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

[Renathras]

Please catch some sleep, take a breather, idk, but whatever is going for you right now, it's clearly not healthy for you.

Disagreeing with someone doesn't mean you get to be unpromptly rude for free. Heated discussions are a thing, we may or may not agree on a lot of things, but we are all human beings in this thread, so please respect that as well.

Oh my lord, would you please tell THEM that?

It'd be nice if they weren't rude all the time, didn't start name calling, and didn't derail every thread going after me. Hell, one of them even said he took being called rude (by someone he was rude to) as a complement.

/sigh

Standards only applied to one person are not standards.

You know how everyone complains about bosses tutorializing way too long? Like bosses do one simple mechanic at a time, taking forever to do so, showing all their mechanics before actually layering mechs and becoming fun? What if they brought back pre-boss trash and gave the trash some of the boss’s mechanics so the boss would be able to get to the fun part?

This is actually a good idea. I feel like it's been done before, but I'm probably thinking something from WoW or another game...

EDIT:

I'm not going to respond to the heckling brigade, but moving on from that:

For me personally damage kits do not need to be reworked at all. They are there to fill gaps in a fight which there should only be a few to "catch your breath".
But if role parity in the playerbase is what SE cared the most about I wouldn't even mind them introducing another healer job with Dawntrail and diversify playstyle among the jobs.

The thing that needs changing most is encounter design. The more tools you have in your bag the more and faster encounter mechanics would need to be in order for them to be useful.

Agree with this. I suspect we're at the point where we have too many tools and where the encounter design is a problem since it is designed around more thinking and resolving, with severe punishment for failing a mechanic. That doesn't really work well with reactive healing models - or healing in general.

I agree with you that ARR was better.

Hear me out for a second here... So much of the stuff you come out with is based on opinions right? You yourself have openly stated that you didn't raid coils when they were current

Depends on how you define current, but I did First Coil in ARR in Job + Labyrinth gear, so more or less "at level". It'd be like if you did P1-4S now in the level 89 Job gear + a few pieces from Agalia.

I've never been talking about high end healers. My consistent position is healers across the game and all the content in it, NOT JUST high end healers - a point I make very often, as you know. That said: I'm familiar with pre-casting. That's how healing was done in Vanilla WoW and in Everquest. Granted, the heal cast times for the big heals were longer in some of those cases.

But, since I've only ever been talking about healing as a whole, all of these points are irrelevant. I think you're trying to be conciliatory here, so I'm not saying this to be mean, but it comes across as a "you can't know what's going on, so you need to sit down and let your betters figure things out for you". The "swing your weight around" comes across as such. The Warhammer comment was referencing it being more or less a non-issue in the MMO sphere. I think MMO Census has it as something like the 98th most played right now, and it even includes non-MMO things as MMOs, and it ranks behind them. (Checked again this morning, 117th with 20.16k players). You can argue that's not actually dead, but that wasn't my point. My point was it's not a popular MMO that is competitive with FFXIV...or ANY leading MMO right now. My point wasn't that it was dead, my point was that it's a more or less failed game compared to the very game we're playing and discussing right now.

I also am curious, since you did mention him, have you seen Happy's retrospectives on the Job kits, the patch history of the game, and where he talks about raids? The HW raid ranking (where he lists them in his personal 12th-1st from worst to best) I was watching last night and he was talking about how the encounter design and damage models changed from ARR through HW, and moved away from what a lot of healers had enjoyed before. Specifically, he mentioned where it became all about DPSing (Pepsiman), and how disruptive that was to the raiding community as well as the community in general and changed encounter design going forward.

In other words, the "it's always been this way" argument being debunked, so to speak.

I think it was different, but so you know, I healed that way on Holy Priest in WoW and I played EQ some with it having that healing model.

It is, however, why I note all the time that the theorycrafting scene had not congealed until HW and how differently different people played the game in ARR and HW. SPECIFICALLY, that when the game shifted very sharply into "healers are Green DPS", that was the impetus for the Devs removing Cleric Stance (as a toggle), indicating that is not the game design they want.

Oh, also where he was ranking the ARR Extremes, he said Levi Ex was one of his favorites because it had the closest (and only...) thing like a "healer swap" mechanic in the game due to the way the healing debuff stack mechanic worked.

Try it MINE with the current balancing. The fight will be over way very quickly due to party DPS inflation.
But: Healer balance remains similar. I can only recommend grabbing some PIE/SPS gear. It's a blast.

Sounds awesome, actually. In encounters like this the boss is also a threat outside of casting "Big Damage AoE Attack" or "This starts a dance of mechanics". Right now, most bosses reposition themselves into the center of a square or circle arena for mechanics, and all of their damage is pretty much predetermined. In most cases currently, the least important thing in an encounter is the boss itself. You dont necessarily have to worry where the boss is positioned, or you dont have to worry about their autoattacks.

Maybe thats not what the game should be about anymore, but sudden spikes of damage need to be reacted to which will always keep healers on their toes, especially with crits as that isnt something that can be put onto a timeline.

...

Right?

[Thurmnmurmn]

I don't recall you ever proving me a liar. All I ever see from you is trying to read between the lines of everything I say when it's pretty crystal clear.
Your feelings aren't proof.

[Saraide]

Literally no one wants any thread to be about you, ren.

[Thurmnmurmn]

Anyways, with that off my chest.

You know how everyone complains about bosses tutorializing way too long? Like bosses do one simple mechanic at a time, taking forever to do so, showing all their mechanics before actually layering mechs and becoming fun? What if they brought back pre-boss trash and gave the trash some of the boss’s mechanics so the boss would be able to get to the fun part?

This would be awesome.
It could even be taken a step further with trials that are linked to the MSQ. Use some mechs that are shown in the dungeon that you need to run right before.

[Saraide]

Anyways, with that off my chest.



This would be awesome.
It could even be taken a step further with trials that are linked to the MSQ. Use some mechs that are shown in the dungeon that you need to run right before.

Healing heavy mechanics could definitely benefit from this. I think a lot of newbies get blindsided when a pile of adds suddenly detonate in their face like in thaleia. It's handled very weirdly currently though. We get some mechanics shown multiple times before any layering but other times they'll just bust in. This however still isnt enough to solve our problem here. I'm still just spamming holy throughout the entire water sprite bit. Wings, lilybell and bubble are just up in the background aswell.

[Sebazy]

I also am curious, since you did mention him, have you seen Happy's retrospectives on the Job kits, the patch history of the game, and where he talks about raids?

I'm not his biggest fan and by his own admission, he's not very knowledgable about the intricacies of healers. I'm honestly not big on any of the streamers but if I had to sit down and subscribe to one, it'd probably be someone like Momo. Saying that the turning point being A3S is pretty fair though, that fight was crazy intense and very fast paced even compared to the rest of the tier. World prog on hand of pain was genuinely quite funny looking back at it. For the first pulls we were genuinely looking for a gimmick as we couldn't believe the damage requirement at first. It took a LOT of work from the entire group to meet that check. I'd say that Faust gets a honourable mention though, you needed to meet a still pretty huge DPS floor to even get into Gordias Savage, I imagine that a lot of people never managed to hit that bar until months, maybe even entire tiers later when they returned with a bunch of gear.

This would be awesome.
It could even be taken a step further with trials that are linked to the MSQ. Use some mechs that are shown in the dungeon that you need to run right before.

Why stop at trials?

Lets have Stone Sky Sea or even as I suggested years ago, Gold saucer mini games that introduce people into common raid mechanics as a progression from the slice is right++

[Saraide]

I'm not his biggest fan and by his own admission, he's not very knowledgable about the intricacies of healers. I'm honestly not big on any of the streamers but if I had to sit down and subscribe to one, it'd probably be someone like Momo. Saying that the turning point being A3S is pretty fair though, that fight was crazy intense and very fast paced even compared to the rest of the tier. World prog on hand of pain was genuinely quite funny looking back at it. For the first pulls we were genuinely looking for a gimmick as we couldn't believe the damage requirement at first. It took a LOT of work from the entire group to meet that check. I'd say that Faust gets a honourable mention though, you needed to meet a still pretty huge DPS floor to even get into Gordias Savage, I imagine that a lot of people never managed to hit that bar until months, maybe even entire tiers later when they returned with a bunch of gear.



Why stop at trials?

Lets have Stone Sky Sea or even as I suggested years ago, Gold saucer mini games that introduce people into common raid mechanics as a progression from the slice is right++

Stone sky sea is exceptionally useless for healers right now aswell.

[Sebazy]

Stone sky sea is exceptionally useless for healers right now aswell.

That moment when you realise that Stone Sky Sea accurately foreshadowed modern day healer gameplay back in 2016......

[Thurmnmurmn]

Why stop at trials?

Lets have Stone Sky Sea or even as I suggested years ago, Gold saucer mini games that introduce people into common raid mechanics as a progression from the slice is right++

Agreed. It should be set that way across the board for the whole game. That every mechanic may reappear in the future without warning.
Although sometimes some mechs can have the same name but act differently (doom per example, can either be a "you're dead", a heal to full or a esuna). But that's a different discussion.

Main reason I left it only to trials was keeping the bad players in mind. The ones who can't remember anything from more than 30 mins ago.

[Shurrikhan]

You are sort of describing criterion trash pulls and what I call the minibossification of trash pulls. You are putting so much effort into designing a trash pull you might aswell just make it a boss encounter.
Second trash pull in the latest criterion dungeon has 4 enemies, two with a vuln down buff (essentially immunity) and two with a damage up buff which swap everytime one is defeated and you need to kite the one you are fighting around so that you dont get caught by the patroling damage immune mobs in addition to a cleansable debuff, a stack marker, a baited aoe following it, a cast you have to interrupt and a bleed raid wide. The criterion trash pulls are by far more interesting than any regular dungeon trash pull currently in the game. I still think they are the weakest part of the experience.

A trash pull and a boss pull, if given equal design weight, are both simply encounters, with the difference that one involves many units and may allow players to prune the capacity of their enemy in an order of their choosing through which units they prioritize, while boss encounters tend to feature just a single unit who may have HP based changes in abilities but rarely outright pruned capacities and therefore will often ramp up in intensity (on-mob-kill mechanics aside) rather than seeming to ramp down.

Trash is trash because its a trash design effort, regardless of whether it has one or many mobs. A well-designed encounter is a well-designed encounter because of the effort and awareness that generated it, regardless of whether it has one mob or many.