Healer role design change?

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

<snip>

Again, though, we're not losing Lilies, just like SGE isn't losing AG and Kardia nor SCH AF and its Fairy... so... I don't get what the point of this exercise is. Yes... remove half of any jobs' free sustain and it will flounder. ...That is not shocking, nor unique to WHM.

Yes, that much value is spread across more systems on other jobs than it is on WHM. But that system does already exist. It's already provided. So I don't see the point in looking at a "What if..." to provide an excuse for further homogeneity.


Likewise, the game has far from switched to "twitch movement at home in a FPS or ARPG". Slidecasting hasn't suddenly turned useless. BLM, even, is doing fine (without even being particularly reliant on Paradox or its 2nd charge of Triple-cast), let alone jobs with only 1.5-2s casts.

If anything, mechanical bloat seems the larger departure from previous tiers to now (in, say, P12S).

Nor would even a lower %uptime on particular jobs be problematic so long as they were fairly consistently so across a given expansion; one could just compensate the job for that, accordingly, via the traits and actions added since the previous expansion.

Almost guaranteed to have a lower %uptime? So be it; in compensation, just give that job more of the ppm that'd depend on said %uptime, with further ability to extend over the particular problem points (be that via some sort of Ancestral Vigor mechanic or whatever else). All that matters is the parity of overall value in practice (not against a striking dummy); it does not require perfect parity in each tangential factor like the amount of free healing (which further offensive potency could compensate for a lack of), %uptime (again, which potency can compensate for), etc.


Tl;dr: I don't think that movement requirements are so bad as to cripple jobs with more than a pittance of hard-casts -- nor, especially, bad enough to excuse further homogeneity or removal of contextual depth (as by removing difficulties in uptime optimization from Melee and Casters).