Healers need an overhaul

[Coatl]

Healers honestly deal too much damage. Yes encounter design doesn't help. Yes healer design could also be better. But even if all that were to change it would still not remove the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal.

[Aravell]

Until you can change the minds of, again literally, millions of people, there is no choice unless they're damage neutral.

I don't see why that has to be the limiting factor. It's not up to me to change minds and make requests within the mentality of the playerbase, like I constantly repeat, if someone doesn't want to heal when needed because it loses them damage, that's a personal problem, and they're being a bad healer in general, that's not my opinion, that's just facts. I'm stating what I think is a big problem in the healer role, if SE continues catering to this mentality, things will only get more streamlined and it will feel worse to play.

But I feel like we're drawing different conclusions here.

My conclusion is this is bad, because it means there's no choice.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, your conclusion seems to be that this is good, because only one right choice means skill expression. That you think every other choice being wrong is...somehow choice. Which makes no sense to me because every other choice being wrong means there IS no choice.

I'm not sure how you could read it any differently, my original quote was:

For there to be meaningful choice, there has to be a variety of outcomes.

A variety of outcomes means more than 2. I didn't say only 1 choice has to be right, I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation, we have no wrong choices that doesn't lead to either a failure of your job or losing damage. I'd rather see options that are 50% wrong or 75% right, not a 0% or 100% binary pass/fail condition. That's why I said that damage refunds is the way to go, not full damage neutrality. Damage refunds also give room to grow as you can fall back on refunds until you've fully planned out the fight, in which case you get to see your damage go up as you're rewarded for your experience (in other words, a skill ceiling).

My point about full damage neutrality removing the reason for choice is that, if you've been given a bunch of tools to deal with a situation, but they all lead to the same result (party alive, no damage loss), then there's no reason to even choose. Choice in that case is an illusion, it all brings you to the same end. The only thing stopping you from doing a Swiftcast Medica now instead of an Afflatus Rapture is that the Medica loses you damage. If that Medica no longer lost you damage, you can choose whether you want to use that Afflatus Rapture or a Swiftcast Medica, but the meaning of the choice is lost.

[Renathras]

I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation,

And there would be. Suppose all WHM heals were made damage neutral.

The party needs to be topped off before a raidwide in 6 seconds. Casting Cure 1 would be the wrong choice, despite it being damage neutral with Cure 3.

Again, this meets your requirements.

You also didn't answer the questions that need answering:

Cure 3 doesn't allow movement and costs 1500 MP where Afflatus Solace under Plenary requires burning the Plenary CD and can be done during movement while not costing MP.

Are those NOT differences? How are they not?

If you don't want healing focused on damage, why do you want Solace to be damage neutral and Cure 3 not to be?

If you don't want healing focused on damage, what DO you want it to be focused on? Damage neutral means it would be focused on resource use (MP, Lilies) and movement requirements, HPS (how fast healing is needed) vs HPM (the most efficient healing for the MP cost), eHP (using a heal with a barrier) vs direct healing (filling up the green bar; basically the Emergency Tactics situation of do you need a barrier on top of your health bars or do you just need to fill up empty health bars faster).

Are those NOT things you want factored into choice? Why not?

If not, what DO you want factored in that isn't damage? And why would making damage neutral harm this?

[Aravell]

The party needs to be topped off before a raidwide in 6 seconds. Casting Cure 1 would be the wrong choice, despite it being damage neutral with Cure 3.

I said "wrong choices" not "dumb choices". Party needing to be topped before a raidwide means you need AoE healing, why would anyone even consider casting a Cure I there?

You also didn't answer the questions that need answering:

"Cure 3 doesn't allow movement and costs 1500 MP where Afflatus Solace under Plenary requires burning the Plenary CD and can be done during movement while not costing MP."
I'd consider this a choice if MP actually required management anymore. You claim movement is a bonus, but what of most fights where you barely have to move? They do the exact same thing then (tops up health bars).

"If you don't want healing focused on damage, why do you want Solace to be damage neutral and Cure 3 not to be?"
If you read what I said in earlier posts, you'd see that I don't want Afflatus spells to be neutral, I want them reverted to a refund like in ShB, along with cutting down on the free healing tools available for the other healers so WHM isn't that far behind.

"If you don't want healing focused on damage, what DO you want it to be focused on? Damage neutral means it would be focused on resource use (MP, Lilies) and movement requirements, HPS (how fast healing is needed) vs HPM (the most efficient healing for the MP cost), eHP (using a heal with a barrier) vs direct healing (filling up the green bar; basically the Emergency Tactics situation of do you need a barrier on top of your health bars or do you just need to fill up empty health bars faster)."
Everything you listed can also be done with damage refunds, there's no reason at all to make everything neutral.

"If not, what DO you want factored in that isn't damage? And why would making damage neutral harm this?"
I want a proper cost to powerful abilities, there should be opportunity costs, MP alone doesn't cut it, if you want a powerful spell, you cut into your damage for it. Damage neutrality on everything will remove the ability to add in any meaningful opportunity costs. MP costs? (MP doesn't need any management) Cooldowns? (Just use your other multitude of free things in your kit) Mitigation versus direct healing? (That's an if/else statement, if damage higher than max HP = use mitigation, else use direct heal after damage)

About the only meaningful thing that you can lose is damage because damage is the only thing that matters in this game.

Let me ask you a question in turn. How does damage neutrality help the healer role design in any way? What benefits are there aside from "I don't lose any damage"? If everything was damage neutral, how can there be a skill ceiling as there is no progression?

[Sebazy]

Healers honestly deal too much damage. Yes encounter design doesn't help. Yes healer design could also be better. But even if all that were to change it would still not remove the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal.

I personally think it's less a case of healer's doing too much damage and more a case of encounters valuing damage above all else.

If you go back to a time when fights put more pressure on healers and the difficulty wasn't largely defined by the enrage check, healers weren't focusing on damage to anything like the degree they are now.

Fights used to dish out solid damage outside of key mechanics and this damage could often be highly erratic, it wasn't uncommon for one round of autos/mini busters from a coil boss to be almost entirely parried/blocked down to near nothing, only for the next to be a string of crits that wipes 60% of your tank's HP off in the time that you blink. It's a crazy stark contrast compared to what e have now where even Regen usually isn't worth the GCD anymore. Healer's had to play it safe and babysit the tanks to some extent or the tanks would just randomly get dropped if both dropped the ball for a couple of GCDs.

Another factor is enrage timers themselves. IMO ThordanEX is the gold standard here. It was perhaps the toughest Extreme in the game to this day, yet it's enrage check was incredibly lenient. A decent group at the time would merrily kill it with at least a full phase left to go, possibly 2. What made this work vs the face roll primals we see today was that the fight consistently scaled up in difficulty as it progressed and IMO actually having the full party survive to see enrage was a tougher challenge than killing the boss. A12S was similar in that again, you generally never saw a hard enrage, instead the fountains would usually wipe pugs if you didn't kill it before then. Both cases were a soft enrage done right. Much better than the 'I'm going to just lazily spam AoEs as an MP check for your healers' that we see in recent times.

Simply put, whilst healers deal a meaningful amount of damage, the current design philosophy on content and jobs will force that to be the priority above all else. If you want to change that without addressing the flaws in design, you would need to have healers dealing an irrelevant amount of damage which in this day and age is functionally 0. Given the kits and content we have right now, that's an absolutely horrible idea as you'll end up with healers standing around with nothing to do for minutes at a time in some cases.

Our damage relative to tanks has decreased steadily over the last few years, yet it hasn't diminished the value placed on our DPS one bit. Continuing to reduce it isn't going to change anything except make solo content even more boring than it already is.

[Shurrikhan]

My point is that you can already do all these things right now, you have the freedom to make any of these choices right now. Why don't people make most of these choices? Because it loses them damage. That's log mentality and it's damaging the healer role, if you need to heal, you heal, it shouldn't matter if it loses you damage as damage shouldn't be your main focus in the first place. Making more and more heals damage neutral only feeds into this log mentality and hurts the role further, even now you'd sometimes see healers that do literally no healing if they have no free healing available, they'd rather let the party die than cast anything that loses them damage.

Making everything as damage neutral as possible also removes the need for choice. You say you'd have more choices available, yes, you would, but all the reasons for making those choices will be completely removed. Why consider your next move when they all do the same thing? If you cast a damage neutral Cure III here to top up the party, what's the difference between that and using an Afflatus Solace under Plenary?

It still seems really strange to me to call wanting to optimize damage "Log mentality", especially when in modern fights so many of the mistakes that could cause a wipe to enrage are not undoable through healing...

...Which, as Ren, Zebra, and others have said earlier, is the core of the issue: to paraphrase, Healers' healing has shockingly little agency anymore. There is a very low ceiling on the kind of rDPS we can produce by indirect means beyond "no one died to unavoidable damage".

And while we could additionally try to fill that lack with support spells and other more interesting downtime skills, I think at the base of all else, we need first/also to have the means of producing more effect for our party through our core healing tools themselves.

Now, I agree that job design should be changed, too, in addition to encounter design. I'd love to see fewer redundancies within our kits (partly through trimming or consolidating some tools and revising them for more versatile use cases; partly through revitalizing what remains thereafter), and enough complexity outside of healing as to still be stimulated in environments with low healing requirements.

That said, on the premise fixes to either one would reduce the urgency or reasonable ambition of fixes to/within the other... I might have to recommend encounter fixes first, if that were at all pragmatically possible (which... it may be, if we could just figure out a broadly applicable method). That is because then we can make sure that we're not simply 'apologizing' our way out of a core kit/role issue, and instead are building on a solid foundation.

Now... on the other hand, if we're only allowed bandaid fixes because the devs are utterly unwilling to bite the bullet and actually give decent space for skill expression within the healing component of healers... then, yeah, kit changes are unfortunately the only reasonable path to go. But, limiting our suggestions to what we expect the devs would actually do is akin to an oath of silence altogether, so...

A variety of outcomes means more than 2. I didn't say only 1 choice has to be right, I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation, we have no wrong choices that doesn't lead to either a failure of your job or losing damage. I'd rather see options that are 50% wrong or 75% right, not a 0% or 100% binary pass/fail condition. That's why I said that damage refunds is the way to go, not full damage neutrality. Damage refunds also give room to grow as you can fall back on refunds until you've fully planned out the fight, in which case you get to see your damage go up as you're rewarded for your experience (in other words, a skill ceiling).

My point about full damage neutrality removing the reason for choice is that, if you've been given a bunch of tools to deal with a situation, but they all lead to the same result (party alive, no damage loss), then there's no reason to even choose. Choice in that case is an illusion, it all brings you to the same end. The only thing stopping you from doing a Swiftcast Medica now instead of an Afflatus Rapture is that the Medica loses you damage. If that Medica no longer lost you damage, you can choose whether you want to use that Afflatus Rapture or a Swiftcast Medica, but the meaning of the choice is lost.

Agreed. I'd much prefer this.

That said, I don't honestly even care that, well, anything gets damage-refunded. Any "damage-refunding" is, in balance, almost certainly all being pulled from the same budget of expected potency-per-minute anyways (the more 'refunded' potency, the less potency per actual attack to compensate).
Lilies made sense for damage refunding only because they're WHM's form of free healing that allows WHM to stack multiple soft-utilities (mobility, weave space, MP conservation) atop that usual oGCD damage-neutrality, which is honestly kinda awesome as a little twist of design (especially when adding the bit of the fun of the redemption method itself, Misery), but they're no basis for broader damage-neutrality anyways, as getting those Lilies into the kit came at cost to free healing within the kit by other means (e.g., typical oGCDs) anyways.

[Shurrikhan]

[On damage neutrality]

The way I see it is fairly simple.

Let's say you expect that a healer pair needs to output the minimum ilvl equivalent of 120k potency's worth of sustain (where damage nullification is divided by HP per potency of healing, etc.) per 3 minutes (the healer's longest CD).

Or, averaged out and divided, each healer would be expected to do ~20k sustain potency per minute.

Now, they're designed to also be able to do ~10k offensive potency per minute within the given setting, if perfectly optimized, even if at minimum item level (for now, let's consider this the average of aDPS and rDPS, so that we're neither leaving out the value of buffing nor of exploiting buffs).

So now you have a spectrum of options with two extremes:

Extreme #1:
You make all healing have no offensive opportunity cost so that no matter how much healing one does, they will still do that 10k ppm offensively.

Extreme #2:
No healing is free, but you set a balancing point around the minimum playing perfectly with a perfect team and tune their offensive casts such that they'd still do 10k ppm offensively if playing well.

Both result in that 10k ppm under perfect play at minimum ilvl. The difference is simply that the second has a lower floor (is more skill-dependent) and its offensive increases quadratically with gear (as it can now spend less opportunity cost on healing, whereas had no opportunity cost it was tuned against anyways and is therefore static except insofar as its getting individually stronger attacks).

We're currently somewhere in between those two but shifted nearer to the first than the second. I prefer the second. I would much rather have a healer on a striking dummy be able to pull much higher damage than they do right now, and to in turn have damage output vary more with healing output.

To me, the current "shape of the curve" between combined sustain ppm and offensive ppm just feels really off; rather than a long plateau of healing doable before damage declines, I'd rather that decline start much sooner, but from a higher high.

It's fine for those curves to vary healer by healer; I'm fine with Sage tapering off slower than most at first and then increasingly starting to fall more sharply than the rest (an arc vs. others' more linear curve), or for WHM to have a slight advantage in combined HPS+DPS at very, very high HPS counts such that its slope seems to flatten out a bit at the end. I just think all 4 should be shifted over a bit, becoming less dependent on free healing and having their healing spells feel redundancy (presently akin almost to a fall-back option of a fall-back option that nonetheless end up as rigidly scheduled as everything else just due to the shittiness of very limited healing agency in modern fights).

_________

EDIT:

The main things I want to see, in order of perceived reward per developer effort likely required (not necessarily in the order of what I think is most important, which is nearly the opposite order):

1. More non-healing actions / depth / interaction

Give healers more to do and more complexity to work with when no healing is required. Ideally in varied ways (some more by buffing, some more via damage alone).

It'd help a lot to also have incidental interactions with healing, such as via priority conflicts with ideally-timed soft-CDs like Regen (or some new Time Magic spells on AST for seeding healing to go off later or to restore HP instantly but then damage the target over time such that you'd have to catch up on that healing, etc.) and versatile recast pools like Aetherflow/Addersgall, as those interactions synergize well to create a sort of 'critical mass' in total cognitive load... but we'll save that for later.

2. Reducing free short-term outputs to make greater room for expression and role-centric play

Reduce free sustain (healing + damage nullification) on Healers, be that by revamping Mana as an overall system or by simply trimming and consolidating some healing abilities, replacing their button-space with new downtime options. In this way, we end up with (A) a greater effective breadth of kit since the superior options would no longer be so able to meet content's needs, making what remains less feel redundant/vestigial, and (B) a more palpable sense of progression available to healers over a fight.

Similarly, reduce free sustain on Tanks and again allow them choices between pure offense and sustain. Finally, also slightly/roughly reduce free mobility on Casters and Rangers, giving them higher output ceilings instead. Icing on the cake: give back Rangers access to indirect means of rDPS such as old at-cost, MP-limited Ballad/Promotion opposite (a revised) Foe's Requiem/Hypercharge. If MP is fixed as a system through and through, then Mana Shift can do similar for Casters, potentially.

3. Increased damage intake + Risk-reward / rDPS exchange via healing / Further healing-based healer agency

First, get rid of most (ramping-to-)OHKO mechanics, replacing them with some way for healers to actually undo them, ideally without relying on Esuna. It's fine if the ally would die exactly 3s later from a non-global DoT tick if not healed in time (and to require significant healing thereafter), or even for survival to cost a spammable but at-hefty-MP cost (especially if, say, lower %MP = lower effective potency to attack spells as well, giving those oGCDs a slight offensive opportunity cost more immediately) eHP-increasing tool to be cast on them just before impact, but there must be something that the healer can do to prevent that death.

Thrice Ruin instead reduces their maximum HP but allows overhealing to increase their max HP by 30% of the amount overhealed until again reaching normal max HP? Fine. That's healer-recoverable. It just shouldn't guarantee one-shots nor cause a second hit 1 secondaway from the duration ending to be as punishing as a second hit taken 1 second into the duration.

Thereafter... (A) increase unavoidable damage altogether, at least slightly away from existing damage bursts, and/or (B) create new forms of avoidable damage that would cost uptime to actually avoid. For instance, let's say a boss may cause near-flat (attacker's GCD-based) reflect damage on hit; if the healers are dead and still being rezzed, you may have to stop attacking for a bit, but otherwise they could heal you through it on the assumption that it's more rDPS to keep attacking despite the healer damage lost (unless one can enter the phase already very low HP and use that time to heal up and use other at-uptime-cost non-attacks, etc.; whatever).

Perhaps even introduce a new class of AoEs that visually signal that they are not as threatening as most and will not cause Vulnerability Up or Damage Down stacks... and speckle them liberally across fights. A player should be theoretically able to dodge all, but doing so should cost uptime and at least sometimes be a party-DPS loss relative to just being healed through it.

While we're at it, revamp AoEs to be more consistent in their connection between indicators and their actual timing, and create some sort of color-system for subtly indicating their raw damage proportionate to the player's max-HP.

Perhaps also include some overlying subtle visual effect to indicate what kind of debuff the AoE would convey.

We could maybe do similar for special attacks and tankbusters, too, and put indicators on the cast bars: e.g., a thick border = No debuff if the damage is fully nullified; dark gold swirled texture on the cast bar itself = Slows; Red gash texture = inflicts DoT; Red-and-black swirled texture = reduces healing; Purple glow = inflicts Doom; if not immunized; etc., etc.).

[Aravell]

First, get rid of most (ramping-to-)OHKO mechanics, replacing them with some way for healers to actually undo them, ideally without relying on Esuna. It's fine if the ally would die exactly 3s later from a non-global DoT tick if not healed in time (and to require significant healing thereafter), or even for survival to cost a spammable but at-hefty-MP cost (especially if, say, lower %MP = lower effective potency to attack spells as well, giving those oGCDs a slight offensive opportunity cost more immediately) eHP-increasing tool to be cast on them just before impact, but there must be something that the healer can do to prevent that death.

This is something that P10S does right. If someone gets hit by the chain tower, it can be fixed with Esuna and a quick top up. If someone mistakenly walks into the poison puddle, you can keep them alive with concentrated heals.

I agree that we could use a lot less instant death mechanics in savage and extremes, more recoverable situations would allow a skilled healer to fix bad situations.

EDIT:

That said, I don't honestly even care that, well, anything gets damage-refunded. Any "damage-refunding" is, in balance, almost certainly all being pulled from the same budget of expected potency-per-minute anyways (the more 'refunded' potency, the less potency per actual attack to compensate). [/SIZE]

Honestly, I'd love to return to the ARR/HW era where there was little to no free healing, where you had to work in tandem with your cohealer to truly excel, not merely work around them. But I think that would be a bit too drastic of a change from what we have right now, so I advocate a half-measure in the form of damage refunding.

[Shurrikhan]

Honestly, I'd love to return to the ARR/HW era where there was little to no free healing, where you had to work in tandem with your cohealer to truly excel, not merely work around them. But I think that would be a bit too drastic of a change from what we have right now, so I advocate a half-measure in the form of damage refunding.

Right, but there's very little difference between damage refunding... and just having fewer free heals to begin with.

Let's say that per minute you have, say, 2400 ST potency of free healing and then 800 ST potency half-cost healing via refunds... vs. 2800 ST potency of free healing and no refunding. The difference between seems, at best, to be that damage for the first healer drops off at by 0|0|0|0|0.5|1|1.5|2 Glares vs. 0|0|0|0|0|1|1|2 Glares or so. That's... really marginal.

And yet the mere fact that it has damage refunding means it would either incentivize delaying heals until right before raid buffs to buff your following filler ST/AoE attack (preferable, imo) or you need an extra Misery-/Toxicon-analog button.

So I don't think damage-refunding (as a [much] lesser alternative to damage negation) really makes any significant difference to just... nerfing the free healing. They're both just nerfs to free sustain ppm. As such, I don't see why one would be a "half-measure"; they're effectively identically drastic changes.

[Supersnow845]

Nice to see nothing has changed about the healer forums in my absence