Please Do Not Lock New DPS Spells Behind Other Spells / Skills

[vetch]

Maybe it's time we try to explain again why using Glarebroil every GCD is bad/boring. We've been treating it as self evident maybe that's why we always get replied with "Healers should heal."

These aren't even mutually-exclusive viewpoints unless you're a purist. I would enjoy it if several of my GCDs per minute needed to be heals instead of resolving everything with free oGCDs or damage-neutral Lilies. It would mean tradeoffs which means making more decisions.

[ty_taurus]

These aren't even mutually-exclusive viewpoints unless you're a purist. I would enjoy it if several of my GCDs per minute needed to be heals instead of resolving everything with free oGCDs or damage-neutral Lilies. It would mean tradeoffs which means making more decisions.

The problem is that our healing actions are too obscenely powerful. Our libraries of free, DPS neutral, 0 MP cost, low-cooldown, instant cast healing actions is swollen to the point of being a medical condition, and we only continue to get more every expansion. The problem with this is it would require a ludicrous frequency of outgoing damage to pressure healers to actually needing to GCD heal frequently. And then there's the problem of healers not really having any interesting GCD heals anyway. Sage has exactly 2 buttons to heal on the GCD that they can heal with (3/4 if you want to count Egeiro and/or Esuna). Sage is literally set up to have almost nothing to do with their GCD regardless of whether they're DPSing or healing with it.

When you compare the healing resources of FFXIV to those of WoW, the contrast is mind blowing. Roe I believe talked before about how a WoW healer wishes they could have something like Medica on their hotbar (maybe not literally). Medica would be a godly healing action in WoW, yet in FFXIV, it's so heavily powercrept that even a half-decent White Mage player will never cast it. WoW healers don't have the ability to bring an entire party's HP from 1 to 100% in 2 GCDs. A mechanic in WOW that reduced the entire raid's HP to 1 and inflicted doom on everyone would be a literal death sentence. WoW healers have no way of healing that much on that many people that quickly. But it's a casual healing check in FFXIV. How do you promote enough damage to actually make healers stop attack and heal when we have the power and resources to heal through multiple doom heals back-to-back if it were thrown at us?

[Azurarok]

Is there's really a point to SCH's Chain follow-up to be a DoT, assuming it's going to fall off before we're able to use it again?

I've always thought DoTs are barely different from having another attack with a CD if they can't be reapplied earlier than when it falls off. Isn't that why they removed NIN's going into EW? I guess there's some stuff revolving gearing and buff interactions, but that makes it even sillier to me since it won't snapshot Chain's crit buff.

IMO they only really add depth to a kit if they're something you have to think about refreshing correctly as opposed to more or less being a button to press when it's ready.

[Zaytex]

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Another level to this is how encounter design is shifting more towards body checks and mechanics which just one-shot a player if they fail it. From a healer perspective, those type of mechanics aren't fun to play against since it basically invalidates your healing tool kit and individual skill as a player. But from another perspective, fights have to do this because a skilled healer can genuinely carry a party through a lot of encounters if mechanics allow for recovery time, plus the whole issue with caster/healer rez power. It's why I enjoyed healing P11S the most out of the latest savage tier since it had the least body checks out of all the fights, even if its encounter design and mechanics are the weakest out of P9S-P12S. So many times in PF, even in farm parties, would I carry and drag a party limping to the next mechanic. That felt good! P12S on the other hand, someone didn't soak a tower? Well gg, let's start again, I can't do anything.

Even something like HH in P10S. Is it hard? Sure, but I wouldn't call it even THAT difficult. You have all your cooldowns available for it and no need to save them for what comes next since it's the last hard hitting mechanic. So often you just use absolutely everything you have, which, as long as you space them out appropriately, will resolve HH fine and dandy.

They could increase outgoing damage so healers have to manage their OGCD heals almost perfectly and occasionally GCD to keep up, but then the weaker players are going to struggle and will cause wipes in parties, which is going to feel bad for the other roles since it invalidates their time and effort, if the sore point of a PF party is just ''our healers can't heal well'' instead of failing mechanics or whatever. IIRC they've said before they do not want healers to be a sore spot for parties and want to decrease the gap between good-bad healers, which was evidently very the case in HW/SB.

If it was down to me, I'd increase damage and actually force healers into using GCD's more and having to manage their entire toolkits effectively, because if you're queueing into extreme/savage/ultimate, the advice should be ''git gud'' instead of ''lets make things easier for you'' if you ever hit a learning curve. Or alternatively, flesh out healers DPS toolkits and give us an actual rotation, so when we are inevitably not challenged enough on the healing department, we have something else to manage and do for fun. Ironically, the only healer which had something to do if healing wasn't required has now been gutted in its rework (IMO), so clearly we know what direction they are taking healers still (i.e nowhere, or to the same/worse state we are now). I think they need to fundamentally rework healers at this point, especially in DT when more healing tools are being given.

[Emitans]

SCH should have an on demand AoE DoT and Chain just buffs its damage (making it a gain on single target)

EDIT: I mean, SCH should have multiple dots which are a gain on 1 (and Bane to spread them), but CBU3 hates fun so we'll never have that again.

[vetch]

The problem is that our healing actions are too obscenely powerful.

How do you promote enough damage to actually make healers stop attack and heal when we have the power and resources to heal through multiple doom heals back-to-back if it were thrown at us?

Delete the resources from the kit.

[ForsakenRoe]

Is there's really a point to SCH's Chain follow-up to be a DoT, assuming it's going to fall off before we're able to use it again?

I've always thought DoTs are barely different from having another attack with a CD if they can't be reapplied earlier than when it falls off. Isn't that why they removed NIN's going into EW? I guess there's some stuff revolving gearing and buff interactions, but that makes it even sillier to me since it won't snapshot Chain's crit buff.

IMO they only really add depth to a kit if they're something you have to think about refreshing correctly as opposed to more or less being a button to press when it's ready.

TBH, it's better as a DOT as it's A: Thematic to SCH, being known for its DOTs in the past, and B: let's say it deals 500p over 15s (5 ticks of 100), if it were a single 500p hit, it'd be much more swingy due to Crit/DHit variance. As a DOT, not only can it not Direct Hit at all (removing that variable from balance calculations for the devs), but the chance to Crit is split across 5 'attempts', making it more consistent rather than 'all or nothing'. It will snapshot the Chain critrate buff upon application too, so that's not a problem

Now, it being locked behind Chain is a separate 'questionable decision'

When you compare the healing resources of FFXIV to those of WoW, the contrast is mind blowing. Roe I believe talked before about how a WoW healer wishes they could have something like Medica on their hotbar (maybe not literally). Medica would be a godly healing action in WoW, yet in FFXIV, it's so heavily powercrept that even a half-decent White Mage player will never cast it. WoW healers don't have the ability to bring an entire party's HP from 1 to 100% in 2 GCDs. A mechanic in WOW that reduced the entire raid's HP to 1 and inflicted doom on everyone would be a literal death sentence. WoW healers have no way of healing that much on that many people that quickly. But it's a casual healing check in FFXIV. How do you promote enough damage to actually make healers stop attack and heal when we have the power and resources to heal through multiple doom heals back-to-back if it were thrown at us?

To elaborate on this, to make comparison more easy to visualize: In WOW, Medica would be 50p, and would have a 15s CD. Medica 2 would have a 1min CD, and be 100p, plus 20p per tick. Cure 3 would be target capped to 5, heal for 150p and have a 1min CD. The sheer power of Medica/Medica 2 compared to their resource cost, and especially their accessibility (being 'there is no CD') is absolutely obscene, and because they're so powerful, it means OGCDs have ended up being scaled 'based on the baseline provided by Medica/Medica2'. You can see this with AST especially, Celestial Opposition, the level 60 skill, is quite literally 'Aspected Helios, but as an OGCD', the potencies are identical.

We could cut every healing potency in half, and healing would still be way too accessible compared to what most content demands of us. I once joked that a SGE could heal an EX roulette with nothing but Kardia, Soteria and Krasis to buff it. Well, turns out the SGE doesn't even need to be present, since you can just replace them with another DPS. How SE thinks that 'the ability to replace one of the three roles in the 'holy trinity'', in a game built with the holy trinity as a core aspect of the gameplay, is acceptable, is beyond me. It's absurd. At least when it happens in WOW (healers are not required to clear content), they patch the game to make healers required again by the time the next patch comes out. SE has let 'no-healer runs' of everything from EX roulettes, to tanks soloing the normal mode raids, to a no healer clear of the current hardest content in the game, for over 2 years.

And no, I don't want to hear about how 'it took skill to do the no-heal TOP run' or 'it took a lot of luck'. I don't dispute how much skill and luck it took. The fact it was possible at all is an abhorrent glitch in the design of the game. It shouldn't have been possible in the first place, not with any amount of luck or skill.

[ForsakenRoe]

Sorry for doublepost

They could increase outgoing damage so healers have to manage their OGCD heals almost perfectly and occasionally GCD to keep up, but then the weaker players are going to struggle and will cause wipes in parties, which is going to feel bad for the other roles since it invalidates their time and effort, if the sore point of a PF party is just ''our healers can't heal well'' instead of failing mechanics or whatever. IIRC they've said before they do not want healers to be a sore spot for parties and want to decrease the gap between good-bad healers, which was evidently very the case in HW/SB.

If it was down to me, I'd increase damage and actually force healers into using GCD's more and having to manage their entire toolkits effectively, because if you're queueing into extreme/savage/ultimate, the advice should be ''git gud'' instead of ''lets make things easier for you'' if you ever hit a learning curve. Or alternatively, flesh out healers DPS toolkits and give us an actual rotation, so when we are inevitably not challenged enough on the healing department, we have something else to manage and do for fun. Ironically, the only healer which had something to do if healing wasn't required has now been gutted in its rework (IMO), so clearly we know what direction they are taking healers still (i.e nowhere, or to the same/worse state we are now). I think they need to fundamentally rework healers at this point, especially in DT when more healing tools are being given.

The problem with this approach, of 'increase damage dealt so healers have to GCD heal', is how many new problems it causes. First of all, the amount by which we'd have to have the damage increase would be obscene. I can currently do an EX roulette as SGE, using only half of my OGCDs. I don't need Holos, or Panhaima, or Pneuma. If I'm healing a WAR, I don't even really need Physis or Kerachole. I could get by with just Soteria and Krasis. With that in mind, you'd have to increase, not the amount, but the frequency in which we take damage, by like 200% (so it's three times as fast).

But I've posted this in the past, and I'll bring it up again. A series of questions that have to be answered, if 'force the player to heal more' were to be implemented:

- How do you expect us to heal more in harder content, where we're already having to spam Succor and Cure3 to handle healing at certain times for week 1 prog (Harrowing Hell Savage, the 11-hit Styx in Savage)? If the solution is 'heal more often' (eg by having raidwides happen more often), has the potency of skills been considered? EG, we can pump out 4000 potency a minute as WHM by just maintaining 100% uptime on Medica 2. How hard and how fast do we need to be hit to actually challenge our total accessible healing potency?

- If we are forced to heal more, has the increased MP cost per minute of our healing been factored in? If we have to use Medica and Cure2 more often (due to having not-enough Lilies to heal everything without damage loss), has their MP cost been factored in, or are we looking at going OOM without a massive amount of Piety added to our gear, or MP cost adjustments across the board?

- Would the 'increase in healing required' affect casual content like EX roulette? If so, has it been considered how it would affect lower-skilled players, and how many would no longer be able to keep up?

- If the 'increase in healing required' does NOT affect casual content, what is there to make that content more 'engaging' for a higher-skilled player? Or is the 'increase in healing required' solution only a solution to a certain difficulty of content? In which case, how does it 'solve' the problem, when it wouldn't be doing anything to the content that arguably needs 'a solution' the most?

- If people become more practiced at the new healing requirements, what stops them from reaching the current plateau, of 'I have X% of my time spare to DPS, so I'll just DPS during it'? If we go from 70% of our GCDs being damage related to... say, 50%, does that 'solve' the issue? If we are always going to have 'some time to deal damage', what ratio of 'GCDs spent on not-damage' to 'GCDs spent on damage' is the 'fix'? And is this 'fix' still forgiving enough to give time for recovery from mistakes, and forgiving enough to allow for less-skilled players to have breathing room (amount of breathing room dependent on content difficulty level)?

- Going forward, if we cannot have 'more damage buttons in rotation' because that is not our role (just ignore that tanks get new ones every expansion, despite it not being 'their role', I guess? Love double standards), what suggestions of 'new additions to the job' are there for later expansions? Is there any new 'thematic' ways to add new non-damage buttons to the healers that feel unique and novel? If a button adds a 'utility' (eg Expedient), how does said utility's effect balance 'feels good to use' with 'is not so strong that it makes the job mandatory for certain content'?

- Finally, would this 'increase to healing required' be going forward, or retroactively applied to all content? If the former, how will people adjust to a sudden increase of healing required when it has never been asked of them (compared to previous content of the same difficulty level)? If the latter, how much extra dev work has to be done to make sure that the jobs can clear old content, with the new adjusted kits, and the new healing required?

The idea of 'healers should have to heal more', on its own/as the only factor in a proposed solution, runs into so many additional 'well then what about the X/Y/Z knockon effect that'd cause, and the main issue IMO is the 4th paragraph. Let's have Coil healing back, sure. But that's a raid. We would never get Coil style healing in something like an EX roulette, so for that content, the solution doesn't solve anything. And the bigger the gap between player skill level and the skill level demanded by the content, the more 'needed' a solution is for that level of content. Making healers 'more engaging' is more pressing to do for something like EX roulette or Maps, because not only is the skill level gap larger there, there's more people interacting with that content.

But also, if we have to heal like it's Coils again, in current Savages, how much time would we spend on GCD healing so as to run our bloated healing kits out of free OGCD options? And then the knockon effects from that are 'how does this suddenly screw our MP economy, and how do we counteract the sudden real threat of going OOM', or 'how does such a change correctly balance the fine line between feeling challenging, while also leaving enough spare GCD space to allow for recovery eg ressing', or 'isn't this going to screw the healing playerbase count, because of the sudden increase in healing required going into X expansion?' We saw Abyssos, and a sudden jump in healing required, along with WOW's jump from 'overgeared full epics' WOTLK into Cata where the healing required suddenly spiked. We have several evidence cases of such a proposal (increase healing required suddenly) and it seems to be a pattern that the playerbases of said games don't react well on the whole, instead choosing to move off the role rather than step up to the plate.

So yeh, IMO a 'more healing required' change in design would bring a crazy amount of baggage. So much, in fact, that I'd expect the playerbase to react negatively to it, as we saw with Abyssos. If it were up to me, I'd look at increasing the amount of depth in the way we deal our damage, in a way that allows for said depth to be optional. An oft-used example of mine is for SCH. If we had, for example:

Broil 5 - 300p
Biolysis - 35p for 30s, total 350p
Miasmalysis - 1.5s cast, 20p, then 30p for 24s, total 340p
Shadowflare - 120p in an AOE, then 40p to enemies in puddle for 15s, total 320p

Then the potency difference between using a DOT, or just using Broil, is incredibly small. Per GCD, it'd be a loss of, at maximum, 5p (for Biolysis). Completely ignoring all three DOTs and just spamming Broil, versus the skill ceiling of managing all of your DOTs, would be a difference of 560p per two minutes (the time when all 3 DOTs realign). 560p is less than two Broils, per two minutes. So in some content that isn't designed to be stressful/challenging, such as an EX roulette, the player can just mindlessly AoW/Broil spam and watch Netflix on the second monitor if they choose, or they can go full 'tryhard' and use their DOTs to their fullest extent.

[Azurarok]

TBH, it's better as a DOT as it's A: Thematic to SCH, being known for its DOTs in the past, and B: let's say it deals 500p over 15s (5 ticks of 100), if it were a single 500p hit, it'd be much more swingy due to Crit/DHit variance. As a DOT, not only can it not Direct Hit at all (removing that variable from balance calculations for the devs), but the chance to Crit is split across 5 'attempts', making it more consistent rather than 'all or nothing'. It will snapshot the Chain critrate buff upon application too, so that's not a problem

Oh my mistake, I had thought DOTs only snapshot potency buffs and no crit/dh buffs (probably mixed that up with reassemble not working on bioblaster). I was aware it's more thematically fitting for SCH but it being a sort of equalizer makes a lot of sense, thanks.

[Kissune]

Sorry for doublepost



The problem with this approach, of 'increase damage dealt so healers have to GCD heal', is how many new problems it causes. First of all, the amount by which we'd have to have the damage increase would be obscene. I can currently do an EX roulette as SGE, using only half of my OGCDs. I don't need Holos, or Panhaima, or Pneuma. If I'm healing a WAR, I don't even really need Physis or Kerachole. I could get by with just Soteria and Krasis. With that in mind, you'd have to increase, not the amount, but the frequency in which we take damage, by like 200% (so it's three times as fast).

But I've posted this in the past, and I'll bring it up again. A series of questions that have to be answered, if 'force the player to heal more' were to be implemented:



So yeh, IMO a 'more healing required' change in design would bring a crazy amount of baggage. So much, in fact, that I'd expect the playerbase to react negatively to it, as we saw with Abyssos. If it were up to me, I'd look at increasing the amount of depth in the way we deal our damage, in a way that allows for said depth to be optional. An oft-used example of mine is for SCH. If we had, for example:

Broil 5 - 300p
Biolysis - 35p for 30s, total 350p
Miasmalysis - 1.5s cast, 20p, then 30p for 24s, total 340p
Shadowflare - 120p in an AOE, then 40p to enemies in puddle for 15s, total 320p

Then the potency difference between using a DOT, or just using Broil, is incredibly small. Per GCD, it'd be a loss of, at maximum, 5p (for Biolysis). Completely ignoring all three DOTs and just spamming Broil, versus the skill ceiling of managing all of your DOTs, would be a difference of 560p per two minutes (the time when all 3 DOTs realign). 560p is less than two Broils, per two minutes. So in some content that isn't designed to be stressful/challenging, such as an EX roulette, the player can just mindlessly AoW/Broil spam and watch Netflix on the second monitor if they choose, or they can go full 'tryhard' and use their DOTs to their fullest extent.

This is really the crux of the matter. There's two solutions to the 'healer is too boring' problem, and one situation is way easier. You can either amp the healing requirements of new fights, which doesn't change the old ones and like you said, has to answer all those questions... or you can give a more interesting dps filler rotation at near-endgame levels, making it not essential, but definitely optimal, and let players choose how hard they wanna optimize. If even ultimates are balanced so that you only need to get half of that example of 560p per 2min, the role would suddenly get way more interesting but the cognitive load would not punish you so much that you'd be unable to heal. And... idk. If someone is overloaded by how much they have to heal in current fights that they need a 1 button rotation... maybe endgame fights aren't for them. But Squenix would never admit that.