What Healer kit (not encounter) change would make GCD heals NOT bad gameplay?

[AnotherPerson]

What I surmised from reading the thread: GCD healing skills are bad because they cost MP, lose DPS, have a cast time, and unavoidable damage is usually too low before necessitating the need for it -- a lot of negatives compared to better alternatives and these negatives do not outweigh the positives. Being able to use GCD heals as the norm rather than as a last resort requires one or more of the listed solutions:

1. Damage consistently exceeds what free healing can cover, thus incentivizing natural GCD heal use because you start depending on it after your free healing is used up (which is harder to implement as healers get more and more free healing abilities without excluding other people who can't utilize all those abilities as well, as shown with SE's healer changes)

2. Free healing decreases drastically -- too many abilities means lots of ways to cycle skill cooldowns without cost, thus never incentivizing the need to GCD heal very often; a smaller amount of free healing tools will be used up much faster and healers would then be relying on GCD healing to cover the remainder

3. Encounter design changes to consistently require you to utilize GCD healing and save ability healing for a specific mechanic only (like quickly topping off players in a short instance or they die to doom), and not like Shadowbringers or Endwalker where you just have to mitigate a lethal unavoidable AOE or die every 30 to 60 seconds with virtually nothing to heal in between, but this comes with its own problems -- namely homogenization of oGCD skills will be applied to all healers to be able to all handle the same situation. Unless SE can think out of the box with each encounter for unique abilities or create abilities with situational uses that can be applicable to a large group of mechanics, it will be fairly difficult to implement this.

4. Damage neutral route - The current WHM Blood lily route - make GCD Heals worth using because it refunds damage, but the priority tree won't be rated any higher than your other free healing abilities unless the damage neutral route rewards large amounts of damage that is then better to fit into raid buffs

5. Creates an interaction that makes it worthwhile for its cost due to its specific use -- See: SCH Recitation Adlo + Deployment Tactics. The Crit shield spread gives a lot of survivability to certain fights and places a very good safety net that can be worthwhile to use at times.
If there are abilities that empower GCD heals and make them worthwhile to use at a relatively low cooldown (ex: activating Emergency Tactics applies the next Succor or Adloquium with Expedience {increased movement speed}), there is then another situational case which can be made that would incentivize their usage beyond simply healing.
In this scenario, Emergency Tactics giving movement speed would allow a lot more leeway and freedom in movement heavy mechanic fights at the cost of a bit of DPS.

6. Put a notable penalty to free healing tools. Ex: Add decent MP cost and remove MP costs from GCD healing tools, so the advantage of free healing tools is their immediate use and unique effect of each free healing tool rather than being advantageous in every aspect compared to GCD healing once they become so numerous that having a cooldown no longer matters. This would raise the necessity to use GCD healing when MP runs low as the go-to-heal and also remove a lot of the same/redundant healing skills in favor for more unique support-oriented skills. In this way, MP management will play a role in the healer toolkit and piety could have a fairly more interesting role (although if every healing ability remains the same other than the MP cost, you could end up with the same situation as before, just with people melding piety to never need to use GCD healing).

To encourage more GCD healing however, healer DPS contribution will have to take a hit -- and DPS checks will have to be more lenient to account for this unless GCD healing went with the damage neutral route.

[Semirhage]

To be fair, the reason WHM gets DPS refunding from its lily heals is exactly because it doesn't have the same library of free oGCDs the other healers do. oGCDs are so attractive because they're instant, free, and don't cause you to stop dealing damage. WHM has to stop dealing damage altogether to heal earlier than the other healers do, which means its damage contribution falls behind faster than the others. Healing GCDs being DPS-neutral is a response to the gajillion free heals that already exist without giving WHM more oGCDs.

DPS-neutrality on heals isn't a straightforward "good" thing. It exists as a catch-up parity mechanic for (rapidly becoming) degenerate free healing that already existed. If we didn't already live in an "everything's free" world, you wouldn't need it.

[Calysto]

Here's an idea that I could guess would works with no or minimal encounter changes :
-decrease OGCD heals potency (~100 ?)
-make ogcd heals spamables (~1s recast)
-increase GCD heal (to balance things out)
-make the OGCD heal give resources
-(optional) make the OGCD have a random proc component (free/instant/boosted/etc) for GCD for flavor

That way :
+GCD heals feel more impactful
+You can do more heals and keep people's HP top'd
+If you want to optimize, you get more APM via OGCD heals
+If you don't you just GCD heal more often, dropping a glare
~same level of homogenization as every healer now need somewhat similar ST/AoE OGCD, but could allow for more diversity on GCD
-you still want to use as few GCD heals as possible
-doesn't fix glarespam on it's own

[vetch]

3. Encounter design changes to consistently require you to utilize GCD healing and save ability healing for a specific mechanic only (like quickly topping off players in a short instance or they die to doom), and not like Shadowbringers or Endwalker where you just have to mitigate a lethal unavoidable AOE or die every 30 to 60 seconds with virtually nothing to heal in between, but this comes with its own problems -- namely homogenization of oGCD skills will be applied to all healers to be able to all handle the same situation. Unless SE can think out of the box with each encounter for unique abilities or create abilities with situational uses that can be applicable to a large group of mechanics, it will be fairly difficult to implement this.

Stormblood Savage raids were packed with these in the form of White Hole and similar such mechs that wanted everyone at 100% HP or else Bad Thing happen. Aside from feeling, uh... bad, as healer mechanics go, to force dips into GCD heals with Endwalker kit bloat you'd need them to fire like once a minute. A recipe for annoyance.

[Supersnow845]

To be fair white hole mechanics that then were combined with other mechanics were probably the most interesting healer mechanics healers have ever gotten, something like forsaken on god kefka was an amazing mechanic, as a comparison a TGC mechanic where he just gives everyone doom and you just heal up is bad

[ForteNightshade]

The problem we have with GCD healing now is not because GCD healing is "Bad," but that it's been power crept. Tanks have gained a considerable amount of self-sustain, removing a lot of need to spot heal them in encounters. Healers have gained many additional OGCD healing actions as well--heals that come at no opportunity cost at all. The result is an environment where GCD healing is almost never necessary at all. Dungeons, Trials, Normal Raids, Alliance Raids, even some Extremes and Savages can be completed while healing exclusively with OGCD healing (at least with Scholar and Sage), and the lilies, while being GCD, refund the damage they cost by rewarding you with Misery. Medica II isn't "Bad" because it's a weak heal. It's just not needed anymore, most of the time. It still is necessary in most Savages and Extremes to some degree, though.

The sad reality is they actually aren't necessary in Savage outside of week 1-2 prog and have been completely overtaken in Extremes. In this tier alone, I've gotten down to fully oGCDing P9S and everything except Hallowing Hell in P10S. And this isn't at the expense of "chadding" my co-healer either. Granted, in PF they'll very often throw up Medica IIs or Succors but they're either completely invalidated by whatever I'm doing or weren't necessary to begin with as there's no damage for long enough Ixo is free. Even when I'm in full recovery mode, I'll still not break double digits on any GCD heal combined. Of course, in week 1 prog this wouldn't be the case but I don't think a couple weeks should be the benchmark when the majority of our time healing will be spent when we have gear. Especially when week 1 prog is often just scrapping together what works and not changing anything.

Extremes, on the other hand, are downright laughable. Hyadelyn and Zodiark were so light on healing even at least, they were cleared without healers entirely. Endsinger does next to nothing, with wipes coming from her planet mechanic one-shotting you. Rubicante is a downright joke that barely deserves being called EX. Barbariccia and Golbez are the only ones who actually deal damage but it's spaced out enough you'll never need to touch GCDs. In Golbez's case, his difficulty is almost entirely on the myriad of body check mechanics he throws at you.

Even Ultimate has been power crept to the point you're barely needing to GCD heal. Most will toss out "safety heals" due to the sheer length of the fights. No one wants to wipe on P6 of TOP because the White Mage wanted an extra Glare. Even if that Medica II was a complete waste.

To this day, l still can't get the why healer needs to contribute to dps check.

Because it would be impossible to design challenging fights with the dev team's current philosophy. They aren't going to increase the outgoing damage enough to warrant frequent healing, which means if enrages were tuned to not account for any healer DPS whatsoever, every boss would fall over when healers were still contributing DPS.

[Renathras]

...

This is why I think they have to be DPS neutral, though, as that community mentality hasn't changed.

In a theoretical world, you could do something like have MP matter, have Glare cost 0 MP (like Resto Druid/Shaman Wrath/Lighting Bolt in WoW costing 0 mana), so you use it as your filler in empty GCD casts where healing isn't needed. So while Cure 1 would be damage neutral against it, it would consume more MP than casting Glare, meaning you'd want to use the Cure 1/Regens when healing was needed, not simply fill every GCD you aren't using Cure 3/Medica/Medica 2/Cure 2 with Regen/Cure 1, since that would still be MP negative over the long run vs using Glare.

Don't get me wrong, the more I think about it, the less I think everything being damage neutral is a perfect solution. But I DO think they need to be LESS damage negative.

Take Misery in ShB. It wasn't damage neutral. People DID still use Lilies for healing, since they were LESS of a damage loss than Medica and didn't risk running out of MP to use, giving them two advantages. They also had a niche use (though wonky and some people disliked it since it encouraged overhealing) of being a damage gain as a movement tool IF it didn't cause you to have to use a GCD heal later. (If it did, Dia was the damage gain, since the alternative was casting nothing while running to the safe zone). Which led to a lot of interesting decisions and choices.

In order to make GCD heals feel good I had an idea for making Cleric Stance a Trait of WHM to change how we interact with them. For every five (this number could be anything really) offensive casts from spells like Stone, Aero, Glare, Dia, and Holy and maybe even Misery too it would grant one stack of Cleric Stance up to a maximum of four. These stacks of Cleric would only be useable on Healing Spells and cause them to become an oGCD. With one Stack of Cleric Stance you would be able to weave Medica 2 or Cure 3 behind a Glare cast. The healing skills would all proc like Cure 2 does from the Free Cure Trait currently while stacks of Cleric Stance were available but they would still retain their MP cost making them an inferior option to Assize but constantly available. In this way we could interact with them more freely and still respect the hefty MP cost. I would also make the WHM revive instant with 3 stacks of Cleric Stance available giving WHM an advantage on reviving people that isn't completely dependent on Presence of Mind or Swiftcast. Being able to run and gun a limited amount of GCD healing might also incentive Piety to really play into the burst healing capabilities. The lack of shielding on WHM might actually make sense with this kind of throughput available.

While an interesting proposal, I don't know that this helps. Instead of you using GCD heals, you're making them into oGCDs instead. Plus side is you actually press the button...but the flip side is it doesn't stop the Glarespam (and may make it worse) since you're just weaving them as oGCDs, right?

Because the reality is that most GCD heals don't do anything to a mechanic that outright kills you for failing it. Can't heal an attack that takes your entire HP bar away if there's nothing left to heal. When everything's reduced to a binary check of whether you do the mechanic correctly or die and the amount of unavoidable damage can be dealt with just free healing, then it's not surprising this is the result.

Yeah, encounter design is a total mess.

These healer kits are as deep as a puddle.

I know you don't like current healers, but (at the risk of derailing my own thread) I'm curious: Do you really think all the healer healing kits aren't deep? I get WHM's you might not think is, but SCH's? SCH's kit, at the very least, if none of the others, has several anti-synergies that require choosing abilities knowing the conflicts they have with each other (e.g. using Dissipation means no Seraph for 30 seconds), and trade offs (Energy Drain vs Soil vs Excogitation vs Indom), and abilities that require some forethought, planning, and setup (like Recitation Spreadlos, especially if paired with some of the other abilities like Fey Illumination and/or Dissipation and/or Protraction). A kit which has a lot of different abilities, which tend NOT to be as powerful (Whispering Dawn is weaker than Physis 2, etc), which need to be slotted into a healing plan for encounters.

Is that not deeper than a puddle?

I think we can solve that by removing the Pure/Barrier split (shocker).

I mean, at this point...does anyone actually oppose this? Other than the Devs, I mean?

I have seen a lot for removing it, a lot of people not talking about it (presumed neutral), a lot of people questioning why it was necessary or how sustainable it will be (what happens when we add a 5th healer?), but I haven't seen anyone supporting it sticking around.

Have seperate GCD for heals abilites and dmg abilites.

Hm?

Like the damage ones and healing ones have separate "global" cooldowns? That is, all damage buttons share a CD with each other (2.5 sec) but not the healing ones, and all the healing buttons share a CD with each other (2.5 sec) but not the damage ones?

That's...an interesting suggestion. I'm not sure how it would work or what the result would be, but that's interesting to think about. I know there are abilities in the game that can share CDs, both in the oGCD types (WAR's single target and AOE oGCD) and I think there are some GCDs that also share a CD with one other GCD.

I've never heard this suggestion before. Wonder how that would even work...you could basically "weave" them together, with damage loss being based around how they fit or clip. Like using Regen then Glare (Instant + 1.5 sec cast; both are not filling out eithers' 2.5 sec GCD), or using Biolysis then Cure 1 (Instant + 2 sec cast)...

Huh.

I'm not sure if this would work or how this would work...but I find the idea fascinating, at the least.

To encourage more GCD healing however, healer DPS contribution will have to take a hit -- and DPS checks will have to be more lenient to account for this unless GCD healing went with the damage neutral route.

I like the way you laid it out. Agreed those seem to be the general options available. oGCDs are too strong, so they either need to be weak or need to be the ones that cost resources. It's always been odd to be that GCDs cost more in cast time, cost more in MP, and cost more in damage loss, but do as or less healing than oGCDs, which also have the advantage of no MP cost and no damage loss. Makes no sense.

And particularly agree with the quote: DPS checks as they exist today are too tight. P8S "1% too much" tuning mistake aside.

DPS-neutrality on heals isn't a straightforward "good" thing. It exists as a catch-up parity mechanic for (rapidly becoming) degenerate free healing that already existed. If we didn't already live in an "everything's free" world, you wouldn't need it.

I think the point is that damage neutrality on GCD heals is a good thing because it makes them good tools to use. How we got there might be an accident, but the same was true of 5.0 SMN, yet the result was good, regardless of the path taken to get there. I agree the issue is oGCDs, though I take the opposite view of you on it - it's not WHM not being given enough oGCDs (as in, it should have gotten more), it's the other Jobs being given too many.

[ForsakenRoe]

I mean, at this point...does anyone actually oppose this? Other than the Devs, I mean?

I have seen a lot for removing it, a lot of people not talking about it (presumed neutral), a lot of people questioning why it was necessary or how sustainable it will be (what happens when we add a 5th healer?), but I haven't seen anyone supporting it sticking around.


Like the damage ones and healing ones have separate "global" cooldowns?

I have seen a few people saying they like the idea, the concept of the split, just that it failed in execution. I'm one of them, in some regards. I heard them say they wanted a 'dedicated Barrier healer', I thought 'hell yes, Virus, Eye4Eye, Disable', one healer would be focused on doing like 80% of the 'HP bar shifting', and the other would be doing like 80% of the mit requirements, using a DOT to keep a constant-but-slight damage down on the boss (thinking Bad Breath BLU kinda deal, but refreshing less often), stuff like that. Of course, since we've had what we've had, I've shifted to being against the split. I still like the idea in concept, but the devs have now shown they're not capable of making it work to a level I'd consider satisfactory, so I'd rather they get rid and approach the role from a different angle, and see how that can create new fight design opportunities (eg, if every healer has a way to shield, we now are able to have 'shield checks' in fights, like Ifrit's Knockback in UWU)

As for separating GCDs like that... Isn't this just OGCDs with extra steps? Like, thanks to the animation lock caused by the roundtrip to the server, OGCDs technically have their own 'GCD', just a much shorter one (like 0.7s or so), that fluctuates in duration based on your ping and/or if you 'have petitioned the great primal Alexander to speed your packets along', as it were. Though I am reminded of the time I thought about 'what if current GCD heals had a 1s recast'

[Aravell]

This is why I think they have to be DPS neutral, though, as that community mentality hasn't changed.

The fact that the community mentality hasn't changed is why I'm pushing the point. If the healing jobs continues trending towards damage neutrality, it will continue to promote this kind of mindset. It's gotten to the point where I want them to course correct into a design where every healer loses damage from healing, not just WHM. If the dev team's answer to complaints that WHM is too far behind wasn't to make Misery damage neutral but was, instead, to gut out some of the massive amounts of free healing AST had, I believe the healing side of the healer role would not have gotten this bad.

Call me a gatekeeper if you want, but I'd rather see healers be designed for people who are interested in healing and not designed for people who refuse to lose personal damage and let someone die, thus losing total raid damage.

[Shurrikhan]

This is why I think they have to be DPS neutral, though, as that community mentality hasn't changed.

Okay, let's just be clear here, though.

"Damage-neutrality," even now, is largely bullshit.

Whatever "free" healing you get, you ultimately paid for. That's why the maximum offensive output of healers relative to other roles has increasingly declined as its "free" healing has gone up relative to healing requirements, thereby increasing their expected offensive uptime. That healing isn't actually free; it's just pre-paid.

Moreover, Lilies are not something special, and no one would be making the mistake of talking about such pointlessly narrow concepts as "damage-neutral GCDs" as if they were a matter of capacity instead of just APM/buttonflow... if WHM had just gone the standard duller route of giving a 60s CD that gives 10 seconds of instant-casting and another 2400 ST or 1200 AoE ppm in oGCDs. Because that's all Lilies are analogous to, and the only reason for their existence.

The difference between having Lilies and not having them... is ultimately just APM and the whether one times their mobile CDs in duration-based chunks or separate casts. Rather than weaving in the oGCDs you would otherwise have, and having a duration-based mobility/weave CD for which you'd probably only need 3 GCDs at a time... you get in GCD form to keep the APM lower and make WHM that bit more distinct.

It's not a new trend. It's the shit we've had since 2.0, when WHM did 80% more offensive potency per filler than SCH because SCH pre-paid for its "free" healing coming from Eos/Selene and Lustrate (and, heck, back then Energy Drain generated MP and hit far harder than a filler attack).

The only changes we've really seen over time is in how greatly healer actions are likely and able to change as they and their party get better at a fight and become more geared. The more that is pre-paid, the less the palpable change (be it in the form of CPM, rDPS, or whatever other metric). With our healing potential being pre-reserved into ppm that cannot be exchanged for anything else (outside of, barely, on SCH), healing has come to feel increasingly less varied with gear and experience.


And it does the community no favors to pretend "DPS neutrality" is anything more than that, no matter how happy they are to repeat a buzzword.