Healer role design change?

[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).

[Aravell]

I want to point out that removing Aetherflow will absolutely cripple SCH.

If you remove Aetherflow and all associated abilities, you lose value on Recitation because you can only use it on Succor/Adlo, no Indom, no Excog. You'd turn SCH into a healer that can only chad their co-healer because they bring barely any free healing to the table. Removing Aetherflow also turns SCH very quickly MP-negative, you'd want to avoid casting Succor even more than you already do now, which is kind of a problem, because Succor is your only method of reliably blocking damage now because every mitigation you have now is on a 2 minute timer, because removing Aetherflow also removed Sacred Soil.

[fulminating]

There’s 3 lily buttons; st, wide and angry. Beyond that there’s several free heals and things - bene, temperance, divine venison, aquaveil, bell to name the ones that first sprang to mind.
Scholar has more aetherflow buttons: aetherflow (mp generator), energy drain, lustrate, soil, indom, dissipation(partial), excog, aetherpact (indirect- no aetherflow means no gauge), recitation(partial), formerly fey blessing (gauge). None aetherflow buttons are: physick, succor, adlo, whispering dawn, illumination, deployment & emergency tactics, summon seraph, protraction.

This is to highlight just how integral aetherflow is as a mechanic to scholar with roughly an equal number of buttons being tied to it as not. This is of course in a vacuum. When you look at which are frequently pressed - or able to be based on cooldown - there is a noticeable bias towards the aetherflow things.

[Renathras]

Oh, so we're doing THIS again.

Nope. I'm gonna bow out.

Semi, they're all yours.

[SenahPanipahr]

I'm not confident that debating to such a level of minutiae necessarily helps with this particular topic anyway, as the problem isn't needing a few abilities tweaked or removed, but a general issue with how Healer jobs are designed, the homogenisation of the role as a result, and how poorly it all fits with historic and current encounter design. (Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I thought most people here were on the same page as far as that all is concerned.)

[Renathras]

I'm not confident that debating to such a level of minutiae necessarily helps with this particular topic anyway, as the problem isn't needing a few abilities tweaked or removed, but a general issue with how Healer jobs are designed, the homogenisation of the role as a result, and how poorly it all fits with historic and current encounter design. (Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I thought most people here were on the same page as far as that all is concerned.)

Yes, which is also my point and why I'm consistently surprised how I can state something everyone agrees with but people want to argue about it. [EDIT: That is, people seem to love trying to "prove Ren wrong" even if it's something they agree with the overall concept of and where the minutia argument (a) doesn't prove me wrong - I can present arguments to counter the above, I just see it as pointless, and I'm trying to get better about not legitimizing the derailing and Ren bashing when there's an actual discussion to be had that isn't any of that; and (b) just gets lost in the weeds and derails the discussion away from "we all agree about X, what should be done about it?" into "I have a technical issue with Ren saying Y about X thing we all agree with, so instead of discussing solutions to X, I'm going to try to make him wrong about Y and fail at doing it because he is the white whale" or something. <_< ]

Concur that the issue is encounter design has changed over time to where healer designs that are closer to ARR are less viable, and that there's now a glaring disconnect between Healer kits and encounter design, which has led to a lot of shoehorning and a lot of homogenization. [EDIT: My point related to WHM and Lilies, as well as BLM and post-SB additions to the Job, are both cases of said shoehorning and was the entire point of me pointing out how WHM wouldn't work in current encounter design without them because it wouldn't have that mobility and mobile healing. It's had to be shoehorned to fit into the current encounter design at all. Even if we submit that SCH needs Aetherflow to be viable (we do not, but let's pretend), SCH had AF and all of those abilities since at latest SB, and they work just fine in EW, whereas WHM hardcasting Medica 2 or chain casting Cure 2 - both things that were viable at various times in the game's history - in EW era high movement fights, does not work without a Swiftcast and a huge chunk of MP that isn't sustainable.]

The obvious solutions are to roll back encounter designs, change Healer kits, or a hybrid solution of doing both. There may also be further solutions, but those three seem obvious from the jump.

[vetch]

Yes, which is also my point and why I'm consistently surprised how I can state something everyone agrees with but people want to argue about it.

Unironically, skill issue. You have, or had, an annoying habit of trying to shortcut people into agreeing with your conclusions once they agree with you on minutiae, so now everyone avoids agreeing with you on minutiae the same way a wolf won't step into a snare twice.

The obvious solutions are to roll back encounter designs, change Healer kits, or a hybrid solution of doing both.

I hope it's the first one. Trying to shoehorn a 'magical spellcaster healer' into an action RPG framework with constant movement is conceptually loathsome.

[Sebazy]

Perhaps a good thing would be to clarify what's changed and the manner in which it's driven current day healing off the rails.

IMHO it's really quite simple and most of the solutions have already been dropped piecemeal in various discussions here over the years.

SE don't really need to go back to ARR style encounter designs, but rather they need to look at what made those otherwise really rather basic bosses such good fun when the modern day equivalents like Alte Roite are almost universally derived.

Ramping up the damage on tanks, allowing bosses to keep auto attacking through casts, allowing those auto attacks to crit, bringing back non telegraphed mini tank busters and additional aoe procs with normalised RNG chances to really keep the healers on their toes. Make us sweat, make us have to keep an eye on the tanks, make us have to keep an eye on the melee. Stop allowing us to let someone sit at 100hp safe in the knowledge that the next AoE is clearly indicated on our spreadsheet and Assize/Asylum/Eos will get them topped long before anything else comes along.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

[Shurrikhan]

Yes, which is also my point and why I'm consistently surprised how I can state something everyone agrees with but people want to argue about it. [EDIT: That is, people seem to love trying to "prove Ren wrong" even if it's something they agree with the overall concept of and where the minutia argument (a) doesn't prove me wrong - I can present arguments to counter the above, I just see it as pointless, and I'm trying to get better about not legitimizing the derailing and Ren bashing when there's an actual discussion to be had that isn't any of that; and (b) just gets lost in the weeds and derails the discussion away from "we all agree about X, what should be done about it?" into "I have a technical issue with Ren saying Y about X thing we all agree with, so instead of discussing solutions to X, I'm going to try to make him wrong about Y and fail at doing it because he is the white whale" or something. <_< ]

If agreement on particulars is coincidental to disagreement on the warrants themselves, then no, it's not an overall agreement.

And since you've frequently shifted goalposts surrounding or made conclusions based on conflations about particulars or chain logical steps beyond their purchase ('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good') for instance, no shit, your minutia gets checked.



As for my overall stance on the relevant topic:

My personal preference is for a bit more melee movement requirements and constraints than are present currently, and slightly to faintly less caster movement requirements (in terms of how they affect in practice %uptime a couple thoughtful runs in) than are present currently, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with a Caster leveraging infrequently available spells or modifiers to nonetheless keep a high amount (or, %uptime) of actual casts, even in today's context. I do not consider that "shoe-horning" so much as simply additional room for skill-expression, which we already overly lack across most of the game.*

I much prefer we keep that room for skill expression, of casts on casters, melee being an actually limited range, etc., over further reducing all towards a lowest denominator of available optimization.



Of course, personally, my preference regarding something like BLM would be to make it slightly less reliant on Triplecast and Swiftcast, sure, but not by giving it numerous free instant-casts; instead, I'd simply decrease the relative cost of shorter AF strings slightly by siphoning a bit more potency towards pre-falloff Flare and later Despair and removing the 30% damage decrease on using Ice from AF3 or Fire from UI3. And, for the sake of leveling improvements and a more intuitive mechanic, I'd likely change most of the stat bonuses from their current awkward mess, wherein some effects are null until AF3/UI3, others maxed immediately, and none increase linearly (see that links above) to just 25% per stack.

But that the caster actually hard-casts... is totally fine. That it has some CDs discretely meant to help with that, so long as the kit isn't too thereby bloated (and I don't believe any case for trimming Triplecast as a "shoehorning" or "bloat" ability could be made as long as BLM's elemental pairings --F4<>B4, Flare<>Freeze, etc.-- remain on separate keys)... is likewise totally fine.



*Admittedly, room for skill expression is a nebulous topic, because the relative value of optimizations are zero-sum. The more the reward for always completing one's combo, the less there's a space for the potential reward of, say, clipping a combo early so that one can Chaos Thrust an add (that'd live for less than CT's 24 seconds, if all goes well) instantly upon its spawn. The larger the bonus in, say, Lance Mastery II (+100 potency on Move-5 of either combo), the less room there is to make decisions between where to end a combo (in that earlier hypothetical), but too little and there'd be no use case for Life Surge outside of Full Thrust. The larger the reward for hitting within raid buffs everything that can reasonably be banked for raid buffs, the less room there is for alternate functions of the skills used therein and the lower the relative value of optime optimization, positionals, or rotating correctly in any other respects. Etc., etc.

[Renathras]

Unironically, skill issue. You have, or had, an annoying habit of trying to shortcut people into agreeing with your conclusions once they agree with you on minutiae, so now everyone avoids agreeing with you on minutiae the same way a wolf won't step into a snare twice.

First, no.

The argument style you're referring to is when you build up from a set of axioms to a conclusion, checking to see if people agree with the steps along the way. If the steps logically dictate the conclusion, this is a pretty valid way to outline a problem/solution to get agreement. "We agree on X. We agree on Y. We agree on Z. X + Y + Z = A, therefore we should reasonably agree on A." Sometimes people don't like this because they actually hold incongruent beliefs vs the axioms they accept, other times they disagree with the link - in which case the proper solution there is to argue whether the link is valid, which is a discussion worth having.

It's not a shortcut or a cheat. If one believes, for example, that taxes are too high but also wants government programs that require those taxes, it's fair to point out to them that they should be willing to accept cuts to services in order to achieve the cuts to taxes they desire, or alternatively, to accept the higher taxes for those services they enjoy. And it's fair to them to suggest a workaround if they can think of one, such as taxing only segments of the population or cutting some services they don't enjoy to make up the shortfall, at which point it's fair to counter that by asking why those services and not the others or why tax those people and not others, and so on.

There's no cheat or fallacy there, some people just don't like it because when arguments are broken down into steps, it often lays bare glaring errors in logic that someone may have used to reach their conclusion.

But, in either case, I haven't had that "annoying" habit. If I lay out such an argument, it's generally to try and see what all points we actually agree on so I know where we can find further points of agreement. Some people say they hold a position they actually do not, but if you can drill down to what they actually do believe, then it allows actual compromise and progress.

I hope it's the first one. Trying to shoehorn a 'magical spellcaster healer' into an action RPG framework with constant movement is conceptually loathsome.

Thing is, FFXIV wasn't designed as an ARPG and doesn't work well as one. The netcode is pretty atrocious for it (just jump in a Frontline if you doubt that). Not only would such a change alienate the people who have been playing the game long enough they didn't sign up for that, it doesn't even work well anyway. Ultimately resulting in a situation that alienates many and satisfies few, even of they who advocate for it.

I agree it's conceptually loathsome, but you have the causality backwards:

FFXIV isn't trying to shoehorn a magical spellcaster healer into an action RPG framework with constant movement.

FFXIV is trying to shoehorn an action RPG framework with constant movement onto a traditional tab targeting framework, netcode and class design.

Thus the problem isn't with the spellcaster healers, since that was the design of the game. The problem is trying to upend that entire system and impose an ARPG framework on it that it cannot support and that hasn't been the identity of the game.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

Hear hear.

If agreement on particulars is coincidental to disagreement on the warrants themselves, then no, it's not an overall agreement.

Okay, I'm done taking your troll bait:

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

If you disagree, you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with most of the people posting in this thread, including Semi who brought the point up in the first place specifically regarding WHM. It's not a you vs me thing, which you seem to love. It's a you vs everyone else thing. I'm not going to be your punching bag because you disagree with everyone else and are using me as your proxy to beat on because you enjoy beating on me, and/or you want to use me as a punching bag even when you agree with me on the basic point. So let's see if you agree with me and everyone else, or if you're the island here. The question is there and it's a simple question to answer, restated so you can't miss it:

Do you or do you not agree that encounter design and healer kits seem to not be designed to work with one another?

And since you've frequently...

HAVE.
NOT.

And I'm not going to engage with people openly engaging in such bad faith. Two of you now. "Well, you did this thing (we're going to accuse you of even though you don't have a frequent habit of doing it, actually), so we can defend attacking you because we felt like it even though you're acting in good faith and trying to have a serious discussion on a topic that everyone kind of agrees on overall." No, not today.

If someone is engaging you in good faith, you should do the same, even if they HAD a history of bad faith. I actually do not, and it's been discussed to death that the cases people perceived that was due to them assuming things about what I was saying rather than asking to get clarification, and often taking part in dogpiles and stupid cliquish vendettas against people (me specifically) regardless of the topic, good faith, good will on my part, or anything that I do or have done other than whatever initially alienated you, which was a misconception on your part in most cases.

Case.
In.
Point:

"('PLD changes were largely considered a net positive, so everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes, thus they must have hated DoTs on PLD, which implies that the SMN changes also were an unmitigated good')"???

What?

I have NEVER to my awareness said "everyone must surely like every part of the PLD changes". PROVE IT. Quote a post of mine where I said that. Because there isn't one and we both know it. You literally made that up. I have, since the changes in 6.3, described the response as "mixed". And even if I hadn't, I can't think of a time I've EVER said of ANY change that "everyone must surely like ever part of" it. Even changes that I like and think most people do, I'm quick to acknowledge not everyone likes the same things and it isn't universal. Indeed, I'm the most frequent poster HERE to say such things, and almost always the first to bring up that there is no universality. I even avoid using the term majority, even when I'm pretty sure there is one and what data we have backs up that there is one, instead opting for "some/many" instead of "most/majority". And where - again PROVE IT with a quote - did I say everyone hated DoTs on PLD and that implies SMN changes were an unmitigated good?

I want a QUOTE, because you made that BS up wholesale.

Not one person here will call you on it, mind you, but we all know it's a lie. Considering how often I hedge what I say and how even when I was invoking majority, I was still quick to point out there was dissent proves that's a lie, but the onus is on you to prove it's true.

QUOTE, please.

Oh, you don't have one?

Of course you don't: Because you made it up.

You either misinterpreted something, misremember something, or flat out made something up, and then used this to justify a completely separate argument and your attacks on someone, when your attacks are based on something that never even happened in the first place.

People tell me just to stop engaging with you guys when you do it. No one ever calls you out, so I don't expect anyone to this time. But I'm starting to take the advice of those like PetLalas to just not engage with you bad faith people.

You can answer the question above, or you can not. That's up to you.

If you don't, it proves my point.

If you do, then we can get back on topic, which is what we should be doing anyway.

If you just want to keep attacking me irrationally and in bad faith, then I'm not going to be a party to that childish vendetta.