What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ty_taurus]

The MSQ is not the game.

First of all, I have not stated it as just the MSQ. That is a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. You're brushing off everything from roulettes to alliance raids to normal raids to Eureka and Bozja to treasure map farming to PVP to wonderous tails and so much more by saying "The MSQ is not the game" which, also, it kind of is. It is largely seen as the main driving point of engagement by the player base at large.

This is what I don't think you're understanding, there is a class of people who do enjoy perfecting things, but only to a certain limit.

I would insert a quote of me saying "there should be a simple and forgiving job for every role" from each example of me saying it, but I'm too lazy for that right now. In short, I have been saying over and over and over and over and over and over again that there should be a healer who is easy to pick up and forgiving to the beginner--a 4 out of 10 on the difficulty scale--the Dancer or the Red Mage of healers. That is asking very little of someone who wants to be good at one job, but isn't interested in something overly challenging like Ninja.

And regardless of how you slice it, having a job with 32 actions on their hotbar (including role actions, LB, and sprint) but only needs to use 6 of them more than 5 times in a 7 and a half minute fight, with one of those actions being used 134 times--nearly 60% of their gameplay is unacceptably bad game design. I don't care if this is an exceptionally talented player, no game should enable this design to be possible.



And I'm totally fine with trying to make the act of healing cut into that Glare usage more. I'm 100% in full support of that, but you cannot convince me that creating a environment where turning that abomination into something like the following example, but with healing instead of damage, in all forms of group-based content including those dungeons, those roulette runs, those alliance raids, etc. wouldn't tear through a massive percentage of the casual playerbase like a sci-fi body horror parasite shredding scientists in half asshole first.

[Shurrikhan]

And I'm totally fine with trying to make the act of healing cut into that Glare usage more. I'm 100% in full support of that, but you cannot convince me that creating a environment where turning that abomination into something like the following example, but with healing instead of damage, in all forms of group-based content including those dungeons, those roulette runs, those alliance raids, etc. wouldn't tear through a massive percentage of the casual playerbase like a sci-fi body horror parasite shredding scientists in half asshole first.

Honestly... if you swapped out only the spells with "Ver" in them with heals (so, ~40% of the CPM here)... that'd still fall well short of the % of CPM spent on healing in min/lowish ilvl runs in ARR. And it was quite doable --seemingly often even preferred-- even with Cleric Stance's pathetically unpolished implementation/coding issues annoying the heck out of optimizers and casuals alike.

(Obviously, that'd have to be split differently among GCDs and oGCDs, but the comparison will be rough regardless as we had almost no frequent oGCD throughput back then outside of SCH.)

I see no reason we can't at least go back to the relative healing requirements of Stormblood by increasing enemy damage dealt (especially) outside of the existing bursts.

The largest factor that'd gate those who want to engage very little with their kits isn't the portion of time or CPM spent healing, but rather the amount of times reaction + basic blanketing (HoTs, shields) alone wouldn't be enough to keep people alive, requiring them to have memorized when incoming damage is coming and/or to keep oGCDs stored for emergencies. But given the amount of empty space between those bursts and that hits outside of Ultimate are typically either wholly survivable or wouldn't be survivable even with all possible mitigation saved for them... that's a non-issue.


Tl;dr: I think we need to improve downtime play and the (depth of) interaction available to healers with other forms of throughput regardless, but we can definitely increase relative healing requirements well above what we see today.

[ty_taurus]

I see no reason we can't at least go back to the relative healing requirements of Stormblood by increasing enemy damage dealt (especially) outside of the existing bursts.

And I don't disagree. I'm not saying we can't increase outgoing damage at all, but increasing it to a level that is still forgiving and manageable to the average player will barely make a dent in the major problem with healer design, especially with how OGCD-focused healing has become. It'll be like pouring a single bucket of water into a kiddie pool. You've made the ground wet, but you still can't really play in it.

[Shurrikhan]

And I don't disagree. I'm not saying we can't increase outgoing damage at all, but increasing it to a level that is still forgiving and manageable to the average player will barely make a dent in the major problem with healer design, especially with how OGCD-focused healing has become. It'll be like pouring a single bucket of water into a kiddie pool. You've made the ground wet, but you still can't really play in it.

So, I imagine there are few different thresholds here.

If you're looking to make healing more interesting in the old min ilvl ARR sense of even casting Regen sometimes being risky because the tank could die in the next 1.5 GCDs' time if you don't Cure II... yeah, that can't happen.

But, that's like a 9/10 level of extremity... while we're currently at less than a 1/10 outside of Ultimate and a select few moments in very few Savage fights.

My thought is that we can get to where you're habitually saving an oGCD or two and occasionally pre-healing (starting your cast before a tankbuster hits, so you heal just after it damages)... somewhere around a 5/10... without parties being noticeably affected. And that would be more than single bucket of water. It wouldn't be any Olympic pool, but it would at least be a small standing one.

Again, we're probably in agreement regarding what all needs to happen, but I don't think we should shy so rigidly away from there being an occasional death if a healer blanks out for 3+ GCDs in a row at the wrong time. And so long as we're not babying the playerbase to that degree, we can actually manage some significantly increased interest from the healing itself.

It still won't be enough to make healing kits/gameplay as a whole interesting to most players at a whole without also giving more interesting ways to fill downtime, but leaving the healing requirements as low as they are now would also hurt the interest in/from those downtime tools, since they'd seem to come with zero risk or priority conflicts to reconcile.

I feel therefore we should look to increase it nearly as much as we can get away with, and then maybe even go a bit harder on the gas next expansion once we've pulled the average player's head out of the ass of modern normal content alone, and design our downtime tools ambitiously but with those damage intake thresholds in mind.*

*This doesn't mean shying from skill ceiling because of that added danger, but simply having that expectation that not every fight will nonetheless allow healer pairs to hit each and every one of their offensive marks, and with a typically larger difference in healer DPS between the damage of early prog and optimized run and a much larger difference in the effort required for the healer pair --or even the whole party-- to get there.

[Aravell]

In short, I have been saying over and over and over and over and over and over again that there should be a healer who is easy to pick up and forgiving to the beginner--a 4 out of 10 on the difficulty scale--the Dancer or the Red Mage of healers. That is asking very little of someone who wants to be good at one job, but isn't interested in something overly challenging like Ninja.

I firmly believe that aside from the jank and various problems associated with Cleric Stance, HW design nailed this perfectly.

WHM was never a difficult job, it was always the simplest of the healers, the 4/10, you could just react and heal whatever damage comes out, or you could meld some accuracy and throw out some damage when you were comfortable. SCH was the advanced job that you went to if you were interested in taking some of the burden of the dps check on yourself, while AST was the advanced job that you went to if you were more interested in taking a more supportive approach to combat rather than doing the damage yourself.

If they simply took this design and evolved it instead of breaking it down and rebuilding everything, the healers might actually have a solid foundation right now.

[ty_taurus]

I firmly believe that aside from the jank and various problems associated with Cleric Stance, HW design nailed this perfectly.

WHM was never a difficult job, it was always the simplest of the healers, the 4/10, you could just react and heal whatever damage comes out, or you could meld some accuracy and throw out some damage when you were comfortable. SCH was the advanced job that you went to if you were interested in taking some of the burden of the dps check on yourself, while AST was the advanced job that you went to if you were more interested in taking a more supportive approach to combat rather than doing the damage yourself.

If they simply took this design and evolved it instead of breaking it down and rebuilding everything, the healers might actually have a solid foundation right now.

Stone III, Aero, Aero II, Aero III, Fluid Aura, Assize, Presence of Mind, Holy, and Cleric Stance. If we cut Cleric Stance and add Afflatus Misery, then consider something else that could take the spot of Fluid Aura, Aero, and Aero III--something that's maybe not just 3 DoTs (counting Dia), but something that's perhaps a bit flexible, then that could be perfectly fine for a still-approachable White Mage.

[Shurrikhan]

Ngl, I really don't want to see rehauls, reworks, or even retouches done on the basis of "Let's just grab these things, and a bit of that, and a bit of that." If we're to rework anything, I'd like to see a legitimate focus on some core theme and organic expansion therefrom.

[ty_taurus]

Ngl, I really don't want to see rehauls, reworks, or even retouches done on the basis of "Let's just grab these things, and a bit of that, and a bit of that." If we're to rework anything, I'd like to see a legitimate focus on some core theme and organic expansion therefrom.

I don't disagree, but at the same time, I also feel like Sisyphus forced to tirelessly push against the bolder of hell that is healer design in this game, and while I would like to see a really fresh reboot of the healer role entirely to actually compliment this game in any conceivable way, I'm willing to take a smaller victory of revamping an older form of these jobs. But I was also just referencing WHM having 8 different actions for offensive gameplay.

[ForsakenRoe]

pictures

For a second I got a heart attack I thought you'd pulled up my trash p12s p2 log from last week, but no it just looks similar (unsurprising given what little choice of filler GCDs we have to work with). For the RDM specifically, we don't need those 12 uses of the 123 melee combo, Scorch and Resolution to be separate if it were on a healer. Just have the 123 as a single button (wouldn't want the healer players getting stressed by complexity after all), which puts it up to '36 casts' of that button and therefore actually taking top spot of 'number of casts'.

Also, as a little thought experiment, were I to change WHM as I deem fit, the Glare count in that picture would be reduced by 3 per minute, to add some extra Dia casts, 4 per minute for Banish casts, and 4 per minute again for 'the cool heal tool', Quake, Tornado, and Flood casts. Let's be generous and ignore Quake, since it's the same button, that still means that in the 7:40 fight you refer to, that 134 Glares drops by ((3+4+3)*7), or down to 64 (plus a bit more reduction due to the other 40 seconds). With a total cast count of 233, and a new Glare total of 'roughly 60', this puts the 'percentage of actions being Glare in a given encounter' all the way down to about 25%

edit: a comparison, because pictures speak a thousand words:

But I was also just referencing WHM having 8 different actions for offensive gameplay.

I reckon I could scrounge up 8 damage actions for a WHM. How about... Glare, Dia, Holy, Misery, Banish, Quake, Tornado, Flood, Assize, POM, Cleric (maybe, not the HW version though). Wait that's more than 8, even if we took out QTF cos 'its the same button don't count' then it's 8

[ty_taurus]

For the RDM specifically, we don't need those 12 uses of the 123 melee combo, Scorch and Resolution to be separate if it were on a healer. Just have the 123 as a single button (wouldn't want the healer players getting stressed by complexity after all), which puts it up to '36 casts' of that button and therefore actually taking top spot of 'number of casts'.

For sure. It's not that WHM should have a cast list identical to the RDM cast list or anything. In fact, we can look at BLM as a better example of what a better designed WHM (or any healer potentially) cast list could look like.



Unlike RDM where a lot of its 'filler' gameplay is split across 5 different actions (Verthunder, Veraero, Verfire, Verstone, and Jolt), BLM does have a rotation that centers around trying to spam a single spell, Fire IV, and as a result, you see a different curve here, and yet from the data I was able to collect, it was the highest rated job, beating DRG and RDM by roughly half a point. But there's a distinct difference regarding how BLM regularly has to engage with other parts of its tools to allow it to cast Fire IV, otherwise they'd run out of MP or drop their Enochian. And yet even being a DPS that's centered around using a single spell as much as possible, it still casts that spell half as much as a WHM casts Glare.

I'm not suggesting that the healers need to have all these other DPS outlets to support their filler per say, because the responsibility to heal should take up a percentage of that, but that healing in combination with other DPS tools together should cut Glare usage in half consistent across various types of content.