#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

Still waiting for SE to discover the concept of 'heal absorbs', that is, a debuff placed on allies that is like an 'anti-shield'. Where a shield blocks damage before it hits our real HP, the 'heal absorb' blocks our healing before it hits our real 'missing HP'. This would (theoretically) incentivize the 'Pure healers' more, because they have access to burst healing options with much more frequency (eg WHM Cure 3, or PI-Rapture), yet also it allows Barrier healers to participate because while their 'burst healing' is weaker/less sustained (theoretically), their application of Barriers protects the allies while the 'heal absorb' is being dealt with, offering a safety net to buy time for the Barrier healer to... work their magic, so to speak.

In Savage, the combination of, say, a Heal Absorb being placed on the team, and a line of 'you suffer a DOT while this Heal Absorb effect is on you', means that the Pure Healer will work to clear the Absorb, and the Barrier Healer would work to protect the team and buy the Pure Healer time to do what they need to do, creating a synergy between the two that is oftentimes lost in current raiding (because SE decided that the Barrier Healers need all those pure-healing tools).

A Heal Absorb, due to being a debuff rather than 'actual damage', also allows the devs to create situations where they're not constrained by the party's HP pool when deciding how much an attack should 'deal'. For example, functionally, a Heal Absorb of 100k, and a raidwide that hits for 100k, are the same on the surface: we heal for 100k to resolve them both. But the Absorb could be coded to ignore mitigations, applying for its full amount. Additionally, let's say we currently have 150k HP as a healer for an example. As such, a raidwide can only deal up to like... 200k unmitigated damage, and that assumes that the team 'kitchensinks' every mitigation into said raidwide, plus Succor on top. A Heal Absorb could be thrown out onto someone with 150k HP, that says 'the next MILLION healing received is absorbed by this debuff', and that's completely fine, as long as it's reasonably possible to clear the absorb before another mechanic causes it to become an issue.

Instead of something like... IDK Poison n' Pop where you get the Nisi explosion, a raidwide from the boss, a Nisi, raidwide, and they're all dealing like 110% of your max HP (in week 1 gear), which boils down to 'your whole team needs to space your mitigations out correctly', the Nisi's could instead do 50% of their damage as actual damage, and 50% as a Heal Absorb, so they're much less upfront threat (they don't require mit or shields to survive like this), but they apply a pressure to clear the Heal Absorb in time to top everyone up for the ACTUAL threat, of the raidwide that is coming from the boss (which does still need mit and shields). Or the hearts debuffs that apply a DOT, instead of being a DOT they could apply a Heal Absorb that keeps ticking and getting stronger as the phase goes on, so that by the time the phase ends, you have a Heal Absorb of like 100k built up that needs to be cleared. Ion Cannon could apply a small-medium Heal Absorb, which kills you if not healed off in time (which adds another layer to Sunrise Sabbath's cannons later down the line), design possibilities that become available with the addition of such a mechanic are super varied.

Effectively, where Barrier Healers deal with standard raidwides (via mitigation/shields), Heal Absorbs offer a way for Pure Healers to have their own flavour of 'resolve this raidwide damage'

Edit: Going back to the M2S Hearts DOT point before I forget, each heart being applied could give 1/4 of your Max HP in 'Heal Absorb'. But, clearing enough of that Heal Absorb could also reduce the number of Hearts you have by 1. This then opens up the design opportunity for the devs, not only to make it possible for healers to recover mistakes even more in that phase (because if someone eats an extra heart, the healer can heal through it to reduce the count back to 'the correct amount'), it also gives opportunity for something like 'there are 8 players, all are at 2 hearts, but 12 towers spawn'. There's not enough non-lit hearts available to take all 12 towers without 4 people getting charmed, so the solution is that the healers have to heal people so that they 'lose' one heart, so they are able to take one more tower.

Heck, make the hearts and their associated Heal Absorb a thing that carries through the whole fight, and make even the Tankbusters give the Tanks a Heart each (or two, if its the stack type and someone tries to invuln it).

[Silver-Strider]

Still waiting for SE to discover the concept of 'heal absorbs'.

Didn't they discover this in SB with Shinryu ex? The Dragonhead adds were essentially a Heal Absorb until dealt with