Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[TheDustyOne]

Less "simple solution" and more "utter frustration and makes us sitting ducks with no mana and dead teammates".

I'd be fine with harder hitting enemies, but could you imagine a new player in that environment where they'd be too scared to even attack because of MP running out? Or even the capability to save a run because Raise is now button bloat? Never mind that we'd have to potentially nerf pretty much all EX and Savage bosses health to account for healers not being able to attack because of their lack of MP recovery. That's not a "simple solution".

[Aravell]

I am not a fan of turning the healers into Dps, but I do understand that there is a lot of downtime for the healers with experience.

Simple solution would be to make healing more difficult, remove mana regen in combat, make enemies hit harder en remove options like being able to use ress spells in combat.

Removing MP regen in combat just adds idle time to fights, it doesn't make healing more difficult or more engaging. Removing combat res just makes dying more punishing, it does nothing to make healing more interesting or more difficult.

[Sebazy]

In fairness, I don’t think increasing the difficulty or cost of mid combat resses is a bad idea, there’s defo a case to be made that the lack of risk in mainstream combat further compounds the impact of a lack of actual healing requirements. Force healers to be more cautious. The issue with that of course is that it doesn’t really work well with the current emphasis on body checks in high end content.

[Connor]

If these mythical ‘new players’ are so completely incompetent in their understanding of tooltips that literally struggle with the tiniest bit of healing requirements are as common as everyone in the forums like to say, doesn’t that make current design literal perfection ?

Can’t fail healing because any button is the right one, can’t fail dps because any dps button is the right one (because there’s only 2). MP management is non-existent, healer dps variation still exists as a means of skill expression (a bad one), it’s not like literally every healer playing is scoring 100/100 effortlessly.

I mean, assuming Jimmy NoFriends is a new player and literally 1 HP more healing is going to make him freak the hell out and start randomly mashing his heal abilities off-cool-down until something happens. how do we justify giving that player even more dps options when they supposedly can’t deal with any kind of healing beyond the most simplistic and easily-resolved mechanics imaginable.


I mean, Jimmy NoFriends is (apparently) so dumb that it’s not fair to increase healing requirements at all or he’ll never clear content again. But we can overload his kit with a bunch of DoTs, DPS interactions, mechanics, optimisations, etc, and that’s totally fine. Not gonna overwhelm him at all, having all these damage-based mechanics and abilities on his job when he thinks he’s going to play a healer. You can make your ‘ but he can just be scum and not hit his damage buttons, it’s ok, we’ll just write about him in tales of D.F argument but we’ve already established he’s a new, incompetent player who can’t figure out things on his own .

What makes you think he’s going to go to the forums, open up the healer section, read that people think lower dps amounts are acceptable on healers (do they?), and suddenly adjust his entire playstyle to maximise healing, manage his full dps kit and have the wherewithal to understand the interactions between the two.

I just don’t understand how we can reconcile that ‘new players can’t handle any more healing’ but ‘new players can handle plenty additional damage options’. Either they’re smart enough to adapt to new abilities or they’re too unskilled for those options to ever be increased in the future without ‘massively impacting’ their ‘enjoyment of the game’ or w/e. I don’t understand how the former can be true without the latter becoming false

[Sebazy]

I’m pretty sure we’ve had people moaning about Harrowing Hell though? Which isn’t even that steep a check tbh.

The key thing is that failing to keep up damage output isn’t a problem for a casual player in casual content. However failing to keep up with healing is a very real problem. And then of course we have this game’s wild aversion to wipes

[Aravell]

The biggest difference between "increase of healing required" and "increase of damage kit complexity" is that not properly engaging with the former will result in a wipe, not properly engaging with the latter will never cause a wipe in regular content.

We all were new players once. Back when I was new, I didn't press my damage buttons much at all, I never caught any flak for it. Even now, people rarely blame the healer for not doing enough damage even if boss enrages. What people do blame healers for though, is when dying to unavoidable damage, a big part of why Abyssos was so frustrating for healers is because healers get blamed for deaths even when it's the tanks and DPS that didn't press their mitigation buttons.

[Connor]

I’m pretty sure we’ve had people moaning about Harrowing Hell though? Which isn’t even that steep a check tbh.

The key thing is that failing to keep up damage output isn’t a problem for a casual player in casual content. However failing to keep up with healing is a very real problem. And then of course we have this game’s wild aversion to wipes

Did we? I saw that one person saying it was an issue, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say it was something ‘too difficult’. I’ve not had any party wipes to it that I can think of either, and while I do generally play healer myself anyway, but I never felt like the Co-healers weren’t always ready to immediately deal with it, usually using the ‘button that now exists solely for this type of mechanic’ lol, like Painhaima / Macrocosmos / Litany / Seraph

The point I’m making about newer healers is that in this hypothetical situation, Jimmy NoFriends has no way of knowing his damage output isn’t entirely necessary (until higher difficulty) . So if this player ends up with a bunch of additional damage options, aren’t they going to assume they need to hit them? I mean, it is a little counterintuitive to give a job buttons but tell them ‘you can not use those’. Wouldn’t a newer player just assume ‘if it’s there I need to use it for something’?

I mean, if he goes to the forums and reads about healers min/max’ing dps, healing primarily through oGCDs to assist dps output, etc, he’s probably going to know how to deal with increased healing requirements anyway through previous players experiences. Otherwise, if he gets overwhelmed by higher healing requirements because he just doesn’t understand it, surely he’s going to get overwhelmed by additional dps options too, because he doesn’t understand why they’re there

[Aravell]

The point I’m making about newer healers is that in this hypothetical situation, Jimmy NoFriends has no way of knowing his damage output isn’t entirely necessary (until higher difficulty) . So if this player ends up with a bunch of additional damage options, aren’t they going to assume they need to hit them? I mean, it is a little counterintuitive to give a job buttons but tell them ‘you can not use those’. Wouldn’t a newer player just assume ‘if it’s there I need to use it for something’?

I mean, if he goes to the forums and reads about healers min/max’ing dps, healing primarily through oGCDs to assist dps output, etc, he’s probably going to know how to deal with increased healing requirements anyway through previous players experiences. Otherwise, if he gets overwhelmed by higher healing requirements because he just doesn’t understand it, surely he’s going to get overwhelmed by additional dps options too, because he doesn’t understand why they’re there

Honestly, it depends on what kind of background Jimmy comes from. If this is his first trinity MMO, it's reasonable for a new player to assume that the healer role is meant to heal, they would also most likely assume that any buttons that do damage is meant for solo gameplay. I really doubt that a new player from that kind of background would look at an expansive kit and decide they need to engage with all of it immediately.

Now if Jimmy has a background of other MMOs, he would be more likely to engage with his full kit. Jimmy in this case would learn as he goes, eventually he may find himself looking for information and finding out how the job is meant to be played. This version of Jimmy would have no problems at all with an expansive kit.

EDIT: I am basing the first example off of my own experience. I never played any MMO like this before, never played WoW or similar. I started healing in HW. I looked at the full kit and came to the conclusion that Cleric Stance is for solo and I'm only meant to heal people when in a party. I'd wager that most players new to the genre like me would do roughly the same.

[TheDustyOne]

Did we? I saw that one person saying it was an issue, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say it was something ‘too difficult’.

If you're referring to what I said earlier, it was in reference to Laerunes suggestion, especially around the "no MP regen" part. I'm all for increasing healing requirements, and thankfully I feel like the newest trial and Anabaseios normal modes hit hard enough for casual content.

Extra DPS buttons is just the safest way to increase the skill ceiling without impacting the skill floor much. Jimmy NoFriends can mess up and reapply his DoT or buff early, or overcap gauge, but so long as people live, no one will care about his DPS being supbar.

[ForsakenRoe]

I mean, assuming Jimmy NoFriends is a new player and literally 1 HP more healing is going to make him freak the hell out and start randomly mashing his heal abilities off-cool-down until something happens. how do we justify giving that player even more dps options when they supposedly can’t deal with any kind of healing beyond the most simplistic and easily-resolved mechanics imaginable.

I mean, Jimmy NoFriends is (apparently) so dumb that it’s not fair to increase healing requirements at all or he’ll never clear content again. But we can overload his kit with a bunch of DoTs, DPS interactions, mechanics, optimisations, etc, and that’s totally fine. Not gonna overwhelm him at all, having all these damage-based mechanics and abilities on his job when he thinks he’s going to play a healer. You can make your ‘ but he can just be scum and not hit his damage buttons, it’s ok, we’ll just write about him in tales of D.F argument but we’ve already established he’s a new, incompetent player who can’t figure out things on his own .

Isn't this just the inverse of the strawman you're trying to call out? Nobody's saying '1 more point of HPS will cause Jimmy to freak out'. But we (or at least me, maybe others) are saying that if you want to increase HPS required as the solution, the amount you'd have to increase it by would either be low enough for Jimmy to still handle, OR high enough to satisfy the grumpy veterans. Some people struggle with Harrowing Hell in normal mode. Some can handle it just fine even in week 1 Savage. How do we make the healing required in content be low enough to not cause issues for #1, while also being high enough to challenge #2? There's no way it can be done, right? There's no overlap between these two points. So we either have to accept that the idea isn't going to work, or make specific concessions like 'this content is designed for casuals so it doesn't get heightened requirements', which leaves that content in the mire it's in right now (which means the solution sucks)

But also, the idea that we 'overload his kit with a bunch of DoTs, DPS interactions, mechanics, optimisations, etc' is pretty strawman too. We don't need an 'overload' of this stuff. Returning two DOTs to SCH is not 'overloading Jimmy with DOTs and DPS interactions'. Making the AST cards have unique effects again is not going to 'overload Jimmy with mechanics and optimizations', it's just what we had in HW and SB and we learned the system well enough back then. Additionally, we're looking at it with the lens of being like, level 80-90 and having everything dropped on us at once. Ideally, these 'new mechanics' would be added over the course of levelling, piece by piece, so that the player has time to get accustomed to each part in sequence. We don't get the entire BLM gauge thrown at us as soon as we hit a certain level, we get parts of it at certain level thresholds, and it compiles on itself to get to it's current complexity gradually.

I imagine that new players could handle more healing. They just won't be able to handle as much healing as is needed to make grumpy bastards like me, or people more competent than me (which are quite large in number) feel something in EX roulette again. And I've said it time and time again, a solution that doesn't affect every piece of content that suffers from the problem (eg healing being bland) isn't a solution. Writing off certain things like 'oh EX roulette isn't designed to be challenging so it can stay how it is' isn't going to cut it, because that's basically what Yoshi hit us with, with the 'play ultimate' quote. 'If you want healers to feel more fun to you, go do the harder content that makes up like 4% of the game, instead of partaking in the other 96%, that's not for people like you'

edit: we also have very few things that incentivize, organically, the healer player to actually use their damage buttons. If we had new damage interactions (learned gradually as you level, as above) that nudge the player to consider using damage as part of their gameplay to help them heal, instead of the current 'do damage or do heal, that's your choice with each GCD', it would help these newer players to consider doing damage as part of their gameplay, instead of jumping to 'healer only heals, damage is for solo content' (not sure that this happens, given that the Hall of the Novice tells you to throw rocks when it's safe to). For example, if we had a trait learned at some point while levelling that says 'casting Glare reduces the CD on Tetragrammaton by 1 second' or something