Healer kit adjustment idea, 40% dps to 60% heals/utility

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

To me it doesn't matter whether it's 10/90 or 50/50 split. Design both sides to be more interesting, cohesive, or/and engaging to play with. Then I'm sold.

[LilimoLimomo]

So do you do Extreme, Savage or even Ultimates as a healer to get that then?

I would if all that Extremes/Savages added to the mix was bigger heal requirements, but unfortunately I can't get that without also fielding many other requirements that are alienating to me.

Heavensward really hit the sweet spot for me where healers had a meaningful job outside of EX/Savage.

[IDontPetLalas]

Healers in FF14 remind me of a scene from the second Kill Bill film. A bouncer arrives late to work, and his boss chastises him for it. The bouncer looks around the empty club and says something along the lines of, "I don't see how this is a problem, there's nobody here to bounce." And his boss responds, "Are you saying that the reason you weren't doing your job is because there's no job for you to do? You make a very good point."

And that's really how I feel about healers.

Adding more DPS to healers doesn't make me want to go back to healing; it makes me want to play a healer even less. When I want to DPS, I play a DPS class. I play healers because I want to heal.

First of all, I think your analogy could be improved a bit. In your analogy, the boss has made two valid points- the first is that bouncer should have been there on time - right now, we aren't discussing whether the healer should be included. Regarding whether the bouncer is needed at all- fair enough, I see how you want to apply this to how you feel about healers.

Now we get to the "how do you feel about healing". I don't know how you feel about clicking 1 button to DPS. I know that if no one needs healing, I don't want to just stand there, and clicking one button (since I just have a dot) and having an occasional card flip could be improved upon.

That doesn't "make me a DPS" in my mind, as someone who had a DPS main for many years there's a distinct difference in how that feels. As a healer or a support (I've enjoyed both) the enjoyable part is being able to balance both DPS and healing, and where it was fun was when I had a balanced selection of skills for both. That's not the case presently for healers in FFXIV.

[LilimoLimomo]

I do totally understand that mindset, and frankly I do want to agree. What’s the point of a healing role if all it does is dps and pop some healing cooldowns?

At the same time though there’s also an element of having to temper your expectations. It’s practically impossible for the devs to ever create a situation where healers literally cannot / will not aim to maximise dps output and reduce the amount of heals used to the absolute minimum. Even if they lowered healer dps to deal like, 1 damage, the game would still revolve around minimising healing output as much as possible and maximising the amount of 1’s you deal to the enemy.

With respect, I think this misdiagnoses the problem. I think it's perfectly fine if some players want to min-max their DPS as a healer; I'm in no way opposed to that, more power to them. The issue is simply that there's not enough damage hitting the party. In normal content boss fights, it feels like my time as a healer is spent 25% healing and 75% DPSing. That's not an issue with min-maxing (especially since I'm not min-maxing), that's an issue of there not being enough of a job to do. As a non-min-maxy player, I want 80-95% of my time to be spent healing. If the min-maxers can shave some of that off to deal even more damage, I think that's cool. But they should be doing more damage because they're just that damn good at healing, not because the healing requirements are on the floor.

I know this is possible to achieve because it's what I experienced in Heavensward. My hope is that we can closer to that again.

[LilimoLimomo]

First of all, I think your analogy could be improved a bit. In your analogy, the boss has made two valid points- the first is that bouncer should have been there on time - right now, we aren't discussing whether the healer should be included. Regarding whether the bouncer is needed at all- fair enough, I see how you want to apply this to how you feel about healers.

Now we get to the "how do you feel about healing". I don't know how you feel about clicking 1 button to DPS. I know that if no one needs healing, I don't want to just stand there, and clicking one button (since I just have a dot) and having an occasional card flip could be improved upon.

That doesn't "make me a DPS" in my mind, as someone who had a DPS main for many years there's a distinct difference in how that feels. As a healer or a support (I've enjoyed both) the enjoyable part is being able to balance both DPS and healing, and where it was fun was when I had a balanced selection of skills for both. That's not the case presently for healers in FFXIV.

Haha, that's fair, it's not a perfect analogy. It just really vibes with me.

I don't mind doing mild DPS, I just don't want to feel like the majority of my time as a healer is spent DPSing. If I'm DPSing as a healer, it should be because I'm so good at healing that I've carved out some extra time for myself; every time I cast Glare it should feel like I'm getting away with something. That's not how it feels right now; my Glares are not evidence of skill, they are simply what I'm doing most of the time. Give me healing to do 80-95% of the time and I'll be happy pressing Glare for the rest of it. (although if I'm honest, I really miss Stone IV)

[LilimoLimomo]

We could just, ya know… have both?

It just continues to make a negative amount of sense why healer has to be the role that is regularly subjected to the “you want to DPS? Then play a DPS!” Fallacy when tanks aren’t constantly badgered by the same argument. can we switch that for at least one expansion please? Just give me one expansion where healers get to have lots of DPS tools and tanks get “I play tank because I want to tank!” Anti-DPS players constantly getting in the way of tank players who want their DPS returned and making them cry until 4:30 am in front of the bathroom mirror eating chocolate chips out of the bag because there’s nothing else sweet to eat in the house.

I think there's room for both, in that if there are a few healer classes that spend more of their time doing DPS, I think that's fine. So if you personally want to be a healer that spends more time DPSing, I would like there to be one or more classes where you can get that experience. But what I want as a healer is to focus 80-95% of my time on healing, so I hope there's a class where I can get that experience as well. Because healer is the only class that provides the experience of triage gameplay, so when that's what I'm after, I don't want to get "not enough" of it.

[ty_taurus]

I think there's room for both, in that if there are a few healer classes that spend more of their time doing DPS, I think that's fine. So if you personally want to be a healer that spends more time DPSing, I would like there to be one or more classes where you can get that experience. But what I want as a healer is to focus 80-95% of my time on healing, so I hope there's a class where I can get that experience as well. Because healer is the only class that provides the experience of triage gameplay, so when that's what I'm after, I don't want to get "not enough" of it.

That's not something class design can give you. The only way to achieve that is to redesign how all of combat functions to have constant outgoing damage, probably with greatly reduced AoE healing potential to force healers to spot heal through single targeting predominately, which would in turn require a rework to every major fight to accommodate a much slower pace of outgoing damage.

Quite frankly, FFXIV is not that game, and it has never been that game.

[LilimoLimomo]

Quite frankly, FFXIV is not that game, and it has never been that game.

If my terminology is leading us to envision different games, I'll simply clarify by saying that I liked what healing looked like in non-Savage/EX content back in Heavensward, and that's the vibe of what I'd like to see again.

[ty_taurus]

If my terminology is leading us to envision different games, I'll simply clarify by saying that I liked what healing looked like in non-Savage/EX content back in Heavensward, and that's the vibe of what I'd like to see again.

In order to accomplish that, you'd want to prune a fair amount of self-sustain off the tanks as well as cut each healer's free healing resource pool significantly (OGCDs primarily). You don't heal because every healer has an answer to nearly any instance of incoming damage that does nothing to make them stop attacking. Make GCD healing more interesting, but you'd also want a much smaller selection of heals to compliment the relatively slow outgoing damage provided by most content, while those tools still have the flexibility to handle healing mechanics in more recent harder fights.

The problem with adding more healing is that, since we aren't adding more damage, the new healing resources are forced to share the same uptime that older healing resources had, which isn't a lot. And once we reach that point where we've stiped away the excess healing and reworked each healer's healing tools to have more interactivity and are capable of complimenting both the easier content and the harder content, we will eventually be forced to ask the question of, "What now?" When the next expansion rolls around, what do you add? If you add more healing again, you'll just end up back in the current situation unless you increasing outgoing damage frequency accordingly, which is very unlikely to occur. So what do you add at that point?

[LilimoLimomo]

In order to accomplish that, you'd want to prune a fair amount of self-sustain off the tanks as well as cut each healer's free healing resource pool significantly (OGCDs primarily). You don't heal because every healer has an answer to nearly any instance of incoming damage that does nothing to make them stop attacking. Make GCD healing more interesting, but you'd also want a much smaller selection of heals to compliment the relatively slow outgoing damage provided by most content, while those tools still have the flexibility to handle healing mechanics in more recent harder fights.

There are numerous ways to go about it, but I think this is among the good ones! ^^

The problem with adding more healing is that, since we aren't adding more damage, the new healing resources are forced to share the same uptime that older healing resources had, which isn't a lot. And once we reach that point where we've stiped away the excess healing and reworked each healer's healing tools to have more interactivity and are capable of complimenting both the easier content and the harder content, we will eventually be forced to ask the question of, "What now?" When the next expansion rolls around, what do you add? If you add more healing again, you'll just end up back in the current situation unless you increasing outgoing damage frequency accordingly, which is very unlikely to occur. So what do you add at that point?

If I understand you properly, you're saying that there's an issue where with each new expansion, there's an expectation that there be additions to each healer's kit. And if those new spells are being used, that necessarily means that other spells are being used less, because they all cost uptime which is a limited resource. Hopefully I'm hearing you correctly.

While this is indeed a facet of design that's worthy of consideration, I don't see it as a particularly challenging one, and there are a variety of ways to go about it. If I'm indeed understanding you correctly, it makes me think that perhaps you are thinking that in "trimming excess healing abilities" we will arrive at some sort of perfect equilibrium state that any change would disrupt? But I in no way think that's the case. For example, let's say you end up in this equilibrium where "healing feels good". In that equilibrium state, WHM didn't have Asylum, but the new expansion comes out and now WHM has Asylum as a cooldown GCD. What do you do? It feels pretty simple to me:

• Asylum adds an amount of group healing per minute equal to A.
• Asylum replaces another GCD, so let's say one less cast of Medica 2 per minute, meaning that there's M less group healing per minute.
• So the new amount of healing per minute is whatever the old value was plus A minus M, meaning there has been an increase in group healing equal to A minus M.
• So to maintain equilibrium, you increase incoming damage to the party by that same amount. There we go, equilibrium has been maintained.

It's also worth noting that you don't even need to get rid of abilities to do this; you just need to calculate the healing that healers are capable of outputting per minute and balance the incoming damage to it (with some wiggle room, of course, so that players can survive without being perfect). And you can balance it either by raising incoming damage, lowering healing potencies, or a mix of the two.

(Hopefully I did understand what you were getting at, but let me know if that's not what you were saying)