#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kes13a]

The thing is, I *kinda* get it... a central mechanic of the game is job switching, and that would naturally veer into possible "role flexing" territory as one goes about leveling different (or every) job, but not everyone is going to enjoy playing a certain role, or even all jobs within a role, or at least they're not going to enjoy playing it with others for any number of reasons.

Personally, wall-to-walls is what weened me fast from tank & healer, as I came from other MMOs where you absolutely did not want to be stacking the trash, and that being an expectation here threw me completely off, doubly so when I wasn't sure if W2W was intended by Square-Enix or if its something the community created and enforced on its own for whatever reason. I've honestly wiped more times to dungeon mobs than bosses at this point, and would rather be the other dead DPS nobody complains about than the tank or healer suddenly in the spotlight.

Of course, even if healer *was* supposedly "stress free" and I just suck even with an "easy" set of jobs (very real possibility) it's also quite boring to play regardless. This became evident to me in not only doing the job quests, but while working on ARR relic weapons where the process became absolute agony on WHM and SCH the moment I had to do a FATE for those accursed books, where every fight was literally 2 buttons because I didn't even need to heal myself due to the chocobo (and even then you're really REALLY better off making the bird DPS to make the pain end early). I... I can't even begin to imagine the suffering somebody must have gone through trying to play any of those jobs during the MSQ, or at least any part of it where you're synced.

leveling a healer solo is.... not the funnest experience. it is something that you have to have friends to help with. but according to Yoshi P and crew... we dont need to worry about damage... if only we could heal things to death while we level...

[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

[ForsakenRoe]

In an exceptionally roundabout way, I suppose they could be seen as such, but the fact they're adds that can't be AOE'd makes it so much more clunky to deal with them, having to ST heal them one by one sucks. Maybe now that they have the ability to make NPCs count as party members (solo instances/trusts) it'd work better.

In terms of what we have for ingame examples, the closest is DRK's Invuln, the effect of which can be written as:

'Grants Living Dead for 10s. Upon taking fatal damage while Living Dead persists, gives a heal absorb equal 100% of your Max HP for 10s. If any of the heal absorb remains at the end of its duration, you are instantly KO'd.'


For illustration, what I mean for Heal Absorbs (as it relates to a debuff on allies for a healer to deal with) is, quick paint diagram:



In this example, John Finalfantasy has a Heal Absorb for about 20k on himself, and various Barrier effects (Adlo, Divine Veil etc) for like 25-30k as well.

A heal used on John will first remove the purple section of the bar (the Heal Absorb), turning it back to grey (missing HP). Once the purple is fully removed, the healing starts affecting the grey 'missing HP' section of the bar again.
An enemy attack that hits John, as we know from current gameplay, would first take away from the orange (the barriers), and then start hitting the blue section (the real HP). The attack would ignore the purple section

Additionally, Heal Absorbs being a debuff allows for some of them to be designed as 'this can be removed instantly via Esuna'. As such, players would get a choice in how to resolve the mechanic: Is it more efficient to use healing to heal through it (eg if you have a DOT at the same time, WHM's LilyBell would be very good at clearing it), or is it better to Esuna the affected players? Target count also falls into this 'choice' factor, if there's 3 players out of 8 in a raid that got the debuff, is it worth AOE healing to solve it, is it worth just Esuna all 3, or is there a way to single-target heal them that makes THAT method more efficient (eg 3 Essential Dignities = one for each player, Benediction on one and Tetra on 2/3, etc)

Edit: You know how if you get a Barrier big enough to be 'more than your whole HP bar' it shows it as a small diamond? Well:



Same can apply here. John here has FOUR HP bars worth of Heal Absorb for you to get through before you can heal his actual HP bar!
(this is a hyperbolic example to illustrate how we can potentially have more Heal Absorb than our current Max HP. I would not expect the developers to make us heal 4 whole HP bars worth of Heal Absorb for one mechanic, we don't have the MP for it)

[BabyYoda]

It is like every single job had healing so healing isn't as important as much

Like if everyone in this earth got 1 bar of gold.. gold will be lower value than water.

As simple as that.. keep healing hard to do or manage by non healer jobs and keep healing full capabilities with healers

[Ramiee]

If we want this accurate to the game John fantasy keeps spamming broil and uses all his aetherpoints on ED then kills his fairy to spam ED more while urianger is in the background spam healing everyone.
Maybe if there's a lot of incoming damage instead of 6 eds it's 5 with a sacred soil and a recitation Indomitability all while broil is being spammed and he refreshed the dot once.

[ForsakenRoe]

If we want this accurate to the game John fantasy keeps spamming broil and uses all his aetherpoints on ED then kills his fairy to spam ED more while urianger is in the background spam healing everyone.
Maybe if there's a lot of incoming damage instead of 6 eds it's 5 with a sacred soil and a recitation Indomitability all while broil is being spammed and he refreshed the dot once.

John's got 10000 MP in the picture, but has some HP missing and a Heal Absorb applied to him, he's not a healer, he's some kind of DPS (or maybe he is a healer, but he's not doing very much spellcasting). Let's say he's a BRD like 1.0 WOL. He won't be clearing that Heal Absorb on his own with just Second Wind, it's not strong enough. I guess he could cleanse it from himself by using Warden's Paean though

[Lorika]

All of ths is fine and all but..... maybe, before adding new mechanics, fixing the existing ones would be better no?
Just a though ^^

[ForsakenRoe]

All of ths is fine and all but..... maybe, before adding new mechanics, fixing the existing ones would be better no?
Just a though ^^

Depends what you mean by 'fix existing ones', like the idea of giving healers something to do via 'here is a debuff, you need to use Esuna to remove it' doesn't need 'fixing' per se, it functions as intended (maybe a better UI indication for it counts as a 'fix'). What that particular mechanic needs is not a 'fix', but moreso a case of 'SE actually remembering they've got it as a design element they can use'. Same with Interrupting casts as a Tank/PRanged, it doesn't need to be 'fixed' because it works, it needs to be 'used more often'.

But the other side of this is that we've had Interrupts in their current form since SHB. We've had Esuna-able debuffs since ARR (with the indicator coming in later). If they've not bothered to make good use of those systems thus far, then I don't see that as a reason to say 'we shouldn't get a new system', because not getting the new system doesn't necessarily translate to 'they'll make the current stuff more relevant'. They could continue to ignore the current stuff too (as shown with DT). At least with making a new mechanic, they'd have to use it somewhere in the expansion it's introduced in, because they want to show off the new thing they just made

[Tigore]

In a way, one could say ForsakenRoe is suggesting for another debuff that can be removed with Esuna. The idea brainstorm of healing through it was for times the heal absorb gets plastered on 4 - 8 players.

The 4 diamond heal absorb on the tank would definitely scream Esuna. Although an 8 player raid one at one diamond will probably just be healed through with Assize, Afflatus Rapture, Earthly Star, Celestial Opposition, Indomidability, Sacred Soil, Kerachole and Ixochole. Although the WAR dealing with it, I am not sure.