Healer role design change?

[ForsakenRoe]

mobility (lol Expedient, Lightspeed, Icarus next to....overhealing lilies)

demanding of mobility,

Reading the word 'mobility' so many times has made me think that 'maybe I screwed up', check it:

Current WHM rotation, we have 18 GCDs per minute where we have 'little to no mobility' because 1.5s cast time/2.5s recast, only able to slidecast and use 1s of free space to move a little bit at a time.

Now look at this second graph, of what I pitched all that time ago (has it been a year yet)

Is this too much mobility? When I first made these graphs to compare '1min snapshot of rotation' I was mainly focused on 'try to lower number of boring Glare spam-casts, and replace with something more interesting'. I feel like, looking back at this graph again with a focus on 'how much mobility does this provide', I've gone and accidentally SMN'd the class out of most of it's cast times, as Glare (and it's upgrade Quake) are the only things on here with a cast time in my pitch, everything else is instantcasts. So 8 actual cast times per minute (SMN has 4 and people hate it for this reason). On the plus side, nobody gets to complain about 'oh no I can't do damage because the fight mechanics don't give me time to stand still', I guess

Maybe Banish needs a cast time too

[Shurrikhan]

snip

Right, but the same applies to healers' MP management (modest though it was), melee's positional and uptime management, tank's risk-reward and positional management, etc. Is an actual prevalence of casting on... Casters... really yet another thing we want to axe from the game, in favor of making them increasingly into simply (fully mobile) Mana-shooting Rangers?

I ask because if we continually roll with the fight design only by trying to mitigate those designs' difficulty, rather than just fairly rewarding success within those designs... that's what we'll get: instant-casts-only Bards, instant-casts-only SMNs, instant-casts-only BLMs (alongside effectively infinite ranged melees, and tanks who have next to no rewards for positioning mobs/bosses correctly, etc., etc.).

Is this too much mobility? When I first made these graphs to compare '1min snapshot of rotation' I was mainly focused on 'try to lower number of boring Glare spam-casts, and replace with something more interesting'. I feel like, looking back at this graph again with a focus on 'how much mobility does this provide', I've gone and accidentally SMN'd the class out of most of its cast times, as Glare (and its upgrade Quake) are the only things on here with a cast time in my pitch, everything else is instantcasts.

Maybe Banish needs a cast time too

If anything, I'd probably put the cast times on the big-trucking-hits, minus Misery? So, to me, at the very least, Quake, Flood, Tornado absolutely should have cast times (possibly a full GCD's), though I'd then want to see some timing-flexibility on them (if that wasn't in the mockup; can't easily go and check right now from on my phone).

[ty_taurus]

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.

I don't see anything wrong with liking Emergency Tactics. In concept, I think it's great also. It's just that, now more than ever, it's heavily power-crept. Ironically, it was already seeing power creep in HW when it was added because Indom was also added and is a considerably stronger healing tool that also has a short cooldown. ET would've really shined during ARR though. And that leads me to a different point... We keep getting new healing cooldowns each expansion, but healing requirements don't increase to compensate for this added healing, so what ends up happening is old healing actions start getting power-crept out, and you end up with "dead" buttons that aren't being used anymore.

Contrast, also, PvP abilities.

The think to keep in mind about PVP though is that PVP gameplay is a different experience. In PVP, combat is experienced in brief skirmishes that you constantly jump in and out of, with the fights themselves being unpredictable. Meanwhile, the standard PVE experience is about enduring long, drawn-out encounters with a learnable pattern. So it makes sense why PVP cooldowns are that much shorter. Now don't get me wrong, as I said above, I think we could trim a lot of fat by taking the most interesting healing cooldowns and making those more often accessible while cutting the less interesting ones, but I think it's an important distinction to acknowledge when talking about job design in this game.

As for the SGE discussion:

I have something similar on the suggestions megathread (page 14 if you're curious) Though I would still have at least your standard two direct heals just so that you can heal without a target. Diagnosis and Prognosis do have uses during phase changes or boss transitions. There's some elements from other sage concepts I've shared before, but it's a more streamlined. It was inspired from thoughts I'd had from the earlier conversation.

[Renathras]

I agree with Semi on this one.

Including BLM.

BLM works in FFXIV today because of shoehorning, not because its design is perfectly suited to this game. The "challenge" and "brilliant design" of BLM that is so praised by the hardcore community is... <checks notes> ...memorizing the safe spots in fights so you can sit still for precious seconds and memorizing when there aren't any for a bit so you have to save your big movement CDs for then. In other words, figuring out how to overcome BLM objectively NOT being suited to the game's current combat design that is so focused on motion and "the dance". And the last several expansions have all been focused on giving BLM more mobility. BLM is more mobile than RDM in current FFXIV entirely due to that. It's been given so much on-demand mobility because its basic kit and rotational design doesn't work with FFXIV encounter designs.

In a similar way, WHM now is almost entirely dependent on Lilies to be functional in current content.

Imagine, for a moment, current WHM design without Lilies. So no Solace, Rapture, nor Misery.

It wouldn't be functional. Your only instant cast heals would be Tetra (60 sec), Assize (45), Bene (3 min), Lilibell (if triggered; 3 min), with Regen (?) and Asylum (90 sec) for cases where healing wasn't needed right away, but even there, Asylum has that weird "increases healing" effect, which is in opposition to the concept of "healing isn't needed right away". PoM, Plenary, Temperance, Benison, and Aquaveil aren't heals per se, and only Benison is indirectly one via being a barrier.

Without Lilies, you'd actually NEED to cast Cure 2, Medica/Cure 3, and Medica 2s, none of which can be cast on the move, which would make encounters like BarbiEx extremely challenging for a WHM. Moreover, casing Dia or Regen would be the only GCD options for long movement requirements, like having to cross from one side of an arena to the other.

.

The Job is designed just fine...it just doesn't fit FFXIV's current encounter design. It was designed for another game - ARR.

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EDIT:

I have something similar on the suggestions megathread (page 14 if you're curious) Though I would still have at least your standard two direct heals just so that you can heal without a target. Diagnosis and Prognosis do have uses during phase changes or boss transitions. There's some elements from other sage concepts I've shared before, but it's a more streamlined. It was inspired from thoughts I'd had from the earlier conversation.

Valid. This was the thing that annoyed me about SGE in PvP and when I first tried it (first Healer after the rework), I was legitimately pissed off because I thought ALL Healers in PvP were going to play like that. Thank god that wasn't the case. But the thing is, I recognize some people...like...that. Hence my saying they'd need to keep something like Durochole/Ixochole specifically for those cases. Though I suppose Prognosis/Diagnosis are fine in that sense. "Cure 1 and Raise" are apparently standards across FFXIV Healer design.

Right, but the same applies to healers' MP management (modest though it was), melee's positional and uptime management, tank's risk-reward and positional management, etc. Is an actual prevalence of casting on... Casters... really yet another thing we want to axe from the game, in favor of making them increasingly into simply (fully mobile) Mana-shooting Rangers?

I think the argument here is more "encounter design is a problem". At least, that's my argument. Semi may be going for the "Jobs need redesign" angle instead. But I think it's valid to point out, at the least, there's a disconnect between Healer Job design and FFXIV combat encounter design. I think we can all agree on that, too.

Whether one thinks the solution is to change the encounter design combat model, the Job designs/kits, or both, is where we may diverge, but I feel we can all agree that the two are not on the same page.

(Also, I know I'm relatively alone in this - on these forums, not as much in the game - but I happen to like SMN; because it's actually designed to work with the current encounter designs, it's actually enjoyable to play in them and doesn't feel clunky and disjointed and like it was designed for a different game. I'm not saying this to say all Jobs should be like SMN. I'm saying this to say that I do enjoy it and that maybe encounter design really really really does need to be changed before every Job becomes like it...)

[Shurrikhan]

BLM works in FFXIV today because of shoehorning, not because its design is perfectly suited to this game. The "challenge" and "brilliant design" of BLM that is so praised by the hardcore community is... <checks notes> ...memorizing the safe spots in fights so you can sit still for precious seconds and memorizing when there aren't any for a bit so you have to save your big movement CDs for then. In other words, figuring out how to overcome BLM objectively NOT being suited to the game's current combat design that is so focused on motion and "the dance". And the last several expansions have all been focused on giving BLM more mobility. BLM is more mobile than RDM in current FFXIV entirely due to that. It's been given so much on-demand mobility because its basic kit and rotational design doesn't work with FFXIV encounter designs.

And previously melee would have to figure out how to slightly alter their rotation or pick GCD tiers so that they could complete a combo just before downtime so they could use their ranged skills without breaking combo, would need to know the exact timing of AoEs (which don't always go off at the end of casts, nor a consistent amount of time prior, etc.) so they can better greed, etc., etc. And if one didn't want to learn a fight positionally as DPS... Rangers were right there.

Again... do we really need to strip the melee-ranged-based complexities from Melee, the casting-based complexities from Casters, etc.?

Is it actually better to just roll over and strip it all away... rather than simply to reward it commensurately (as, yes, BLM does with its highest rDPS in the game)?

Imagine, for a moment, current WHM design without Lilies. So no Solace, Rapture, nor Misery.

It wouldn't be functional.

Imagine, for a moment, SCH without Aetherflow. It wouldn't make the cut, either. And why would it?

Imagine, for a moment, any other healer with 2400 (or 1200n) less mobile curative ppm and 930 less offensive ppm.

None of them would survive that. I'm not sure why we're treating this as something WHM-specific.

Hell, the Lily system provides more mobility than its analogs on other healers.* It doesn't need an outright Lightspeed or the like. Yes, that makes Lilies a bit more important to WHM than AF or AG to SCH and SGE, respectively, but... how is that a problem? We wouldn't pretend either of those jobs would be complete without their core systems, so why pretend WHM is uniquely a core system away from failure.

*That's probably why attaching, say, a 50% cast time reduction to PoM would actually be excessive (even if attaching a 2.5s cast time reduction to Thin Air would probably be fine and arguably deserved).

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't see anything wrong with liking Emergency Tactics. In concept, I think it's great also. It's just that, now more than ever, it's heavily power-crept. Ironically, it was already seeing power creep in HW when it was added because Indom was also added and is a considerably stronger healing tool that also has a short cooldown. ET would've really shined during ARR though.

ET would still have a place, I think, if it weren't just 'the next ONE spell has it's shield converted into raw healing'. Dusty's Black/White Grimoires idea made the most sense to me, have ET's effect as one of the stances you can be in, 'shield mode heals' be the opposite stance. I'd even add more to that and make it so that if you're in the 'shielding' Grimoire mode, your pure heal tools ie Indom are converted to do shielding, at a lower effectiveness (ie, 200p shield vs 400p pure healing), to incentivize... actually shielding, on a shield-focused healer, crazy I know

I don't necessarily 'hate' ET, I just put it in the same category as Pepsis: it's there, it exists, it's learned at level 58, it could be so much more than it is

If anything, I'd probably put the cast times on the big-trucking-hits, minus Misery? So, to me, at the very least, Quake, Flood, Tornado absolutely should have cast times (possibly a full GCD's), though I'd then want to see some timing-flexibility on them (if that wasn't in the mockup; can't easily go and check right now from on my phone).

Yeh I left those hard hits as 'the same cast time as their lower counterparts', so Quake was 1.5s, the other two instantcast. I think having them change to have a different cast time from their base form is not ideal in terms of fluidity (ie, you need to heal on the move cos mechanic, you press the heal, empower spells, now you can't cast that Banish because it's suddenly got a cast time), so maybe just having Banish/Flood be a 2.0s cast (slightly longer than Glare, but it does hit harder) might be enough, that'd put the count up to 13/24 GCDs having cast times, so just over half. Or maybe having Banish have a cast time, but the upgraded forms all being instantcast, things 'empowering and gaining instantcast property' is a lot less wonky for gameplay than 'thing empowers and suddenly gains a cast time you're forced to respect'

I'll just leave it as is, with the excuse of 'hey, if only 8/24, literally one third, of the GCDs ask the player to stand still, that makes the design super-casual-friendly, which means it fits way better with what SE's looking for'. I don't exactly associate 'healer role' with 'the class is glued to the floor', since in 'the other game' it's mostly only Priest and Shaman that get glued to the floor, iirc. If we needed a class in this game that is the token 'I cannot move even one pixel' healer class, I'd nominate it be SGE, because it has Icarus, in a similar fashion to BLM's refusal to move, and it having Aetherial Manipulation. Also if it's damage contributed to it's healing in a more robust design than 'teehee 170p on one guy', it'd stand to reason that it would want to stand still and deal damage constantly with as few interruptions as possible

[Shurrikhan]

...

Personally, I'd kinda like to see something similar-ish to the SMN route, wherein each gives a chain of utility-including available actions that one can use or just skip past.

For instance, let's say you've got Quake as a long cast, Flood as a charge-up (hold cast for up to 1 GCD's time), and Tornado as a channel that can be held for up to 1 GCD (operating in 20% of GCD ticks).

Quake would apply Resonance, causing your ST attacks to deal 100 potency also to all other enemies nearby.

Flood would change your heals from casts to charge-ups, dealing their full potency even if the cast is cancelled early by movement but dealing 200 more potency if cast at their normal times.

Tornado would grant Vortex for a duration based on channel time, causing your DoT to be usable over direct damage (ST filler) for a bit.

From there, Banish would probably be a 1.5s cast time.

Something like that.

(I don't remember what "BotE" was.)

[Renathras]

Again... do we really need to strip the melee-ranged-based complexities from Melee, the casting-based complexities from Casters, etc.?

Again, not my argument.

My position is that encounter design has changed since ARR/HW/even SB, and not for the better, and that encounter design needs to shift back. FFXIV is not an ARPG, it needs to stop having fights designed as if it were one.

Imagine, for a moment, SCH without Aetherflow. It wouldn't make the cut, either. And why would it?

What are you talking about? SCH current meta is devoting as many AF as possible to pathetic 100 potency Energy Drains. Without AF, SCH would still work just fine. It still has an abundance of healing tools that can clear every encounter in the game right now. Again, the current design meta for SCH is "use no AF on heals". The only question would be if its slightly lower potency would make it unable to deal enough damage to clear content...and the answer would be yes, since ED is a pretty pathetic amount of increased potency on the whole that only makes the difference in cases of massive DPS player messups that bring Enrage that close to the wire.

Imagine, for a moment, any other healer with 2400 (or 1200n) less mobile curative ppm and 930 less offensive ppm.

That's oddly specific and not at all comparable to "remove this one set of mechanics from the Job and watch it be entirely non-viable".

None of them would survive that. I'm not sure why we're treating this as something WHM-specific.

As noted: Because it is WHM specific. WHM is a Job that seems designed for a different game, because it was. So was SCH, but it was originally designed as a more mobile support healer with oGCD focus to aid the main healer (WHM) while chiefly focusing on dealing damage. As this is more or less what FFXIV's combat system has become, SCH slots into it pretty well other than a little jank related to pet AI and snapshotting stuff.

FFXIV encounter design in general doesn't match the Healer design, but in the case of the other Healers, this is muted because they don't have as much raw healing (that becomes even more useless overhealing), they have more mitigation and mobility (what FFXIV encounters actually care about now), and their kits are focused on oGCD healing to augment fairly mobile damage dealing. They also aren't perfect with FFXIV's encounter design, but WHM is the outlier and the biggest sore showing the disconnect between the two.

[Shurrikhan]

That's oddly specific and not at all comparable to "remove this one set of mechanics from the Job and watch it be entirely non-viable".

But that's what you're asking for there. You're asking for the removal of 3 uses per minute of 800 ST or 400 AoE free cure potency per minute. That'd be huge... on anyone.

Yes, that much happens to be stored in one mechanic on WHM, but strip Fairy skills from SCH, Kardia from SGE, etc., and... no shit, it's going to be a lot. Because they're supposed to be. It's why their core elements.

What are you talking about? SCH current meta is devoting as many AF as possible to pathetic 100 potency Energy Drains. Without AF, SCH would still work just fine. It still has an abundance of healing tools that can clear every encounter in the game right now. Again, the current design meta for SCH is "use no AF on heals".

Sorry, yes, fairy skills would be the more apt comparison for healing output.

Regardless, though, without that extra 300 potency per minute, it wouldn't likely be hard meta. And it's only even able to waste the healing potential of all its AF, anyways, because healing requirements in general are so low. That is the core issue.

So we've got a litmus test healer that tells us the modern condition has gone basic-bitch; shouldn't we be addressing the condition, then, rather than just going straight to homogenizing that healer / ignoring whatever that test tells us? The more we roll over with/to the problem, the less we can contest it in the future.

[Renathras]

But that's what you're asking for there. You're asking for the removal of 3 uses per minute of 800 ST or 400 AoE free cure potency per minute. That'd be huge... on anyone.

No, I'm not asking for that. I'd hate that. I'm pointing out that Lilies are a crutch that is the only way WHM is currently viable, much like Triplecast and SEVERAL instant casts like Xenoglossy and Thundercloud are for BLM. Again, remove SCH's Aetherflow and you've removed Incom, Soil, Excog/Lustrate (which SCH players frequently ignore to cast ED anyway), but they still have ample healing somehow because their other non-"on CD" use healing is more than adequate for most encounters. If a SCH has to move, even ignoring AF, they have Blessing, Dawn, Embrace casts, Aetherpact, Seraph/Consolation x2, and the Embrace casts are happening all the time passively. SGE is in a similar boat, having Panhaima/Haima, Holos, and Physis on a really short CD, as well as constant Kardia healing going out with every damage cast AND they can cast Eukrasia Prognosis/Diagnosis while moving AT ANY TIME, and they have pretty good MP economy allowing somewhat liberal use of those tools. They also have frequent access to Icarus allowing them to stand and hardcast something if they wanted to (though they really have no need) and still move in time. AST I don't know as well, but I believe it also has a lot of healing options that can be used while moving.

Note that with WHM, it's not JUST healing, either; Lilies also contribute to its damage via Misery (in buff windows, this is a DPS increase on a Healing Job that doesn't have any party buffs, so its "selfish damage" is important), but ALSO is an MP management tool. WHM needs to use four lilies a minute. Recall before 6.1 that it was MP negative over the course of encounters because Misery was a DPS loss so people were using Lilies only if they had to and instead chadding on their co-healer to actually do most of the encounter healing. Making Misery damage neutral was the equivalent of giving WHM 1600 MP per minute.

Lilies are entirely essential for WHM to be viable because of how much is tied up in them. On demand movement, on demand healing (Rapture can be boosted with Plenary), "selfish DPS" essential damage, and MP economy. And unlike Faerie abilities or Kardia, WHM does not get Lilies at level 4. It's not just a "core element" (which is added half-way into the leveling process...), it's an ESSENTIAL element. SGE without Kardia would still work. SCH without Aetherflow would still work. SCH without Eos would probably still work as well, btw. WHM without Lilies would NOT work in FFXIV's current encounter design system.

Sorry, yes, fairy skills would be the more apt comparison for healing output.

And again, doesn't matter; SCH without Faerie Skills would still be fully capable of healing in the current game using Aetherflow augmented by its non-Faerie skills like Recitation, Deployment Tactics, Emergency Tactics, Expedient, Protraction, and also still bringing Chain Strategem to the table for the party. SCH is not so dependent on any one thing to be functional since it has a lot of functionality across its skills. It's why I've said before that SCH doesn't really have a lot of fat to trim since all of its skills ARE useful (albeit generally overkill; you can make Spreadlo shields so strong that many attacks in the game won't even scratch the party, and if you add Consolation and mitigation on top of that, it's entirely possible to have "ultimate" attacks land with no party members taking actual damage to their health bars), and was designed around the concept of oGCD healing in the first place. Far moreso than WHM, anyway. And it has carried those traits forward to the modern game.

Likewise, SGE without Kardia could heal just fine. Even if you took away its oGCD heals, SGE with Eukrasia has the most mobile GCD heals in the game. Where WHM has 3 Lilies, SGE can keep casting Eukrasia heals until it runs out of MP, which is at the VERY least 11 Eukrasia Prognoses in a row, possibly 12, roughly three times what WHM can do with Rapture. "But WHM has Plenary to boost that!" and SGE has Zoe. It also gets a healing boost from Physis II if it wants (Krasus if we're talking single target), or a damage reduction from Holos or Kerachole.

And recall in 6.0 when Lilies WEREN'T damage neutral how WHM was far and away the worst Healer for raiding. It had to chad on its co-healers or tank its damage, and unlike SCH and especially AST, it didn't boost its party damage to make up for this. Without that 1600 free MP from Lilies per minute, it was in an MP deficit over long fights even if it wasn't having to cast any GCD heals. It was far and away the worst Healer and the most non-Meta pick in 6.0, and it was so bad, it was one of the fastest times SE has actually addressed a Healer issue in the game's history, something that people like Semi and so on can attest is...not a common thing for them to address quickly.

We know how bad WHM would be in current encounter design without Lilies since we got a partial taste of that in 6.0 (that wasn't even the full taste) and it was already bad.

That.
Said:

...because healing requirements in general are so low. That is the core issue.

Agreed.

So we've got a litmus test healer that tells us the modern condition has gone basic-bitch; shouldn't we be addressing the condition, then, rather than just going straight to homogenizing that healer / ignoring whatever that test tells us? The more we roll over with/to the problem, the less we can contest it in the future.

I am.

I'm consistently ragging on encounter design in this game. That's what I'm doing right now by pointing out the problem of ARPG movement heavy fights in a tab target, hardcast game like FFXIV. The reason SMN is what it is and RDM and BLM and all the Healers have become so mobile is because the game is now designed such that Jobs without mobility CANNOT execute mechanics in current encounter design.

I do see that as a problem.

My solution is that encounter designs need to be re-designed more akin to the way they were earlier in FFXIV's history when twitch movement at home in a FPS or APRG was not the order of the day for solutions to most of the game's mechanics.

Some others may be arguing for something else, but then you should be addressing them in your post, not me.