. EX and up should be impossible without at least 1 healer and 1 tank present, and Ultimates should be forced into the 2/2/4 party design, the top end fights need to push every role to their absolute limits.


When your holy trinity game is becoming more a unholy duality game, you have fundamentally messed up your core design and need to go back to the drawing board and find a solution to fix it.

I could go on a long winded rant like I have before to my friends, but it wouldn't ultimately boil down to anything more than what you've said.

This TOP clear is just a straw on a massive pile, putting a magnifying glass over what is a fundamental design flaw with the game as a whole.

[Sebazy]

I disagree with the first - one side of the argument IS entirely to blame; encounter designs are simply not what they used to be

Encounter design is the problem, and must be addressed first, otherwise nothing else mattes. "give healers more dps buttons"; okay, that makes players that enjoy DPSing happy (but we already have 11 Jobs exclusively for that...), while making those who play Healers because they don't enjoy dps very unhappy (which is a problem), but still ends up with 1/0 Healer clears, doesn't it? How does that fix the problem?

Ok, sit down for just a second. Open your ears and listen for just a moment.....

DPS buttons are far from the only problem with healers right now....

Got that?

Now, riddle me this:

Titan HM and EX were both fairly stern healer checks back in the day. In early 2.0 it wasn't uncommon to see HM pugs forming with 3 healers in place of a second tank and EX was a stiff challenge on release. Then we come around to Titan Unreal. The same fight as EX but with the ability to raise people who fell off. Was it a healer check? In my eyes, no not at all. It was a safety dance check. The healing aspect of it was easy. The 'challenge' was staying alive. (Or rather, the challenge was finding gaps to raise people because swiftcast was on fire).

Why was that? The content hadn't changed? You know the answer, can you bring yourself to say it?

Yeah, it's our healing kits.

We have bigger heals
We have faster heals
We have far more free heals
We have far more resources for when we aren't using said free heals
We have so much more AoE healing that we can use it to replace our single target work
Mobility isn't a problem anymore, we have plentiful heals that we can pocket to cast on the move
Positioning isn't an issue like it used to be either, we can project even powerful AoE heals to pretty much anywhere as needed in any boss arena.

If you think a fight like TitanEX was my only example of a challenge for healers, you're sorely mistaken.

You look at just about any historical fight that was regarded as a healer check in it's time and I guarantee you that it would be absolutely trivial with the kits we have now.

As mentioned before, ShivaEX could get seriously spicy if you got back to back staff phases. Unreal was a token piñata. Utterly trivial and beyond a joke.
IfritEX was perhaps the biggest healer test of it's time. Did you ever run it in 2.1? If you did, now imagine doing it with Earthy Star, Soil and Asylum in their current forms lol. Trivialised.
A6S making AST suffer for it's shorter range and starving everyone else for MP by locking you in combat between each boss? 20yalm Stars and free raises would like a word with that. Trivial.
Even the almighty Godka... Heartless Angel into whatever else was a test unlike anything else at the time. Now picture it with Lilybell and Macrocosmos in play. DOA mechanic. Trivial.

I could go on but it's a waste of time really. The TLDR is, our healing kits have tied SE's hands in what they can do and spoiler alert, it's not an awful lot. You keep saying that the solution is to change the content but how? Are you going to sit there and suggest that they need to double down on healer light party stacks with vulns to stop this? Is that really a good solution in your eyes? If not, how else do you suggest they fix it and will that solution offer anything for competent healers that have or are discovering just how mind numbing mainstream content is now?

I suspect your solution won't offer anything because frankly, I don't think you want it to.

Meanwhile, adjusting the player kits (For healing potency, not DPS buttons before you try to hand wave it all away because some sprout fresh out of Ronfaure agreed with you) IN TANDEM with better consideration for healer responsibility and engagement in content as a whole will. Why are you so against that?

[GrimGale]

Why are you so against that?

I can answer that.

[Renathras]

You keep saying that the solution is to change the content but how? Are you going to sit there and suggest that they need to double down on healer light party stacks with vulns to stop this? Is that really a good solution in your eyes?

I've literally answered this - to you, I was replying to you, I believe - before. I'm trying to remember all the points, but things like damage not being regular, continued attacks on Tanks by bosses while casting (something you've proposed yourself), more consistent but smaller raidwide unavoidable damage that requires consistent healing (so cannot be treated by oGCDs alone), reducing oGCD healing power A LOT and making oGCDs more on abilities that augment GCD heals and mitigation (Presence of Mind, Divine Seal, Thin Air, Plenary Indulgence, Recitation, Deployment Tactics, Emergency Tactics, Fey Illumination) rather than REPLACE them. I'd honestly love it if Healer Jobs only had 1-2 oGCDs that healed and they had long CDs and were for clutch or emergency use, or extremely planned use, like how Tank Invulns (especially Hollowed and Bolide) are used; like how Benediction was GENERALLY used in ARR. You might notice that I point out a lot of abilities that were from ARR's WHM kit, or abilities in a similar vein. And to do this while nerfing the healing of Tanks and DPS and the mitigation from DPS.

Make more GCD actions, not less. Imagine WHM right now if it didn't have Afflatus heals (say you still get Misery every 1 min, whatever), Assize, Asylum, Tetra, Divine Benison, Aquaveil, and Temperance only had the heal boosting Divine Seal component. BUT, WHM also has an aoe mitigation cast spell (Protect) and a single target 500 potency barrier spell GCD (Stoneskin), and its oGCDs were all the kind that augment their GCD heals to make them more mana (Thin Air), hps (Presence of Mind), or both (Plenary Indulgence) efficient. The gameplay would revolve around using GCDs to heal your party, using oGCDs if you need to boost that for hard content.

Since the GCDs are still entirely functional, this doesn't hurt casual players in casual content.

Since the oGCDs only strengthen GCDs but GCDs are still required, even high end players would still break up their Glarespam for GCD spells that weren't Glare/Dia/Holy, thus being less "mind numbing" since it requires active engagement. YES, using them well would mean more GCDs for Glare, but you'd still need to break that up with GCDs for healing, and the content would still require consistent use of heals, thus being more engaging.

And in harder content, it would encourage intelligent use of oGCDs to augment healing, meaning high end players would still be engaged and the midcore would be more pressed but still be able to meet requirements. "Jonny Casual" isn't doing Ultimates, so this won't matter there.

While you might not find that the most fun thing ever, it's clearly better than what we have now AND would mean these "0 Healer clears" of content would no longer be a thing.

Meanwhile, adjusting the player kits (For healing potency, not DPS buttons before you try to hand wave it all away because some sprout fresh out of Ronfaure agreed with you) IN TANDEM with better consideration for healer responsibility and engagement in content as a whole will. Why are you so against that?

Is that not literally what I'm proposing?

I can answer that.

No, you can't. Not with anything other than a delusion/lie on your part, anyway.

The adults are talking, Grim. Maybe at least wait for my answer next time.

[GaiusDrakon]

grey healer who never cleared any tier arguing with entropy healer

you love to see it

[Sebazy]

<snip>

Bah, made a concise response and then managed to nuke it.

The TLDR: Then I don't get why you comment elsewhere that it's a content thing and content needs to change first and foremost? Both of these things need to change in tandem. I've mathed up elsewhere that a 50k raid wide every 18 seconds isn't enough to put our kits under any strain at this point. When many of us state that we think healers need to change, I'm pretty confident that it's not just DPS buttons we are talking about. Dismissing it as just that is missing the point.

grey healer who never cleared any tier arguing with entropy healer

you love to see it

Honestly, I'm no Elia, Ayessa or Fretty etc. I'm the comfy option that heals the retirement home team

[Ivtrix]

Guys, while it does show a big glaring weakness in fundamental mmo role triangle, let me assure you that this fight is in fact hard enough with healers.

Player skill is a huge factor, the players who managed to get this to work are exceptionally talented.

[GaiusDrakon]

Guys, while it does show a big glaring weakness in fundamental mmo role triangle, let me assure you that this fight is in fact hard enough with healers.

Player skill is a huge factor, the players who managed to get this to work are exceptionally talented.

Christ

Literally no one is saying that healers are completely useless

People are saying healers are in a bad spot and this clear was a symptom of a far larger problem

[fulminating]

It's just being used as a good springboard for people to finally talk and hopefully get addressed the current deep issues with the healer role. I don't think more than one person's said TOP is too easy.
Edit: oops beaten to it