Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[Shurrikhan]

I play healer sometimes in FFXIV, but I main Healer in WoW as a Holy Priest. As a Holy Priest, in terms of what i can do when I DPS, I have:
Smite - Deals Single Target Damage
Holy Fire - Deals Single Target Damage and applies a short DoT
Shadow Word: Pain - DoT Damage.

Obligatory note that this is not how even the most basic healer, the aforementioned Holy Priest, played just 1 expansion ago, wherein even the still-almost-solely-healing-focused meta builds included...

• A (suppressive) nuke attack on a Haste-scaled short CD
• A 1-minute-CD nuke with incap (upgradable to stun)
• A 20s linear AoE CD (fires a skillshot that goes out and then comes back, damaging in both directions - healing and damage)
• Or, 40s radial AoE CD (slowly growing massive explosion - healing and damage)
• Means of generating, through your attacks, additional charges of Holy Fire, which could stack even on the same target
• The ability to cause an enemy's attacks to instead heal their victims up to some (very high) total amount converted
• Or, a super-saiyen mode that allowed you to float around at greatly increased speed, converting your attacks to make them more powerful, instant-cast, and therefore (since they'd normally take up more than a GCD's time) take less uptime each
• Or, another 1-minute-CD AoE 15s-DoT that also caused enemies who attack the victims to be healed
• Or, the ability to distribute three buffs among your allies (MP from attacking, mitigation, and core cooldown recharge rate) per 90s
• Your rushable (each ST heal reduces ST CD's CD; each attack reduces your attack CD's CD) CDs would cause your next heal or attack to deal far greater potency
• An execute skill that can be used earlier at HP cost and on CD
• Buff from damaging enemies in execute range, potentially augmentable for further benefits when killing an enemy with your execute

And among other non-healing actions that were nonetheless important to your value...

• Lifegrip (Rescue)
• Movement buffs (via 3 charges of ground-placed buff-on-pickup or from shielding an ally)
• Purging enemy buffs (spammable ST and AoE on CD)
• Cleansing debuffs on allies (short-CD ST and AoE on CD)
• AoE fear (enhancible, or replacible with an at-range version or a draw-in)
• Incap on undead and demons
• Dominate Mind (controls mob instead of self)
• Soothe Mind (greatly reduces aggro range, allowing party to sneak past)
• Give ally +20% attack speed
• Give ally cooldown reduction on their defensive (think Riddle of Earth, Manaward)
• Give party/raid MP
• Teleporting past enemies in your soulshape (increased movement speed) form would slow them

And that's for your most "vanilla" healer.

[IDontPetLalas]

I keep repeating that what Shurrikhan just listed is not atypical, I had a similar selection of similar abilities in at least 2 games that I played, if not more.

Here's a link to the classic version https://aionpowerbook.com/powerbook/...&aionclassic=1 of one game, the skill list isn't going to give the complete picture due to skill customization (the stigma system, in that game) - but if you hover of the list, as I filtered on max level, classic version- you'll see that there are far, far more DPS skills for the game's sole healer - the only other being a support job, which- as the game went on, was quite capable of solo- healing easier content.

Also, for variety, SWTOR gave these specs as described here https://swtor.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_Sage - as I enjoy playing the underdog I went Republic, and got to throw pebbles . In one spec, Sage goes pure healer and couldn't squash a bug, however in the other 2 specs they're quite fun , in both PVE and PVP, as both burst or dot spec.

[Rithy255]

What I want is to actually heal as a Healer, Doing damage should be something that you can maximise for skill expression instead of just something you can upkeep 100% the time. If we reduce those then we have a chance of making Utility actually more useful in "saving healer gcds" and being more useful and impactful... Especially tanks should feel the need to actually use their cd's to make the healers life easier instead of just kitchen sink tank busters.

How can we get healers to heal?
-Reduce Healer OGCDs.
-Reducing Potencies in general, mainly a reduction to AOE healing, this can also apply to abilities like Shake.
-Increase fight design's damage.
-Reduce tanks default (no mitigation) defensive value, so the healer and tank's both have to think about their kits more.

I wouldn't also mind adding stuff like damage Proc's, different dot timers, just in general slightly more damage buttons, I think the actual issue is more that healers aren't really going to click any of their other gcd actions often... healing at the high end should be about decision making. It's all well and good to give healers more DPS but they will still be boring DPS without adressing the issues that both Healer and Tank have currently.

[PyurBlue]

What I want is to actually heal as a Healer, Doing damage should be something that you can maximise for skill expression

That's already what it is. Healing comes first, it has to. The way FF14 works right now that doesn't prevent healers from having 100% DPS uptime. I don't see it as a problem though. It's just the way the game is designed.

How can we get healers to heal?
-Reduce Healer OGCDs.
-Reducing Potencies in general, mainly a reduction to AOE healing, this can also apply to abilities like Shake.
-Increase fight design's damage.
-Reduce tanks default (no mitigation) defensive value, so the healer and tank's both have to think about their kits more.

I wouldn't also mind adding stuff like damage Proc's, different dot timers, just in general slightly more damage buttons, I think the actual issue is more that healers aren't really going to click any of their other gcd actions often... healing at the high end should be about decision making. It's all well and good to give healers more DPS but they will still be boring DPS

I'm struggling to see the appeal with a focus on constant heal GCD uptime. OGCD's are good thing. They aren't spammable and have cooldowns. They make healing more interesting than GCD's because you can't just mash them on demand. They require more planning and thought. GCD's are a safety net, or at best something to use occasionally when incoming damage is really big. GCD heals don't have any more appeal than OGCD's to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If I had to press Medica constantly, it wouldn't make content feel rewarding or fun.

Increasing the damage dealt to party is fine, it's too low in some areas, but trying to force healers to case heal GCD's instead of damage GCD's won't improve anything.

[Rithy255]

That's already what it is. Healing comes first, it has to. The way FF14 works right now that doesn't prevent healers from having 100% DPS uptime. I don't see it as a problem though. It's just the way the game is designed.

Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"

I'm struggling to see the appeal with a focus on constant heal GCD uptime. OGCD's are good thing. They aren't spammable and have cooldowns. They make healing more interesting than GCD's because you can't just mash them on demand. They require more planning and thought. GCD's are a safety net, or at best something to use occasionally when incoming damage is really big. GCD heals don't have any more appeal than OGCD's to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If I had to press Medica constantly, it wouldn't make content feel rewarding or fun.

Increasing the damage dealt to party is fine, it's too low in some areas, but trying to force healers to case heal GCD's instead of damage GCD's won't improve anything.

You're misunderstanding what I meant by more GCD healing, I don't think pressing medica 10 times in a row is fun gameplay either, OGCD's barely require planning you just press one and heal/mitgate a mech and have the rest of your ogcds. Planning OGCD's would actually be more impactful if you had fewer because they could lead to gains in the first place, right now you really don't need to plan much... maybe in harder fights but a lot of them don't even need healers. OGCD's being a good thing only works if you don't have a abundance of them, I personally think having the need to gcd heal here and there would make it more fun then just pressing one of your 5 OGCD raid wide buttons while ur cohealer also does so in raids.

I'm not saying oh yeah healers should spam medica! fun gameplay, but healers should be actively pressing gcds more often in my opinion, Healer is at it's most fun when you've got to make choices between DPS/Healing, It should be difficult to maximise damage output while healing that's what makes it fun, That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

[PyurBlue]

Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"

You're misunderstanding what I meant by more GCD healing, I don't think pressing medica 10 times in a row is fun gameplay either, OGCD's barely require planning you just press one and heal/mitgate a mech and have the rest of your ogcds. Planning OGCD's would actually be more impactful if you had fewer because they could lead to gains in the first place, right now you really don't need to plan much... maybe in harder fights but a lot of them don't even need healers. OGCD's being a good thing only works if you don't have a abundance of them, I personally think having the need to gcd heal here and there would make it more fun then just pressing one of your 5 OGCD raid wide buttons while ur cohealer also does so in raids.

I'm not saying oh yeah healers should spam medica! fun gameplay, but healers should be actively pressing gcds more often in my opinion, Healer is at it's most fun when you've got to make choices between DPS/Healing, It should be difficult to maximise damage output while healing that's what makes it fun, That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

You're right, I misinterpreted your post. While OGCD's themselves aren't bad, they need to be balanced against the amount of damage the party is taking. Currently we have too much healing/too little damage, and most of it is tightly scripted, which takes away a lot of the planning and resource management aspects that we could have.

[Renathras]

I'd argue that WHM was the exception ; not SCH, as of HW AST had more going on in utility too

Strictly speaking, I was talking about ARR.

That said, the split was still more apparent in HW. AST, for example, was the pioneer of the "one spamnuke + one DoT" model of healing DPS kits.

Should also note here: Even WHM had more utility options back then. Protect (CNJ/WHM was the only one that got the Pro-Shell trait) and Stoneskin were, for the time period, utility actions.

I think what people have to realize is that 4 mans are always going to be kind of boring. It doesn't matter what they do, they're going to keep it simple for MSQ stuff. Anything MSQ and probably 24 mans are made for an extremely general audience. So at the end of the day, changes to make things "more exciting" (damage OR dps kits) won't happen there. So the discussion is really on Extremes and higher, since the other stuff...probably isn't going to change much, and if anything (e.g. Pantheon 24 mans) they're moving in the more accessible direction.

So are healer kits AS A WHOLE. What I mean by this is that they design healer kits for a really general audience. It's why I pitch my 4 Healers Model all the time, because it allows for wiggle room. BLM and MNK clearly aren't made for entry level play for the most part. MNK is pretty complex with high optimization but also a higher skill floor than a lot of Jobs due to both the unusual and more intricate base rotation as well as the faster GCD. Then you get into is resources and cooldowns and high end abilities and it completely throws it for a loop. But the Job is able to exist this way because there are other DPS Jobs - even Melee DPS - that are far simpler to pick up and play as well as to master.

Likewise, even with ShB SMN, The Caster role has had RDM since SB as an easy to pick up, play, and optimize/master member of the Caster role.

But the Devs are on record saying they got rid of Cleric because of the community fighting about it and new healers feeling too pressured both to DPS and to DPS in a way that compromised healing. Since that change, though, Yoshi P has also said that there was still too much, which is why they removed even more going into ShB. So the Devs are on record saying they consider DPS kits on healers to be too difficult for "accessibility reasons". That's their position. Meaning we won't likely ever have a case where they make the DPS kits more fleshed out BUT refuse to change healing requirements, since they've been even stiffer on less DPSing healers being more accessible than they have even on healing requirements. Recall in ShB, when they were saying that less damage was good, they were teasing at the time an intent to increase healing requirements, showing of the two, that was the one they were more willing to change.

I do agree that SE doesn't seem to like things being different because of balance...and yet, the Melee, Ranged, and Casters ALL have more diversity in their kits than Tanks and Healers do. And if anything, DPS Jobs are the ones where balance is more significant. If SCH did 2% more damage than WHM, that's 2% of 60% (since healers do ~60% of DPS Job output), which is 1.2%. On the other hand, if DPSers are off by as little as 1.5%, that's a bigger difference in overall party damage than a healer doing 2% less than another healer.

Not to mention we have RDM/SMN and BLM sharing a role, so even there the argument completely folds.

I still think they're more likely to say "We'll have an easy, couple mediums, and a hard for each role" than "We'll have all members of a role being hard/complex". Granted, complex is entirely subjective, but Yoshi P talks about old school MMOs where healers effectively had little to no damage kit and mostly only used it for soloing. I think he might be more willing to budge on something like GNB/SGE being more damage focused than on making all healers damage focused, since he's afraid of another healer exodus like SB.

It's why I think a solution that allows both to coexist has the most chance of success. Which is more likely, EW WHM + Aero 3, or HW WHM being readded to the game, or WHM with a full on "elemental phase" burst rotation along with more GCDs to optimize and shorter duration DoTs to drop? If we're being honest, we'd be kind of lucky for them to give us Aero 3 at this point. And how much LESS likely is it that we'll get a full on tank-level DPS kit for all the healers?

.

I know I get maligned a lot for "wanting braindead rotations", but my own proposal includes adding complex rotations to a couple of the healer Jobs, and strikes me as the most likely one Yoshi P would listen to. "So, WHM will still be easy for people picking up healers, so I don't have to worry about a mass exodus of healer players, but I also will have some people coming to the role that typically main DPS Jobs?", or "So now all healers are complex, trying to appeal to the types of players that like to DPS, but it's risky since we don't know how many of them will actually take on the added stress of managing player health bars AND we run the risk of people that don't enjoy DPS rotations leaving the role, causing a healer shortage?"

I feel like the mixed approach/4 Healers Model is actually more likely to get more damage buttons on a couple of the healers than any demands of a blanket "all or nothing" approach that demands all of the healer Jobs get more.

What I want is to actually heal as a Healer,...
...It's all well and good to give healers more DPS but they will still be boring DPS without adressing the issues that both Healer and Tank have currently.

Basically agree with most of this post. I don't even think we need more damage on all of the healer Jobs, some are already in a good place, they just need to actually need to use GCD heals. I'd add one other thing - MP/resource management so you actually DO think about which heals you want to use. Do you want to use that expensive Medica 2, or Medica 1 that costs half the amount but does far less healing? Cure 2 to heal a lot now or Cure 1 to be sustainable with your MP pool or Regen to be somewhat sustainable as well while healing for more but taking more time to do so (is it safe enough to take time to heal or do you need the healing now, and if now, do you need a LOT that justifies the high MP cost of Cure 2, or will a Cure 1 or two be acceptable?)

I'm struggling to see the appeal with a focus on constant heal GCD uptime.

Because a lot of people play healers because they want to heal people. They want their gameplay focused around a healing rotation/skills, not a damage one.

The big problem with oGCDs isn't that they exist, it's that they're as or MORE powerful than our GCDs, often enough to do all the healing on their own, and we have so many of them (other than WHM) that you can heal entire encounters without ever hitting a GCD heal. This would be fine, except then what do you do with that empty GCD? Do you just sit in place? Well, you want to do something productive, so what do you do? Well, you spam a damage spell, and that's boring. People often complain that around 80% of their GCDs cast in an encounter are Glare/Broil/Malific/Dosis.

There are two ways to fix that, only one of which is "more DPS buttons as part of the rotation". The other is "more GCD healing required", since a GCD spent healing is a GCD NOT spent casting a boring spam nuke over and over again.

That is the appeal.

oGCDs are NEARLY spamable because we have so many of them. Let's take SGE as an example. Here's a list of oGCDs it has and their CDs:

No CD (limited by Addersgall, 1 per 20 sec): Durochole
30 sec: Ixochole, Kerochole, Pepsis
45 sec: Taruochole
60 sec: Physis, Krasis
90 sec: Soteria, Zoe, Rhizomata
120 sec: Haima, Panhaima, Holos (arguably Pneuma)

While not all of those are direct healing, a lot of them are healing + bonus additional effects, and they're both frequent and powerful, replacing GCD needs entirely. SGE is a big offender here, but other than WHM, all of the healers have a ton of oGCDs. WHM itself has a lot, having Benediction, Assize, Asylum, Tetragrammaton, Divine Benison, Temperance, Aquaveil, and Lilybell as outright healing or mitigation, with Presence of Mind, Plenary Indulgence, and Thin Air working to make your GCD heals stronger/faster/more accessible. And that's also not counting Afflatus Solace/Rapture as "oGCDs", despite them effectively being equivalent to them in the sense of having no MP cost, a resource based CD, and damage neutral.

They're too powerful AND too many/too frequent, so they outright replace GCD healing for the most part.

Which is fine if we have a couple healers that work that way, but not for a healthy overall healing model.

But having too pick and choose which heal is best based on the situation, how quickly the healing needs to be applied, how much healing needs to be applied, what resources you have available, and what resources you need to save is really engaging and fun. Far more fun to many people than doing a DPS rotation and weaving the occasional oGCD heal.

Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"
...
That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

Yet again I find myself saying I agree with your posts. Well said.

[Sebazy]

No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way.

This really depends on your perspective. To you it might not have been a staple, but to a high end healer it likely was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlj5BQPQwnw

Oct 2013, long before patch 2.1, Note, healer doing significant DPS when cooldowns permit. Skip to 3:40 and check out the cleric uptime on the first boss, beastly!. Also note the gear, primarily Darklight with Relic weapons.

Random reddit discussion about how to deal with super long pulls in WP during patch 2.0 in 2013. People are already mentioning healer DPS potential despite how brutal some of those pulls were if you weren't boss gating them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...derers_palace/

Waffle_Slapper 1 point 10 years ago
I usually let my hots do all the healing. I'll start with divine seal> cure2 > regen > swift cast > medica2 > eye for an eye > presence of mind > cleric stance > holy untill everything is dead or shroud due to aggro or mp.

Joffrey_is_so_alpha[S] 1 point 10 years ago
I wish you could come on some of my FC runs! I occasionally go with 2 other WHMs and a SCH, and we tear the place up with Holy spam. (Note this was from the OP who was complaining about the mega pulls in the first place!)

Basically, Nabril's choice of wording is poor, but he's not entirely wrong. Healer damage and it's value was pretty well understood and was a known quantity from pretty early on. People just generally didn't place much importance on it until Faust came along and introduced everyone to our future evil overlord, Mr DPS check.

[Renathras]

This really depends on your perspective.

It does.

But we're talking about the general community here, not just high end raiders. Not only that, it wasn't even consistent among the high end raider community yet, and world first clears (for example, First Coils) had the WHM not casting DPS spells and focusing on party healing. It became more a point of contention with Second Coils since theorycrafting started picking up and since the Savage was released and was...well...VERY savage. But this also wasn't the way the game was being played by many people at the time, and arguably not the way it was designed and intended to be played.

When that became more mainstream was in HW, which resulted in Cleric being deleted because of all the problems it causes. This is also where we start to see the design intent as that's where the famous Yoshi P quote about them not factoring healer DPS into balance came from, and where they shifted to making raid bosses less DPS demanding, and then removed Cleric Stance outright (as a toggle) with the launch of the following expansion.

But the point remains that from the outset, FFXIV was GCD healing focused, not oGCD healing focused. Not only that, our kits were weaker vs the damage we had to deal with back then.

So people arguing against it can't really rest on the weight of inertia or "it's always been this way" to make their arguments for them.

The game was arguably at its best when it accommodated different types of healer players and different types of healing. The most diverse healer kits we've ever had were in SB where SCH was basically an ARC/SMN without Fester and Bahamut, but AST was a mainline buffer with a spamnuke + DoT rotation and WHM was a mainline healer with two DoTs and a spamnuke, which then was improved in ShB and EW. The problem was, WHM was fixed as SCH and AST were broken, and then encounters became more scripted (less random attacks, boss autoattacks, and boss crit autoattacks) at the same time, leading to a massive kit/encounter disconnect.

ShB or EW WHM existing in SB would have been very popular (vs the kind of garbage that was SB WHM), as it would have actually fit the encounter designs of the time a lot better.

If you could shift encounter design and damage profiles back to SB levels, then take EW WHM and combine it with SB SCH and HW AST, you'd probably have a really good set of healer Jobs and most players would probably be pretty happy with that result, like as not.

[Doragan]

That said, the split was still more apparent in HW. AST, for example, was the pioneer of the "one spamnuke + one DoT" model of healing DPS kits.

That wasn't the case in HW, though. We had 3 DoTs, one being Aero from crossclass. This really started being a thing in Stormblood.

FFXIV was GCD healing focused, not oGCD healing focused. Not only that, our kits were weaker vs the damage we had to deal with back then.

So people arguing against it can't really rest on the weight of inertia or "it's always been this way" to make their arguments for them.

Lustrate's % healing working in Cleric Stance? Whispering Dawn (double buffed or not) being completely busted until like Shadowbringers? This used to be the main way to heal allies during raidwide due to how often and how bombastically strong it was comapred to what it is today.

Please don't try to rewrite history like that. Ask anyone else who has been raiding since ARR and they'll tell you how it has *always* been this way, like. They are still playing the game, come on.