Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[Sebazy]

Isn’t the issue for SE not the ideas themselves but the implementation? FFXIV (according to them anyway) has such messed-up code that even when they have an idea, they then come up against the problem of having to actually code/program that idea in a implementable format to the game.

I think the whole PS3 limitations thing is more related to back end stuff, server code, character data storage etc? From the outside looking in they don't seem to have trouble coming up with unique and complex mechanics either for players or monsters. Construct's enumeration, ASTs Macrocosmos etc, Warri... Reaper's conal cleaves etc. The ingredients are there and many of them are pretty new so I can only assume that the combat scripting system they have in place is pretty capable.

oGCDs being required is difficult for players not good at managing oGCDs. Fights with high movement, fights with a lot of healing at once that GCDs are insufficient to cover, etc.

There's also the all too easy to fall into trap of trying to pocket those cooldowns for a 'rainy day' that would invariably never actually come.

[TheDustyOne]

There's also the all too easy to fall into trap of trying to pocket those cooldowns for a 'rainy day' that would invariably never actually come.

I'll save this Elixir for when I REALLY need it.

*Cue credits*

Goshdarnit.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I'll save this Elixir for when I REALLY need it[...]

What I really like to call the "99 Elixir Syndrome".

[Renathras]

What I really like to call the "99 Elixir Syndrome".

To be fair, this is also a thing for players coming from other games or single player games. I remember when I started FFXIV PLD in WoWs' "Lay on Hands" ability still had something like 60 minute CD (maybe it was shortened to 10?), and I looked at WHM's Benediction the same way as an emergency use only button. Which it's terrible for due to the delay. CD used to be 6 mins instead of 3 mins, kind of playing into that. FFXI players trickling into FFXIV over time also felt this, since the Job big abilities there had stupidly long CDs (we're talking like 4 hours or something).

And oGCDs being usable at any time and fairly powerful very clearly seemed to play into that idea, and for at least some Jobs, DID work that way and were more emergency buttons in ARR. People just didn't change over time and a lot of players even now see it that same way.

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No, I think you're right, because I remember them unifying the durations at some point so it would have been ShB (at least I THINK they unified them in ShB; Gamersescape says 6.1, which seems super late, but may be true because I remember there being some discussion about if Aero 2 was more damage than Dia for a brief time...). I think I'm conflating the calculation from the Healers: Then and Now thread, but that is probably due to factoring in the Afflatus abilities:

In practice, SB WHM cast Aero 2 3.333... times per minute and Aero 3 2.5 times per minute. This is a total of 5.833... GCD casts per minute that weren't Stone IV.

In practice, EW WHM casts Dia 2 times per minute, 3 Afflatus (Solace/Rapture) per minute, and 1 Afflatus Misery per minute. This is a total of 6 GCD casts per minute that aren't Glare III.

On balance, EW WHM is casting non-Glare damage (or damage-adjacent Solace/Rapture) spells on roughly the same average frequency as SB era WHM did.

I concede the duration point, though the rest does still stand: Aero 1 had already been removed and Aero 2 made an instant cast direct upgrade, and that EW WHM uses more non-nukespam GCDs per unit time than SB WHM did, making EW WHM a direct upgrade in the sense of "less Glare/Stone casts during downtime". Note, however, that three of those (Rapture/Solace) would have, in SB, required a separate cast, meaning WHM has marginally less use of its GCD healing spells (Medica 2 / Cure 2) than it would have in SB. But on the downtime non-Glare side, it is better off in EW than in SB, mechanically speaking.

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"This just absolutely hamstrings fight design, no?"

Yes and no.

Swiftcast exists. Afflatus Rapture exists. We could honestly convert a lot of oGCDs into GCDs. The question is, is the problem "casting too much Glare"? People SAY that's the problem all the time, but is that a misdiagnosis? People have a habit of looking only at GCD casts and insisting that's their entire rotation, meaning if we had no oGCDs anymore and all oGCDs were GCDs, that would fix that "problem" outright...but is that really the correct description of the problem? I suspect it is not. I could be mistaken, but I suspect if we made all oGCDs GCDs, such that you wouldn't have "Glarespam" anymore, people would still be complaining. I think the "Too much Glare" is probably not what the actual issue is.

...never mind that, despite the name, WHM is the least Glarespammy of the healers. All the others spam their nuke more than WHM does, with SCH and AST being the worst offenders since they don't have other GCD damage (or damage-adjacent) buttons to cycle through. WHM has Solace/Rapture/Misery and SGE has Plegma. So unless SCH is doing so much movement they use Ruin 2 a lot, they're using a lot of Broil IV, especially now that they can weave with it, and AST has always used a lot of Malific, people just seem to...forget this for some reason.

As for how to deal with things: Different players enjoy different things. One of my favorite things to heal at level was Memoria on WHM. When the two tanks are holding his attack and you could pop Presence of Mind and Thin Air then just UNLOAD Cure 3s. It just felt powerful and fun. I also like that for SCH, I can keyboard dance across Fey Illumination, Recitation, Adloquium, Deployment Tactics, Summon Seraph, Sacred Soil, Consolation, Emergency Tactics, Succor, Consolation (or something like it) to do ridiculous healing and shielding as well. Both are fun, and I liked that both were in the game (before they nerfed Thin Air into the ground, anyway...)

Whether you consider it "interesting design" or not is irrelevant; it's fun at least some of the time and to some of the people. And that's what matters in a game - what is fun.

And one woman's "interesting design" can be another man's "horrible design": I HATE in PvP that I run out of healing on WHM and AST, that SCH's Adlo barely heals, and that SGE has no direct heal. That's annoying to me. Old PvP, Cure 2 had a high MP cost, but Cure 1 had none, meaning you could still patch spot heal. Now when I've used my other abilities I have the "exciting" gameplay of <checks notes> casting Glare until something comes off CD. And watching my party die being able to do nothing about it. That isn't fun. Having charges on powerful abilities makes sense, but not having fallback heals feels really really bad to me as a healer. Imagine if a DPS Job's abilities all had charges, and when you used them all, you just sat there and autoattacked or cast Physick or something until you got more charges. Most DPS players would hate that.

The issue with Medica 2 is there's no reason to cast Medica 1. In the past, you'd have a sort of "healing combo" where you'd use Medica 2 to get the HoT ticking then Medica 1 since it was more HPS efficient. The thing is, now Medica 2 does the same healing (with the first tick) per GCD, but also costs only 100 more MP and has 5y more range. Medica 1 has no reason to exist and chain casting Medica 2 is the "correct" move in that situation (unless the party can stack, in which case it's M2 then C3 spam).

And the problem is, the heavy movement is ALSO hamstrining fight design, it's just ALSO hamstringing Job design as well. Isn't that worse?

Besides: Contrast Ex7. Lots of healing, some movement, but a decent amount of points where standing stationary or group stacking is possible. It's a really fun fight and somehow manages to cater to all healer types at once. That's good design, imo.

Quick correction of facts:

Already discussed.

And also wrong: Aero 2's CD was apparently not increased to 30 sec (according to Gamersescape's version history, anyway) until 6.1. o.O (I know, surprised me, too: https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/A...sion%20History

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Yes, the 4 buttons existed in HW. But people are often pining for SB, not HW. Recall that HW didn't have most of the oGCD healing, either, just for reference.

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Fights are ALREADY constrained - so many oGCDs and instant casts means that fights all have to be heavy movement and have large spikes of damage. That's ALREADY constraining fight design. Smaller spikes can be easily handled, and low movement allows for GCD heal use, making the oGCDs redundant.

So why not "Hard pass" on that?

[ForsakenRoe]

WHM's Benediction the same way as an emergency use only button. Which it's terrible for due to the delay. CD used to be 6 mins instead of 3 mins

5, not 6

No, I think you're right, because I remember them unifying the durations at some point so it would have been ShB (at least I THINK they unified them in ShB; Gamersescape says 6.1, which seems super late
...
Aero 2's CD was apparently not increased to 30 sec (according to Gamersescape's version history, anyway) until 6.1.

I'm not sure it's 'right' for you to be 'educating' others on something you only learned about this very day, especially considering they likely already learned about it from the same place you did: me linking the patch notes listing the change. I know it was in one of those drop down thingys, but come on

As for the PVP woes, do you really want PVP to be decided entirely on 'who has the healer on their team' because I would prefer not to have janky systems like Dampening to 'force' a death to eventually occur. Culling Time in The Feast was bad enough. What are you after, an infinite charge Cure1 spell that heals for, say, 4000? It'd do little to help in CC and even less in Frontlines. Putting pressure on the enemy to drain them of their sustain before running out of yours is the whole reason PVP even works. There were times in pre-EW times, you literally could not kill a healer in PVP, as a DPS, if you were solo. They just healed through everything you threw at them. I remember walking away from FOUR DPS all wailing on me, as a Noct AST, because reapplying the shield over and over was instantcast. That is absolutely toxic design. Even if it had a cast bar so I had to stand still, the fact I could keep 4 of the enemy team busy, making space for my allies to take objectives etc, was ridiculous. I'm glad it's gone. All that is needed is Cure2 should be instantcast like the rest

edit: the bit about WHM being the least 'Glarespammy', we have to consider both the GCD count spent on one button (eg Glare), but also the overall APM. One value in a vacuum paints a very distorted picture. For example, if you did that with DRK and WAR, you'd get a result that makes them look like they're equally slow and GCD locked. But WAR is actually that slow and GCD heavy, DRK has a lot of weaving involved. AST is not 'more Malefic spammy' in the grater picture compared to WHM, because, while it does spend more of it's alloted 24 GCDS (actually higher, since AST runs spellspeed often) on Malefic, it has more going on in the minute-per-minute gameplay, because of OGCD heal weaving, and cards. The relative lack of OGCDs on WHM means that the GCD actions it DOES have, are thrown into sharper focus

[Renathras]

I'm not sure it's 'right' for you to be..

Do you know why so many people won't admit to being wrong about things?

This BS.

"Oh, you admitted to being wrong about one thing, therefore, you don't get to talk anymore". And you've been wrong about things before, so don't even start. Not to mention that I'm saying something I literally did pick up on, so it's correct information to be "educating" someone who was trying to jump in on a dogpile (you already set the record straight, a second post was redundant). And clearly, she hadn't learned it, considering she also wasn't right about it.

Not to mention literally everything else I said was correct, which is why you only had the one thing to harp on, and why you're trying to run a victory lap on that single laurel.

Next time you're wrong about something, do you want me to say in your following posts you don't get to speak/it's not right for you to talk because you were wrong about one thing?

This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about people attacking. And we WERE having such a good conversation beforehand. Note this is something I specifically DON'T do to others who admit they were wrong about something. Because I want to have good conversations, not attack or one-up people. That was a bad post and you were bad for posting it.

So stop that BS.

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As for the PvP system: I'm explaining why it's bad and doesn't feel good. It would be a bad idea to port something to PvE that already feels bad in PvP.

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APM is a separate argument, and one different people have different preferences on. BLM, for example, has a low APM. But this also comes down to "do oGCDs count or don't they" when having these kinds of discussions. IN GENERAL, they don't (otherwise we'd have to count things like Assize, Tetra, Asylum, etc, which people do not).

[ForsakenRoe]

Far as I can tell, she was using an archived version of it, I'm using the modern version's page with the version history.

An archived version of the Job Guide, from SE's site, yes. It only goes back to SB due to that being the first time they actually made said page, though, so for HW or ARR changes we are entirely reliant on either Gamerescape's version history tab, or Consolegameswiki which exceptionally crispy and sluggish to load for some reason. I figured it would be better to get the info directly from the source as it were, rather than risk transcription errors with a 3rd party (eg they might write that a change happened in 5.15, when it technically happened in 5.15c, and I would want that specificity)

Next time you're wrong about something, do you want me to say in your following posts you don't get to speak/it's not right for you to talk because you were wrong about one thing?

So long as it's a situation identical to this one (where I am wrong, get corrected, and then try to continue talking from a position of knowledge on the subject using the updated information, as if I knew the 'real answer' all along), sure go nuts

Funny thing about old Feast, you could actually dive the opposing team and camp their base in 8v8 matches and just never die as a SCH, the balance was ridiculous back then. If I recall correctly, a single WHM can also keep their entire party alive indefinitely in Frontlines.

I used to do it for the GARO event as WHM, infinitely accessible Repose was absolutely disgusting too. Infinitely accessible Stella on AST as well, for HW specifically. Was especially nasty in frontlines, you hit one guy at a time and watch your blob of attack dogs just pile onto the 'straggler who fell behind'

[Aravell]

As for the PVP woes, do you really want PVP to be decided entirely on 'who has the healer on their team' because I would prefer not to have janky systems like Dampening to 'force' a death to eventually occur. Culling Time in The Feast was bad enough. What are you after, an infinite charge Cure1 spell that heals for, say, 4000? It'd do little to help in CC and even less in Frontlines. Putting pressure on the enemy to drain them of their sustain before running out of yours is the whole reason PVP even works. There were times in pre-EW times, you literally could not kill a healer in PVP, as a DPS, if you were solo. They just healed through everything you threw at them. I remember walking away from FOUR DPS all wailing on me, as a Noct AST, because reapplying the shield over and over was instantcast. That is absolutely toxic design. Even if it had a cast bar so I had to stand still, the fact I could keep 4 of the enemy team busy, making space for my allies to take objectives etc, was ridiculous. I'm glad it's gone. All that is needed is Cure2 should be instantcast like the rest

Funny thing about old Feast, you could actually dive the opposing team and camp their base in 8v8 matches and just never die as a SCH, the balance was ridiculous back then. If I recall correctly, a single WHM can also keep their entire party alive indefinitely in Frontlines.

[Shurrikhan]

until 6.1. o.O (I know, surprised me, too:

Fair enough; I should have specified "its replacement" or "our (current/relevant) ST, instant-cast DoT", expecting an irrelevant nit-pick on a technicality over a skill that was by then irrelevant to the earlier point in question. Good use of... Roe's resource (all in the same breadth you slight others for mentioning anything others may have already discussed earlier in the thread -- the very same one, it would appear)?

Fights are ALREADY constrained - so many oGCDs and instant casts means that fights all have to be heavy movement and have large spikes of damage. That's ALREADY constraining fight design. Smaller spikes can be easily handled, and low movement allows for GCD heal use, making the oGCDs redundant.

First, I said nothing of instant casts. But having more oGCDs does not "mean that all fights have to be heavy movement and have large spikes of damage". There is no paired requirement for heavy movement and large damage spikes. There is no requirement for either individually. And is what is thereby permitted goes beyond either.

It is more than a little absurd to say that "Now that we have this tool, fights must cause us to live or die through its advantages." The whole course of the game, and of pretty much any other MMO, has proven otherwise. Literally anything that can make unique use of oGCDs can be good design in the context of oGCDs, and even letting those tools merely be redundancies woven in for efficiency is technically still fully permissible design.

You're free to dislike movement. You're free to dislike damage intake of any sort that would require split-second heals and/or heals from finite resources (e.g., limited by gauge and/or cooldowns). But having those tools does not force X, Y, and Z, just as new mitigation tools do not force constant or per-CD mechanics that would be one-shots if not for a strict schedule of stacked mitigation; those tools are simply something that helps allow for that variance in fight design in a more engaging manner than would changes to the base, spammable kit as to allow for near-infinite mobility, etc.

_________


:: Again, I'm not a fan of, say, EuD / EuP spam having infinite mobility, so I'm not about to defend a strawman. I'll say only that EuD/EuP spam doesn't outright break the game to me because it's a perk of only a single healer and is generally ill-advised anyways in the present context, but I have not advocated for constantly spammable instant-casts. I just like a degree of additional burst healing available atop our GCDs because of the complexity in fight design and player interactions therewith that such permits.

OGCD heals would be far, far more useful to the game if they could act as something that isn't quite the core of healing nor saved only for specific mechanics (instead, having their consideration interwoven a lot more around our GCDs heals and time-sensitive attack GCDs), but included reasonably/sparingly, they are good thing. Their presence permits that much more from fight design, but they do not force anything. Yes, we should probably re-concentrate/consolidate some of them; they are become rather bloated. But they are not the reason for high movement, etc.; they did not force those outcomes.

Look to the other kits and to trends across the expansions. Movement is simply a growing design fad that fits poorly born partly of and partly for the watering down of role identities (especially, that of Melee and Casters), not a consequence of oGCDs heals.

[Renathras]

Good use of... Roe's resource

It was a nit-pick of a nit-pick, so turnabout is fair play. That said, I didn't use Roe's resource, I looked it up myself earlier to verify what she posted (Wayback sometimes does some weird stuff, as do some of the referenced pages; Mr Happy did a series on the Jobs through the game's history and worked through that process). Far as I can tell, she was using an archived version of it, I'm using the modern version's page with the version history.

But this is an aside distraction, and as I said, I don't hammer people for honest mistakes admitted fairly. Let's get back on track, shall we?

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They kind of do mean they have to be, otherwise, there would be no pressure to use all the oGCDs and to plan out their use carefully to ensure you have them for the movement phases. If there was no movement, you could use them willy-nilly since they would be completely substitutable vs the GCDs that you have to use during the encounter.

Likewise, large damage spikes are necessary otherwise the kit isn't challenged. If the damage was not "several ways of large damage within a 10 second period every 30 seconds", you could easily deal with it without having to tax your kit at all.

So the oGCDs both encourage and nearly require the fight design to be high movement and heavy damage (when damage is applied) in order to at all pressure the kits. And it even ceases to do so as players gear, leading to the "too much downtime" problem.

Having these tools DOES force this encounter design. At least as much as not having them forces another. Your argument is equally applicable here.