#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Connor]

Perfect? No. Leagues better than the travesty we have now? Yes.

It's understandable to want what worked in the game before and is also more fun that what we have right now. All the speculation about "make healers heal 80% of the time" or "make healers caster DPS with some healing" are all untested, but Stormblood healers? We had them, we played them, and they worked fine.

In my experience during Stormblood, again, healers were very much the same as what we have now just with a couple extra steps to achieve the same (dps) result. Like as a Scholar you could use Miasma II with almost complete impunity in normal content unless you weren’t hitting Aetherflow/Energy Drain/Lucid Dreaming (though maybe that was still Shroud of Saints lol). Who needs MP when you have Excogitation?

And this was before things like Recitation and Seraphism existed, so by today’s standards there would be practically nothing ever clashing with things like DoT timers in a way that you’d ever have to actually consider how/when they’re applied. You just apply them the exact same way every X amount of seconds and just move your many oGCDs around that. Stormblood was very much what I think of as a ‘conveyor belt rotation’. It’s a straight line of ‘use xyz dot, filler, reapply dots in zyx order, repeat’. It doesn’t branch in any meaningful way because that’s not how FFXIV’s healing works (oGCDs don’t affect the belt).

Stormblood healers might sound better on paper, but personally I found them just as hard to enjoy as they are now. Making decisions between healing and damage? That doesn’t bother me. Having illusory ‘decisions’ that inevitably all end in the same outcome (‘use the dps’)? I feel like that’s what we’d get if we went back to ‘Stormblood’ design

[Ramiee]

Stormblood healers might sound better on paper, but personally I found them just as hard to enjoy as they are now. Making decisions between healing and damage? That doesn’t bother me. Having illusory ‘decisions’ that inevitably all end in the same outcome (‘use the dps’)? I feel like that’s what we’d get if we went back to ‘Stormblood’ design

You can water this down to every single job in the game, there isn't any real decisions of any job theres a specific rotation every single one is designed to follow. But I have to say spamming 3-4 buttons over spamming 1 button feels more fun.

[Connor]

You can water this down to every single DPS job in the game, there isn't any real decisions of any job theres a specific rotation every single one is designed to follow. But I have to say spamming 3-4 buttons over spamming 1 button feels more fun.

I’d like to hope they at least make a little bit of effort to differentiate the roles in some way, personally. Just because DPS (and tanks probably idk) are so heavily rotation based doesn’t mean healers need to be. I mean, isn’t one of the main draws of the role ‘no rotation’? Seems a bit silly to just discard that aspect. And I mean, DPS not having their own meaningful decisions to make outside of ‘press glowing button’ is very much an issue to me too.

Personally I’d rather have 2 abilities and actually have to consider what I use and when, than 4 abilities you just repeat ad infinitum. To me 1 button is no more or less fun than 30 unless there’s some modicum of thought around their application. I mean, you could argue ‘ffxiv doesn’t support that design’, but then, it doesn’t support basically anything except everything staying as stagnant as it is now anyway, so sooner or later they’re going to have to do something about it

[AmiableApkallu]

I like the current model around which healer jobs are built and function, I just don't like the environment within which they operate, to me the heals are good, the tools function well and if 60/70% of my uptime were some kind of healing I wouldn't object to the one or two button dps filler.

Healers, as they currently exist, are just as badly designed for 60/70% uptime on healing as they are for 60/70% uptime on DPS. For example, SCH and SGE functionally have one single-target GCD heal and one AoE GCD heal. Spamming Succor/Adlo is no more interesting than spamming Art of War/Broil.

You'd have to fundamentally redesign healing kits by turning a bunch of oGCDs into GCDs, and then tweaking things based on balance and desired distribution of actions.

[Alice_Rivers]

I don't play much SCH or sage and I'm kind bad at them anyway, I don't have that problem with WHM or AST though. I would have plenty of options to cast - GCD or otherwise, plenty of supporting options to think about and wiegh the use of at any given moment. From my perspective that's far more interesting and engaging than spamming glare 90% of the time or even, as Connor points out, chasing the shiny button around and around.

[Aravell]

Stormblood healers might sound better on paper, but personally I found them just as hard to enjoy as they are now. Making decisions between healing and damage? That doesn’t bother me. Having illusory ‘decisions’ that inevitably all end in the same outcome (‘use the dps’)? I feel like that’s what we’d get if we went back to ‘Stormblood’ design

You may not personally enjoy Stormblood healers, but many others did. But that's not what I'm pointing out, I'm pointing out that most people who want major overhauls have ideas that may not even work within the game design. You know what did work though? Stormblood worked, and many people have pointed to it as a good compromise.

Also, having done high-end optimisation in Stormblood and Post-Shadowbringers, I greatly disagree that Stormblood is exactly the same as what we have now. We had way more nuance back then than simply following a fixed rotation of Glare x11 then refresh Dia.

[Ramiee]

Personally I’d rather have 2 abilities and actually have to consider what I use and when, than 4 abilities you just repeat ad infinitum. To me 1 button is no more or less fun than 30 unless there’s some modicum of thought around their application. I mean, you could argue ‘ffxiv doesn’t support that design’, but then, it doesn’t support basically anything except everything staying as stagnant as it is now anyway, so sooner or later they’re going to have to do something about it

Blue mage is right there. The main game is designed around strict rotations because CBU3 over the last 10 years has removed all management from aggro, to healing, to TP/MP. Now every job is a burst spender and it is extremely boring and badly designed and utterly lazy and unimaginative and thats why the devs love it. The only thing they need to rebalance now is attack potency instead of entire systems, sadly ShB started this and even parts of SB and they only ever got praise for it it was only until EW standardised CDs to make every job explicitly burst jobs is when people started complaining. Healers spamming 1 button is not fun they need damage mechanics they don't need a rotation but they need something that prevent 1 button spam.

[Kacho_Nacho]

I agree with Connor that adding damage rotations to healers are a bad idea. Let tanks and damage dealers keep them because that's part of what keeps them interesting to play.

With healers, I think the additions of abilities like Glare IV are a better path. Make our abilities unlock other abilities which would give us a choice to use instead. That way it's not a true rotation.

In addition, I think the reintroduction of DoTs for healers only would be interesting because then we wouldn't be tied to the two minute meta. Instead, we would be dealing constant steady damage to contribute to the success of the party.

[Connor]

snip

Right. And the dev’s answer to that is a 120-second cool-down oGCD offensive ability on every healer. Based on current design they’ve technically fulfilled every requirement people are asking for. Created dps variance between healers for skill expression (pressing buff buttons is apparently ‘skill expression’ to devs), gave more dps options, some are DoTs, varied with Psyche being 60 seconds, WHM’s being 3 stacks. Oracle is…there, I guess.

I’m not really sure what Blue Mage has to do with the healer role as a limited job. Unless you’re saying ‘If you want to think about using abilities just play a limited job!’, which I’ll admit I certainly wasn’t expecting. I mean, I guess, but I’d prefer being able to do actual content lol.

The more we follow the path of ‘conforming to current design’ the more we eventually end up exactly where the devs are at now.
- healers need to dps
- needs to be accessible, mp-friendly, unaffected by healing
- can’t create too much skill variation
- (theoretically) the dps options cannot exceed those of the dps role.
- Optional dps abilities that experienced healers can use to gain an advantage
= stick all the potency into a super-filler, super-dot, and make an optional dps skill for healers to hit every so often.

Technically all of those points already do exist in the current design. It’s just that they’re extremely boring and uninteresting in execution. But, the question is whether that makes any difference to the developers. I imagine they’re at the point of ‘who cares if it’s fun if it’s easily balanced and accessible?’.

The only way the developers can ever get out of the design corner they’ve pushed themselves into is by making changes overall anyway.

If they stick to the current design then we just get them saying:
- Healers can’t heal too much because that’s not accessible
- Healers can’t dps too much because then they won’t heal
- Healers have (presumably) limited design space / ability amounts.
- Make the healer dps super limited and heal kit expanded and everyone become filler bots
- Make the healer’s healing kit super limited and everyone becomes Cure bots.
- Doing both means more balancing for poor indie developer SE.

No matter which way you turn you’re just going to run into a brick wall with current design anyway. I don’t think any amount of changes purely to job design in a vacuum will change that, and it goes for other roles too (tanks, phys ranged). And I mean, it’s ultimately worth considering whether SE is ‘willing’ to continue the sacrifice of player engagement over job accessibility; all signs point to yes. Unless they make ‘major’ design changes anyway

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Squishing a reply in to this now giant post to avoid double posting lol. I mean, I don’t have any issues with healers having offensive abilities in a vacuum. Things like DoTs make sense, but I’d also argue there are other aspects associated with the ‘healer’ role like buffs/debuffs, healing gcd vs oGCD usage, MP management and requirements, etc. My issue with the system is that basically outside of ultimates none of them are going to matter anyway leading us down a spiral staircase of bad healer gameplay. And with those changes I’d like to hope we can actually start to see interesting and varied skills with interactions and actually requiring some thought, rather than just taking what we have now and ‘stretching it out’. Like, 2 DoTs with debuffs that are mutually exclusive so you have to deliberately rotate application based on which one you want, is much more appealing to me than ‘4 DoTs that do damage’.

[Somnolence]

Leagues better than the travesty we have now?

I was watching Rinon video where he gushes over new AST and he called Afflatus Rapture a WHM movement tool. I haven't realized this since I am casual healer but I guess the idea is that if Glare can't be casted due to mechs forcing movement, Lily heals can be used to move that potency onto Misery, not for healing, but for solely for DPS purposes. As WHM movement tech.

How are devs so out of touch with the job design that the players are resorting to such degen optimization?