Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[TheDustyOne]

Can you teach me this black magic?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Mother Nymeia. What have you done?

[ty_taurus]

When healer discourse has reached the point of glitching the forums itself.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Why would we necessarily want that, though, let alone for all of them?

On SCH, you'd effectively have...

• a 3-charge CD with 4 options, with a further bottleneck of 45s, 30s, 30s, respectively, on its later, higher priority actions (Lustrate; Excogitation, Sacred Soil, Indomitability), recharging in sets of 3 per 60s
• a multi-cost 10 to 25-charge CD with 3 options (Physic, Succor, Adloquiem), regaining over 80% charge per minute
• a 10-charge CD that starts combat at 0 with 1 option (Aetherpact), gaining roughly 3 charges per minute
• a single-charge CD with 1 option (Fey Blessing), recharged per 60s
• a single-charge CD with 1 option (Recitation), recharged per 90s
• a single-charge CD with 1 option (Deployment Tactics), recharged per 120s
• a single-charge CD with 1 option (Protraction), recharged per 60s
• a single-charge CD with 1 option (Expedient), recharged per 120s
• a single-charge CD with 1 option (Whispering Dawn), recharged per 60s
• a single-charge CD with 1 option that opens up a 2-charges of a follow-up action (Summon Seraph, Consolation), recharged per 120s

Those are the means through which your potency per average minute is split, no line competing with any other line. Making GCDs no longer compete with damage added only that single, 3-option line.

But at the same time, the sheer amount of healing possible through those 10-25 charges that take only a little over a minute to fully refill basically renders the rest redundant.

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.

Some people like playing Chess by setting a cat on the enemy side of the board, toppling the opposing king. Not all preferences are worth wrecking the existing game to placate. A game built to leverage an assembly of skills of varying weight as to rewards fight knowledge and awareness, then having so huge a flexible resource is going to encounter some massive anti-synergies with that general objective.

It's like bringing an uzi to a medieval combat simulation mostly built around close-range dueling. Sure, it may be nice for those who don't want to use medieval weapons, but it ruins the existing experience.

All this is not to say that you can't have compelling GCD gameplay. Most healing experiences I've partook in that have mostly or all GCD heals also happen to have, imo, more compelling healer gameplay than XIV has (though not merely because our healing output options competes more with each other than XIV's do until having run out of CDs).

You just can't have spammables (or, skills with a massive pool and high value-recharge rate) that are as effective as strict CDs without defeating the whole point of those strict CDs having been included in the game.

[Renathras]

Help I broke the internet

Is it sad that this is legitimately one of the cooler things that's happened here? XD

EDIT:

Shurrikhan: I didn't say anything about all of them. You know my stated position on healers, so why would you think that?

For my part - if it wasn't obvious by the examples - I was talking about WHM more specifically. I do think it would be POSSIBLE (since the other poster posited the question) to do so with other healers, but I'm not sure it would be the right call on all of them. I've also argued before, in threads you were a part of, that I'd honestly like to see Afflatus Solace and Rapture removed and, instead, have the base GCDs act as that, with MP being the limiting factor instead. I've also suggested an "Afflatus" ability like Recitation or Eukrasia that modifies the next GCD heal to be instant cast and all the rest as if it was a Lily ability. I've proposed both things as suggestions to possible changes to WHM's healing kit.

Because I understand some people like playing chess and some people like playing checkers and some people like playing Warhammer 40k and we all have to play on the same table/board. Also, note that the "existing experience" is what we have now, not a more complex DPS kit experience. We HAD compelling GCD gameplay in ARR (at least on WHM), and debateably in HW and SB. ShB explicitly introduced the Lilies to keep WHM GCD focused,but I feel they did it the wrong way.

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Ideally, we would have only a few oGCDs and healing would mostly be GCD based. But some people don't like that. So IDEALLY IN THAT CASE, we'd have some healer Jobs that do one and some that do the other. Right now, we don't really have that. We have WHM with pseudo-oGCD GCDs and an extensive slate of GCD heals that are never touched. Medica 1 is outright pointless as Medica 2 is better in literally every way other than a MP cost so negligibly higher that it's irrelevant. Cure 1 at least is faster at firing off than Cure 2 and (less than) half the MP cost. For all it gets derided, at least it's DISTINCT from Cure 2, something Medica 1 doesn't have going for it. Are are some, albeit niche, cases you would use Cure 1, while there are no cases you would use Medica 1 unless you're trying to be EVER so slightly more MP efficient. You can literally remove Medica 1 from your bars and lose nothing of value as long as you aren't running content lower than level 50 since that's the only time you'd ever need it as spamming Medica 2 produces effectively the same healing that spamming Medica 1 does, and at effectively the same MP cost and with a 5y greater radius. And if you don't need that radius (e.g. when the party is stacked), you could just use Cure 3 instead.

[Shurrikhan]

Help I broke the internet

You have a List inside an indentation or split by a quote. You likely forgot to resolve a List that was within what you quoted of me.

[Sebazy]

You have a List inside an indentation or split by a quote. You likely forgot to resolve a List that was within what you quoted of me.

My head cannon is that warrior priest discussion is too powerful to be contained by mere <hb>'s and I'm sticking to it!

[Shurrikhan]

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.

____________

It was the reverse, you generated resources pretty much by connecting your hammer with mobs or other players, the more people you managed to hit, the more gauge you built. This in turn allowed you to weave in your powerful instant cast heals meaning more GCDs were freed up to swing the hammer creating a sort of potency snowball.

Wait, that doesn't sound anything like heals refunding their offensive costs, though -- only a means of adding in more free damage since its uptime costs get refunded through bigger heals.

That's effectively a trade-off of "+ Bonus damage" in exchange for your healing having "- Limited effective range" and requiring "- Increased personal risk".

We already have many, many examples of that mechanism across other games (heck, see the post-Legion WoW's Holy Paladin, for instance, whose gauge generation depends heavily [though among other things capable of more range but on far longer CDs] the use of Crusader Strike, a filler melee attack).

We also see this already on Sage, whose every attack already pack ~40% of a basic healing GCD's worth of healing, and at lesser MP cost.



Do we have any examples from other games, though, of healing actually giving offensive refunds (not offense giving healing refunds)?

ShB explicitly introduced the Lilies to keep WHM GCD focused,but I feel they did it the wrong way.

When was that explicitly mentioned? I don't particularly doubt that it was, but the results looks almost precisely like they saw complaints about homogenization coming out of kit prunes and Role Actions in Stormblood, noted that WHM would otherwise need additional charges and potency or available cast frequency on its oGCD heals AND a movement skill AND something through which to redeem Secrets of the Lilies... and decided "**** it, 3 birds, 1 stone. We'll do them all together. And it'll even be diverse for our having done so."

There are some, albeit niche, cases you would use Cure 1, while there are no cases you would use Medica 1 unless you're trying to be EVER so slightly more MP efficient

Agreed. Between 2.1 and 5.0, I might have said at least that Medica I was better for topping people off immediately, but once the regen potency was again boosted (at first to just 100) and duration halved and cast time reduced to a GCD... (And then EW took that even further by buffing it to a whopping 150 potency per tick, up from 50 and then 100, and direct healing potency from 200 to 250, all without even increasing its MP cost, for... reasons?)

Because I understand some people like playing chess and some people like playing checkers and some people like playing Warhammer 40k and we all have to play on the same table/board.

Aye, but some are more compatible games (sets of objectives and mechanisms which support that) than others. If you've three marine animals and one tortoise, chances are you're going to badly limit the many to support the last. Sometimes, it's worth setting boundaries.

Also, note that the "existing experience" is what we have now, not a more complex DPS kit experience. We HAD compelling GCD gameplay in ARR (at least on WHM), and debateably in HW and SB. ShB explicitly introduced the Lilies to keep WHM GCD focused,but I feel they did it the wrong way.

ARR's kit being compelling had almost entirely to do with tuning, not the lack of GCDs. Hop into Twisting Coil with a plugin to keep track of mock-timers and a plugin for custom dummy buttons and see how compelling it is. Even when playing with the Minimum Item Level option, potency creep and tank passive sustain increases make kind of a joke of that experience.

oGCD heals weren't favored any less then; there was just more incoming damage than, say, SCH's 75% HP per minute via Lustrate could remotely deal with.

And you already know my position on healing requirements: While I'm not a fan of increasing the damage per event by much, I am in favor of increasing the number of damaging events greatly, increasing the total healing required by ~40% or so. (There are many accordant small adjustments I'd make to let oGCDs and GCDs play together better, but all that's really required to make GCDs relevant again... is more damage intake.)

On that matter, though, I might not be in agreement with many others here, to whom a 40% increase in healing requirements (even presuming we have the MP to make up for it, etc.) may seem excessive. Though I agree with them that we could use a couple extra downtime tools regardless.

[Sebazy]

Do we have any examples from other games, though, of healing actually giving offensive refunds (not offense giving healing refunds)?

Strictly speaking, I'm struggling to think of an MMO healer that specifically gets damage back from healing without resorting to sort_of_ism's by way of time/opportunity as is the case with Warrior Priest.

I have a nagging feeling that SWTOR might have had something close but I'm struggling to put my finger on it, Combat Medic had a filler heal that generated their ammo resource but I'm struggling to remember if any actual damage was gated behind it.

Another of Warhammer Online's healers was a mage that theoretically had to evenly deal damage and healing output to balance a gauge for optimal potencies but from memory it was a bit of a bust and to my memory at least, never really quite worked as intended. WOL's cleric type healer was built around a buff/debuff rune gimmick rather than direct damage.

Beyond those reaches and of course, FFXIV WHM I'm at a bit of a loss.

[ForsakenRoe]

I've also suggested an "Afflatus" ability like Recitation or Eukrasia that modifies the next GCD heal to be instant cast and all the rest as if it was a Lily ability. I've proposed both things as suggestions to possible changes to WHM's healing kit.

Can I get a doublecheck on why I got chewed out for suggesting a 0-100 gauge on WHM, with claims that it'd be 'homogenization' (despite the only other healer having a 0-100 gauge is SCH, and it works very differently from what I suggested for WHM)...

But 'a modifier that works like Eukrasia', to the point of even changing the cast time of the heal to be instant (like E.Diag or E.Prog are, compared to their non-Eukrasian counterpart) is somehow fine and not 'homogenization'?

Beyond those reaches and of course, FFXIV WHM I'm at a bit of a loss.

Current Resto Druid, I know off the top of my head has a CD called Nature's Vigil, which is 'For 15 sec, all single-target healing also damages a nearby enemy target for 20% of the healing done'. Pretty sure that includes any HOT that is 'single target' like Rejuvenation. If you pop it after your ramping is set up (eg alongside Flourish) it can add up to be a lot more damage than your filler GCDs. But I suppose the question is, are you asking for kit where 'you use the healing, and that leads to you being able to deal damage to recoup the lost damage later', or something like Pneuma, where it's a case of 'it's used for healing, and happens to be damage neutral at the same time'. Because there's a few more examples of the latter than the former usually. Like Shamans now can deal damage over time with Healing Rain with a talent, which you'd also be using to heal. But that's 'damage neutral in the moment', rather than 'damage neutral via a refund mechanic at a later moment in the fight' which doesn't give as much agency to the player

Also congrats on breaking the forums