Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

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

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

[TheDustyOne]

Oh sure, I have 99 of them.







But I might need all 99 later.

[ForsakenRoe]

*for the people thinking of when WHM had Aero 2 and Aero 3 but think that Aero had an 18 sec duration; Aero 2's duration was made 30 sec in SB and Aero 3's was 24. Functionally we've substituted Aero 3 2.5x per min for Afflatus Solace/Rapture/Misery 4x per minute.

I think you got a different copy of the expansion to me

edit:

You can see Solace at the bottom, which means this is the SHB changes. Even in SHB, Aero2 was 18s, not 30s, and only became 30s duration when upgraded to Dia. The change that standardized the DOT at 30s the whole way through the levelling process did not occur until well beyond Endwalker's release (given that I can see the patch note for the change in the 6.1 patch notes). If you want to say 'A2's duration was changed to be functionally 30s thanks to it's upgrade to Dia, A: say that, and B: it still didn't do that till SHB introduced Dia.

If you want to tell me I'm wrong/misremembering/blinded by nostalgia, that's fine, but you better come with receipts cos I sure as hell will be doublechecking this stuff.

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.

On the other hand, removing the oGCDs would mean the fight design would change a bit (less movement all the time) and that falling back on GCD spam would be functional (less difficult for newer healers).

This just absolutely hamstrings fight design, no? We can have big mobility dance mechanics like Act 2 or Act 4 from P4S where we run all over the place, specifically because we're not locked in place for casting GCD healing. And in those cases where there's movement AND GCD healing required, that is an expression of skill, to be able to keep up on a healing check while also having to deal with 'something the game is doing to prevent you from healing'. Act 4 was kinda hard to heal early on as WHM, partially because WHM not great (MP issues), partially because of the running around that was required. If the AOEs from the thorns were smaller such that you could safely stand middle and turret, that mechanic would be a joke by comparison

The fights are designed around the assumption that we have a certain amount of healing that is available, even while moving. I also don't think that pressing Medica like 8 times in a row, to deal with something like Curtain Call, was interesting. I found it much more fun to do that fight on AST, because rotating the CDs I had available to me to cover 16 raidwides in a row required some thought. Would it be enough to just use Celestial Opposition for the next few, or do I need to supplement with another thing? I only have one use of Neutral, where would be best for it? etc.
I don't like Medica and Helios, as they are. There's zero interesting design around them. I would much rather have things like the Lilies, where there's reasonable 'caps' on their effectiveness, be it via CD, Recharge times, target count caps, etc. At least Cure3 has a range limit to work around, but they keep extending that too. They might as well delete Medica1 and just make Cure3 15y at this point. Which they probably will in DT, let's be real

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

I seem to be doing that with my resources in OSRS. Prayer potions? Better hold onto those for when I do PVM stuff. I have the materials for over 4500 prayer potions in my bank.
I do not need to hoard so much and yet I do, I think it's encoded into our brains from when we were living in caves and not 100% sure we knew where our next source of food would come from

[Silverquick]

Thats why i said raide wide should happen more often,
Higher auto atk dmg means you have to heal the tank more often, 100% uptime on hots.
Even better would be to randomize dmg also.
Every fight is scripted --> every heal can be planned.
By adding RNG and unavoidable damage into the mix --> you can make healing more reactive.
But we all know SE will never do that, inc the overall dmg output would be more realistic goal to wish for.

[/B]

They might actually be starting this or rather testing the waters on it.

I've been noticing when running the Expert Dungeons that it's really starting to do a lot more raidwide damage. And you can tell when the healer is asleep at the wheel because you start to have people dropping to Stackups. Its really noticable now when you don't have a healer keeping people topped off. I was on RDM and ate a tank buster the other day because the Tank went down. On another occasion I dropped to a Stackup and even just dropped out of nowhere because the healer wasn't keeping people topped off after the raidwides. Nice thing about RDM is that when you have a healer not doing that, you can turn around and start Vercuring yourself to keep from dropping because the healer didn't keep up with the constant Raidwide.

[Shurrikhan]

Quick correction of facts:

*for the people thinking of when WHM had Aero 2 and Aero 3 but think that Aero had an 18 sec duration; Aero 2's duration was made 30 sec in SB and Aero 3's was 24. Functionally we've substituted Aero 3 2.5x per min for Afflatus Solace/Rapture/Misery 4x per minute.

Aero II was only made a direct upgrade to Aero I (no cast time, 18s duration, up from 12s) when Aero I was pruned in Stormblood. We didn't get our 30s DoT until Shadowbringers.

*for the people thinking of Cleric Stance and when WHM had Aero 1, 2, and 3; that was HW, not SB.

Which says nothing of all four buttons having existed together. Granted, you already know what I thought of old Cleric Stance (mostly thoughtless ping-punishing garbage).

_________________

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.

On the other hand, removing the oGCDs would mean the fight design would change a bit (less movement all the time) and that falling back on GCD spam would be functional (less difficult for newer healers).

That's not just fight changes; those are significant fight constraints: Little to no movement, little to no significant burst (for which oGCDs ought to be held), little to nothing requiring quick reaction.

Hard pass.

Needing, at least in high-end content, to use an increasing number of skills as level increases is true of every role... Why should Healers become a (further) exception to that?

[Rithy255]

Something dawned on me... from a time long long ago... yes it's name was white mage.

I remember in shadowbringers it having a long cast time, I really liked that about white mage made it feel like the "healer counterpart of BLM" but now that cast times are so small on it, doesn't hit the same, I kinda remember why I enjoyed white mage and it being hard to move sometimes... using lillies as movement.

But THIS is the thing I don't even think healers need full on rotations... they just need interesting differences in combat, I think Adding damage buttons to some healers may enhance it, but adding cool differences in how the job fundamentally plays is also really healthy. This + healing more often, some procs here and there... Just would feel a lot better.

[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.

...

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.

.

"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

.

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.

.

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

[Fyrebrand]

And give DPS and tanks massively buffed self healing

Apparently there's at least one player out there who thinks your wish has already come true.

I just had a random Black Mage player come up to me and ask me about something that happened in their last dungeon run. Apparently, the healer refused to heal the BLM at all and let them die. When BLM asked why they were acting this way, the healer told them "You can heal yourself in a boss fight."

Imagine caring about your own healer DPS so much that you let the actual DPS jobs die and slow down the run. Not to mention acting like such a big shot while not even knowing BLM doesn't have a self heal.

[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.

.

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.

.

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).