#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Connor]

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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’.

[Ramiee]

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.

Blue mage is the only truly open job that doesn't follow any rotation because you can make it, there is an online standard in the blue mage community but you don't have to follow it. Thats why I brought it up its the only job thats like this.
Ever since ARR we have had a built in rotation for pretty much every single job, so its a fundemental aspect of the game that can't be removed, so healer dps kits would have a clearly designed pattern if the devs added them. Look at the current magical dps they're all rotation based.

[Sharawiwi]

Blue mage is the only truly open job that doesn't follow any rotation because you can make it, there is an online standard in the blue mage community but you don't have to follow it. Thats why I brought it up its the only job thats like this.
Ever since ARR we have had a built in rotation for pretty much every single job, so its a fundemental aspect of the game that can't be removed, so healer dps kits would have a clearly designed pattern if the devs added them. Look at the current magical dps they're all rotation based.

BLM was the most stimulating job in the game, followed by AST and MNK creatively speaking, and they had to butcher everything about it.

I was hesitant to ask you folks here but I'll jump.
What is keeping you hoping for 8.0 ? How do you cope ?

I'd love to be fully delulu and not be affected by the state of the game but I've poured so much into it. And now thanks to DT I've left and I fear I'll never come back, maybe I'm just looking for any reason to stay.
This is twice harder because I've been having so much fun on many other games since I stopped FFXIV, apologies for the small blogpost :P

[Ramiee]

What is keeping you hoping for 8.0 ? How do you cope ?

I'd love to be fully delulu and not be affected by the state of the game but I've poured so much into it. And now thanks to DT I've left and I fear I'll never come back, maybe I'm just looking for any reason to stay.
This is twice harder because I've been having so much fun on many other games since I stopped FFXIV, apologies for the small blogpost :P

Me personally, I'm interested in Eureka 3, Beastmaster and maybe the deep dungeon besides that I don't really care about the expansion. I like Pictomancer and Red Mage but they aren't as fun as EW BLM, ShB SMN or ARR-SB SCH. The 90-100 job changes are by far the worst we have ever got in the game they are so dull and boring, so right now I am interested in systems that allow me to change the Job design to be more interesting. I don't expect much because I think the job design team is incompetent and need to be replaced or restructured but if Eureka and Beastmaster aren't fun I won't be staying around in DT for the entire time and will probably sink back into playing GW2 or other games.

[ForsakenRoe]

I agree, but that doesn’t seem to be the general solution offered by the thread. The solution is ‘give healers more dps abilities but make them decision-based resource-costing irregularly timed nukes and dots and somehow so wholly optional that the normies will never be expected to use them (frankly I don’t see this situation ever existing in ffxiv lol).

Then as soon as someone mentions healing suddenly it’s
‘We can’t put healing requirements above what they are now or normies can’t handle it’
‘We can’t make healers heal because it’s impossible because game design so just delete a bunch of heals and turn them into dps’
‘Healers had more nukes in the battle system that was effectively a different one from what we have now therefore they should go back to that design from 8 years ago’

Outside of that however? They could give us 100 dps abilities and they could be the most powerful and flashy skills in existence; it would still be business as usual outside of savage. Just with a couple extra steps (that are supposed to be optional except nobody doing normal content has any excuse not to be dps’ing 100% of the time, so…)

Part 1: It is entirely possible to give healers 'more dps abilities but make them wholly optional so normies aren't expected to use them'. DPS checks right now are tuned in such a way that allows a healer to drop multiple GCDs over the course of the fight. If a new action was added to a healer, with a potency higher than the filler spell (but only very slightly), the use of that action would be 'optional'. As an example, Glare 3 is currently 330p. If a new instantcast action was added with a 15s CD, and a potency of 350p, it's a gain to use it over Glare. But NOT using it would cost you 20p per 15s, or about 3.3p per GCD that it's off CD on average. On the flipside, purposely holding it to use for mobility in a point of the fight where you'd otherwise not be able to cast Glare, turns that 20p loss into a 350p GAIN, rewarding fight knowledge. 'Irregularly timed nukes and DOTs', I assume, refers to how people request things like SB DOTs for SCH, wherein Bio was 30s, Miasma was 24, etc. The reason for this is simple. You posted in a later post from this one about a 'belt rotation', of ABC DOT applications, and then CBA in sequence as they fall off, to refresh them. But having identical timers wouldn't fix much of anything, because it'd just be ABC every X seconds (in this case presumably 30s). It's the fact that the timers are staggered, the fact that sometimes two DOTs are requiring reapplication at the same time (and therefore a decision must be made about which to apply first as a higher priority), things like that, that mean the staggered timers are a more logical design decision. And as before, the total DOT potency for each of the DOTs need not be some '250% of your filler spell' value like it is currently, but instead a more moderate amount, such that forgetting to apply a DOT is punished very little.

You say you don't see how it could work in FFXIV. I beg to differ.

Part 2: The topic of 'healing increase' vs 'dps variety' is a tale as old as time, but the general gist of it is that additional DPS buttons can be made optional via careful potency balancing (as mentioned above), but requiring more healing output from the player is a binary. Either they have the skill to output that increased requirement, or they don't and get gated by the game. Personally, I would be fine with SE bumping the healing required, but I can't be certain that other players would be. So I think a decision that doesn't potentially alienate other players quite as heavily as 'I'm a new player and I literally cannot keep up with the incoming damage' might. Additionally, the 'increase healing required' method is entirely dependent on the content itself. Does EX roulette get increased? If not, the 'solution' doesn't solve the issue in some of the content that needs it most (lower level stuff like roulettes), and if so, the above 'game gatekeeps less skilled players' might occur. It's got risks attached no matter which way they try to do it. Also, I seem to recall about 4 weeks ago that people were cheering on the forums that 'stuff hits hard in EX roulette yay' because of the doll slams at the end of Strayborough, or the AOE spam pots at the end of Cactus City. Now we have raid gear coming in, and those raidwides tickle. Increasing 'healing required' is very gear dependent, and as soon as we get more gear, the challenge evaporates. Additionally, as SE adds more and more healing and mitigation options to non-healers, the 'increase healing required' approach becomes more and more neutered, as Tanks and DPS become more and more equipped to counteract such changes. More DPS variety, however, is gear-agnostic, content-agnostic and 'what is in my ally's toolkit'-agnostic.

Personally, I think the best way to go forward would be to add more DPS variety, and with the goodwill that buys, it buys the devteam time to assess if 'increase healing requirements' is a feasible path forward, and to start implementing it. But I'd expect that if they were to increase the healing required, it'd be something like 25% more, maximum. And that's not enough to actually affect how few GCDs we use in EX roulette, because we have so many more available to throw in, so I don't personally believe that 'increase healing required' can be the whole solution, only a part of one. As is probably the case with adding more DPS variety, we would likely need a combination of both approaches.

Part 3: Additional DPS abilities allow for more interesting interactions within our downtime gameplay. Take Misery for example. We can purposely hold off on using it on a dungeon boss, so that we have it ready to dump onto the next pack of mobs in the dungeon. The mere existence of the action gives us the choice, allows us to make that decision, of whether to use it on the boss, or to hold it and use it on the trash. Energy Drain, as much as some might dislike it, is another example. Without it, SCH's gameplay seems to just... fall apart completely (as was evident in SHB when they tried to remove it)

So, let's take a hypothetical. I previously have posted about a suggestion for WHM wherein it gains a new Job Gauge element. Just narrowing it down to the specific scenario of 'you are in a dungeon doing a trash pull', said Job Gauge would fill by casting Holy, be spent on an AOE GCD heal, and said AOE heal is damage neutral by upgrading Glare/Dia/Banish (new action) into Quake, Tornado and Flood (each being AOE with 50% falloff). By adding just one button (the AOE heal), it changes the potential amount of buttons you're pressing in AOE from one (Holy) to FIVE (Holy, AOE heal, Quake, Flood, Tornado). But the existence of the design allows the player some optional decisionmaking, even in something as 'brain-off' as a dungeon trash pull. Do they use the heal as soon as it's available, or hold it until the Tank is a bit lower on HP to maximise how much effectiveness they get from using that heal? What order do they press the Quake, Flood, Tornado buttons in? Will the trash actually live long enough for Tornado's DOT effect to fully tick? Would it be better to use a heal and then the following Quake/Flood/Tornado on this pack that is almost dead, or hold it until the next pack? Where should Holy be slotted in between Quake/Flood/Tornado, to maximise the Stun's effectiveness?

You're right on one thing: We don't need 100 DPS abilities that are 'the most powerful and flashy skills in existence'. We need one or two with a good design behind them, minimizing the amount of work required from the dev team, but maximising the 'effect' on our gameplay should we choose to interact with them. Rapture and Misery are just two buttons, but they completely revamped the way we look at healing as a WHM, while simultaneously allowing for decisionmaking like 'do I spend a Lily in downtime to keep my damage going even while I can't hit the boss (due to Misery's refund)' or 'do I spend a Lily here as a mobility option', versus choosing to hold onto the Lilies to use for their primary purpose (healing). So I would like to see one or two new buttons on each healer with that kind of impact on our gameplay. Especially on SGE, if Rapture/Misery can completely change how we look at GCD healing, I want to see changes to Kardia that completely change how we look at the 'deal damage to heal ally' paradigm because atm Kardia feels like such a well of untapped potential

I was hesitant to ask you folks here but I'll jump.
What is keeping you hoping for 8.0 ? How do you cope ?

Prog, pretty much. The only time the Healer role's design feels like it actually matches the content it's played in, is early prog in Savage while you're not 100% on the mechanics. Recovering from mechanical failures, triaging people to try and see the next mechanic, etc. Once prog is over (as it now is) I basically just raidlog

[Reinha]

BLM was the most stimulating job in the game, followed by AST and MNK creatively speaking, and they had to butcher everything about it.

I was hesitant to ask you folks here but I'll jump.
What is keeping you hoping for 8.0 ? How do you cope ?

I'd love to be fully delulu and not be affected by the state of the game but I've poured so much into it. And now thanks to DT I've left and I fear I'll never come back, maybe I'm just looking for any reason to stay.
This is twice harder because I've been having so much fun on many other games since I stopped FFXIV, apologies for the small blogpost :P

I thought I would play this game until it shuts down but DT has irreparably changed how I feel about it. They ruined my character, my house, my favorite job, the story and even my computer's performance when running the game. All within one major patch. The things I looked forward to in upcoming patches and the things I enjoyed every time I logged in are no longer of the quality they used to be. I don't consider it my main game anymore, just a game I'm playing for now.

It's not my first rodeo. I quit WoW after I finished a big meta achievement I had been working on. Currently I'm working on reaching Gil cap but after that, who knows? I'm still waiting to see if they will fix the graphical update, viper and the MSQ in 7.1. If they don't, I don't see what reason there is to wait until 8.0. Healing is certainly not it. This role is not getting fixed. If the devs don't even understand what removing NG did to the mental load when playing viper, they simply cannot comprehend the problems with healers.

[Jojoya]

And now thanks to DT I've left and I fear I'll never come back, maybe I'm just looking for any reason to stay.
This is twice harder because I've been having so much fun on many other games since I stopped FFXIV, apologies for the small blogpost :P

Why fear that you won't come back?

If it's no longer fun, it's no longer fun. Loyalty to a game is useless because games have no loyalty to the players, only to the money that players bring with them.

If you're having fun with those other games, then play them. Get an urge to peek back into FFXIV? There are plenty of content creators covering it. Take a look at what they're putting online at that time (within your spoiler tolerance) and see if it looks like it has changed to be more appealing to you or if you're better off continuing to play other games.

FFXIV is unlikely to disappear any time soon unless SE totally strips its budget because they're having too many problems with their other projects. Which would be very stupid on their part. They should be investing more into FFXIV to keep more players interested. The more active players they have, the greater the revenue stream they'll have to split with other projects. Neglecting the successful projects is a very good way to kill off a company.