The death of savage raiding and SE's lack of action

[Sensui]

Lotta people playing VPR and PCT. Not exclusive to ex-healers.

[Jojoya]

That’s the core of the problem, it’s not “a few spare GCD’s”, it’s 95% of your total GCD’s. GCD healing is expensive on mana and mana regen is completely static. All you have to do is look up your kill time and you will know exactly how much mana you will have. So just bumping up damage to reduce damage GCD’s doesn’t fix fundamental flaws in the healer kit

My point was that I didn't have those spare GCDs in WoW because the encounter design team made sure there were players that needed to be healed.

We've got the excessive number of spare GCDs in FFXIV because the encounter design team doesn't give us that much to heal.

Again, that's encounter design and not job design.

I agree that SE hasn't done a good job of incorporating mana into the healer toolkit but what does that matter when there is little to heal unless someone screws up a mechanic? It's all going to go to damage regardless.

If we actually had things to heal throughout a fight, then mana allocation would be worth another look.

I also feel like a lot of healers don't understand the difference between instant cast and oGCD. As WHM I have Benediction, Tetragrammaton, Liturgy of the Bell and Assize for oGCDs.

I save Benediction as an "oh crap" button, usually using it after a party member gets raised. Tetragrammaton I use if I don't have a lily available for Solace. Liturgy I use if the party is going to take either multiple hits over a short period of time or we're going to take a large hit that that I know is coming and can time placement of Liturgy so it goes off just after. Assize I use on cooldown because free damage.

In other words, I don't have to use any of those that often because I'm getting lilies fast enough to have Solace and Rapture available. Those are not oGCDs. They're just instant casts.

I could choose to use them if I want just as I could choose to use any of my heals with a cast time. I don't need to because the party isn't taking damage often enough for me to use them. And first I'm going to use up my lilies to generate blood lilies for Misery. Maybe I put a Regen on the tank before a pull but it's usually pointless after that because the tank will heal themselves to full without help.

So most of my healing actions used are 2 actions that share a resource that has a 20 second recharge timer. Or in other words, I only have a need to cast a heal about 5 times every 60 seconds and 2 of those are going to be oGCDs more often than not. That leaves me with 22 free GCDs per minute for dealing damage because of a lack of better things to do.

The job design team could cut the potency of all those abilities in half so they're more in line with heals that have a cast time and I'd still have 17 free GCDs per minute.

They could switch around mana costs and I'd likely still have 17 free GCDs a minute because they're not going to take things to the point that poor mana management is going to cause a wipe. Even if they did, the answer is to stop dealing damage so that mana is conserved for when the healing will be needed (anyone else remember "wanding" to conserve/regen mana in WoW?).

I agree that tank sustain isn't an encounter design problem but a job design problem. But it's a tank job design problem, not a healer job design problem. SE could leave tanks as they are and still make healing more engaging by having encounters deal more party wide damage more frequently.

Again, I'm fine with the toolkit I've been given and I get a lot of use from it when in a duty with group of players that love standing in bad. What I want is that toolkit to be just as useful when I'm in a party of good players. There is a middle ground that can be reached through encounter design.

[Supersnow845]

Lotta people playing VPR and PCT. Not exclusive to ex-healers.

And the shortage caused in EW when we had a new healer

[Sensui]

Usually waiting for shield heals and physical ranged. Also waiting for non-WAR tanks.. I dunno, it's pretty ... normal? Nothing about it feels out of the expected. There are A LOT of PFs up, especially early in the week. Back to my post earlier in this thread. It's combination of things happening. A shortage of healers is not the root cause.

[Havenchild]

Okay fine the healer strike failed to affect PF queues, there is your precious win. Now if you’d kindly stop retroactively linking points we didn’t make to the healer strike that would be fantastic. Your last paragraph of the last comment is a blatant lie and caused by you being unable to realise that being unable to pivot in a 4 page argument isn’t a strength

Cool, thanks. Now you can also kindly stop trying to strawman my point to prove something that I never argued against in the first place.

Waiting for supports is normal, waiting for one support over the other in a meaningful difference across all types of content and being back up by the surveys is a problem

If supports being waited on is just universal and expected why don’t we have constant outcry’s at how long people are waiting for tanks

Hell most of the listening posts report tanks filling before even physical ranged

We have always had support role deficiency with maybe a slight lean towards healers being worse. We have always had outcries in game for both Healer and Tank. Phys Range also follows those two. I have been in PF (or pugs specifically) for a very long time (even before cross world PF), that's been the same since SB perhaps even before SB around a similar timeframe.
You just live under a rock or CLEARLY don't engage enough with PF.

[Jojoya]

Thing is, we can't have a constant dmg going pout because of this game's gcd system. WOW's gcd is 1 second. FFXIV is 2.5. Something like say, Anub'arak from WotLk, can't happened in 14 because of this slow gcd. The other issue is they don't want to pressure casuals at all.

Edit: Also as snow said, our healing gcds are much more expensive than our dmg gcds, outside of the tier 1 single target. Cure 2 is 1000, Medica is 900 and pretty weak, Medica 3 is 1000 and heals more than both cure 2 and medica, Cure 3 1500. Alsow tih the thin air nerf, there are much fewer instances of being able to spam cure 3.

So it gets designed around the 2.5 GCD instead of the 1.5 GCD (I don't know if things have changed in WoW since I played but almost no one was stacking enough Haste to reach the 1 second GCD floor). Again, that's encounter design.

How often does the average WHM get into a situation where we're worried about our ability to spam Cure III (which would mostly go to waste considering it's hard to get a random group of players to understand when stacking up for healing is a very good idea)? I think I used it twice last week on M4N at the very end of the fight but then Liturgy came off cooldown and I got lilies back. If I had been solo healing the fight I would have needed to use it more but I wasn't.

The pressure argument is a poor one. If a player can use abilities 25 times per minute as a DPS, they can use abilities 25 times per minute as a healer. That's not where the pressure comes from, nor would reducing the number of casts possible per minute change the pressure.

How is someone supposed to learn how to heal when they're only placed situations where almost no healing is needed?

And the shortage caused in EW when we had a new healer

Adding a new healing job doesn't mean non-healer players are suddenly going to be interested in healing.

The EW shortage was the same shortage that always has existed. Those who were willing to be healers were already healers. They had 4 choices instead of the previous 3 but that doesn't mean they were going to start playing healer 33% more often.

Most players are never going to be interested in healing (or even tanking for that matter) no matter how healing jobs are designed. There's a perception that healer and tank mistakes are in a spotlight since those are most likely to lead to a wipe in normal content. Most players don't want that spotlight to end up on them.

[Aravell]

Honestly speaking, there's actually not enough information to say with 100% certainty whether or not there is a healer shortage. It's all just anecdotes against anecdotes.

But we do have some things that are facts:
- More people have been pointing out that PF is lacking healers recently.
- There's been a lot of screenshots of all the empty green slots in PF across multiple regions.
- There's been documented screenshots of people offering healers gil to help their party, and no one is offering tanks any gil to help their party.

That's all we really know about the current situation. SE is the only party with the actual numbers and we won't know about it unless Yoshi P chooses to address it in the upcoming LL.

[Havenchild]

And yet the shortage has gotten so bad that multiple places are talking about it.

This isn't just a forum echo chamber thing. People who laughed about the healerstrike are also acknowledging a shortage, and it's still early in the tier, it can only get worse from here.

You keep saying that numbers support you, yet you don't have these numbers, no one here does, only SE themselves have the numbers.

So there's a neat little thing called FFL (figure it out), which you can parse out how many people cleared (and uploaded) clears by the end of week 1.

Some of the data is as follows and has been confirmed on twitter/reddit by multiple users.

Week 1 Tier Clears

Arcadion: 950
Anabaseios: 288
Abyssos: 252
Asphodelos: 539
Eden Promise: 172
Eden's Gate: 313

(Eden Verse doesn't exist because FFL was down for Week 1)

Now keep in mind, this only includes loggers, and perhaps repeat clearers (on alts) so those uploads could be potentially included as well. But I assure you, that is rarer for Week 1 than not as most people hit a sort of burn out after the heavy prog and rarely jump back into PF that week (but not impossible on an alt). If we even remove 100 uploads from each column in each tier to account for this, there is still a decisive increase in the amount of clears of Arcadion compared to others. I imagine the LuckyBancho numbers (which read achievements on lodestone and due to be released within the next month or two) will confirm a big jump in overall clears.

[Supersnow845]

So there's a neat little thing called FFL (figure it out), which you can parse out how many people cleared (and uploaded) clears by the end of week 1.

Some of the data is as follows and has been confirmed on twitter/reddit by multiple users.

Week 1 Tier Clears

Arcadion: 950
Anabaseios: 288
Abyssos: 252
Asphodelos: 539
Eden Promise: 172
Eden's Gate: 313

(Eden Verse doesn't exist because FFL was down for Week 1)

Now keep in mind, this does not segment repeat loggers, so those uploads could be potentially included as well. But I assure you, that is rarer for Week 1 than not as most people hit a sort of burn out after the heavy prog and rarely jump back into PF that week. If we even remove 100 uploads from each column in each tier to account for this, there is still a decisive increase in the amount of clears of Arcadion compared to others. I imagine the LuckyBancho numbers (which read achievements on lodestone and due to be released within the next month or two) will confirm a big jump in overall clears.

Okay now (without mentioning the healer strike as I am not and the person you replied you didn’t either), explain why this isn’t explained by square enix’s god awful balancing around pictomancer. You can see the first tier is always cleared at a higher rate and this had the added problem of the wonky PCT balancing completely deleting the DPS checks

I’ll go back to my maths (which again I’m not using to strawman any point about the healer strike), a higher tier clear rate exasperates baseline shortage issues which reveals a deeper shortage amongst healers than tanks which is a problem for healers (either tanks are doing something right or healers doing something wrong) tanks were the rarer role pre ShB so something flipped creating the current shortage distribution, that’s a problem with healer design

Savage always has built in “protection” from feeling shortages as there is always more people that want to clear savage than actually clear savage. When that number is closer the shortage gets worse

[Havenchild]

Okay now (without mentioning the healer strike as I am not and the person you replied you didn’t either), explain why this isn’t explained by square enix’s god awful balancing around pictomancer. You can see the first tier is always cleared at a higher rate and this had the added problem of the wonky PCT balancing completely deleting the DPS checks

I’ll go back to my maths (which again I’m not using to strawman any point about the healer strike), a higher tier clear rate exasperates baseline shortage issues which reveals a deeper shortage amongst healers than tanks which is a problem for healers (either tanks are doing something right or healers doing something wrong) tanks were the rarer role pre ShB so something flipped creating the current shortage distribution, that’s a problem with healer design

Savage always has built in “protection” from feeling shortages as there is always more people that want to clear savage than actually clear savage. When that number is closer the shortage gets worse

Ok focusing on your previous point, there is a likelihood that relative to the previous tiers, there is potentiality of a feeling of a bigger shortage than before because in the design of 2H, 2T and 4DPS and in relation to week to week (beyond week 1), we can safely assume that more DPS have obtained clears after week 1 compared to the same amount of Healers or Tanks in PF and we know this based off the fact that a heavy majority of the playerbase overall mains DPS roles. That's not anything out of the ordinary.

Something else we can pull though is still that many more tanks and healers entered the tier this time around. Now what we are seeing is a massive shift to PCT. It is the top DPS in terms of parses overall but it is not a specific exclusive reason as to why the clears are far higher than average (more than 3x on average). The core reason of why the tier has been cleared decisively quicker than others is because two specific things aligned, 1) The initial balancing of PCT which was very strong, and the XIV team admitting to not having enough time to adjust PCT AND rebalance classes AND rebalance the raid for DPS checks, so they basically brought the other jobs up to align with PCT without tuning the raid to the increased DPS.

We knew this, they said this. So by that, perhaps we can blame the initial overall issue on PCT but it's not like the job itself is driving these numbers to this degree. It's just the raid itself isn't accounting for the high DPS of all jobs.

But the second reason is actually the mechanics themselves. There is a surprising lack of hard body checks this tier. There are some positioning checks here and there but PF struggles the most with body checks, basically mechanics that if a certain amount of people aren't at point A when thing goes off, mechanic auto deletes everyone. All included DoTs for failed mechs this tier are easily GCD healed through. Something like the Pandemonium fight last tier did NOT allow this, which not only combined aggressive body checks with very short timing on mechanic overlap but overall way more 1 shots of groups of 3+ players.

Savage imo, hasn't ever had a protection from shortages. It's just that a lot more people entered the raid tier, and more of that new group are playing DPS over Healers and tanks. This has been the same issue every single tier though. There has never been a tier where by Week 6, Healers and Tanks were abound after reset day.
Most people in PF leave the raid scene after getting their bis.

As for Healer role having even lower numbers than tanks, it is the MOST unpopular role as always, especially in PF because it has the most responsibility compared to Tanks or DPS. It not only has to plan on it's mitigation but also sufficiently heal damage (both expected and unexpected adjustments), while also managing MP, while also doing DPS, while also doing mechanics/positioning. A healer death is far more costly to the success of a raid fight, even after everyone has gear. In PF, where the average unexpected events is the norm, a decent amount of Healer resources tend to be required to keep a run together. This is why when you see tiers that introduce body checks or aggressive DoT ticks with AoEs (ala tree boss) where GCD healing becomes alot more required, the Healer population tends to shrink and alot leave the scene. When the Healer checks are relatively manageable, the Healer pop goes back up but it's still a shortage. Not to mention, there are ALOT of greedy Healers in PF that would prefer to Glare then use a single GCD heal when it's clear its required to survive or top up for big damage. Thus, there is really no direct solution to the shortage of healers without perhaps changing the dynamic of the games design (and giving everyone more personal responsibility on there health management)

If you want to see more Healers in PF, you have to mitigate the responsibility requirement healers innately deal with. Otherwise, you can never fix any shortage issue on the role overall. You are not gonna convince DPS to Heal in mass and your best offer is more responsibility with everything in spades. That's a bad deal no one is really signing up for. It does not matter if you add more DPS options, or better utilize the Healer kit in raid.

There are options beyond still for SE to utilize like, job in need bonuses, that they can try to reward guaranteed drops for players willing to fill into deficient roles but not much beyond that and I wouldn't expect any MAJOR deterrents to shortages from even that.