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

[KenZentra]

snip

Yes, thanks for breaking down how healing in FFXIV works and that healers deal damage more often than heal, welcome to the thread. Obviously you would cast less heals when you heal more effectively. Looking at your last graph, yeah, and isnt that a problem? You cast 2 healing spells out of 24 casts of damage. You spend roughly 92% of your casts as a healer, dealing damage. The obvious outcome of spending (apparently) 100% of your time pressing 2 buttons is that you want more buttons to push. Naturally, you'd want to fill those with buttons your are going to push during healing down time, but at that point, you are not really a healer anymore. I mean looking at your final graph, what would the difference be between a healer and a DNC with extra curing waltzs (whom is filling in for a healer)?

As I've said before, giving all healers a DPS rotation to follow is just going to reinforce that they are DPS first and healers second, which the devs will apply to encounters going forward. When devs design encounters, the first thing they look at is how healers are going to deal with what it throws at them, and with how scripted and structured the game has becomes (especially for healers) the outcome being that all healers need to be able to deal with the exact same mechanics; get to max HP, with shields. Get hit, repeat. You get dropped to low HP (in savage) and then you do two oGCDs and continue dealing damage, just as you've shown.

Im not sure how its some radical idea that healers should probably be balanced around not spending 92% of casts (or 100% of GCDs) dealing damage. Maybe the devs should just buff DNC to have more curing waltz lol

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not sure how its some radical idea that healers should probably be balanced around not spending 92% of casts (or 100% of GCDs) dealing damage.

It isn't. It's also not an idea that anyone here has fought against -- only that the solution is not simply to flip the table into 92+% of casts spent on healing, as that leaves almost nothing left for recovery, and spamming Medica is not particularly any more interesting than spamming Glare.

And by the time you get the portion of GCDs heals down to an amount still remotely accessible, such as a "mere" three-quarters of casts, the downtime kits of jobs like SCH would still feel flat (ED wouldn't be worth using and that leaves them with just Bio per 30s and Broils between).

That is to say, rather than just the one, it requires at least a few steps:

1. Increase healing requirements to, MP being mostly a non-factor, what might makes fights feel threatening (even if not yet interesting) for healers but short of outright wipefest hellscapes.
   
   
2. Address the (im)balance of healing spells relative to each other through categorical (only this one player needs healing and/or they need it faster than Medica can produce) and/or shared-resource (e.g., MP, AF, AG) concerns and/or through just curtailing the most absurdly powerful spells among them. Ideally, take that opportunity, also, to make it so the spell kits aren't basically just the same basic copy-pasta across every healer. By the end of this, the healing itself should be pretty interesting.
   
   
3. Provide a sufficiently engaging downtime kit to handle at least what flexible space remains in group content among skilled players. This may not be enough to solve healers being dull in solo-content, but solo content is not exactly the point of an MMO. Ideally, find ways for this kit to interact, even if indirectly or just coincidentally (such as through priority conflicts in spending refreshing two status effects, one offensive and one defensive), with the healing kit so that each is made more interesting through the other's presence. By the end of this, healing in group content should be thoroughly engaging (even if not solely do to the healing actions themselves).

[KenZentra]

It isn't. It's also not an idea that anyone here has fought against -- only that it the solution is not simply to flip the table into 92+% of casts spent on healing, as that leaves almost nothing left for recovery, and spamming Medica is not particularly any more interesting than spamming Glare.

And by the time you get the portion of GCDs heals down to an amount still remotely accessible, such as a "mere" three-quarters of casts, the downtime kits of jobs like SCH would still feel flat (ED wouldn't be worth using and that leaves them with just Bio per 30s and Broils between).

I dont think healers should be spamming 1 button ever and never have, just like any other class or role. But I do think they need to spend more than 8% of casts healing. I would reckon reworking healers to using their whole kits and more interaction between their spells would promote that. Right now, healers have next to no interaction between abilities in their kits, whether thats their DPS or Healing. As well, more unique healing spells that arent just "heal/shield for X" or "Heal/shield everyone for X", but the structure of the game right now will not allow anything else, which is part of the problem.

[Shurrikhan]

I dont think healers should be spamming 1 button ever and never have, just like any other class or role. But I do think they need to spend more than 8% of casts healing.

Then that's you and every 'DPS in disguise' on here.

Stop strawmanning those asking for a 'mere' 35-65% of a skill healers' casts being spent on healing as solely wanting "DPS rotations" and less than 8% of casts spent on healing and you'd find common ground real quick.

Again, the sticking point is very simple: To many here the existing downtime kits --especially on jobs like SCH (or, more broadly, non-SGEs)-- wouldn't be sufficient at any amount of healing requirements that would still be reasonably accessible. That's why they're asking not JUST for healing requirements to be increased (nor, for that matter, just for downtime kit to be improved), but for BOTH to see revisions.

Asking for just the one over the other is merely running with the premise of the thread (IF you had to pick ONE) and/or a note on the state of the devs' willingness to actually do squat, in which case solely improving the downtime kit would work for all situations without potentially excessive decreases to accessibility (some decrease is fine; losing all but your very best healers is not), while solely increasing uptime can satisfy only in harder group content and requires a much larger host of accordant changes to make feasible. If you must, blame the OP for the false ultimatum, but the sheer number of people quickly saying "NEITHER should stay the same" or "BOTH should change" should already have clued you in to this.

Regarding the last point? Two issues with that 1- exactly what level of skill? and 2- "solo content is not exactly the point of an MMO"- that's the view of some, but not all players, and looking at the amount of solo content in this game (such as deep dungeons) I wouldn't say that this is true of this game. That is definitely true of some MMOs, even to the point that no content can be completed solo- but that's becoming less common from what I've seen.

Let's say... skilled enough to clear a Savage tier Week 1 without guides and within 12 hours worth of pulls, provided they have a pretty a consistent party (not resetting progress due to PuGing). Or an Ultimate raider. Whatever tf you like that sets a fairly high bar, since we want to appeal EVEN to their amount of downtime, as they will have the most downtime.

And note the "at least". If even an Ultimate raider is able to feel pretty engaged even in Extremes and Savage, then I'm happy. I don't need them to feel super engaged by MSQ solo fights. But if that were possible, then great.

[KenZentra]

Stop strawmanning those asking for a 'mere' 35-65% of a skill healers' casts being spent on healing as solely wanting "DPS rotations" and less than 8% of casts spent on healing and you'd find common ground real quick.

I'd absolutely love to see my strawman. I've never said "healers should spend 100% of the time healing" like you think I have. I've only said I think they need to spend more than 8% of their total (GCD and oGCD) casts on heals, which is what the math comes out to according to "ty_taurus". I've said time and time again, that adding more DPS buttons will not solve the problem of Healers feeling boring and what I think would fix it, is if they were required to cast more heals due to more consistent damage being thrown out and healing spells having more interaction with each other outside of "Heals X amount". I also argue that adding more DPS buttons will require Healers to focus more of dealing damage more than healing, which they already focus on currently. Again, I have never and will never say "healers need to spend 90%+ of their time/GCDs/Actions as healing". I said, "more than 8% of actions healing". Whats higher than 8%?

35-65% of a skill healers' casts being spent on healing

Ah, thanks for that.

Asking for just the one over the other is merely running with the premise of the thread (IF you had to pick ONE) and/or a note on the state of the devs' willingness to actually do squat, in which case solely improving the downtime kit would work for all situations without potentially excessive decreases to accessibility (some decrease is fine; losing all but your very best healers is not), while solely increasing uptime can satisfy only in harder group content and requires a much larger host of accordant changes to make feasible. If you must, blame the OP for the false ultimatum, but the sheer number of people quickly saying "NEITHER should stay the same" or "BOTH should change" should already have clued you in to this.

Oh. Well, Im sorry that I was staying on topic? Crazy that in a thread about having one or the other, I decided to talk about having one or the other. Even still however, If healing kits (and by extension encounters) are revamped to heal more often, then you will have less time to DPS, so no, you would probably not get more DPS actions. That also applies vice versa, if you have an expanded DPS kit, you will most likely have the same or less healing actions to avoid button bloat and job complexity.

Again, I tank and heal, and mained healing from HW until EW. I guess playing a role makes me a "DPS in disguise"?

Talking about strawmanning, btw:

I have said Healers need to heal more than what they do, which according to someone else looked like 8% of their actions.
-You said that I was in favor of flipping it to 92% of actions as healing, rather than damage.

I have said if Healers have a bigger or complex DPS kit, they will be spending less time healing, as to keep up their DPS they will forgo GCD Heals, which they already do and will continue to enforce a meta already in motion that Healers DPS more than they heal, by a lot.
-You said I am strawmanning people asking for 35-65% healing casts as wanting DPS rotations, which I did not.
In fact, I had actually said that I'd be more than happy to have a healer that does decent damage like SCH used to do in the past and that healers shouldnt have to spam any button over and over again, whether thats healing or DPS. Its almost like I want healers to be fun also? While you are over here actually strawmanning many things I've been saying. You can just like, not agree with me instead of starting an argument?

[Shurrikhan]

I'd absolutely love to see my strawman. I've never said "healers should spend 100% of the time healing" like you think I have.

Nor did I say you did.

Talking about strawmanning, btw:

I have said Healers need to heal more than what they do, which according to someone else looked like 8% of their actions.
-You said that I was in favor of flipping it to 92% of actions as healing, rather than damage.

Nor did I say that. I simply pointed out, across multiple posts now, that...

• Even if you flipped how we spend our GCDs, uninteractive spammable filler heals would still be uninteractive filler, regardless of whether it's a heal or attack; the problem goes beyond mere tuning relative to content into also the tuning and functionality of skills among/relative to each other, and treating our healing kits as just needing increased difficulty hurts what is possible for/from those kits.
  
  
• Increasing healing requirements to a point that our downtime kit would actually be fitting (e.g., some 80% of skilled healers' GCDs spent healing) would likely decrease cast diversity when compared to a lower bar (a mere majority of time spent healing) for which, yes, our present downtime skills would still seem insufficient to many. Difficulty without balance tends to reduce variety of actions. You need the balance, too.

We started all this with a simple note on my part not to confuse "It's boring when I'm not healing much" (which I could even accept as a fact of being a healer, even if that still seems wasted opportunity to me, as tanks can be plenty interesting even when their not nullifying much damage or positioning many mobs) with "It's boring because I'm not healing much." One thing that repeatedly surprised me, at least initially, in healing in tBC, WotLK, Cata, WoD, BFA, and ShL, and echoed when listening to healer-main Mythic streamers, etc. was that the fights with more interesting decision-making and moment-to-moment actions around healing were rarely the ones that cranked up healing requirements all the way up to 10/10, because those fully cranked up fights actually devolved their cognitive load into mere whack-a-mole with MP-efficient spam. Unless the kit is perfectly suited to make a puzzle problem out of that particularly cranked-to-hell fight, there is a point of painfully diminishing returns, even if we were to think nothing of downtime tools going to waste (say, for lack of MP, so that we'd instead spend that time idle).

I.e., don't underestimate the impact the kit itself has on how much can be managed out of it at various levels of stringency; it's not quite as straightforward as it might first seem, and pushing too high can actually remove a given kit's ability to engage with its complexities, which are the actual enjoyable part for many (as compared to the mere mechanical whackamole that increasingly replaces it). That was it.

To which concept you responded with "People who play this game like to pooh pooh actual MMO healing, then go back to hitting that glare key like a woodpecker," as if having played XIV for any time left me unable to appreciate the raid/M+ healing I'd done in WoW or GW2 and left me happy with Glare spam??? Seriously, what?

We're already talking some 80+% healing uptime there, and the difference being mostly just whether one is even able to interact with some of my healing nuances otherwise available being pushed out by too high of burst intake (can't set up/can't use efficient heals/spec basically barred until hotfix) or too great of total damage (forced towards the most MP-efficient shit only, actually decreasing my number of real options and concentrating my CPM down to fewer and fewer among my non-CD actions).

How is the likes of 'high requirements, but not quite so high as to literally reduce my number of effective choices among my heals' wanting godsdamned Glare spam? How is caring about how the kit itself is designed and how it might otherwise devolve to equally few choices under tuning increases alone wanting Glare spam?

If it's so bad to prefer fights that allow slightly more elaborate plays (and less spec exclusion) and the occasional damage key, fair enough, I guess, but no part of what I had said implied being okay with Glare spam, only that difficulty affects what healing complexities can reasonably interact with at BOTH ends, and our kits' balances in themselves play a hefty part in what engagement can come from those encounters.
_____________________

EDIT: Now, if your response after quoting me had little to nothing to do with what you quoted of me, I apologize for the mis-assumption in thinking your reply was meant for the person you quoted / was made in reply to the ideas presented in that quote. But if my preferring just short of whatever healing requirements are so tight as to actually devolve healing kits is too attack-spam-happy to you just because we might still be able to fit in the occasional utility-laden attack, then we're going to have to agree to disagree.

Again, I prefer that a typical healer spends a majority of their time healing. I actually like the existence of weaker, more-MP efficient heals for the flexibility they allow in tuning. I'm not exactly super DPS-focused in what I like from my healing jobs/classes/specs. I just feel that healing kits need to be considered for their interactions at varying intensity levels (if only for the fact that we want room for skill expression and gear will inflate over time) and that even 80% time spent on healing would still be worth improving downtime kits over.

[IDontPetLalas]

It isn't. It's also not an idea that anyone here has fought against -- only that the solution is not simply to flip the table into 92+% of casts spent on healing, as that leaves almost nothing left for recovery, and spamming Medica is not particularly any more interesting than spamming Glare.

And by the time you get the portion of GCDs heals down to an amount still remotely accessible, such as a "mere" three-quarters of casts, the downtime kits of jobs like SCH would still feel flat (ED wouldn't be worth using and that leaves them with just Bio per 30s and Broils between).

That is to say, rather than just the one, it requires at least a few steps:

1. Increase healing requirements to, MP being mostly a non-factor, what might makes fights feel threatening (even if not yet interesting) for healers but short of outright wipefest hellscapes.
   
   
2. Address the (im)balance of healing spells relative to each other through categorical (only this one player needs healing and/or they need it faster than Medica can produce) and/or shared-resource (e.g., MP, AF, AG) concerns or through just curtailing the most absurdly powerful spells among them. Ideally, take that opportunity, also, to make it so the spell kits aren't basically just the same basic copy-pasta across every healer. By the end of this, the healing itself should be pretty interesting.
   
   
3. Provide a sufficiently engaging downtime kit to handle at least what flexible space remains in group content among skilled players. This may not be enough to solve healers being dull in solo-content, but solo content is not exactly the point of an MMO. Ideally, find ways for this kit to interact, even if indirectly or just coincidentally (such as through priority conflicts in spending refreshing two status effects, one offensive and one defensive), with the healing kit so that each is made more interesting through the other's presence. By the end of this, healing in group content should be thoroughly engaging (even if not solely do to the healing actions themselves).

Regarding the last point? Two issues with that 1- exactly what level of skill? and 2- "solo content is not exactly the point of an MMO"- that's the view of some, but not all players, and looking at the amount of solo content in this game (such as deep dungeons) I wouldn't say that this is true of this game. That is definitely true of some MMOs, even to the point that no content can be completed solo- but that's becoming less common from what I've seen.

[Nizzi]

[*]Provide a sufficiently engaging downtime kit to handle at least what flexible space remains in group content among skilled players. This may not be enough to solve healers being dull in solo-content, but solo content is not exactly the point of an MMO. Ideally, find ways for this kit to interact, even if indirectly or just coincidentally (such as through priority conflicts in spending refreshing two status effects, one offensive and one defensive), with the healing kit so that each is made more interesting through the other's presence. By the end of this, healing in group content should be thoroughly engaging (even if not solely do to the healing actions themselves).[/LIST]

I don't disagree with the idea that solo content isn't the point of an MMO, but given the developers have shifted focus on making content for solo players especially with things like EO or Variant, just doing a fix that only applies in raid content isn't enough. I obviously want to be spamming Broil in Savage/Ult less but I do not want the majority of this game's content to be fundamentally unfun to the role/job I want to play. It's why I know the "uhh give us buffs and make us Esuna more " suggestions will do literally nothing in the grand scheme of things because it's not only high end raids where the role is monotonous and boring. Healer kits are already ridiculously lopsided to have full usage only in Savage/Ultimate, and while I understand the healing portion of the kits won't ever be able to be stressed in casual content, it's even more of a reason to make these jobs fun in that content.

Like even if we go back to 2013 Coils era where most people were standing still and spamming Adlo, Physick and Succor and waiting around to recover MP, there's a whole other portion of the game that isn't serviced by that and I also want to be able to have fun in that too. I don't see how what a level 50 Scholar had in 2013 is too much for a potential level 100 Scholar player to deal with in 2024.

"If you want to have fun just go play a DPS job" is not an appealing option for me personally. I don't like how fun is an afterthought for the role.