#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[CaptainLagbeard]

Healer's potential damage output is "fine", enrage timers are designed around it. Healers dragging people down in M11S has nothing to do with their potency numbers.

Your main damage source being a single button is the entire issue, because the higher you make the potency of that one button the more dps you lose when you miss a cast of it.
And bad healers miss a whole lot of casts.

Giving them more buttons won't fix the missed casts, making their casts do damage fixes their low damage output.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Giving them more buttons won't fix the missed casts, making their casts do damage fixes their low damage output.

Sure. Now place an average healer on that position. What they end up doing is, they don't cast anything no matter how 'easy' their buttons are to press, because they're shaking or too stressed to press their buttons proper while mechanics are going out. Better healers? Still 1 button spam, but now they're doing way waaaaaaaaaaay more dps.

This is partly why making their filler nukes stronger ends up widening the disparity: devs HAS to balance this around the assumption that healers will output their 'supposedly easy healer dps output'.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Sure. Now place an average healer on that position. What they end up doing is, they don't cast anything no matter how 'easy' their buttons are to press, because they're shaking or too stressed to press their buttons proper while mechanics are going out. Better healers? Still 1 button spam, but now they're doing way waaaaaaaaaaay more dps.

This is partly why making their filler nukes stronger ends up widening the disparity: devs HAS to balance this around the assumption that healers will output their 'supposedly easy healer dps output'.

Well they're currently balancing the game around healers doing piss poor damage because their attack potencies are too low.
So there's no one singular fix that solves everything, but I think as a start balancing out the game would be nice.

There is really no justification why Healers should do less damage than Tanks, because neither role is a DPS. So, as a start to fixing things, Healers need to have their base damage pulled up to the same level as Tanks. And if SE is afraid to give Healers more attacks or more gameplay, the only way to do that is increasing potencies.

[Absurdity]

Giving them more buttons won't fix the missed casts, making their casts do damage fixes their low damage output.

Except it does...to an extent. Splitting the damage between more spells and abilities means less damage lost per individual cast than right now. Add some DoTs back into the mix that still do their damage while you're not casting any damage spells and we can at least shrink the disparity between good healers and mediocre healers.
Making your filler do 800 potency per cast will mean some healers do tank dps numbers and some do auto attack-only dps numbers, good luck if you get one of those in your party finder when enrage timers are balanced around the former.

[Alice_Rivers]

Well they're currently balancing the game around healers doing piss poor damage because their attack potencies are too low.
So there's no one singular fix that solves everything, but I think as a start balancing out the game would be nice.

I'm inclined to agree with Rein on this one, raising healer dps potencies is not going to help with this problem. Normal content would go faster, yes, and maybe you would feel the fact you're not actually healing less as a result but in higher level content, it wouldn't change the fact that forced damage is carefully calibrated to be barely non-lethal and the resulting healer response of mitigate/shield, top people off and then press dps buttons for the next minute. The result being experienced healers press their dps button by default and perfect their slidecasting, then go "Oh, wups, guess I should mitigate that more" when someone dies. On the other hand, less experienced healers are still going to be paralysed because they either don't know the damage profile is awful or they still actually care about keeping people alive rather than killing the boss.

The way I would fix that problem is to raise damage in normal content so healers actually get trained to heal and in savage adjust the damage profile to do less raidwide damage a lot more often so that healers spend more time doing healing and it feels more manageable which gives newer healers more confidence to press their dps button.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Like I said, there is no one singular fix that would solve every problem.

But it would be a good fix to make Healers damage output comparable to Tanks, even if it is by just boosting potencies. And SE themselves have said they don't want to give Healers more attacks, so the only viable fix IS increasing potency on the one attack we have and the DoT.

If balance breaks the game, the game deserves to be broken.

[ForsakenRoe]

SE could reduce how punishing it is to miss a GCD attack as a Healer due to needing to Heal, via potencies.

Here's an example: SCH has Broil4 as its filler. Originally, SCH's filler spell, Ruin, was 80p, Broil4 is 320p, literally 4x as much potency. Let's assume the SCH is running 2.50 GCD (base GCD, no spellspeed). If we take the 20p away for a second to make maths easier, we can look at it as 'we deal 300p (plus 20p) per 2.5s'. Thus, by multiplying things by 1.2x, we can get to 'we deal 360p (plus 24p) per 3s'. 3sec happens to be the DOT tick rate, and so we could instead have something like:

Broil4, Spell, 400MP
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 25p.
Additional Effect: Applies Broiling
Broiling Effect: Damage over Time
Potency: 360p
Duration: 9s

Thus, players would continue to spam Broil to deal damage, as they currently do. But if a player has to drop a cast of it, to apply Succor/Adlo or such, they don't lose the full potency of Broil (320p). They'd lose only the on-cast portion (25p in this example), and the DOT portion (360p per 3s) would continue to deal damage, keeping damage rolling even in high-intensity HPS check mechanics. As you spam Broil, you'd constantly refresh the DOT portion. Of course, this comes with the downside of 'you can press Broil once per 3 GCDs and still do almost your whole damage output', so it'd have a pretty sizeable effect on skill expression, but numbers could be wrangled as needed

Like I said, there is no one singular fix that would solve every problem.

But it would be a good fix to make Healers damage output comparable to Tanks, even if it is by just boosting potencies. And SE themselves have said they don't want to give Healers more attacks, so the only viable fix IS increasing potency on the one attack we have and the DoT.

If balance breaks the game, the game deserves to be broken.

But the problem with that, is that the content is already 'balanced' around Healers having the output they have. If SE increased Healer damage output by, eg, increasing Glare to 400p, then content will have its DPS checks (in content where DPS actually matters) scaled up to match that new output. So you'd be doing the same rotation, with the same impact on the boss's HP bar (as a proportion of the total HP of the boss)

If there's a choice between Healers getting 'deal more damage, with the same rotation', and 'deal the same damage, with a rotation that has 2-3 more buttons in it', I'm taking Option B, frame 1.

Also, we had a time in the game where Healers were out-dpsing Tanks, at the start of SHB. The Tanks pitched a fit about it, and I expect they would do so again. The general opinion of the playerbase seems to be that yes, Tanks should be doing more damage than Healers, despite the roles both being equally 'not a DPS', and while I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment, I also don't see 'make Tanks and Healers do the same damage' as being a solution to the problems that Healers actually have

[Absurdity]

I don't particularly care whether or not healers do the same dps. Granted it "feels" odd to have the role that spams a single button the entire time do the same damage as jobs that can technically still do things "wrong", as hard as that may be nowadays.
This was basically the argument in Shadowbringers, when tanks still took slightly more effort.
But ultimately "feels odd" isn't a particularly strong argument, especially with the current state of jobs, what matters is if this would actually fix anything, it wouldn't.

As already explained the DPS checks in content that actually has them already account for healer DPS, so healers doing more DPS just means the DPS checks get increased by that amount.
You're ultimately still doing the exact same thing and your increased DPS makes no functional difference, it just looks nicer on damage meters.

Well, it will change two things. Content that doesn't account for healer DPS will get faster and Healers that are already bad at pressing their single damage button consistently will now be even worse comparatively, because every single cast of Broil/Malefic/Dosis/Glare will have increased in value.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Well the alternative to fixing the lack of balance would be lower tank DPS to the level of Healers... But that then would make every currently existing piece of content kind of impossible.

And Yoshi-P has talked about not wanting to change healer gameplay, to not give them any additional stress as he puts it... So, with that mentality, the only thing that could be fixed is attack potency.


Although there is another thing that's been talked to death on these forums, Tank healing, which needs significant nerfs... Could generally keep the current balancing, give a huge boost to healer DPS, and take Tank healing to EW DRK levels. Healers get their downtime as they need to heal, and then do damage where they can in their downtime.

[Absurdity]

Well the alternative to fixing the lack of balance would be lower tank DPS to the level of Healers... But that then would make every currently existing piece of content kind of impossible.

What balance? There is no "balance" between tanks and healers, they are entirely different roles. When we talk about balancing DPS it is only within a given role, healers aren't competing with tanks for damage output, they're competing with other healers.