#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Shurrikhan]

The main issue with trying to increase healing requirements, is that we have an upper cap on how much damage an attack against us can do: our Max HP level.

This is irrelevant unless that limit degrades (or, denies beneficial opportunities to) our gameplay, but here the only effect is on the number of heals we can fit into an HP bar before overhealing -- i.e., on the tuning of (GCD) heals relative to player max HP. Such does not require in any way universalizing a healing absorb mechanic. It would require only a higher ratio of heals doable to player max HP.

Part of the idea of 'it can be removed with Esuna' is, as you surmise, to make Esuna a more relevant aspect of our gameplay. But it also offers ways for those players who panic, or who haven't got the resources to handle the healing required, to still resolve the mechanic.

No, it wouldn't. It would simply be optimal at X healing-absorption afflicted, competitive near that, and non-optimal in certain other situations. In the same way that a spammable Arm's Length would not simply give healers without the spacial awareness a way to still resolve a knockback nor a spammable Communio would give another way for Reapers to meet DPS checks, neither would Esuna be simply an extra "way... to resolve the mechanic." It would be THE way.

you could have things like AST's Essential Dignity say something like 'If the target is afflicted with Aetherblight, they are considered to be below 30% HP regardless of their current HP value', so that ED's scaling is always set to maximum effect to tackle the debuff faster. Maybe SGE's Kardia healing is twice as strong against Aetherblight, because of their medical knowledge. Maybe Emergency Tactics on SCH makes healing spells be a guaranteed Crit when they're used against Aetherblight, or Excogitation instantly detonates on someone if/when they receive Aetherblight.

But... why? Why would you not simply follow a single intuitive rule instead of adding the equivalent of X healer heals more against damage taken from this (kind of) attack and that healer against that attack, etc.?

There's already an established norm, btw, which is to simply consider healing absorption (and, in many games, normalized pending DoT damage) as missing HP for the purposes of any %missing HP calculation. Such retains the relative power of each tool, rather than relatively weakening the likes of ED or Benediction. I'd argue you probably don't even want that, though, if you want Aetherblight to feel at all meaningful. (Just as it probably should not be cleansible if you want it to feel impactful, especially if it's going to absorb 100% of healing up to its cap instead of some lower variable percent.)

Even that, though, is just a job balance decision to make the best of an otherwise added imbalancing mechanic (healing absorption) by making some jobs weaker and/or some stronger against that particular debuff. And, given Esuna, I doubt it's going to be particularly relevant regardless.

Or maybe PLD's Cover applies all the damage (and I guess Aetherblight) that you Cover, as Aetherblight instead of real damage (so instead of taking a 150k TB twice for 300k and dying, you'd be able to take it and get 150k damage, 150k Aetherblight and live), increasing Cover's versatility, and being able to take someone else's Aetherblight onto yourself as a PLD (with the selfhealing of Confiteor combo/HolySpirit/Holy Sheltron) could open up interesting strategies for some groups.

Again, there's already a very relevant norm here, especially for among Tanks, that would be both more intuitive and more gameplay-affecting: delaying damage taken to be instead taken over time (usually with the portion of health to be consumed by one's DoTs suffered shown --you guessed it-- as a second color or shade of health bar).

Yes, you can of course healing absorption to allow tanks to suffer sustain costs beyond their max HP, a la Purgatory on a Death Knight. Again, I think the game could benefit from involving healing absorption sparingly and deliberately.

But why revolve so much around a singular debuff? And why give it a Get Out of Jail Free Card in the form of Esuna?

To Wrap Things Up:

• I'd be happy to see healing absorption added to the game, but only as one extra undermechanic among several (e.g., Stagger, Break, flat rating buffs, etc.). To be clear, those should each be situated such that their effects are easily conveyable and understood in/for both their function and implications. (There therefore shouldn't be too many, but enough to meet our needs while generally shrinking the tooltip sizes and apparent memorization required to introduce more diverse kits engagingly in the contexts of the game's fights.)
  
  
• That said, I don't think a healing absorption debuff should typically interact with Esuna, since the whole point of the healing absorption is generally to require... more healing actions. I therefore dislike what making Aetherblight cleansible would do both to Esuna and to healing actions when competing against it.
  

  Allowing that interaction would replace the need to give Esuna a niche through far more contextually interesting debuffs (which are virtually any that are not healing absorption, be that a snare before an incoming AoE, vulnerability, particular DoTs, timing and mitigating explosions, purging a debuff at a particular time to optimize a compensatory buff, etc., etc.) with something that newly competes with and therefore overshadows or would be overshadowed by the rest of the healing kit all to center itself around a debuff that is probably the least typically interesting of any type.

• The present tuning of healing actions as portions of player HP can never be an issue in itself; it can only be an issue in terms of...

1. the relative reaction time available to healers,
2. the throughput available to healers as a portion of their uptime relative to incoming sustain needs,
3. the degree to which overhealing would be a concern, and
4. the relative tuning, given the matters above, of certain actions against each other --and per their mid- and longer-term costs-- as to allow for situationality / context-minded decision-making among healer actions.

Consequently...

1. If, at present, we somehow were to be lacking in available time to react to damage intake, we'd need only either nerf the frequency of attacks or both nerf the damage per attack and our heals.
   
   
2. If, at present, we are not spending enough time on GCD healing actions (uptime costs are too low), then you need only increase the relative healing required through a greater number of attacks (spaced away from burst) and/or weaker heals (for everyone, generally).
   
   
3. If, at present, the issue were solely that we far too easily overheal, again, one need only nerf damage intake slightly and proportionately nerf our heals (therefore giving a longer period over which that healing can be done
   
   
4. If, at present, our best options are too consistent and obvious, such as by having no real opportunity cost, and therefore leave no room for situationality, then adjust their tuning relative to each other. Such would in turn allow for shorter available reaction times to be salvagable even among higher uptime needs.

Conclusions:

• You would therefore, imo, be better off leaving Aetherblight as just another debuff instead of trying to make it, specifically, the way out of various healer woes. Simply target those problems in simple, straightforward manners not beholden to any particular debuff:

1. If there's not enough to heal, bring in more damage in ways that least disproportionately affect necessary reaction time, scheduling of limited actions, or necessary cognitive load in general. (E.g., add between-bursts hits, rather than just amping all incoming damage or nerfing heals outright.)
   
   
2. If there's not enough cognitive load engaged, increase the decision-making space available to healers by allowing for meaningful soft-branching opportunities in practice such as through the tuning of stronger vs. weaker actions, ramping undermechanics, meaningful healer damage opportunities and some small but impactful increases to healer non-healing kit, etc. This part may be intwined with the first, as it can also provide ways to reduce necessary reaction time and the sense of living or dying by a scheduled CD. Note, however, how it is not beholden to any singular debuff or undermechanic, only to healer kits actually being more cohesive and engaging in themselves.
   
   
3. Thereafter, if healers were to still struggle with being able to give out two heals without overhealing and to lack optimization opportunities for trimming those overheals, reduce both the incoming damage and all healing outputs proportionately so that the likely excess healing portion is decreased in bringing people up to required eHPs.

[Tigore]

There are definitely more avenues we can explore to increase the damage to parties with reduced risk of one-shotting the party. Although the Aetherblight system Forsaken Roe is suggesting is definitely interesting. She said we could also tie a non-lethal DoT in as a possibility so the healers are discouraged from greeding against the Esuna casts too much. Just a light DoT that slowly ticks based on a percent of max HP so it needs attention but could probably be done in around 5 - 10 seconds safely with everyone at full health still. The healers can also throw a shield up before it happens to potentially negate the mechanic from setting in the first place. That probably took inspiration from the Ifrit Trial knockback mech being negated if the player takes zero damage.

Some other avenues to consider could be something like this. They could very well be paired together with Aetherblight, so the solution to increasing party damage is not unilaterally on one thing.

1. Increase the Max HP of all classes

It's one of the simplest ways to allow encounters to increase the damage it deals reasonably on us. The HPS of the healer cooldowns are so strong now that the higher amount of HP to heal probably wouldn't be noticed much. The mana costs of the barrier spells were slightly reduced too, so first timer healers should reasonably be able to handle it with Succor and Eukrasian Prognosis.

2. Consider making some more of the major damaging mechs multi hit

I believe a tank buster for our current Savage fights already do this. We could also count the perma DoT on a recent Trial fight for this type of mech too. If there is enough sign for the healers that the total damage will be well over the full health of the party, it will definitely start to put the cooldowns like Asylum, Seraphism, Macrocosmos and Panhaima to work. This might also make the regens have a better place for working as a solution rather than it always being a mitigation check. The mitigation cooldowns should still work as another way.

3. Put in more gravity based mechs

This is similar to the White Hole that sets all HP to 1. It has the property of keeping the damage taken more relevant to players if it is percentage based on their current HP. It may not kill the players by itself, but it can ignore Defense and Magic Defense. If we had more mech combos that alternated a gravity hit with a regular hit, this could potentially make the regular hits more deadly if the healers have not prepped up shields, regens or spike heal cooldowns.

4. Use more debuffs that muddle the character stats and / or movement

Even if the boss has no enrage timer, reducing a character's ability to deal damage to the boss will obviously equate to a longer fight and more healing that would need to be done. At this point, it may also need to target the oGCD damage, buff and healing constants somehow to actually hurt more. It's still just a test for the healer or BRD to notice it and use Esuna / Warden's Paean to take care of it. If we do actually consider the AoE Esunaga getting in for a healer like WHM, it might need a cooldown of at least 1 minute or 90 seconds to be fair to the others.

[Shurrikhan]

@Tigore

Agreed. And again, I don't mean to say Aetherial Blight or any other mechanic can't be useful; I just don't think solutions paths ought to be conflated or that a solution ought to seek out a problem to justify it instead of us first building solutions straightforwardly from and to as directly as possible address what problems we can agree exist.

In other MMOs, for example, there is usually a clear distinction made between kit or between-abilities balance, inter-build balance, spec/mastery balance, class balance, and role balance, and one does not therefore adjust the proportion of power of a kit already balanced among itself to bring up the power of the class against others (instead simply buffing the class's outputs as a whole by the proportion they tend to fall short in real personal contribution).

Now, there are bundles to consider, of course: if, for instance, our main concern is healer engagement (and I'd argue always that gameplay should be the foremost concern, even if other solutions may mitigate issues in the interim), there would necessarily have to be room kept in mind also for the impacts of increased healing requirements and ways to meaningfully leverage healer kits for engagement in that context alongside any non-healing means of engagement added (ideally, synergetic with those healing considerations).

But I don't want to limit all those possibilities around, say, a single buff, debuff, gauge system, or under mechanic. Making any singular element that disproportionately necessary for the rest to work just invites future issues. If some portion of output or cognitive load can be reshaped/reshaded later through some new element to a net benefit, great, but that should be more in the realm of augmenting a then-working system than a focus for the way out in the first place.

[Lorika]

I don't understand why people want to add layer upon layer upon layer of mechanic to fix healing. It's not the first time iwonder why, but it's the first time i voice it.
i think all your idea aren't the solution at all.

You just want to add new code into a game know to have a spaghetti code for years.... It's asking for bug, lag, dev taking even more time to to things, risk of mistake making some fight too hard and being nerfed later, rendering thoses mechanic near meaningless on other fight, even more unbalance between jobs etc... etc...

Why wanting to take the risk to make things even worse when the answer, the solution, the fix is way more simple : Tank and DPS just need to have their mit, self-heal/heal and potency nerfed. it's the most simple and efficient way to fix healing.

SE just need to roll back on the powercreep they created.

[Mercury_Grey]

I don't understand why people want to add layer upon layer upon layer of mechanic to fix healing. It's not the first time iwonder why, but it's the first time i voice it.
i think all your idea aren't the solution at all.

You just want to add new code into a game know to have a spaghetti code for years.... It's asking for bug, lag, dev taking even more time to to things, risk of mistake making some fight too hard and being nerfed later, rendering thoses mechanic near meaningless on other fight, even more unbalance between jobs etc... etc...

Why wanting to take the risk to make things even worse when the answer, the solution, the fix is way more simple : Tank and DPS just need to have their mit, self-heal/heal and potency nerfed. it's the most simple and efficient way to fix healing.

SE just need to roll back on the powercreep they created.

i want to point out PLD, and WAR has already had their healing nerfed. PLD before its mini-rework/update used to out heal healers I would know because i mained PLD back in StB and ShB. WAR healing in the showcase build was a lot stronger then it is now. They nerfed it before it went live especially the AoE healing. If they nerfed a lto of mit now then tanks would be squisher then they are now which would defeat the purpose of them ebing tanks. Would you rathor have a tank wiht strong mits an da heal so you can devert your resources more to the party, or a tank who will die despite healing and mitigating. I'll use everkeep extreme conga to explain it. During teh conga tanks have ot use thier 40% mit with maybe a rampart to survive. If tehy nerf that MIT to 30% then they have to use even more mitigation to survive. Since in teh conga its suppose to be a stack, but if people stack the markers everyone blows up

[Supersnow845]

i want to point out PLD, and WAR has already had their healing nerfed. PLD before its mini-rework/update used to out heal healers I would know because i mained PLD back in StB and ShB. WAR healing in the showcase build was a lot stronger then it is now. They nerfed it before it went live especially the AoE healing. If they nerfed a lto of mit now then tanks would be squisher then they are now which would defeat the purpose of them ebing tanks. Would you rathor have a tank wiht strong mits an da heal so you can devert your resources more to the party, or a tank who will die despite healing and mitigating. I'll use everkeep extreme conga to explain it. During teh conga tanks have ot use thier 40% mit with maybe a rampart to survive. If tehy nerf that MIT to 30% then they have to use even more mitigation to survive. Since in teh conga its suppose to be a stack, but if people stack the markers everyone blows up

Yes the point should be the tank and the healer should have to work together to solve the tankbuster, the tankbuster shouldn’t be able to be survived with only the tank mit

Adlo used to basically be a tank mit as you would help the tank survive the tankbuster so they could better spread their mit out, these days you just kitchen sink infrequent tankbustets then otherwise barely interact with your tank kit

The healers have single target heals for a reason

[Lorika]

i want to point out PLD, and WAR has already had their healing nerfed. PLD before its mini-rework/update used to out heal healers I would know because i mained PLD back in StB and ShB. WAR healing in the showcase build was a lot stronger then it is now. They nerfed it before it went live especially the AoE healing. If they nerfed a lto of mit now then tanks would be squisher then they are now which would defeat the purpose of them ebing tanks. Would you rathor have a tank wiht strong mits an da heal so you can devert your resources more to the party, or a tank who will die despite healing and mitigating. I'll use everkeep extreme conga to explain it. During teh conga tanks have ot use thier 40% mit with maybe a rampart to survive. If tehy nerf that MIT to 30% then they have to use even more mitigation to survive. Since in teh conga its suppose to be a stack, but if people stack the markers everyone blows up

Sorry but right now when i see a Tank take a Tank Buster and loosing less than 50% of it's HP (and even less with PLD job skills), thing that can be fixed with just one heal.
When i see a DPS insta healing more than 50% of it's HP after a raid wide AOE.... Damage that was also mitigated by some DPS personal/group Shield/mit, and that can be healed with one group heal.
Without forgeting how trivial most DPS check have become.

I don't know for you but i really think there is some serious problems.

[Mercury_Grey]

Sorry but right now when i see a Tank take a Tank Buster and loosing less than 50% of it's HP (and even less with PLD job skills), thing that can be fixed with just one heal.
When i see a DPS insta healing more than 50% of it's HP after a raid wide AOE.... Damage that was also mitigated by some DPS personal/group Shield/mit, and that can be healed with one group heal.
Without forgeting how trivial most DPS check have become.

I don't know for you but i really think there is some serious problems.

On the DOS having some healing that's better then healers I do agree but at times if a healer has to focus on mechanics like for example worl ext the 6 hot tnak buster and having to keep both tanks alive. The dps having some healing br ok

[Lorika]

The dps having some healing br ok

So a team like the following is ok? : War, GNB, Monk, Picto, Dancer and RDM....

Sorry, but as a healer i feel just completly useless with a party like that.

[Tigore]

Nerfing the tank and DPS party mitigation would get the job done too. Although ... we immediately get met with resistance and backlash if that is the only method we use ... >.> It was what ForsakenRoe mentioned, so she thought that buffing the encounter damage more would be accepted more or not noticed as much. It may seem like a roundabout way to fix the problem, but maybe it can add some more new mechs for us to have fun with if Square can pull it off. Plus using only a full on nerf might have unintended consequences of making the easy soloing stuff more harder than intended. The solo instances would be okay with that WoL self heal buff, but other stuff like solo Hunts, Treasure Chests and FATEs may be a different story.

I can see the other side of it where the tanks and DPS do want to help somewhat with the damage taken too. We could find a midway point where all the roles can do something to help solve a mech. These are some other ideas to consider too. We may still need to consider slightly nerfing some mitigations and self heals, but it might only be a small amount if the encounters are actually hurting the tanks and party members enough. After all, accidentally making the self heals as pitiful as the 1K critical Physick SMN GCD heal is not a curse I want to inflict on anyone.

1. Increase the frequency of tank busters

The fact that the tanks can kitchen sink cooldowns and still be fine is a problem I can read. Typically, tanks are supposed to stagger their cooldown use one at a time for longevity rather than taking almost no damage for 10 - 20 seconds, then suddenly get hammered afterwards. It may still have to be frequent enough so the tanks don't just simply provoke swap every minute and still kitchen sink it. If we do want swaps, Warcraft often times used a stacking vuln debuff that lasted maybe 30 seconds that required switching at around 3. The consequences for messing up the swap too early or not doing so usually involves taking more than double damage or flat out dying at a full stack debuff. Yes, the Warcraft Paladins were able to bubble off the debuff (Divine Shield) and right click it off immediately, but it was a 5 minute cooldown.

2. Increase the boss' auto attack damage

This can be a simpler solution to encourage more use of spells like Regen and Aspected Benefic to counter it. The occasional Sacred Soil -> Lustrate and Taurochole -> Druchole can work to help mitigate this if it is doing significant enough damage to worry about it.