Let us use phoenix downs in combat, give healers more damage buttons, and a bit else

[Jeeqbit]

They kept saying they were getting feedback that healing was too stressful. The devs took this to mean that the problem was juggling healing and damage dealing at the same time. Personally, I think they completely missed the mark.

I actually don't. Probably the most busy healers were with damage was in Stormblood. Although I could manage it just fine and it kept me busy, it was a lot to manage and keep track of, since SCH and WHM had a whole bunch of different DoTs to apply and track. And plenty of players are definitely not like me... and would not manage that.

Still, making them spam 1 button wasn't necessarily the answer. I do feel like Sage gets pretty good with its damage kit, especially if you rig it before a boss fight by doing a tank shield and a party shield to get a full sweep of Addersting at the start of a fight due to the standard raid AoE+buster. Gives you a good variety to press.

WHM feels pretty good to me overall, despite the main button being on a 2 minute CD, because many fights have a lot going on that I need to pay attention to players for between that.

AST is alright, has lots of damage and buff buttons, and the card game always gave it something, although its card system used to feel more fun with a Royal Road or Lord/Lady RNG system.

SCH is really what got shafted the most in terms of damage. It has a lot of damage buttons in the sense of... Energy Drain x6 or more. But it feels like the other healers just have more variety, and the crit button doesn't feel as good as what the other healers have to me. But this is how SCH has always been beside the DoTs it had, and it's my main healer, so am fine whatever they do with it really.

IMO, what is actually more stressful for a lower skill healer is when you die and the entire group wipes because of it

Well yes, and tanks fear the same actually, but the reality is many players can clear a dungeon regardless if that happens (did it earlier today, defeated two bosses as a MNK despite that the healer died, and it was a tight sync dungeon too so I had to use my self-heals). Moreover, when they die, players usually don't care and just pull again and beat it. Hopefully new players will learn these truths about FFXIV eventually.

The punishment for underperforming on a healer is WAY higher than any other role.

Now do you see why everything has become crazy easy, to the point you can finish a dungeon without a healer easily? Healers are optional in most dungeons/fights if everyone else plays well. It's the same reason they gave heal potions to everyone in PvP - to reduce reliance on the healer.

Let us use phoenix downs in combat.

I would like if we could use all forms of potions on others... like in traditional FF games. It disappointed me this was not possible, and yet there's not really a good reason why. Would it really hurt to be able to use a Hi-Potion on a party member?

[Supersnow845]

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The problem with changing the healer design because not everyone could handle the SB/HW healers is that it has arguably raised the healer skill floor rather than lowered it because what you do is way more visible now and people expect more

In HW when you had cleric stance if you ran a dungeon and the healer spent 99% of their time in healing stance and maybe refreshed a DOT here or there everyone was fine and understanding; but you had room to show off your skills if you knew what you were doing.

Now the modern healers expect 99% DPS uptime because healers have nothing else to do with their wealth of oGCD’s, so “safety play” is more noticed and ridiculed

So the modern healers arguably made mistakes on both sides, their floors are higher because others expect them to do DPS as a baseline, not their ceilings are barely above the floor because there is nothing to optimise besides uptime

[Rebeccubus]

I actually don't. Probably the most busy healers were with damage was in Stormblood. Although I could manage it just fine and it kept me busy, it was a lot to manage and keep track of, since SCH and WHM had a whole bunch of different DoTs to apply and track. And plenty of players are definitely not like me... and would not manage that.

I do want to ask one thing of this. At least in casual content, isnt it okay to NOT track all your damage stuff? Having optimization beyond what casual players are comfortable doing is okay, they shouldnt feel pressured to do what isnt comfortable (within reason, which of course everyone has a different take on where that is). Taking away tools for hardcore players to play with feels like only a loss for them and not much of one for casual players who couldve just ignored them anyway. I personally wish that was the mentality people took. Everyone in 14 is meant to do damage, but it should be okay for healers to pause focusing on their DPS in order to keep everyone alive.

Still, making them spam 1 button wasn't necessarily the answer.

Agreed, they chose the wrong solution again. I'd argue there was a path to "simplify" (smooth out via QoL) healer's damage rotation's by making it more in depth and interesting with a better flow/cohesion without removing basically everything they had.

Well yes, and tanks fear the same actually, but the reality is many players can clear a dungeon regardless if that happens

True, however it is definitely less so, and a tank in a dungeon can be ressed where a healer usually cant. Meaning they get to keep playing the game and can participate in the team again.

Moreover, when they die, players usually don't care and just pull again and beat it.

This is good, yes. I like people being resilient to difficulty and I do not want the solution to be making everything easy to clear. I simply thing that the balance of responsibility needs a LITTLE adjustment, not a complete overhaul.

Now do you see why everything has become crazy easy, to the point you can finish a dungeon without a healer easily? Healers are optional in most dungeons/fights if everyone else plays well. It's the same reason they gave heal potions to everyone in PvP - to reduce reliance on the healer.

And ironically we see the opposite issue in a lot of savage fights of the last expansion where a SINGLE death meant a wipe because mechanics were designed to obliterate you if you didnt have everyone up. Damage also got really really bursty with like raidwide damage back to back to make sure you couldnt survive without a healer. Once again they chose a bad solution to a problem. I do think the PvP change was good due to them also giving healers a lot of crazy cool offensive abilities. THERE everyone being very solo-capable makes sense.

[Jeeqbit]

I do want to ask one thing of this. At least in casual content, isnt it okay to NOT track all your damage stuff? Having optimization beyond what casual players are comfortable doing is okay, they shouldnt feel pressured to do what isnt comfortable (within reason, which of course everyone has a different take on where that is). Taking away tools for hardcore players to play with feels like only a loss for them and not much of one for casual players who couldve just ignored them anyway.

Yes, the developers could have just left it and said "it's fine if some players don't engage with the damage buttons", since that's really the approach now anyway with them being taught to spam Cure > Cure II or Adlo.

The reason I think that they changed it from Stormblood was actually because I don't think it was intentional for healers to have all these attacks. Let me explain...

• White Mage had an older Aero DoT, intended for use below level 50.
• White Mage had a separate DoT they got, clearly intended for higher levels. But you could actually apply both!
• White Mage had an AoE Aero, clearly intended... for AoE. But this meant you could apply three Aeros.
• It was pretty clear they had different intended use cases, one of them really needed to be an upgrade, and the many Stone attacks technically had different use cases (applying different status effects for example) but in reality it was ideal to have a priority macro to use the highest level Stone available.
• So SE fixed all this by creating the trait upgrade system we have now.
• SCH had a bit of a different problem. It inherited all of Arcanist's actions, which were intended for Summoner and SE didn't really intend for Scholars to care about. Which is why they will never make a class split into multiple jobs again. This wasn't intended and it was their mistake all these actions were available to Scholar, and they seemed to find it challenging to solve it (ended up being as simple as changing the Affinity).

True, however it is definitely less so, and a tank in a dungeon can be ressed where a healer usually cant. Meaning they get to keep playing the game and can participate in the team again.

We have Red Mages and Summoners to rez as well. Maybe the increase in the amount of jobs over the years has diluted how often you see Red Mages or Summoners, but when Stormblood came out, Red Mages were everywhere and rezzing a healer was possible most of the time due to it. Their popularity has dwindled over time but that's probably in part due to variety of jobs now.

This is good, yes. I like people being resilient to difficulty and I do not want the solution to be making everything easy to clear. I simply thing that the balance of responsibility needs a LITTLE adjustment, not a complete overhaul.

While I agree, the truth is there are people playing the game purely for the story or for social reasons and are completely hopeless at games, and I think that's the primary reason that the main story has to have a mode of some form that makes it possible for them.

And ironically we see the opposite issue in a lot of savage fights of the last expansion where a SINGLE death meant a wipe because mechanics were designed to obliterate you if you didnt have everyone up.

Well that is Savage. I wasn't referring to Savage. But if you get ARR, Heavensward or Stormblood fights and scale them up (like we have with Unreals), the difference is clear between then vs now. A major part of the difficulty in those fights in the past was needing to rely entirely on the healers to keep you alive, whereas now a Warrior can use Shake It Off and numerous self-heals to make fights like Sofia and Ultima way easier. Although they still need the healer in these fights usually, it is still a big advantage over how it was in the past.

Damage also got really really bursty with like raidwide damage back to back to make sure you couldnt survive without a healer. Once again they chose a bad solution to a problem.

I feel like people really did ask for this. SE, who felt they had attempted this before, tried making it rougher in Abyssos so they could say "we told you so" when healers started avoiding PF.

The raidwide back-to-back thing though has always been in Savage really. Usually as a soft enrage mechanic in particular.

[Rebeccubus]

The reason I think that they changed it from Stormblood was actually because I don't think it was intentional for healers to have all these attacks.

Honestly? You do make good points, and its very possible they never intended for healers to have so many damage buttons. This argument may be flawed due to stuff like cleric stance however, because that was flat out just a damage stance for healers to manage, not even something they got from a DPS class via shared actions.

That said, at this point I feel like the easiest and best fix to implement would be giving healers back some of those damage buttons. FFXIV is just designed as a game where theres loads of time for damage dealing and aside from really hard fights, healing is often quite slow and predictable. There would be a LOT more work on fixing fights to be more engaging for healers because so much content was designed around them having more damage buttons so they have something to do when they weren't healing. Even newer content struggles with this when the damage is just not high enough for healers to be engaged. Adding some extra damage stuff to do would make it more engaging. It would be like if tanks only had a 123 combo and the rest of the bar was mit. It would be boring af because aside from wall to wall pulls and hardcore content, theyd have nothing to do but that 123.

[Jeeqbit]

This argument may be flawed due to stuff like cleric stance however, because that was flat out just a damage stance for healers to manage, not even something they got from a DPS class via shared actions.

That was primarily a Conjurer action (and yes it was cross-class, but that system was unmaintained and an afterthought). So if we assume Cleric Stance was intended for White Mages, they didn't originally have the additional AoE DoT they got in Stormblood, which is when they effectively removed Cleric Stance (because that stance became a tiny damage buff).

It still doesn't really change that they had no upgrade system to say "don't use this older version of the same action", even where it seemed logical. I don't think the developers even knew if they were meant to be upgrades - they just threw a load of mud at the wall in ARR to see what stuck. A lot of ideas they dreamed up when designing it didn't happen in reality, and at this point in the game they know what won't work.

[Rebeccubus]

That was primarily a Conjurer action (and yes it was cross-class, but that system was unmaintained and an afterthought). So if we assume Cleric Stance was intended for White Mages, they didn't originally have the additional AoE DoT they got in Stormblood, which is when they effectively removed Cleric Stance (because that stance became a tiny damage buff).

It still doesn't really change that they had no upgrade system to say "don't use this older version of the same action", even where it seemed logical. I don't think the developers even knew if they were meant to be upgrades - they just threw a load of mud at the wall in ARR to see what stuck. A lot of ideas they dreamed up when designing it didn't happen in reality, and at this point in the game they know what won't work.

Honestly fair

Going forward I think I'd like to see healers given interesting damage rotations that ARENT just "here is more dots to track". They need to feel impactful like theres decision making (The scholars Ive had in my raid group talk about energy drain as really nice for this because it gives them something to think about as far as spending resources on damage or healing) but it doesnt necessarily need to lead to button bloat or an overwhelming kit. I actually really like some of the ideas they put into DT. WHM getting those instant casts and AST/SCH getting a fancy new button for burst feels good. I'd like to see those sorts of ideas expanded upon. I also think WHM lilies are incredibly smart design once you unlock the blood lily because it ties their healing and damage together in a way that feels very natural. I want more stuff like those, not just like 3 extra dots to track.

[Rebeccubus]

Maybe the increase in the amount of jobs over the years has diluted how often you see Red Mages or Summoners

Honestly I think this is a good argument for WHY we should diversify the ressing role a bit. RDM and SMN having raises has been a design trap for them in balance, and as you say they will be around less for emergency resses as more classes get added, putting more pressure on healers. It is probably an issue showing itself more as time goes on.

Well that is Savage. I wasn't referring to Savage.

Sorry, to be clear I was agreeing with you and just adding on that the issue ALSO presents itself with the opposite problem in harder fight designs. You were correct.

While I agree, the truth is there are people playing the game purely for the story or for social reasons and are completely hopeless at games

I also understand this as a goal and is why I really like trusts. Letting new players go at their own pace is great. Though it is hard because you cant design the game for everyone at once of course. I think that what we got in DT is a good level of difficulty for most casual content. That WILL alienate some players that can't match the required skill, but that's true of the majority of games. If anything I'd want the devs to invest in better designs to help give players opportunities to improve (like trusts and hall of the novice). I also feel that diversifying the raises via phoenix downs will actually HELP those that are hopeless at the game. Currently, unless a healer invites friends or uses pf, they have to get LUCKY with a SMN/RDM joining their group, which will be rarer with time as you say. If they get unlucky then the full pressure is on to be perfect. Making it so everyone has access to even a really weak res would help those players as it'd be easier for others to carry them.

I feel like people really did ask for this

What i remember is healers saying "We are bored and have too many heal buttons that we don't need. Ideally we want the damage buttons back, but you seem insistent on giving us all these heal buttons so can you at least make us need them?" and then thats when we got the Abyssos fight design. Thats what i remember, anyway.

The raidwide back-to-back thing though has always been in Savage really

Yeah it has been, as has the instakill body-check mechanics. But they got more prevalent and more aggressive about them as a reactionary measure to complaints, from my observation.