#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

It doesn't necessarily have to be a fancy new DPS rotation, at least not instantly, but the damage output should be brought up to the same level as Tanks at a very minimum.

Bringing this back just to say: I believe that the 'variety' in what DPS buttons we press is the issue, not the amount of damage we deal, and we should not get the two conflated. You could bring Healer DPS output up to the level of the tanks by simply boosting Glare's potency to 400, sure, but that doesn't fix the issues with the role. It's still going to be bland as heck. It's still going to be one button for the majority of your GCD gameplay. And it's still going to be Healer that gets replaced by DPS to try and pull off nonstandard runs (because trying to do a fight with no Tanks is much rougher due to AA damage, tankswaps etc).

If we get the two confused, SE will have the 'get out of jail free card' to say 'well they wanted more damage, so we boosted their output' and keep the current gameplay. Let's not give them the 'out'. Instead, I think the solution is simple: giving us a more intricate rotation, that is effectively 'optional' due to sensible potency balancing. For example, if we say that SCH has 3 DOTs instead of 1, Biolysis (350p), Miasmalysis (340p) and Shadowflare (320p), if the player ignores all three and just uses Broil (310p) they'll still clear any content in the game. Savage week 1 DPS checks are tuned around giving healers the leniency to drop a lot of GCDs to use healing GCDs instead (doubly so this tier, because the DPS check this tier was weirdly low). The player could choose to spam Broil as we do now, or interact with this 'optional' complexity, rewarding them with an effectively 'cosmetic' boost to damage that has almost zero effect on the group's chance at hitting enrage. But for those who want to optimize, it provides a much more deep gameplay experience, because ANY amount of extra damage is going to be welcomed as part of the optimization (see Energy Drain, even as weak as it now is).

I think the problem with this is already shown by Eukrasian Dyskrasia being made unable to stack with Eukrasian Dosis: some players feel the need to be 'optimal', even when they're not actually skilled enough to BE 'optimal', and the thought of 'I have to put in more work' isn't appealing to said players. And unfortunately there's nothing that can really be done with this, because to me, that mindset is anathema to 'common sense game design principles'. It's possible to make a design that allows a player to play sub-optimally and still clear (even I can make one (or more accurately, four)). 90% of the content in the game doesn't care how sub-optimal you play because there's no enrage timers. And in the 10% that DOES have enrage timers, you can drop GCDs to heal (eg I cleared P11S week 1 with over 30 Succor casts) So as an example, I make a design that gives SCH 3 DOTs instead of 1. Someone says 'I don't like this idea, I don't want to juggle 3 DOTs', I would say 'that's fine, you don't need to', because I tuned the potencies to be such a small gain (as shown above) that it will not make or break a clear. I make a design for SGE wherein Kardia is a much more interactive system than 'targeted fairy heal', being temporarily augmentable with effects like 'stronger', '50% as strong but AOE', 'also applies shields', etc, and someone says 'I don't want to have to mess with all that stuff I prefer healing on SGE as it is now', I'd say 'ok that's fine, the design keeps all the other OGCDs so you can still heal just as you did before if you want, the Kardia stuff is just another tool in your kit that you're free to ignore (it's not like we don't already ignore Pepsis 95% of the time)'

I think the key thing here is that it needs to be clarified that the gameplay of healers shouldn't be 'replaced', instead it should be 'added to'. EG Instead of replacing WHM's focus on GCD heals (that are damage neutral) such as Lily heals, with a more OGCD centric gameplay like the other healers, do the opposite! Go MORE into damage neutral GCD healing, have another system that works alongside the Lilies that allows for damage neutral GCD healing. That way, not only do those who enjoy current WHM have the current WHM still, but they have extra options to avail themselves of if they so choose. And for the optimization minded players, having multiple 'refund' skills like Misery, means that there's a new minigame of trying to line up your healing GCD order in such a way that all of those 'refunds' can all go into the 2min burst, turning WHM into the 'ADPS big burst' healer (which means it'd actually have an identity beyond 'Cure3 bot')

[Bobby66]

It doesn't have to be entirely just buffs to Healers, they can also bring down Tank DPS and have the two meet halfway, but that's even more work.

But "Having jobs be balanced would break the difficulty" is not really a good argument.


So they could just take the loss, drop the difficulty in older and at the moment current content, in order to make future content with properly designed balance between the roles instead of the absolute randomness we have now where some roles are just worse because fuck the players who want to play these roles.

I mean my argument is not that the jobs being balanced would break the difficulty since let us be fair I am willing to bet SE does think overall the jobs are in a good state balance wise especially tank and healers. It is more so that maintaining that level of balance does seem like a nightmare and one I do not see them jumping for joy to do.

Though oddly enough I posed a question on the tank forums if they would be willing to take a damage hit for the sake of balance and for healers. Yeah, that did not go over well. Any nerf to tanks would result in the cult of the bald man to raise up. In short tanks would legit rage and they probably would be listened to over healers and everything would be changed back to the way it was.

[AnotherPerson]

Bringing this back just to say: I believe that the 'variety' in what DPS buttons we press is the issue, not the amount of damage we deal, and we should not get the two conflated. You could bring Healer DPS output up to the level of the tanks by simply boosting Glare's potency to 400, sure, but that doesn't fix the issues with the role. It's still going to be bland as heck. It's still going to be one button for the majority of your GCD gameplay. And it's still going to be Healer that gets replaced by DPS to try and pull off nonstandard runs (because trying to do a fight with no Tanks is much rougher due to AA damage, tankswaps etc).

Healer never had just one problem. Tanks and DPS getting buffed upwards while leaving healer in the dust doesn't make healer better or shift the problem to something else. In fact it just means healer gameplay gets powercrept further the moment tank and dps starts getting more healing actions to the point no-healer clears are done on same patch - as shown in Dawntrail.

Healer falling behind tanks in DPS is one problem.
The engagement of gameplay being monotone is another problem.

Healers did not have much of an issue with healer DPS because engagement was important, but the moment tanks start being able to replace healers in such a significant degree, it only highlights a new problem of healers -- the point that the role imbalance is causing issues with even keeping a healer on a party because they offer far too little in a general overview of the gameplay. Just making 'more to heal' will never be a proper solution because of ilvl. ILVL will eventually reduce the burden or even need of healers from 2 to 1. Except we're already at the point on patch release before BiS where we can go from 2 to 0 healers on the current hardest available content difficulty.

At this point I don't see any solution with people not wanting healers to be good at anything other than healing but never making the healing part ever required in anything other than maybe at best 3-4 pieces of content before it gets invalidated again. Even asking for parity is too much of an ask now.

[Aravell]

Though oddly enough I posed a question on the tank forums if they would be willing to take a damage hit for the sake of balance and for healers. Yeah, that did not go over well. Any nerf to tanks would result in the cult of the bald man to raise up. In short tanks would legit rage and they probably would be listened to over healers and everything would be changed back to the way it was.

Of course it wouldn't go well, go to literally any job forum and ask them if they'd like a nerf and the only answer you'll ever get back is a "Hell no!".

I think SE should stop caring what the playerbase thinks about nerfs, nobody will ever like getting their favourite job nerfed, but nerfs and buffs are both essential to balance. Look at the Expedient nerf, most SCH mains agreed that 20s of Sprint was too powerful and they accepted that the nerf had to happen.

Are you saying that tanks would throw a tantrum over a nerf when others would accept a nerf for the health of the game? If tanks would throw a tantrum for such a minor reason then I think SE shouldn't listen to them at all at that point.

[GartredZW]

So we just don't do something because it'd take time? Because it might be hard? Talk about laziness. Someone once told me "If something is worth doing at all then it's worth doing properly" and I hold it to be true. If healing if worth fixing, then healing is worth fixing, not dps. And if fixing healing means going back and rebalancing content then so be it. When I look back on previous content I see healing really start going downhill when tanks start getting increasing amounts of self-healing and damage stops outpacing mitigation by any appreciable margin, the natural result of which is the reduced need for healing, I also see a reduction in interruptible attacks and esuna-able effects during the same period which further compounds the issue.

Do you want something to get done, or do you want to just complain? We have to be at least somewhat reasonable with our requests if we want anything to get done. "Give us a couple more damage buttons to use when nothing needs healing." is an astronomically smaller task than "redesign every fight in the entire game to require more healing, but not so much that reacting a bit too late causes deaths."
I'm mostly working off of comparison to the healer design in World of Warcraft. Where you heal about 95% of the time, and do damage only if you're really good. You stay target locked on your tank most of the time, and use your filler heal when you have nothing else to do. That's not the kind of design I want in this game. What we have now feels like it has a lot more room for player skill expression. The only issue is that the apex of your skill expression is usually just not dropping a Glare cast, or making sure all your Aetherflows go to Energy Drain.
This is why I want more to do in terms of damage that doesn't detract from the healing. It's possible to do in just a single patch as I've said, and it would make playing healer in any normal content so much more enjoyable.

Like I said earlier. Where are the Tanks complaining about not really needing to use their mitigation, or tank swaps against normal mode bosses? They're not complaining because they've got an actual damage rotation to keep them occupied.

[ForsakenRoe]

At this point I don't see any solution with people not wanting healers to be good at anything other than healing but never making the healing part ever required in anything other than maybe at best 3-4 pieces of content before it gets invalidated again. Even asking for parity is too much of an ask now.

If SE wants to boost healers to be roughly inline with tanks in terms of damage output, that's up to them. My point is that if we as a playerbase aren't specific with our requests and say 'we want more damage' instead of 'we want more variety in how we deal our damage', it gives SE a very easy out to just boost some potencies and leave our gameplay loop to rot as it currently does. Additionally, we had a small amount of time in SHB where WHM was doing more damage than some of the tanks and they (tanks) were pissed

I'd rather have a fun damage rotation than deal the same damage as tanks. I'd rather take a 25% damage NERF if it means getting a more fun damage rotation, in fact

[CaptainLagbeard]

I mean my argument is not that the jobs being balanced would break the difficulty since let us be fair I am willing to bet SE does think overall the jobs are in a good state balance wise especially tank and healers. It is more so that maintaining that level of balance does seem like a nightmare and one I do not see them jumping for joy to do.

Though oddly enough I posed a question on the tank forums if they would be willing to take a damage hit for the sake of balance and for healers. Yeah, that did not go over well. Any nerf to tanks would result in the cult of the bald man to raise up. In short tanks would legit rage and they probably would be listened to over healers and everything would be changed back to the way it was.

I'm sure tanks would absolutely lose their minds if they ended up nerfed for the sake of achieving balance while maintaining generally the current level of difficulty. Which is why it would probably be for the better to just drop the difficulty for current and old content, so Healers and Ranged DPS can actually be balanced again and not be worse for the sake of being worse.

[Grann-Goro]

Like I said earlier. Where are the Tanks complaining about not really needing to use their mitigation, or tank swaps against normal mode bosses?

Here !
And I add that I also complain about not having to decide where the boss stands on the battlefield anymore.

I'm sure tanks would absolutely lose their minds if they ended up nerfed for the sake of achieving balance while maintaining generally the current level of difficulty.

Oh god no ! At least not me !
Since the very moment I reached level 82 as a PLD at the beginning of Endwalker, I fell like playing with a cheat code !
That's not fun at all.

[Sharawiwi]

Though oddly enough I posed a question on the tank forums if they would be willing to take a damage hit for the sake of balance and for healers. Yeah, that did not go over well. Any nerf to tanks would result in the cult of the bald man to raise up. In short tanks would legit rage and they probably would be listened to over healers and everything would be changed back to the way it was.

Don't make me think about it, I really don't like WAR OTPs in this game xd

A more interesting question would have been : "Would you rather take a nerf to self sustain or have every heal jobs removed from the game ?", if the overwhelming majority of tanks chose the second, SE would listent to them as they outnumber us...

[Alice_Rivers]

Do you want something to get done, or do you want to just complain? We have to be at least somewhat reasonable with our requests if we want anything to get done. "Give us a couple more damage buttons to use when nothing needs healing." is an astronomically smaller task than "redesign every fight in the entire game to require more healing, but not so much that reacting a bit too late causes deaths."
I'm mostly working off of comparison to the healer design in World of Warcraft. Where you heal about 95% of the time, and do damage only if you're really good. You stay target locked on your tank most of the time, and use your filler heal when you have nothing else to do. That's not the kind of design I want in this game.

FF14 is the game that got me to play a healer, I loved it back when I was learning WHM and spent most of my time healing and damage casts were a reward for being good, it's insane and increasingly infuriating that healing is my reward for people failing to see a bright orange area or other obvious bad zone or for tanks (DRK excluded) not bothering to learn their jobs and then I see people like you tell me that I shouldn't care that I'm just a bad dps with better heals and that I should want to be better dps. NO. If I wanted to play dps I'd play a dps job, that's why they exist.

We used to have content in which healers healed, we still do, the devs do know how to design such content, they do know how to design such jobs, they just don't want to and you appear to be fully willing to allow and embrace this design.

What we have now feels like it has a lot more room for player skill expression. The only issue is that the apex of your skill expression is usually just not dropping a Glare cast, or making sure all your Aetherflows go to Energy Drain.

And so instead of healer skill expression being not dropping glares, or heaven forbid being good at healing, you want healer skill expression to be not dropping a glare, then a light, then a something else cast in a row. At that point I circle back to "Why have healers in the first place?" Just make everyone that isn't tank some flavour of dps instead.