How would you solve the boring "damage rotation" of the healers?

[Eisi]

Are people really incapable of imagining anything beyond the most plain oatmeal take on a melee DPS 1-2-3 (or 1-2-3-4-5) combo as the way to give a healer more DPS gameplay? You know, the thing no caster DPS does except for Red Mage’s melee combo, the one part of their kit specifically trying to mimic a melee DPS?

Idk, I posted some stuff like this thread here: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...rooms-and-WHMs

Here's the idea basically:

[Lailani_Fey]

We should remove damage oGCDs from drk because players might ignore mitigation in favor of their burst.

This however, I fully disagree with, someone tunnel visioning is not a reason to kneecap a jobs kit. [...]

Your analogy draws attention to an essential dilemma in class design. While I appreciate your perspective, the situation with tanks in FFXIV could be seen as a cautionary tale for healers. Consider the following:

• Tank gameplay has become less dynamic, with routine tankbusters and aggro swaps overshadowing core tanking elements like positioning or aggro management.
• Situations requiring a more adaptive approach, such as add management and crowd control in certain fights, are infrequent (P7S, E3S) and unengaging.
• While tanks do have moments to aid teammates, these are often pre-planned and not reflective of dynamic gameplay.
• The push towards a predictable, optimizable fight timeline seems to prioritize perfect execution over adaptability.

This trend towards predictability and optimization in tank roles could foreshadow a similar path for healers if their damage rotations are emphasized. It's crucial to address the foundational issues in healer design first, rather than complicating their roles with more complex damage mechanics.

[...] It's fine for better gear to make content easier over time, it gives that feeling of power and progression as people get through the content. Healers having access to a greater DPS kit just means that they don't get bored later in a tier from lack of healing, simply because they have another engaging thing to focus on.

I respectfully disagree with the notion that enhancing gear should primarily boost HP and defensive stats. The sense of power and progression can be adequately represented through increased damage output, without necessarily affecting survivability to a great extent. This approach could help maintain a balanced challenge in healing, regardless of gear level. Additionally, expanding healers' DPS toolkit as a solution to potential boredom risks overshadowing their primary role. The focus should be on making healing itself more engaging and dynamic, rather than shifting the role towards damage output.

Damage exceeding maximum HP is a mitigation check, not a heal check. Remove the tanks in such a situation and people die, remove the healers in such a situation and people still live, albeit at low health. A heal check is continuous, back-to-back damage such that even with mitigation, you will die.

You make a fair point about the distinction between mitigation and healing. I summed it up as healing responsibility especially because shield healers exist. If you are refering to tank responsibilities like Wild Charge or Tank Buster mechanics, I do agree and it should be kept as tank responsibility.

[Lailani_Fey]

Or if we removed Healing Waltz from DNC because it detracted from their DPS responsibilities. All this does is simplify a job down to its role and not what that job specifically offers.

Your point about the uniqueness of each job's toolkit is well-taken. However, the issue at hand is less about simplification and more about balancing the core responsibilities of a role with its supplementary aspects. For healers, the current trend seems to be a shift towards damage dealing at the expense of dynamic healing gameplay. My argument is not for the removal of damage-dealing abilities but for a careful recalibration to ensure that healing remains a central, engaging aspect of the role.

Healers can and should have increased healing responsibility compared to now, but that doesn't mean they can't also have more than Glaroilificosis spam + DoT. We know it can work because that's how it worked pre-ShB. SCH had like 7 different attacks back in SB while raiding (Broil, Bio, Miasma, Miasma II, Ruin II, Shadowflare, Energy Drain) and it didn't detract from its ability to heal. Now, it only has Broil, Ruin II, Biolysis, and Energy Drain in that same raid environment, with Broil being spammed much more compared to how it used to and Energy Drain being nerfed since then.

While I concur that more varied gameplay is desirable, it is crucial to understand the concept of contribution as a zero-sum game. Enhancing one aspect of a role often requires a corresponding reduction in another. This also applies to the distribution of a player's attention among healing, damage, and movement. In my view, Endwalker raids require an excessive focus on choreographed movement, which detracts from the core responsibilities of healing and damage dealing. Therefore, the priority should be on rebalancing these aspects to ensure a more holistic and engaging experience.

[Lailani_Fey]

We already had lesser free healing, less healing on the rest of the party, and we also had more complex damage kits back in HW and SB, you know what we called healers that didn't heal and only did damage back then? We called them bad healers and then we kicked and replaced them, then life goes on. Can we just call Glarebots bad healers and just kick them again?

It's frankly ridiculous that we have to have our kit design hamstrung because some healers can't do the job they queued up for. You know that some tanks don't mitigate during their burst because they think it's too hard, right? They just demand that the healer shields them, should we then ask for tank burst to be deleted because some of them can't weave mitigation?

Lowered healing requirements and gear creep is only part of the problem, if you only address that portion, you don't satisfy people in the end. Every part of the problem has to be addressed at once or we still end up with greatly unhappy people.

I agree that merely addressing lowered healing requirements and gear creep is insufficient. The approach should be comprehensive, targeting the root of the evolving design issues. My proposition is to start at the foundation and correct the existing and progressing design flaws. Adding more complex damage rotations to healers at this juncture would only exacerbate the underlying issues, leading the development down an unfavorable path. The goal should be to restore a balanced and meaningful role for healers, ensuring they are neither sidelined as mere damage dealers nor overwhelmed by monotonous healing tasks.

[IDontPetLalas]

I agree that merely addressing lowered healing requirements and gear creep is insufficient. The approach should be comprehensive, targeting the root of the evolving design issues. My proposition is to start at the foundation and correct the existing and progressing design flaws. Adding more complex damage rotations to healers at this juncture would only exacerbate the underlying issues, leading the development down an unfavorable path. The goal should be to restore a balanced and meaningful role for healers, ensuring they are neither sidelined as mere damage dealers nor overwhelmed by monotonous healing tasks.

First of all, there are a number of threads on this, to date, the overwhelming majority have not requested "complex damage rotations" for healers.


Secondly, " In my view, Endwalker raids require an excessive focus on choreographed movement, which detracts from the core responsibilities of healing and damage dealing." So now, your talking not only about overhauling the job design , but overhauling the fight design as well?

I'm not against examining any of the above, I'm just pointing out that doing so is likely a complex task and even if Square were to take it on, it would likely not be realized until..late 7.x? 8.0?

[ty_taurus]

I agree that merely addressing lowered healing requirements and gear creep is insufficient. The approach should be comprehensive, targeting the root of the evolving design issues. My proposition is to start at the foundation and correct the existing and progressing design flaws. Adding more complex damage rotations to healers at this juncture would only exacerbate the underlying issues, leading the development down an unfavorable path. The goal should be to restore a balanced and meaningful role for healers, ensuring they are neither sidelined as mere damage dealers nor overwhelmed by monotonous healing tasks.

I would say the exact opposite. Address the lack of damage options now while healing requirements are abysmal, let the community get comfortable with those changes, then gradually increase healing requirements at all thresholds till we find the sweet spot where content of all difficulties can ask for more without stressing the novice healers. Doing it the other way around will make it harder to acclimate to expanded attack options.

[LilimoLimomo]

...

Thank you so much for your well-explained thoughts! There's so much to consider here and you've been very thoughtful.

For the rest of this post, I'm going to try to distinguish between "mandatory healing/mitigation" and "wiggle room". In short, each encounter will have unavoidable damage (and other things like status effects) that has to be healed, mitigated, etc in order to survive the fight. Part of the difficulty of every part of an encounter will be the amount of "wiggle room" that is available to make up for mistakes; if not used for such recovery, then it can theoretically be healer DPS. That's the model for healing I'll be referring back to periodically.

As I mentioned in another recent post, I agree that we can't reach a satisfying outcome to this by simply raising incoming damage; there are a variety of aspects of systems that would need to be re-tuned, including healers themselves.

Healers would become more and more stationary as many GCD heals have cast times meaning mechanical complexity for healers would plummet hard.

You would definitely want to balance the healing required to the amount of movement requirements. If healers can't keep up with the mobility required by content in the same way that DPS and tank classes can, that would be something to address with their kits, whether that means changing certain GCD's to instant cast, allowing charge casts during movement, etc. In addition, not everything under the "mandatory healing/mitigation" umbrella needs to be healing. If there are resources that enable healing, such as MP or charges of various kinds, any abilities that actively manage these and thus prepare for the next bout of healing fall under this umbrella as well.

Even if 50% of GCDs will be required for healing, the other half is still going to be boring nuke spam.

I think there are a lot of different ways to make 100% of GCD's required for healing. To be clear, I'm not saying that's the goal, I'm just saying it's entirely possible. And if 100% is possible, then lesser thresholds will be possible as well. There's no need to settle for a huge amount of DPS time unless we choose to restrict ourselves to systems that prevent alternatives.

Situations where something goes wrong will straight up be unrecoverable. If you need both healers to constantly be healing to even survive without something going awry then every time a healer dies it's going to be an instant wipe.

This is a good concern, but thankfully it's addressable. Encounters do need to to have that aforementioned "wiggle room", and they will, to whatever threshold seems appropriate. But even aside from that, how recovery mechanics occupy the space of that wiggle room needn't look the way it looks now. Just to throw out some unpolished examples, healers can have re-raise, adding a single death buffer for an encounter. Or healers could have once-per-encounter abilities that can mitigate a sticky situation, but with a meaningful downsides like lowered DPS that makes them only for emergencies and not for the "official plan". Do not consider these to be actual ideas that should be implemented, but rather take them as examples of ways that problems that can't be solved with current gameplay mechanics could potentially be solved if we went outside the box a bit.

And if we're being fair, I do think it's important to point out that "50% of GCD's will be nuke spam" and "situations where something goes wrong will be straight up unrecoverable" cannot reasonably coexist. If our combat system somehow becomes so twisted that half of a healers GCD's are DPS and yet they don't have the bandwidth to recover from mistakes, then something is fundamentally wrong and needs to be addressed.

What you are asking for is essentially permanent harrowing hell, a mechanic from p10s that requires heal spam when not solved by tank LB3. This is doable as a one time mechanic in a fight, not as a permanent state of being.

Hopefully the above has clarified that this isn't what I'm after. ^^

Additionally, as of now getting people to full health can happen very quickly.

I anticipate that this is probably among the things that could need a change: that outside of certain rare-use moves, overall healing potency might need to lower to allow more space to play in each player's limited HP pool.

Making aoe healing slow will then just shift the healing role into a near stationary heal spam machine.

Yep, as mentioned above that would be a concern, and if mobility was too limited then adjusting the healer kit to allow more mobility would hopefully address that.

In general the mana cost would have be nearly nullified as spamming GCD heals right now is only possible in extremely limited capacity.

I can see mana going a variety of different ways. If we wanted to have more time spent actively healing, perhaps mana wouldn't play as much of a role in healing. Or if mana regeneration became something that healers could do actively with certain moves, then such moves would both aid in enabling healing while also occupying "mandatory healing" time without actual being literal healing.

This also does nothing to adress healers being extremely simplified in any normal mode content. DPS retain most of their job complexity in normal mode content, Tanks a little less so. Healers have no job complexity in normal mode content at all.

Similar to the above, I think there are a lot of ways to address this. I guess the first one would be to determine whether complexity is a desirable goal. Some players want it, some players don't, but in what proportions? Do these preferences align with other preferences such as the difficulty of the content they're engaging in? I don't have these answers so I can't say, but hopefully CBU3 has invested in trying to elicit this data. For my tastes, I personally don't think healers need much in the way of complexity. The only way that DPS can engage with the encounter is to play the game of solitaire that is their rotation, so I get why a degree of complexity might be preferred there. But healers have more pressing concerns: keeping the party alive from moment to moment. That's innately engaging in a way that slowly depleting a lengthy health bar simply isn't. Is it enough? The answer will vary from player to player. It's a big tangent, but on that note that's why I support class design where some classes are less complex and others are more complex, so that different types of players can all hopefully find a class that aligns with their needs and preferences.

I hope that helps to shine some light on why I see this as not only a desirable solution, but one that is well within the realm of possibility. And thank you for posing such constructive criticism, without which I would not have been able to clarify why I see things differently. ^^

[LilimoLimomo]

Care to take on ty's challenge, then?

If I'm interpreting ty's challenge the way I think is intended, I don't think I qualify. It says:

"To those who believe that the issue with healer design can be completely resolved by increasing the healing requirements only, I have a challenge for you:"

If "increasing healing requirements only" means just by changing what the boss outputs in terms of status and damage, then that's not me. I think more needs to change, like the kits of the healers themselves, potencies, etc.

[LilimoLimomo]

Experienced healers at this moment can go through dungeons with 0 GCD heals, if you add in some Esuna casts, they would still be casting their 1 damage spell 90+% of the time.

Yup. Which is why I think one of the things that needs to change is healers' kits/potencies. If you have so much oGCD heal power that you don't need any GCD's, something has gone wrong.

New players don't stay new forever, they also will eventually gain experience and also become bored

Exactly. And you know what won't decrease the boredom of many healers? DPS. With respect to the healers who do want more DPS, that's not a satisfactory solution to healers who don't want DPS. The allure healers have over other classes is the healing they do, so that's where I would aim to make the class's gameplay shine.

[mallleable]

I wonder what it would be like if when a boss does an attack that also inflicts damage over time that the damage over time component is no longer affected by mitigation buffs/debuffs forcing players to have to just heal through it.