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

[kyyninen_kirahvi]

I refuse to take part of your drama. Instead I try to answer what's asked.

Title. Would you rather...

1. Heal kits stay more of less as simple as they are but their damage kits/party buffs get put back to HW/SB levels of complexity/interaction (not copy/paste those expac's but roughly that many damage buttons/interactions). Stuff like a tiny AoE that buff's people's damage, SCH getting its dots back, AST cards going back to how they were in SB, Aero 3 coming back. etc

2. Damage kits stay as they are (30 sec dot, one button spam), but their healing abilities are made significantly more complex. No more "press one button to heal everyone to full". More unique interactions, passives, cooldowns etc. Stuff like a CD where everyone's HP in an area is averaged out, a debuff on the boss heals anyone when they attack the boss, AoE heals cost way more MP/are on a cooldown. etc.

And yes, a mix of 1 and 2 is absolutely allowed and frankly, that's my preference.

Out of those two options I'd prefer the second, sprinkled with a bit of the first. There is a need to make healing better and make the solo experience better.

At the moment the healer jobs have really no other direction but to embrace DPS complexity. I'd really much like to heal, but I feel like there is no space for more heal actions atm... I'd even rather have buffs of all kind, but DPS seems to be something Squre would more likely do.

I will continue to advocate more DPS to Sage. It needs them.

[NamiRocket]

I'm just a newbie healer, but imho, if you make the healing part of healers harder, you'll put more strain on less skilled players.

It's an MMORPG. It's not supposed to be brain dead.

I don't think it's asking a lot to want the gameplay loop for healers to be more engaging than spamming an extremely limited toolbox of DPS abilities 70% of the time, setting up your group with HoTs, shields/mitigations, and/or procs 20% of the time (mostly so you have to actively heal less), and actual healing when a mistake is made the last 10%. I don't think it's super hardcore or out of touch to suggest that the gameplay loop of healing in FFXIV could be made a little more complex and engaging than it currently is without pushing away newer players.

[IDontPetLalas]

I just want to add one comment as Sebazy said, "Wildstar had was a level cap gameplay loop that pretty much excluded people that weren't willing to knuckle down and put some serious effort in" - having played Wildstar, this is absolutely, 100 % percent correct. While that game's style wasn't universally popular, what really killed it was the brutal investment that end-game raids required- not to mention the numbers required for some raids (much more than FFXIV), so getting that commitment from so many people was not easy - at least at the point that I left.

[Saraide]

It's an MMORPG. It's not supposed to be brain dead.

I don't think it's asking a lot to want the gameplay loop for healers to be more engaging than spamming an extremely limited toolbox of DPS abilities 70% of the time, setting up your group with HoTs, shields/mitigations, and/or procs 20% of the time (mostly so you have to actively heal less), and actual healing when a mistake is made the last 10%. I don't think it's super hardcore or out of touch to suggest that the gameplay loop of healing in FFXIV could be made a little more complex and engaging than it currently is without pushing away newer players.

The skill range between good and bad players is large. Just last week I saw one of the 3 alliances wipe to the exploding water sprites in thaleia. You'd be gating a lot of new players out long before you reach spicy levels for experienced healers. The devs are sort of willing to do that for savage as we have seen with harrowing hell. But doing that in normal will have consequences.

[Sebazy]

<snip>

Indeed. There's a balance to be struck here, IMO SE has gone a bit too far down the braindead road at times which has caused a weird situation where the difficulty floor in mainstream endgame content pretty much begins and ends with finding the DF queue button. When the challenge entails merely not getting kicked for inactivity, even the easiest Extreme is going to be a shock to the system coming from that.

My biggest problems with these sorts of debates is that we always see people trying to push one extreme or another, trying to push a black and white solution as the answer when it really isn't.

Despite what some might want to take away from my boring essay above, I'm not trying to suggest that healing requirements shouldn't be increased. They absolutely should. Whomever signed off Byregot should have an incoming damage timeline emailed to them as a daily digest to remind them never to allow anything like that near the live servers again.

The thing is, there's only so much mileage you can get out that alone. If we really want to solve healer gameplay once and for all, more things need to change, not least the design philosophy SE's job design team uses when they tackle healers. We need something more interesting to do when all the healing is done. It doesn't even have to be DPS. It just needs to be A) Engaging and B) Worthwhile.

[Thurmnmurmn]

The skill range between good and bad players is large. Just last week I saw one of the 3 alliances wipe to the exploding water sprites in thaleia. You'd be gating a lot of new players out long before you reach spicy levels for experienced healers. The devs are sort of willing to do that for savage as we have seen with harrowing hell. But doing that in normal will have consequences.

That just reminds me of the communities reaction to the dead ends dungeon at the beginning of EW.
People were freaking out that the mechs were too hard. When it really wasn't, it was simply something new for normals (talking about the second bosses wind mech).

People in normals don't want to think (sadly)

[ForsakenRoe]

Not only that, you do realize I've agreed with - and wasn't I the one who originally proposed? - Protect -> Plenary? o.O

"look more ridiculous", indeed...

I've never opposed that particular idea at any time.

You remember that time a month or so ago, when people said you don't seem to be actually reading anyone's responses properly, and you hit everyone with the 'no u' and accused us of not reading things?

I do take a little bit of umbrage with his characterization of my idea as just 'a second CD but this one is a GCD (true) and a 3step combo once every 40ish seconds'. I'd say there's a lot more to it than just that, but of course, arguing against the addition of things like Divine Seal > Temperance, Tragedy > Misery, Rapture at 70, the shield Lily spenders or Protect > Plenary would make him look more ridiculous than he usually does. Doubly so for the last of those, given that it's one of his suggestions that I thought 'wow, this is a Ren post that actually makes sense for once, I'll add it to the pitch'. If I had pitched just the healing stuff, and had the gauge only build from GCD heals, he'd probably be all for it. It feels like the main point of contention, every time, is Dia being made 12s duration, and it sucks cos there's loads of stuff there that he'd probably really enjoy, but he just keeps getting hung up on the bloody DOT duration

I am indeed aware of who first came up with the idea, and even mentioned as much, as shown in bold. So why are you asking me if I realise that you agree with your own idea? It's times like this that lend credence to the idea that you just hit a certain point in a post that you disagree with (for example, Dia at 12s duration), and you feel compelled to post to rebut everything up to that point without bothering to read the rest, to see if it got addressed at a later part of the post

'look more ridiculous' indeed x2

That just reminds me of the communities reaction to the dead ends dungeon at the beginning of EW.
People were freaking out that the mechs were too hard. When it really wasn't, it was simply something new for normals (talking about the second bosses wind mech).

People in normals don't want to think (sadly)

It happens every expansion, but there always seems to be a crowd who see the gameplay from the media tour dungeons from the influencers and go 'ooh look how much we have to heal', like Tower of Zot apparently was going to stomp our heads in with how hard everything hits. Well, fast forward and anyone who hits 82 on tank and gets their upgraded mit (Holy Sheltron etc) goes from 'damn this does kinda slap' to 'this is easy street', except DRK who apparently doesn't get to join the other tanks in being completely busted in selfsustain (only on damage, and even then only when daddy SE lets them for one patch, as a treat)

I guarantee we're gonna see the same thing again, reveals of some new healing tools and some goobs on reddit will insist 'no no, the point has been made and been wrong 3 times in a row now, but THIS time, they're gonna make us heal so much you won't even have time to reach for that Glare button!'. And then we'll hit level 92-93 and the difficulty will immediately fall off a cliff, just like it always does. It's part of why 'healing requirements adjusted' can't be the only factor in the 'solution', gear and levelling causes us to outscale the difficulty presented by the healing requirements way too fast. What is hard as hell to heal in Savage at Min ILVL (640 this tier) becomes a joke at 660 (current BIS) and that's just a 20 ILVL gap. We can have like 40 ILVL difference between our gear and what an EX roulette dungeon asks for as minimum (for people trying to catch up), so we're always going to have some players (the ones who do the harder content, get better gear, and therefore most likely to be desirous of these changes) outscale these dungeons and the difficulty presented by alarming amounts. And I'm sure we can all agree, we shouldn't be designing the heal checks in Lunar Subterrene around someone having P12S BIS, so how do we make someone who IS in P12S BIS feel engaged in that dungeon using just healing changes? The answer is, we can't, not with just the healing

[Aravell]

Indeed. There's a balance to be struck here, IMO SE has gone a bit too far down the braindead road at times which has caused a weird situation where the difficulty floor in mainstream endgame content pretty much begins and ends with finding the DF queue button. When the challenge entails merely not getting kicked for inactivity, even the easiest Extreme is going to be a shock to the system coming from that.

My biggest problems with these sorts of debates is that we always see people trying to push one extreme or another, trying to push a black and white solution as the answer when it really isn't.

My main problem with certain arguments is that they push the increase of healing requirements as the only possible solution, well, some would be satisfied if that happens, but the people who dislike the current 2 button DPS kit would still be dissatisfied, possibly for another 2-4 years because SE is very, very slow at making changes.

I can understand that people want to see the thing they want the most, but my main question is, what possible good reason is there for blocking the evolution of the damage kit while evolving the healing kit other than "I don't like doing damage"?

[ForsakenRoe]

Maybe I should draw out my proposed rotation (and the current one) on xivrotation, so we have a visual reference of the difference in Glare-Per-Minute (as if the pie charts weren't good enough at making that point)

Further to this post, decided to make good on what I said. Here is our current rotation, using Stone and Aero for icons instead of Glare/Dia because all the blues just blend together (assume we're at level 70 and doing UCOB or something). The listed actions take place over a roughly 3 minute time frame (I probably should have done 4 lines, to make it a 2min loop but oh well)



Man oh man that's a lot of Stones. We can replace any three Stone casts in this per minute (displayed as two full lines) with Solace/Rapture, and one in raidbuffs with Misery, but that is not shown here as A: it's versatile in the timing of when you do it in your 'rotation', and B: this is just to illustrate the 'core gameplay loop' without all the fancy schmancy optimizations. Anyway, here's Fig B. The Tetragrammaton icon represents 'Water', the 15s GCD.



Again, three Stones can be removed per minute to make way for Solace/Rapture, one in raidbuffs for a Misery, if timings mean that a Water/Aero is 'replaced', then that Water/Aero gets bumped down the timeline by one GCD and the Stone that is now in the way gets removed instead. Additionally, if so desired for optimization's sake, one Stone can be removed per minute to use the funny gauge spender heal, and three more to use Quake, Flood and Tornado (which is done by doing the same rotation admittedly, but at least it looks different)

Need I say more? Because I will, don't tempt me

[Rolder50]

The problem with #2 asking for more complicated healing actions is that the way they design fights just doesn't work with complicated healing. There's not enough damage, not enough variations of -how- fights do damage, and everything is far too formulaic.