Healer role design change?

[Sebazy]

nope they were designed to heal. the only reason they had DPS spells at all was for solo play. thats why they never accounted for healer damage in dps checks and stuff..

the issue being they dont want players to get too hurt, because it puts too much pressure and stress on healers and they wont play the role or something..

To clarify on this a little:

This line of thought is kind of out of date now and has been for a while. SE's raid design approach shifted quite a lot with Sudo moving be it for better or worse. There are examples of duties where the healer is forced to DPS either for a personal damage check (eg: O5N Phantom Train) or simply that the entire fight is clearly and provably tuned with healer DPS being taken into account (eg: E8S Shiva).

I'd say it's a fair point that healers were initially designed around healing first in ARR because not enough attention was paid to our damage potential, this lead to frequent occurrences of healers actually out DPSing proper DPS jobs in dungeons with regularity through ARR and HW. Now SE clearly pay much more attention towards keeping our damage in check even if the kits themselves have gotten more simplistic.

I have an idea for it. Rather than making it a 90/120s CD that is flat, bland, boring, just throw it out with no thought to it's use, make it a lily spender. That way, it's still damage neutral (you get blood lily from it), but it has to be thought about, as it's going to cost you a Rapture. Picture the scene, a Doom that can be cleansed by getting players to full HP OR Esuna'd, everyone is at not-full-HP. Do you spend the lily on the Esunaga and remove the dooms easily, or do you use it on a Rapture to heal people, and remove the dooms that way, while also restoring HP? What if the Rapture is not enough to get them to full? Then the Esunaga would be the better option because the doom would kill them, and you'd have to 'waste' a GCD heal to get the rest of the HP filled. Decisionmaking moments

Too neat an idea to get buried on an old page within 10 minutes. I like++

[GoatOfWar]

Healer as a role seems to have very diminishing value the later in the game you go..to the point of current ultimates being cleared without a healer or even less than recommended.

I think healers should be given more of a support role philosophy.

Obviously damage is not strong or constant enough to warrant a lot of healing...and tanks have heals that are comparable to a healer.

Either give healer's more unique utility options, like haste, damage up, crit up, buff timer extensions etc.

or give enemies more debilitating statuses that only a healer can cure/mitigate.

Warrior and Paladin are the only real standouts. Warrior especially needs hard healing nerfs.

[Aravell]

There are examples of duties where the healer is forced to DPS either for a personal damage check (eg: O5S Phantom Train)

Slight mistake here, it's O5N that requires healers to do damage (Yes, even if you got Siegfried, he may have 1 HP but you still need to hit him). O5S healer ghost was the one with mega-bloated HP that you can barely chip down, it periodically explodes for a lot of damage and also takes a % of HP damage to itself, you can clear the healer ghost entirely by just healing (mostly because you're barely even chipping their HP).

[ForsakenRoe]

Didn't you have a debuff to esuna too? Though none of that mattered once people learned about the WARskip and insisted on trying to do it in every PF (even if the WAR didn't have the loadtimes required to pull it off)

[vetch]

Didn't you have a debuff to esuna too? Though none of that mattered once people learned about the WARskip and insisted on trying to do it in every PF (even if the WAR didn't have the loadtimes required to pull it off)

Yes, the healer's ghost opens with a cleansable Healing Down debuff before it starts chunking your HP.

[Sebazy]

Slight mistake here, it's O5N that requires healers to do damage (Yes, even if you got Siegfried, he may have 1 HP but you still need to hit him). O5S healer ghost was the one with mega-bloated HP that you can barely chip down, it periodically explodes for a lot of damage and also takes a % of HP damage to itself, you can clear the healer ghost entirely by just healing (mostly because you're barely even chipping their HP).

Ooop, ta for the correction, fixed++

[Shurrikhan]

nope they were designed to heal. the only reason they had DPS spells at all was for solo play. thats why they never accounted for healer damage in dps checks and stuff..

the issue being they dont want players to get too hurt, because it puts too much pressure and stress on healers and they wont play the role or something..

This hasn't been true in XIV, even as far back as 1.0, nor for virtually any other MMO. Even in Everquest, healers did more than heal, even if their rDPS contribution was given by indirect (but still non-healing) means, such as through damage, mobility, anti-knockback, anti-stagger buffs, etc.

Moreover, you can absolutely further incentivize healing without decreasing healers' reaction windows between initial damage taken and the victim's death. I'm not advocating for such a system, but it wouldn't be hard to have HP reduced below 50% to have a proportionate impact on throughput, such that more rapid and responsive healing has a commensurate throughput (e.g., rDPS) advantage. Such in turn increases the value of preemptive heals, decreases or even inverts the rDPS opportunity cost of timely GCD heals, and gives more reason to bank the occasional oGCD heal.

"But that healing is done for party DPS! Healing shouldn't be about party DPS!" you may complain. Well, you're shit out of luck, because so long as an encounter's objectives is to reduce the HP of some particular unit(s) to 0, every single form of output in the game will be weighed by its contribution to reduced average time-to-kill -- i.e., party DPS. Just as all damage would be weighed by its contribution to reduced average time-to-100%-heal if an encounter's objective were to increase the HP of some particular unit(s) to full.

[Shurrikhan]

Here are some general thoughts I have on what I'd like to see in the future:

1. Rebalance DPS values between Healers and Tanks to be much closer.
- Healers are currently last in line to get their gear in many premades groups. This would at least allow healers to be interchangeable with tanks in terms of gear priority.

I feel like this depends primarily on how we see the value of (i.e., how we should "tax", as they are non-situational and non-optional) healers' "free" sustain (Lilies and oGCDs, be they mitigation, heals, or both), especially relative to what all tanks bring.

Tanks already bring with them hugely increased heal-efficiency due to even just their passive %mitigation¹. Though that passive value has diminishing returns in two-tanks scenarios because only one can tank at a time, their actives mitigation tools are more like those of healers: they do not waste each other except to the extent that they'd have excess coverage (or, in healers' case, there is not enough damage taken for both to use their oGCD sustain tools on CD without overhealing).

¹ While additive eHP increases like pre-traits Thrill of Battle grant further eHP, they do not increase the relative value of HP consumed over their duration, unlike mitigation like Rampart [a 25% eHP and efficiency increase], etc.

² Given that tanks weren't taking much less damage even with their 20% mitigation Role-wide passive, this one can more or less be thought of as a non-tank nerf that simply increases the party's dependence on tanks, more so than a tank buff, but still, that has further increased the relative value of tanks.
Personally, I'd prefer to see that removed and boss tankbuster (and maybe auto-attack) damage reduced accordingly, but that's more in the interest of reducing bloat, now that the devs don't have to pretend to former (bad) turtle-tanks that they lost nothing with the removal of old tank stances. The gameplay would be identical apart from the punishment of a tank dying once in a blue moon being very faintly less.

At present, I feel that the combined offense+sustain of tanks too greatly exceeds that of healers, and while tanks auto-balance part of that sustain (sadly, the least interesting part -- their passive mitigation)... they probably should be nerfed somewhat in addition to healers' offense being buffed (since their sustain already frequently encounters bottlenecks / redundancy and therefore buffs to sustain would not increase their value in practice).

Tl;dr: Yes, buff healer offensive ppm, but also probably decrease tank sustain (in the sense of effective mitigation+healing).

2. Rework the cleansable debuff UI to make cleansable debuffs far more visible, and make cleansing a more common choice.

This I'm more on the fence about. Personally, a hard cleanse seems about the least interesting way to deal with nearly any¹ debuff, to the point I'd often prefer that Esuna did not exist, as its presence actually dumbs down options otherwise available.

¹ The exception to this is "mechanic goes off on cleanse," where the healer then consumes a GCD to basically act as a Duty Action, in the interest of net rDPS increase by freeing up positioning.

Some examples of things I'd rather not see cleansed:

Simple DoTs - The most common form of cleansible debuff. This could actually require a decent bit of healing that, especially amid healing-intense situations, could require a preemptive HoT/Barrier if the target is known or blanket (blind/raidwide) sustain if not... and perhaps some saved up oGCDs to compensate for continually bad crit-luck. Or... it just takes the healer seeing the blue-line-highlighted icon and hitting the "Nah, let's not do this mechanic" button. The latter, despite its button cost, makes the mechanic less engaging and wastes its potential, in turn, to make the healer's kit more engaging.

Doom - Again, you could race the timer to heal the player up despite everything else that's going on in that time, perhaps even having to make the split-second choice between sacrificing that player or risking one or more death elsewhere... or you could hit the discrete "No mechanic, tyvm" button.¹

¹ Now, if you pair the Doom debuff in some way with something else, like a non-cleansable DoT that deals more damage the lower the victim's HP is... then the decision isn't so easy/automatic, and the Esuna becomes an emergency useful but optional means of trading out one risk for another.

Fully Undoable Mechanical Debuffs - This would be like Allagan Rot being created every 10 seconds and normally needing to be passed on within the next 10 seconds... or... just cleansed, with no penalty for doing so. I don't want Esuna to be a way out of a mechanic. I don't want my responsibility as a healer to be to dumb down fights.
Heck, I'd be fine with having ppgcd low enough that spending a GCD to Adlo a melee so they could maintain uptime standing in a fire would be worthwhile, but that needs to be a sort of situational fungibility and a deliberate decision, not something depended on to axe whole mechanics.

On the other hand, though, I'd be fine with more minor mechanics or annoyances being healer-cleansible, so long as their being cleansable neither noticeably dumbs down the healing nor the mechanics (a Lily-spending AoE Esuna onto a raidwide 10s Heavy, for instance, is basically just Expedient but potentially more versatile, depending on what else in that fight can be cleansed), as that allows for attentive prioritization (helping the 'carry' carry harder or one's 'weakest link' in the given mechanic or period to pose less risk).

I guess the one thing I really don't want, though, is for a behavior akin to "I see Cleansible = I cleanse." I want those to still be decisions, even if that means often leaving Esuna weak enough to be merely competitive on average.

3. More frequent appearance of chip damage occurring in all forms of content.

Aye. Not much more to be said here. Just... increase the healing requirements where they wouldn't make the existing bursts of damage overwhelming anyways, giving us more to/with which we'd feel like we're really responding/engaging.

[vetch]

"But that healing is done for party DPS! Healing shouldn't be about party DPS!" you may complain. Well, you're shit out of luck, because so long as an encounter's objectives is to reduce the HP of some particular unit(s) to 0, every single form of output in the game will be weighed by its contribution to reduced average time-to-kill -- i.e., party DPS. Just as all damage would be weighed by its contribution to reduced average time-to-100%-heal if an encounter's objective were to increase the HP of some particular unit(s) to full.

That's a hell of a strawman.

The stress and the fun of triage healing is when something is doing its best to kill my party members, and I have to make decisions and adjust on the fly to help them survive. I've never had any illusions that I was helping them survive so they can go on to foster orphaned kittens; it's always been keeping them alive so we can do damage to make the enemies not alive.

But when the stress is not there, the fun is not there. One-button instant HP fixers that you can more or less pick from randomly for the scheduled half-minute damage interval are just. Boring.

[Shurrikhan]

That's a hell of a strawman.

That wasn't a general "you". It was to the person quoted, whose past comments I was referencing.

The stress and the fun of triage healing is when something is doing its best to kill my party members, and I have to make decisions and adjust on the fly to help them survive. I've never had any illusions that I was helping them survive so they can go on to foster orphaned kittens; it's always been keeping them alive so we can do damage to make the enemies not alive.

But when the stress is not there, the fun is not there. One-button instant HP fixers that you can more or less pick from randomly for the scheduled half-minute damage interval are just. Boring.

100% agreed.

I'd add to this that the occasional variably-valuable offensive GCDs (such as a DoT at exactly its time to be refreshed), too, can add to those elements of engagement without so quickly being geared out of.

I really like intensive triage healing, but when we enter all but Savage content vastly overgeared and underpressured, and quickly gear the pressure even out of Savage... we should have some longer-lasting levers made available for healers to pull on, too, and concerning design with the downtime, too, is a good way to provide that.