Healer role design change?

[ty_taurus]

Yes, however what I replied to, specifically, has nothing to do with fixing the healer role but is simply a preference on gear distribution. You're now conflating healer design and how individual statics decide they want to divvy out loot. Both are subjective but only one is an actual design issue.

My original post was about what needs to happen to fix the healing role. The only part of your response I was referencing was where you specified that 'it doesn't make sense for healers to have as high damage output as tanks because they mainly just have 1 DPS action' which completely disregards the point I had made in the same post that the healers would need more DPS actions. I'm not talking about the rest of what you're saying. You can't criticize one bullet point of a proposal while completely disregarding another bullet point that quite literally answers the criticism of the first point. And, I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in what you think is or isn't possible in the future. It's entirely irrelevant to what I was talking about and is overall a useless argument anyway because unless you're a time traveler, you will never know what changes will occur in future expansions.

I'm not saying anything will or won't happen, but expansions are periods of great change in a game like this. It has happened with literally every other expansion before EW--things changed a lot. This is the only time where we've basically changed nothing from one expansion to the next, and everyone seems to think it's written on the rosetta stone itself that that means no change will ever happen again. I have no idea what changes will occur in the future. I'm not making an argument for any of that. I'm just saying what medicine this game needs to cure the healer problem. Whether or not the design team is willing to take that medicine doesn't change the fact that the medicine is needed.

[ForsakenRoe]

"Bringing WHM up" in Stormblood's paradigm is waaaay more than potencies. The other two could mitigate in several different ways. And had a bunch of free burst heals and regens. And party damage buffs. AOE Esuna. MP refresh. Excellent personal damage. WHM was missing entire categories of personal capability that the other two had in spades, plus they could handily cover the vanilla blandness that WHM brought to the table.

Remember, the idea isn't 'revert to 4.0 wholesale', it's 'take inspiration from design of 4.0 re: rotations, while keeping the improvements on QOL/useability that 5/6.0 brought, ie Lilies, Divination being a predictable raidbuff (better for balancing/less damage swing), etc'. Going back to 4.0 wholesale would mean, for example, removing Art of War (to mirror Miasma 2) and Energy Drain, and nobody wants to have that happen again. I'm going to assume SE would leave AST as the current 'Diurnal only' now that we have SGE, even if I got my way and had 4.0 style design come back for the 'HW three'. As such, to address each of the things that made SCH/AST OP and WHM 'not good and also very bad in SB':

Mit: Either add Protect as a 60s CD that mirrors CU on AST (upgrading to PI at later levels to save hotbar space), or drop Temperance to a 1min CD, shortening it's duration a little (to 15s) if needed.

Free burst healing/regens: Lilies being reworked addresses this somewhat. AST gets an average of 600p of healing every 20s via rotating it's current OGCDs (CO/CU/Star). WHM gets 400 per 20s, with it going to 600 with PI. We have to remember, SB's version of PI was not good either, and has since been made more useable. It also has Asylum for 900p total. Lilybell is the big thing that can be looked at IMO. A 3min CD that gives 1000p for instant detonation, up to 2000p if all 5 stacks are popped 'properly' as it were. But it's direct competitor is Macrocosmos, capable of deleting certain mechanics (though I imagine they're going to be very wary of how they design hp-to-1 style mechs going forward because of it). I think if they change Lilybell to be a 120s CD with 4 stacks, or a 90s with 3 stacks (and delete the penalty for early detonation), the skill would feel so much better to use. Macro remains with the niche of 'it can delete mechanics sometimes' and Lilybell gains a niche of 'it's up twice as often'. You'd be able to rotate, every 45s, between Asylum and a 3stack Lilybell, for 2100 potency per 90s before even touching Lilies. Lilybell would also have a seperate 'niche' of sorts, of the versatility of choosing how to do it's healing. You can pop it upfront for burst, you can leave it to get even distribution of pulses (ie for a DOT). Macro doesn't have that, you choose when it gives you the burst of healing, but you can't split that burst up into smaller amounts, meaning less agency in the healing it provides

Party damage buffs: WHM got a solid showing in SHB when it's personal damage was so strong that it was not only outstripping party buffs, but also some of the tanks, this is again a numbers thing. I don't think giving WHM a raidbuff changes anything in either direction. SAM exists fine and has no raidbuff, yeh it drops from it's top spot as everyone gets gear sometimes, and other times not. BLM is the same, often hanging around in the top 3 without having a raidbuff. Just requires SE to be good at tuning numbers which.. yeh, could be an issue I guess. Definitely not possible with 4.0 AST (as it was then), but with something like what I've put in that other thread (ST cards with roughly equal contribution to damage, Divination as the raidwide buff, thereby making it's damage output 'predictable' from a balance perspective), it should be possible to balance WHM against it a lot easier compared to the insanely swing-y damage of a 4.0 AST

AOE Esuna: Doesn't exist anymore, but if it were to come back I'd imagine it'd be on WHM if anyone (as a lily spender), since SCH has Expedient now as a 'cool weird utility thing'. If AOE Esuna came back on SCH, I dunno what I'd do for WHM. The first thing that comes to mind is a Raise skill that has a long CD (like, 5+ min), but raises the target with no weakness (or if they have weakness, doesn't turn it into brink of death). People would complain that 'my utility only good for prog' but I could say the same about something like Neutral Sect, you don't actually 'want' to use it because it only works on GCD heals

MP refresh: Addressed with Thin Air and the damage-neutral-Misery change, we now save 1600MP per min due to prep/firing a Misery. Every time they reduce Assize's CD it helps a little too. SB WHM's MP economy was not great, and HW was even worse, but now it's been helped a lot. If needs be, we can have a trait added somewhere that says that Thin Air affects the next 3 spells instead of one. If they added my ideas we'd be getting +500 each time we casted the big AOE heal I made too (the one that grants you a Quake/Tornado/Flood cast) but hey, a quick-and-dirty fix can be to just increase Assize's restore amount

Excellent personal damage: Personal-damage wise WHM is on the right track in relation to AST and SCH, its higher than them (in personal damage) which, since it has no raidbuff, is where it should be. But this is once again a case of 'can SE balance a non-raidbuff class versus one that has raidbuffs', and it's doubly precarious because AST is so heavy into raidbuffing in terms of it's identity, it's like comparing DNC and MCH. SHB shows they're capable, whether intentional or by fluke, of making WHM be competitive even without having it's own raidbuff

If you were to ask me 'do you believe its possible to have SB style design, and for the healers to be well balanced against each other?' I'd say 'yes it is absolutely possible'. If you asked 'do you believe it's possible for SE to achieve this', I'd hesitate before answering, and I'm not sure which way I'd answer it. I want to believe that if they put their mind to it and decided 'this is the way we are going with healers', they'd get the numbers right. The problem is that they don't want to go that way designwise, else they'd never have done the SHB changes in the first place

6.2k characters i done did a Ren

[ty_taurus]

Mit: Either add Protect as a 60s CD that mirrors CU on AST (upgrading to PI at later levels to save hotbar space), or drop Temperance to a 1min CD, shortening it's duration a little (to 15s) if needed.

In general, I've started to develop the preference of really cutting total actions down in favor of making the actions that stay more frequent. For example, I really like Haima and Panhaima. I think they're interesting, but I'd rather see them become 60 second cooldowns instead, and I'd be happy to remove tools like some or all of the -choles in order to justify that much accessibility. So I'd much rather see something like Temperance drop to 60 seconds or less even if that means reducing the effects somewhat. Adding charges also helps. For example, why does Scholar need both Indomitability and Fey Blessing? Why does it need Whispering Dawn and Sacred Soil and Fey Illumination?

I want to see each kit curated down to the most interesting unique tools, and use that extra space to add ways to interact with those tools more. For example, why not cut Asylum and Plenary Indulgence completely and make Liturgy a permanent object you place. Every time you hit Liturgy with an AoE heal, you can activate it to trigger an OGCD AoE heal, and it can store up to 5 charges this way? One action releases all charges at once for HP burst recovery, another grants you a buff that automatically consumes a single charge to heal a smaller amount when you take damage (mimicking the current Liturgy effect), and maybe you have a third action--a DPS spell that causes all charges to hit enemies with a damage down effect for added mitigation, or something o that effect? This could also resolve the Assize problem. Instead of Assize healing additionally, it adds a charge to your Liturgy. Maybe you can spend your charges to either heal, or

[ForsakenRoe]

For example, why does Scholar need both Indomitability and Fey Blessing? Why does it need Whispering Dawn and Sacred Soil and Fey Illumination?

Soil's for mit, idk why they added the regen in SHB. I thought it was dumb at the time too. For Indom/Blessing, I've said ages ago that I'd probably remove Blessing, and rework Deploy so that the Fairy does a copy of the skill you use, from a list. Indom would make the fairy do Fey Indom (functionally equivalent to Blessing atm), Deploy Adlo would be a double ST shield on one target for super mit on a tankbuster, Deploy Succor would be current Adlo-Deploy, bigger partywide shielding, and Deploy Excog would be for 'I really don't want this tank to get instaslapped by an auto and die after this TB' I guess

As for a merged Illum/WDawn, I think you are describing Physis2, but jokes aside, yeh I'm not a massive fan of Fey Illumination's existence either, I'd rather have lost it in the prune than Rouse for example

[Aravell]

Rework Deploy so that the Fairy does a copy of the skill you use, from a list. Indom would make the fairy do Fey Indom (functionally equivalent to Blessing atm), Deploy Adlo would be a double ST shield on one target for super mit on a tankbuster, Deploy Succor would be current Adlo-Deploy, bigger partywide shielding, and Deploy Excog would be for 'I really don't want this tank to get instaslapped by an auto and die after this TB' I guess

This system would actually be very interesting on SGE. Imagine if:
- Dosis is a straight heal on Kardia target
- Eukrasian Dosis is a regen on Kardia target
- Dyskrasia pulses an AoE heal out from Kardia target
- Phlegma places a shield on Kardia target
- Pneuma pulses an AoE shield out from Kardia target

[ty_taurus]

Soil's for mit, idk why they added the regen in SHB. I thought it was dumb at the time too. For Indom/Blessing, I've said ages ago that I'd probably remove Blessing, and rework Deploy so that the Fairy does a copy of the skill you use, from a list. Indom would make the fairy do Fey Indom (functionally equivalent to Blessing atm), Deploy Adlo would be a double ST shield on one target for super mit on a tankbuster, Deploy Succor would be current Adlo-Deploy, bigger partywide shielding, and Deploy Excog would be for 'I really don't want this tank to get instaslapped by an auto and die after this TB' I guess

As for a merged Illum/WDawn, I think you are describing Physis2, but jokes aside, yeh I'm not a massive fan of Fey Illumination's existence either, I'd rather have lost it in the prune than Rouse for example

I'd rather see Whispering Dawn upgrade into Fey Blessing, and/or have that replace Indomitability as your OGCD AoE heal. I also don't see the point in having both Physis II and Kerachole. I get that Physis II has the healing increased effect, but I'd rather rework how you access that rather than have two slightly different OGCD regens. And that's kinda my point with Soil/WD/Illumination... they all bleed together.

This system would actually be very interesting on SGE. Imagine if:
- Dosis is a straight heal on Kardia target
- Eukrasian Dosis is a regen on Kardia target
- Dyskrasia pulses an AoE heal out from Kardia target
- Phlegma places a shield on Kardia target
- Pneuma pulses an AoE shield out from Kardia target

I'd want more choice involved with Kardia. That kind of change just makes the regens and barriers consequences of doing your rotation. I've actually started thinking more along the lines of something like:

Dosis - Deals 330 Potency. No MP Cost. No Kardia Effect
New Spell - Deals 330 Potency. 800 MP Cost. Heals your Kardia target with a potency of 250.

In the past, my concepts of a Sage rework included other similar concepts. Namely Polydipsia which replaces Soteria: a DPS spell that applies 4 stacks of Soteria to your Kardia target, doubling the Kardia effects granted by other spells, or Eukrasian Polydipsia which instead grants 2 stacks of Therapeia to your Kardia target which blasts the Kardia effects of other spells to all allies nearby them.

Basically, your DPS rotation is about making choices with your Kardia healing, and using Dosis when you don't need to heal.

[Renathras]

In general, I've started to develop the preference of really cutting total actions down in favor of making the actions that stay more frequent. For example, I really like Haima and Panhaima. I think they're interesting, but I'd rather see them become 60 second cooldowns instead, and I'd be happy to remove tools like some or all of the -choles in order to justify that much accessibility.

Kind of agree with this (whole paragraph). I was thinking earlier this evening how much I like Emergency Tactics.

...no, wait, hear me out, please.

What I like about it is how FREQUENT it is. It's a modifier ability, which means it allows other abilities (Succor and Adlo) to pull double duty, like Eukrasia. Unlike Eukrasia, though, it's limited by a CD. But it's not a really heavily punishing one. I think it was 20 or 30 seconds originally, but it's 15 now. I was thinking how I like Plenary, but it's only once per minute, which tends to mean I think of other things to use first. The CD is in that weird place where it's JUST long enough to be out of mind, but not long enough to be a major or clutch ability.

Contrast, also, PvP abilities. Other than LBs themselves, abilities with CDs are usually either 15 sec or 20 sec CDs, meaning they're up all the time. Short CDs like that result in buttons that feel somewhat impactful, because they can't be spammed, but still accessible and go-to since they're still frequently available.

.

As for the SGE discussion:

My ideal for SGE at this point - I'd never touch it, but I know some people really want this - would be to remove (almost) all of its healing. Give it a DPS rotation on par with SMN's/RDM's (without the melee bit) and boost its Kardia to be serious healing. Give it a few oGCDs for mitigation (Kerachole, for example), and some emergency heal for when Kardia isn't cutting it (Durochole, for example), and that's it. Its main use oGCDs would be things like boosting Kardia with Soteria, a Synastry/Beacon of Light second short duration Kardia, and an AOE Kardia. Performing its DPS rotation correctly combined with proper Kardia targeting/hot-swapping/use of the extra Kardia oGCDs would be what leads to proper healing performance.

Right now, SGE can debateably outheal a pure Healer depending on how you look at it and consider eHP, and that aside, given the lowish healing requirements in this game, SGE can do ample overhealing. Its oGCD heals are ridiculously powerful and accessible. It has better Regen healing than WHM (or even AST, I think), and can access them on the oGCD, unlike WHM's Regen and Medica 2, which are DPS losses to use. Asylum on a 90 sec CD is WHM's only oGCD regen, while SGE has two (four if you count Panhamia/Hamia, though those are more akin to Lilybell), Physis with a 60 sec CD and Kerochole with a 30 sec (which unlike SCH, doesn't compete with Energy Drain so can be used freely). And right now, it doesn't have the "heals by doing damage" feel. Kardia feels like (and functionally is) Eos' Embrace while SGE's bulk healing is done with its oGCDs.

[Semirhage]

-snip-

WHM is a tricky creature. There's the "here's what they could do with it" angle, and the "here's what Square Enix has been really stubborn about" aspect too. WHM has several design....directions? "Identities"? Aspects which seem to be part of Square's design document on the job which they haven't outright stated but can be inferred from precedent? Whatever you want to call them, they s u c k. WHM is like a healer case study in how you design a job that hates FFXIV's combat system, much like BLM is for caster DPS. It's a job that you'd think maybe works if you squint at it, and then you introduce it to....*points at FFXIV*.

What's this, slightly more potent free heals on twice the cooldown (Tetra vs Essential Dignity)? How terrible! FFXIV's combat system rewards shorter cooldowns much more than it does long ones. Slow-cast spells that have slightly more potency? Hell with that, modern fight design wants you to zip around the arena every other GCD like an AST with Lightspeed can. Somewhat stronger GCD heals? FFXIV wants you dealing damage, and the other healers are set up much more comfortably to heal and deal damage simultaneously, while the lilies are a bandaid on top of stopping and swapping between them. Asylum's trait gives you Yet More Healing? Too bad for you; FFXIV MUCH more frequently likes it when you handle damage with a snappy cooldown while the boss sits around casting/not hitting anyone and don't spend precious time dumping a bunch of useless overhealing. WHM is designed to shine in a completely different game from this one. FFXIV's combat loves short cooldowns (the first thing any WHM cooldown sacrifices for something stupid that the game *doesn't* reward like slightly more potency), mobility (lol Expedient, Lightspeed, Icarus next to....overhealing lilies), buff-stacking (lol my only buff requires me to stand still).

The reason the caster DPS have so many instant casts is because they would be unplayable without them. I've poked around the subject in the DPS subforum a few times. FFXIV increasingly isn't designed for the RPG job fantasy of planting your butt in one spot, maybe scooting on occasion, and getting your fighters to handle wrestling in a web-grease-spike pit on fire. The whole game wants you to play like an action combat sword-swinger: dodge rolling and darting around and getting your whole arena length 100 meter dash cardio going. One of the reasons I'd be down for a full (GOOD, monkey's paw. GOOD rework) rework of WHM is because its whole design philosophy is just so anti-FFXIV. Playing WHM anywhere outside dungeon Holy spam feels like rolling an acrobatics character in a game that's set in a flat plain with no trees.

[Shurrikhan]

WHM is like a healer case study in how you design a job that hates FFXIV's combat system, much like BLM is for caster DPS.

I'm really hoping that analog isn't relevant to your wider point, since, if anything, the other casters would be more interesting if they didn't spend so much of their reiterations apologizing themselves right out of role identity.

And, if WHM were putting out a form of throughput that wasn't so quickly capped / made redundant... that'd honestly be fine. The core issue is literally just that (A) there's no non-burst and non-scripted healing to be done anyways and (B) despite its "big/pure heals" identity... it's typically had weaker or merely competitive heals in practice.

That said, on all other counts...

WHM has several design....directions? "Identities"? ... Whatever you want to call them, they s u c k.

...Agreed.

The reason the caster DPS have so many instant casts is because they would be unplayable without them.

And yet... BLM really does still do fine. Top rDPS for every fight. Top aDPS on many. Yes, modern fights are more demanding of mobility than before, but... cast times are no more a fundamental issue than positionals or any other form of contextual complexity.

Like... I agree with you that WHM deserves a rehaul, but... I don't think the 'issue' you're focused on is nearly as great as you make out here. It's instead a simple matter of parity, where other jobs simply have more.

And even if, say, the devs ended up fixed on the idea of WHM being a high cure-ppgcd healer... as long as they made up for that with offensive potency and compensatory features so that any healer pair with them had roughly the same offensive ppm in practice (WHM probably "chadding" over AST or SCH, but w/e)... that'd be fine.

For me, my main issue is that WHM's only identity is Generic Healer™ and that it so often just hasn't been balanced against the other jobs. But so long as fights are consistently demanding of mobility, that doesn't mean that you need to give every job the same amount of mobility, since you can just compensate for that lack of mobility in other ways. Similarly, even if more of a given healer's curative ppm would be GCD-based, as long as its total curative ppm and offensive ppm would be balanced in practice... it truly does not matter; you can quite simply raise potency in compensation, and the only "problem" would be that the "GCD healer" would be more rewarded than most for doing zero healing over raid buffs and for healing when there's nothing to attack.

[Semirhage]

I'm really hoping that analog isn't relevant to your wider point

Sort of? It's hard to have focused discussions on problems with class design because FFXIV has so many of them at the moment. That bit right there?

the other casters would be more interesting if they didn't spend so much of their reiterations apologizing themselves right out of role identity

Is what I mean about one of the major issues with casters in FFXIV. They're all apologizing for casting. FFXIV isn't a game designed for "casters" anymore. It's designed (well, not "for", since it lacks a lot of the features that action combat aficionados also enjoy, but moving in that direction nonetheless) like they want it to no longer be a traditional RPG, like they want it to be a dodge-rolly two-button action combat game, and what we're left with is this unholy abomination that's like the worst elements from both: Depthless kits designed as if you need to quickly react instead of using your abilities in a thoughtful order, but also bosses that don't force the kind of reaction time you need in an action game.

Casters in FFXIV *all* apologize for being casters. Triplecast, swiftcast, 1.5 second nukes, instant free spells all over the place.

WHM is (maybe not so much anymore, with the caster apologies added to it) the most "oldschool immobile caster" of the healers, which was a segue into- WHM's design considerations are basically all a game of what 'features' would one give a class that the game consistently gives no shits about, while heaping things the game rewards on its competition.

Two different points, with a tenuous bridge between topics. BLM does great damage for sure! But the game still wants you moving all over the place like a fighter, so we all keep getting anti-caster changes to our kits to bend them to fit modern gym class fight design, which makes you feel like less of a...well, caster.