Healer Suggestions Megathread

[Katish]

Simple barrier stacking solution : on/off stance ; if active, switch the crit barrier order.
that way you can have 2 barriers healers, and at most the equivalent of a crit barrier so not much cheeze
edit : If deployment only spread gavlanize (no matter the stance), no cheeze at al I guess

Why have it stack when they can already out-heal pure healers when it matters? Lel, the concept of pure vs shield healers is a travesty in that regard.
The pure healers are more like situational healers at best.
But healing altogether is a meme because we don't even need healers tbh [and this will continue moving forward with tanks and dps taking up more of the healing. (Which I'd like to see, just to bring the point home that we really aren't needed. Which will bring attention to issues more, making it more apparent.)]

[Shurrikhan]

Simple barrier stacking solution : on/off stance ; if active, switch the crit barrier order.
that way you can have 2 barriers healers, and at most the equivalent of a crit barrier so not much cheeze
edit : If deployment only spread gavlanize (no matter the stance), no cheeze at al I guess

...This seems needlessly convoluted. Any they probably shouldn't be allowed, at the least, to stack against the same hit anyways. Leave them as is, with the larger remaining absorb effect taking over, or have damage simply drain the larger one first and only use one at a time (the remaining damage from a tankbuster larger than the larger barrier would go through, rather than also consuming the smaller barrier).

As is, atop barriers not being as bottlenecked pure heals (are by max HP), "barrier healers" generally just output more sustain (damage nullification + HP recovered) altogether. Sage puts out almost a quarter more healing than White Mage. Yes, WHM's relative performance might increase faintly and SGE's would shrink if there were far more damage taken, but... there isn't.

I appreciate future-proofing for likely challenges or changes, but... this state looks likely to continue for the next couple expansions at the least. Given that, allowing barriers to stack can be pretty much irrelevant to those affected (who are overpowered enough not to care even if they frequently thus afflicted... which they aren't), while a bit of slap to the healers who'd be further made inferior by comparison. So, change it, sure, but... as part of a larger bundle that actually balances them down to the level of pure healers or vice versa.

[Calysto]

Balancing is another issue entirely ; just saying it wouldn't really break it more than it already is.
A barrier healer should want to cast it's shields.

[Magikazam]

Just remove healer, in fact, remove all classes. Just give us a blue, a red and a green variant of Warrior

[vetch]

But healing altogether is a meme because we don't even need healers tbh [and this will continue moving forward with tanks and dps taking up more of the healing. (Which I'd like to see, just to bring the point home that we really aren't needed. Which will bring attention to issues more, making it more apparent.)]

No, the playerbase is already so spoiled by having free healing tools everywhere and DDR fights that deal no damage when you stand in the right spots that there'll be a huge uproar if the devs so much as glance at restoring the trinity model to a balanced and healthy state.

For a free preview, check out what WAR mains say right now when non-Warriors ask about reining in WAR's ridiculous sustain.

Now extrapolate that outcry to all the healers who will have to give up their super-powered oGCD heals, and to all the tanks who will now be squishier so that healers will have more healing to do, and to all the players in general who prefer DDR battles to RPG ones because they get anxiety when the healer leaves their HP at 70% for ten seconds to triage someone else. It'll be a hurricane of "Balancing the game is all well and good, but can't you do it without making MY main job any weaker?"

Further worsening the problem won't make the changes any easier to make.

[Katish]

No, the playerbase is already so spoiled by having free healing tools everywhere and DDR fights that deal no damage when you stand in the right spots that there'll be a huge uproar if the devs so much as glance at restoring the trinity model to a balanced and healthy state.

For a free preview, check out what WAR mains say right now when non-Warriors ask about reining in WAR's ridiculous sustain.

Now extrapolate that outcry to all the healers who will have to give up their super-powered oGCD heals, and to all the tanks who will now be squishier so that healers will have more healing to do, and to all the players in general who prefer DDR battles to RPG ones because they get anxiety when the healer leaves their HP at 70% for ten seconds to triage someone else. It'll be a hurricane of "Balancing the game is all well and good, but can't you do it without making MY main job any weaker?"

Further worsening the problem won't make the changes any easier to make.

I'm just quoting the direction they're likely to take lel given what they have already done, I didn't say I supported it, in fact it's the opposite. As to why I'd want them to do so, is only to realize how bad of a healer design philosophy they have made. When healers are COMPLETELY replaced in everyday instance, all PF with nothing but DPS, perhaps then they'll declare something is wrong. We have to watch it burn before it can rise anew, and I'd rather they tarnish the role quicker to make that rebirth happen sooner. Though given they have signed off on this healing concept, Endtrail(Dawntrail) might make it happen quicker, we might see much needed changes within the expansion or next expansion hopefully. If they do nothing, well the role dies and then they have to figure something else out.

All healers imho need a redesign and re-imagining (shield and pure concept is absolutely stupid), because what they contribute in value is for naught, in a static and in normal content. When the tanks and dps do our job for us, what's the point? Healers need to have their combat brought up with new combat skills, heals considered in fights, removal of redundant heal skills, and other designs tailored just for the healer role. The tanks need some redesign. (they are not the healers, therefore they should not have heals) They should specialize in defending party members and guarding hits, and they need a new resource that isn't healing HP... (maybe removing their mitigating skills and combining it to make a new resource, with their different kit each manipulating it differently, might make for interesting tank design (unsure, though I've seen other games use Super Armor before so it's not unheard of). The DPS AOE heals need a longer cooldown, and should only act as support to the healers, not a replacement, save for single target heals (those are fine, although SMN could use their Physick converted over to INT).

[Aravell]

Bringing back this thread for another of my (very likely terrible) ideas.

Main points
- All GCD heals are now free
- All OGCD heals now cost MP
- Healers can no longer autoattack
- Healers now siphon 500 MP every 3 seconds when they're not casting
- More damage spells are added with different effects and MP costs

All OGCDs now costing MP means the benefits are now power, movement or utility. If you mismanage and fall behind on MP, you have the option to fall back to the MP-free GCD heals, this means the newer healers aren't left behind while giving more experienced healers something to think about and optimise. Every heal also now only grants the additional effect when HP is actually healed, so Lustrate will only grant fairy gauge if HP is healed and Afflatus Rapture only grants a charge to the blood lily if HP is healed and so on, this means people can't just throw them away and get the benefit from it still. If a less experienced player runs low on MP or an experienced player makes a mistake and runs low on MP, they have the option to just cast nothing and gain MP back, this is a failstate if MP isn't balanced properly, you can still fulfill your primary purpose of healing while in this failstate because GCD healing is free, but you won't be able to do any damage or OGCDs.

Damage spells added in will interact with the healing kit, such as buffing your OGCD heals. Buffs can range from refunding the MP cost to increasing potency to other effects. Damage spells will all cost MP, the greater the effect, the greater the MP cost will be. Damage optimisation will involve using GCD heals to conserve MP where possible while also using OGCDs where it's the most impactful, because you don't want to spam OGCDs since it now shares a resource cost with your damage spells.

The purpose of this is to try and satisfy both sides of the argument. The side who only enjoys healing will be allowed to do so, they can engage with the MP juggling with their OGCD play while spamming the cheapest nuke, much like the playstyle we have right now. The side who enjoys the balancing act will have more engagement by juggling damage spell costs with OGCD costs with the threat of entering a failstate where they can't do either things.

[Shurrikhan]

Bringing back this thread for another of my (very likely terrible) ideas.

Main points

1. All GCD heals are now free
2. All OGCD heals now cost MP
3. Healers can no longer autoattack
4. Healers now siphon 500 MP every 3 seconds when they're not casting
5. More damage spells are added with different effects and MP costs

* Original post altered to feature a numbered list instead of bullets, for ease of reference to each point.

A quick critique on the relationship between [1] "All GCD heals are now free" and [4] "Healers now siphon 500 MP every 3 seconds when they're not casting":


If you go with [4], you'll also need to determine if this is a server tick or is based on the time since casting, and if the latter, whether progress is saved and therefore accumulates, in which case swiftcasts and shorter casts mean more mana regenerated. Which... is not terribly intuitive. (And if you nonetheless want the gameplay implications of that, there are far clearer ways to make those win conditions visible to players.)

More importantly, though, there's no need for [4] if you just take a softer approach to [1].

Just fixing Spell Speed's MP inefficiency by having MP tick per GCD (a 20+% increase to MP generation) instead of per a fixed 3 seconds, and/or a base buff to MP regen or Lucid Dreaming, would net you enough MP for a sustainable oGCDs even while giving them a cost proportionate to their potencies or higher (e.g., at least a Cure II's cost for a Tetragrammaton).

Else, it would seem more reasonable to greatly reduce the CDs of the oGCDs and spend MP only on them oGCDs and Raise, while similarly retooling other casters to share cooldowns, in a sense, via MP affecting their abilities more so than their basic spells.

_________

Tl;dr:

Rather than seemingly to arbitrarily punish the use of filler attacks and requiring the occasional extra pause of .5s after an instant-cast as to qualify for having "not casted" for 3s, etc., I'd pick either

1. a system by which the cost of abilities are essentially their net cost or their excess over the minimum cost per GCD (if you spend 200 MP per average GCD but regenerate 250 MP per average GCD, you're still net positive) and you needn't mess with the base cost per GCD or
2. a system by which they're the only cost.

________


The rest seems fine.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think we should just remove Lucid Dreaming entirely, and compensate it's regen-per-min effect with buffing things like Assize's MP restore effect, natural MP ticks, or both. It's not an interesting button, it only serves to make 'pressed it and died right after' more punishing, and it's effect of 'restores 3850MP per minute' (or, averaged out over 1min, 192.5 per 3s, less than the base regen amount of 200mp per tick) is not worth having a hotbar slot dedicated to it, especially given the main opposition to several good suggestions has been 'we don't have the hotbar space for something like that'

Remove Lucid, make filler spells cost nothing (or like, 100mp), use the hotbar slot for something more interesting

[ty_taurus]

I think we should just remove Lucid Dreaming entirely, and compensate it's regen-per-min effect with buffing things like Assize's MP restore effect, natural MP ticks, or both. It's not an interesting button, it only serves to make 'pressed it and died right after' more punishing, and it's effect of 'restores 3850MP per minute' (or, averaged out over 1min, 192.5 per 3s, less than the base regen amount of 200mp per tick) is not worth having a hotbar slot dedicated to it, especially given the main opposition to several good suggestions has been 'we don't have the hotbar space for something like that'

Remove Lucid, make filler spells cost nothing (or like, 100mp), use the hotbar slot for something more interesting

I'd prefer MP regeneration to be a manual choice the healer makes, like making a lily spell/addersgall action that restores MP at the cost of a resource that would otherwise go to free healing. Have standard spells cost no MP to avoid bricking, but have potent spells with high MP costs that allows the player to choose to be ambitious as they see fit, and balancing how many of their resources they dedicate to healing vs MP regeneration is in response to the content they're playing. This was one of the perks of Stormblood Scholar. Miasma II was expensive, but with Energy Drain, was a notable DPS gain over Broil II. It would be the player who chose how ambitious they wanted to be with their offense, and how much Aetherflow they felt they could afford.

As it stands, I don't see why MP has to exist at all. There's no decisions to be made with it, no consequences for managing it effectively or poorly... At best, it's a self-resolving circuit that has no real impact on the player's gameplay other than just limiting their ability to revive players. At worst it punishes particularly the novice healer who can't manage to use Lucid on cooldown or just relies on expensive GCD heals like Cure III. It's antithetical to the idea of making healers more accessible.