Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[AmiableApkallu]

Obviously, the problem with that argument is that they have no solution that makes GCD heal casting NOT suboptimal play.

This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation.

A GCD heal might suboptimal for your personal DPS while being optimal for the party's total DPS. This is the fundamental trade-off that a healer makes -- or would be making in this game if healing requirements were a bit higher and/or oGCD heals less available.

For example, presented with a situation where a party member has tanked the floor prior to a bona fide body-check mechanic, spending a GCD (or more) Raising that party member is the optimal thing to do. Continuing to blithely spam your nuke because "Raise is a DPS loss" is sheer idiocy given that doing so will lead to a wipe. In this situation, if you're the sort of healer that will cast that Raise only if it's "damage neutral", then to be blunt, you are a bad healer and should go play a DPS job.

The same style reasoning applies to every other GCD-based heal.

[Renathras]

This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation.

No, it's not.

But regardless, the point stands: Making GCD heals damage neutral basically puts them on the same footing as oGCDs, just with a limiting factor of MP rather than of CDs (though in some cases it can be both, like Pneuma). People that like weaving oGCDs between damage spells and not using GCDs hate this idea, since GCD healsers would be arguably as effective as they are, but in strictly mechanical terms, there's no reason not to do it.

And we're talking about GCD heals. Raise is not a "heal" in the normal sense. So to be blunt: That is a gross misrepresentation of the argument. (Also, I haven't seen anyone asking for Raise to be damage neutral, have you?)

[Sebazy]

Making GCD heals damage neutral gets a bit of a bad rap but I do appreciate why.

It needs to be done tastefully IMO, just slapping a refund onto everything puts us in a position where you might as well go full keyboard cat if resources allow, it further takes the finesse out of the role, further shrinking the gap between the skill floor and ceiling, something many are still sore about after the removal of so many other facets and intricacies of our kit.

To turn a point you tried to use against me in another thread, the healer jobs themselves are already largely braindead (AST burst phase allowing), why push something that makes them more so? It doesn't make me think more in mainstream content? It doesn't make an alliance raid more engaging? It doesn't fix me being bored senseless on solo content?

*HOWEVER*

IMO this sort of dismissal only really stands up when you take the (Sadly almost inevitable) perspective of SE simply slapping a refund on our existing GCDs and calling it a day

You've probably seen me rant and rave about the glory that was Warrior Priest in Warhammer Online many a time, a big part of what made it stand out over other more traditional MMO healers was that the entire class was not just a damage refund, it was damage positive. Using the right ability in the right moment was a net gain on resources and potency per minute over simply standing back and mashing a heal. It sucked you in, the more you understood it, the more dynamic it became and the more it rewarded you.

Basically I think done right in a manner that rewards both activity and ability choice, damage neutrality could be a very good thing indeed, Quickened Aetherflow was a great trait that I still miss for good reason even if it was seemingly quite insignificant in isolation. Simply slapping a refund on Medica II spam or some other silliness just doesn't feel good for me though, sorry.

[Renathras]

...I understand, to a point, the why.

In vacuum, it means there's nothing to really optimize. Situation X pops up and you hit somewhat whatever your hand activates first when you just smack your controller/keyboard without looking, and it solves the problem.

But I think this is a thing we agree on - such changes shouldn't be done in a vacuum/stand-alone/aren't the only things that should change.

For a very simple example, imagine a world where all your GCD heals aside from Cure 1 cost a lot of MP and MP actually was relevant. It isn't right now, but this would be a change. Now the "random smack your keyboard" style of "gameplay" goes away. Chain casting Cure 3 makes you go oom and now you can't do anything. Being DPS neutral doesn't change that if you have no MP to take any actions at all. So there would still be consideration for what the best tool for the moment is. If Cure 3 and Medica 2 cost 2000 MP, for example, now there WOULD be cases where you might consider Medica 1. Right now, there's no time you'd ever use Medica 1 over Medica 2 since it has a shorter range and Medica 2 does as much healing even as chaincasting Medica 1 (more or less) since the first HoT tick makes them equal, and Medica 2 has a 5y longer range for a miniscule 100 more MP cost which is irrelevant if you're using Lucid on CD anyway. Further, you'd still have to consider things like overcapping Misery, which you might sometimes still need to do if you were having to cast more GCD heals with more healing intensive encounters. And there are times that things like Tetra would still be useful options, such as when you have two very damaged people before a pre-body check AOE (that is, where the boss AOEs and would kill them, causing the subsequent body check to fail) where you might Cure 2 one and weave Tetra oGCD to heal the other before the attack lands, thus salvaging the attack and body check.

It takes very little thought to see how just making GCD heals damage neutral wouldn't make the entire world end, but rather would add more interesting choices and optimizations - because "oGCD healing plan + Glarespam" clearly isn't more interesting. Hell, if we just made GCD heals damage neutral RIGHT NOW and DIDN'T change anything else, that would STILL be more interesting. I'd have the option to roll HoTs across the party or not, which is already more interesting than Glarespam.

[Sebazy]

Hell, if we just made GCD heals damage neutral RIGHT NOW and DIDN'T change anything else, that would STILL be more interesting. I'd have the option to roll HoTs across the party or not, which is already more interesting than Glarespam.

It's a little more nuanced than that. The irony is that rolling hots across the group would actually be the superior choice. You get the same damage and you have continuous healing rolling on people as mechanics mitigating risk and just overall making things comfier. That's before we touch on the advantages of an instant cast Regen for mobility and timing vs Glare's short cast time. I did something similar for Hello World prog, rolling regens and precasting Medica II en route to my spot to reduce the risk of a ranged dps death in certain combinations.

it would just be.... weird and counter intuitive IMO.

[Shurrikhan]

You've probably seen me rant and rave about the glory that was Warrior Priest in Warhammer Online many a time, a big part of what made it stand out over other more traditional MMO healers was that the entire class was not just a damage refund, it was damage positive. Using the right ability in the right moment was a net gain on resources and potency per minute over simply standing back and mashing a heal. It sucked you in, the more you understood it, the more dynamic it became and the more it rewarded you.

That's fair, but a couple things:

• What was the balancing point for the Warrior Priest? How much of this "damage positive" refunding did it rely upon just to match other healers? (How much of a disadvantage did it face outside of its ideal situations, and were those situations more finnicky than those of other healers?)
  
  
• What were the mechanisms by which a Warrior Priest could achieve damage neutrality or better with its heals? Were those situations spammable?

For something spammable, as we typically mean by "GCD heals" in discussion of balance (wherein Solace/Rapture are the single outlier), to be able to achieve damage-neutrality (let alone be something around which the kit must be balanced, through "damage positive" returns), those opportunities, at least, must not be continuous (at least to your average, even if skilled, Savage raider, etc.).

But how do you limit them? (Not a rhetorical question.)

If heals naturally scaled with incoming damage, you could use a refund mechanism on a burst healing skill that does not scale with incoming damage in order to allow it a degree of scaling, much like The Blackest Night does.

But when they're all of flat value? Sure, you could make a heal uniquely scale with incoming damage while the rest do not, but then any refund mechanism for getting a good use out of it just makes a situation in which "the rich get richer; the poor get poorer," purposely unbalancing it.

Or, perhaps you have the refund mechanism trigger when it doesn't meet parity... but then you're just squishing the fail condition of that action, which will likely --in balance-- take some of that retained value from its would-be peaks. Given that we could already tighten balance between jobs without squishing the fail condition of a skill unique to them (by just offering that more distinct job alternatives), that doesn't seem worthwhile either.

Quickened Aetherflow was a great trait

It also wasn't a refund mechanism, though. It was simply a trait which, in effect, reduced the CD of Aetherflow from 60 to as little as 45s, and punished you for not spending your last AF at least 5s before the skill would finish cooling.

(Yes, it originally did 10s at a time, but only at a 20% chance, and that was changed within a single hotfix/minor patch, into the 100% chance of 5s from 4.05 onward until it was removed.)

[AmiableApkallu]

it would just be.... weird and counter intuitive IMO.

In a world where we literally, quoting Renathras,

just made GCD heals damage neutral RIGHT NOW and DIDN'T change anything else,

my issue would be that maintaining a HoT is no more interesting than maintaining a DoT. "Push button on a timer" is not interesting without a mechanic that tries to confound that (let's conveniently ignore that I'm bad at that as it is).

That said, I would agree that modified MP costs could be that confounding mechanism.

[TheDustyOne]

That said, I would agree that modified MP costs could be that confounding mechanism.

I kinda wanna keep note of this if I change up my reworks; MP-less heals aren't refundable, but MP-heavy heals are refundable. MP more or less is something time-gated, so it still works as the deterrent for spamming, while still offering free Cure and Medica options if things really do go south. Even makes Piety a little more useful.

[Sebazy]

It's been a few years so apologies to anyone that plays the community rerelease if I get anything wrong:

• What was the balancing point for the Warrior Priest? How much of this "damage positive" refunding did it rely upon just to match other healers? (How much of a disadvantage did it face outside of its ideal situations, and were those situations more finnicky than those of other healers?)

• Warrior Priest was very heavily risk vs reward centric. It had a reasonably competent bread and butter ranged heal but on a sluggish cast time that stifled mobility hard. From memory the biggest drawback was that it's ranged/cast kit was entirely single target, you had to triage manually if you had multiple people taking damage (Granted AoE healing was no way near as prevalent as it is in FFXIV). To utilise it's powerful instant heals you had to use your melee kit which in turn freed up more time to get more swings out of the hammer. The trade off here was that Warrior Priest was fairly squishy and had minimal ranged control or CC. The gameplay loop generally involved starting out at the back looking for a window to dive, then jumping in to cause as much damage/healing throughput as you can before you had to back off, then spending your remaining gauge whilst looking for the next opportunity to jump in.
  
  
  

• What were the mechanisms by which a Warrior Priest could achieve damage neutrality or better with its heals? Were those situations spammable?

[Sebazy]

Help I broke the internet