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

[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.
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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.

[Shurrikhan]

A small note on "Healers are DPS first, healers second":

So long as the fight is won by reducing a unit's or units' HP to zero, every job's value will ultimately be about damage.

We bring tanks when the damage the party can produce by having a tank is greater than the damage you could produce without them there, if only by nature of their preventing the greater damage losses that come from deaths and/or the increased at-cost healing requirements the party would otherwise face. The short-term indirect/supportive output (sustain, which just allows damage-dealing units to continue dealing damage, and the ability to reposition enemies for greater effective uptime) will often enough exceed the direct value (damage) one could otherwise manage by having yet another DPS.

We bring healers when the damage the party can produce by having a healer is greater than the damage you could produce without them there, if only by nature of their preventing the greater damage losses that come from deaths and/or at-cost caution the party would otherwise have to deal with. The short-term indirect/supportive output (sustain, which just allows damage-dealing units to continue dealing damage) will often enough exceed the direct value (damage) one could otherwise manage by having yet another DPS.

Make that a fight ended by increasing a unit's or units' HP to X/full/etc., and the relationship would invert. You deal damage (to adds attacking the unit) to nullify healing requirements you'd otherwise have to face. The short-term indirect output (damage) may often exceed the longterm direct output (healing).

The healing requirements are currently too low to always necessitate 1 in 4 members of the party being healers (not necessarily a problem, imo, so long as some fights may also want 3 of 8 to be healers, in turn) or even to take any at all (a problem at that point unless only viable for the best of the best). That much is an issue, sure, and healing would imo feel better if the average healer needed to spend more of their time healing than not.

...But the value of every role will always be in terms of whatever metric (or direction) wins the fight, be that HP-increases or HP-decreases. That's never going to change, nor is it worth trying to change. That's just inherent.



That's also why I can't understand anyone complaining that another party member's mistake --or worse, GCD healing in general-- may cost the healer damage. Ultimately, in terms of party damage, they don't, unless that mistake didn't actually need to be healed. Look at the average clear speed (including wipes) with and without the healer, and see which is, on average, getting that boss to 0 HP faster. Chances are, the mistake being healed is still speeding up the run a whole lot more than not having the ability to make up for it, let alone refusing to for 'mah Glare'.

As a healer, your largest source of (party) damage contribution... is your healing. But, much like having a ton of barely-any-HP enemies or killing with an ST skill an enemy that'd otherwise die to the next AoE before getting its attack off, yes, you can waste some of that contribution by overkillinghealing, because your are dealing with many smaller ally HP bars rather than just a single (in the case of nearly all XIV raids) enemy HP bar.

[Aravell]

I think it's rather strange to claim that we'd be spending more time doing damage if we had more damage buttons, especially considering that we at one point in the past had more damage buttons and we actually spent less time doing damage than healing.

The actual reason that we spend so much time doing damage is because we have way too many avenues of healing without actually dipping into the GCDs, so we end up spending those dead GCDs with damage spells. Because while "Heals for X" has a limit, a limit which is lowered by the frankly unnecessary amounts of tools we have, "Deals X damage" is only limited by the enemy HP bar, so damage will always have the greater value.

Adding more healing buttons would not solve anything, increasing healing required would also require quite a sizeable increase to even come close to pressuring our current kit.

Another note: Even if we spend 80% or so of our time healing, that's still not a valid excuse for why the downtime kit HAS to be boring. There has not been a single good reason why one part of our kit has to be barebones and boring.

[Renathras]

I think it's rather strange to claim that we'd be spending more time doing damage if we had more damage buttons, especially considering that we at one point in the past had more damage buttons and we actually spent less time doing damage than healing.

That's because our oGCDs were weaker (something people have asked for and been told we can't do that since it would make past encounters impossible), we had less oGCD heals (same), and we had more randomized damage with boss crits and continual auto-attacks during casts (we've also been told we can't go back to that), and healing occurred more frequently during the encounters, necessitating at least some GCD heals, and more than now (and we've been told we can't do that because our heals are too powerful - while also being told we can't nerf the heal strength because it would make Johnny Casual unable to clear content).

It's easy to say the only solution is more DPS buttons when you've insisted every other solution is disallowed.

[Shurrikhan]

Except, Ren, the point being made isn't that you can't increase healing requirements, only that you can't increase healing requirements enough for highly skilled players to be fulfilled by merely Broil-Bio without making the experience noticeably inaccessible for less skilled players. Increase that flex space even a bit (e.g., a skill or two's worth of complexity more) and you're golden for most content. Increase it a bit more, and that's yet more content secured.

Neither side will work on its own. Improving just the damage is an improvement of equally insufficient quality to improving just the healing kit. The only difference is that one works for all content without incurring accessibility issues while the other does not. They're both still individually insufficient. But alas, that the shit false ultimatums stick you with.

[Renathras]

Except, Ren, the point being made isn't that you can't increase healing requirements, only that you can't increase healing requirements enough for highly skilled players to be fulfilled by merely Broil-Bio without making the experience noticeably inaccessible for less skilled players. Increase that flex space even a bit (e.g., a skill or two's worth of complexity more) and you're golden for most content. Increase it a bit more, and that's yet more content secured.

Neither side will work on its own. Improving just the damage is an improvement of equally insufficient quality to improving just the healing kit. The only difference is that one works for all content without incurring accessibility issues while the other does not. They're both still individually insufficient. But alas, that the shit false ultimatums stick you with.

...which is probably why many people are okay with giving SCH back its SB kit.

That aside, the issue isn't just "highly skilled players" but everyone else deriving enjoyment. No where has the discussion ever been "what do highly skilled players - and no one else - want?", nor is it like ever to be.

Moreover, such players are going to be bored in 4 mans whether they have a Tank rotation or 2 buttons. Anything less than a full on DPSer rotation isn't going to satisfy in 4 mans with current damage/healing profiles. "What will make high end players not bored in MSQ content" isn't the question, because the answer is "realistically...nothing can".

More DPS buttons alone will not work.

More healing alone CAN work.

The best solution is probably a mix of both - more healing requirements and a couple of healer Jobs having more damage buttons with a couple not. That's most likely to resolve the situation satisfactorily for the most players.

[EDIT: Yes yes, people can say all they want a second DoT and a 3 hit combo burst every 2 minutes will make them not bored...but really? C'mon. That's going to be "novel" for a week, "exiting" for half that, and within 6 months, those same people will be demanding more DPS actions because they're still bored. That doesn't make sense to base the problem/solution on, since it not only ignores everyone else, but it also probably doesn't even address the needs of THOSE players, either.]

[Sebazy]

So how do you view a more fleshed out DPS kit? Will it do the same amount of damage it does right now, less, or more? How do you expect these abilities to interact with each other?
The only things I can think of is procs, DoTs, combos and charges.

IMHO right now the biggest issue with the core concept and gameplay loop of FFXIV healers is that when played at a decent level, pressing glare is either the optimal choice or very close to it.

It's absolutely bonkers to me that SE have continued down this path despite repeatedly claiming 'we want healers to heal more, we don't tune around healer dps' etcetc and yet here we are. Need to heal someone? Glare > Benison > Tetra, want to heal lots of people? Glare > PI > Rapture. Want to raise? Glare > Swiftcast > Raise etcetc. You can say 'But Seb, just drop your cast and swiftcast > raise right off the bat to which my response is simply: That's when you randomly get Swiftcast not taking effect and that raise not being instant, weaving Swiftcast off a Glare solves that entirely.

It's wrong and borderline absurd to me that I should want to weave swift off a glare to remove the risk of it bugging out and not making the raise instant but here we are. Yet another little facet of the game that's encouraging us to just take our brains out and mindlessly smash glare.

This is big part of why I'm actually softer on WHM than I am the other healers, at least with WHM our Lily spenders rival Glare for value per GCD. For the rest, they are locked in firmly and it sucks, doubly so for AST which just shouldn't be. It has so much potential to play like a completely different healer, it's got some truely great ideas like Macro but yet once it's done shovelling all it's cards as tightly into that 2 minute burst window as it can mange, it spends the next ~100 seconds or so playing like any other healer.

Worrying about healers doing more damage is completely missing the point, that's not the goal here. I used to be able to do more DPS than a well played and well geared DPS job in dungeons back in HW as SCH and I'll be the first to admit that was a broken state of affairs. Our damage output relative to other jobs has dropped significantly over the years yet you'll struggle to find people complaining specifically about the numbers themselves.

Basically, I want us to be in a situation where I can do an alliance roulette or such but still get value from thinking about what GCD I'm pressing. As long as the answer isn't nearly always 'Glare' and when it isn't it's 'Dia', I suspect I'll be much happier than I am now. Rather than me waffle on more about all the different ideas I've thrown at these boards over the years, my suggestion would be to go watch some SWTOR or Warhammer Online (if you can find any decent PoVs at least) healer gameplay. Both offered up vastly superior healer concepts to what we have now.

[EDIT: Yes yes, people can say all they want a second DoT and a 3 hit combo burst every 2 minutes will make them not bored...but really? C'mon. That's going to be "novel" for a week, "exiting" for half that, and within 6 months, those same people will be demanding more DPS actions because they're still bored. That doesn't make sense to base the problem/solution on, since it not only ignores everyone else, but it also probably doesn't even address the needs of THOSE players, either.]

You keep saying this, but if that's the case, where was this discussion back in the later half of HW and all of Stormblood? Creator laid the foundations that we are still sat on today, SCH and AST had all the resources they needed to spend significant chunks of time nuking if not to the same extremes that we have now, and of course Stormblood just moved us ever closer to where we are now and finally gave WHM the resources needed to spam rocks as well.

The only comparable issue I can remember back then was one I raised myself at the media preview for Stormblood which was SCH losing it's spammable AoE for 4.0 which was swiftly course corrected.

Why was it fine back then for years, but would be a problem now within 6 months?

More healing alone CAN work.

How many times do I have to debunk this claim. GFC man. I've quite literally done the math and calculated cleanly and openly for you that even if we half our healing potency, it would take a round the clock Harrowing Hell Normal to get us spending 2/3rds of our GCDs on heals.

Harrowing Hell, 24/7. With halved healing potency.

Wildstar called, it wants a word with you sir.

[Zairava]

More DPS buttons alone will not work.

More healing alone CAN work.

The best solution is probably a mix of both - more healing requirements and a couple of healer Jobs having more damage buttons with a couple not. That's most likely to resolve the situation satisfactorily for the most players.

Going to chime in again.

No, increasing healing alone isn't going to cut it. I'm not very skilled at the healing role but even I can recognize that even if you increase the healing need to dish out you are still going to find that downtime and it will boil down to spamming glare/broil/etc. Even for me, I will inevitably fall into that loop.

Increase it too much and you turn either at or just short of spamming healing spells, which isn't much different then just spamming your one damage spell.

The best solution is a mix of both, but if they insist that healing requirements should NOT be higher, then ultimately...yes, the dps is going to be the best route for downtime engagement.

[ForsakenRoe]

That's because our oGCDs were weaker (something people have asked for and been told we can't do that since it would make past encounters impossible)

I'm not sure which OGCD you refer to, but I remember a time when Indom was 500p and now it's 400. Fairy potencies are roughly equal to how they were in SB (they just fixed pet scaling being unintuitive), but they still used to be stronger thanks to Rouse. I suppose you could make the argument that back then we had less, true, for example on AST we didn't have CO as 'second Helios', it was used to extend card durations and had no healing attached.

On the subject of 'something we can't have (weaker OGCDs)', we did actually try that, though not by choice: AST released in 5.0 with 'weaker OGCDs'. You can see the 'panic buffs' to rectify that here:

Since SE buffed them by like 50% (or in some cases, even more), I would call that a good case study on 'actually maybe we can't just reduce OGCD power by 50%'. It wasn't just a case of people complaining because AST was struggling to compete vs WHM (and WHM being cracked for the first time in like 3.5 years), people didn't seem to like the idea of being forced to cover the healing with GCD heals because 'their OGCDs aren't enough to keep up'

Wildstar called, it wants a word with you sir.

Damn that's a name lost to the ages

[ForsakenRoe]

I really like what you've shown here and breaking down what it could look like. Thank you so much!

NP, though I should note that some of the more 'healing side' parts of it were left out, as I was focusing on answering the question of 'how do we make the DPS rotation for healer, without it being interrupted by us doing our job of healing'. So, to clarify the other half of the changes, the healing side:

- I'd make Cure and Medica upgrade at 30 and 50 respectively to Cure 2 and Medica 2. Freecure can stay if the devs really must keep it, just make it so 'Cure 2 has a chance to make Cure 2 free'
- I'd swap Rapture and Plenary, so Rapture would be at 70 and Plenary at 76. This allows Rapture to be available in UCOB/UWU, where WHM has crazy mobility struggles compared to AST (or maybe I just suck)
- I'd add 'Afflatus Tragedy' at level 58 and move Thin Air back up to 68. This would be a low level version of Misery, doing 800p (4 Stone 4 casts is 880p currently). I suppose this one isn't quite 'healing related' though

- I'd add two new buttons ideally, a single target and an AOE shielding Lily spender, with potencies lower than the shield healers currently have and no base heal. I went with 400p/250p, compared to SCH/SGE's current 540/320.
This would allow WHM to get value out of a Lily they spend with 30s of leeway, given that we're now apparently incentivized to purposely 'waste' Lilies to get Misery for raidbuffs. Also, I hate the Pure/Barrier split so I want it gone (I think it failed). I figure we can name them Afflatus Bastion and Sanctuary. Sanctuary, the AOE one, would also have synergy with Plenary, giving it a 200p heal so it functions a little more like a Succor

- I'd readd Divine Seal as a level 40ish skill, boosting our healing potency by 20% for 20s, on a 2min CD. It would upgrade to Temperance at 80, so we don't need an extra button bind for it
- I'd readd Protect at a lower level, as a 5% mitigation, 10s duration, on a 60s CD. It would upgrade to Plenary at 76, so that doesn't need an extra bind either. This is so WHM can compete vs AST, who has CU as a 60s mit
- I'd add a trait to Medica 2 at some point in levelling, which does 'When you have Medica 2 active on yourself, Cure 3's MP cost is halved', so you can pump harder in big heal checks with less MP concerns

- And finally, the 'new gauge' would also be built via non-Lily healing spells. Regen would give a total of 10, Cure2 would give 10, Medica2 would give a total of 15, and Cure3 would give 20, iirc. Higher amounts than the damage skills, but you don't want to rely on the GCD heals if you can, as they are damage loss. But if you DO rely on them, the extra speed of gauge building means you'd get that damage neutral heal faster, to get you out of 'damage loss city' sooner

Thank for read. Never let it be said that I 'only want more damage button', I'll take more healing buttons and interactions too, as long as they're interestingly designed and have cohesion within the kit. Plus, all of this would only require 2 'additional keybinds' in total, for the shield lily buttons. Without those (if SE insists on keeping WHM as a Pure healer and giving it zero shield options), it is button neutral (+2 for Banish and gauge spender, -2 because of Cure/Medica consolidation)