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

[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)