A simple revamp to Cleric Stance that might fix raid balancing..

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

500% buff to Holy spam? Fucking yes, we have reached maximum carnage!

[Riyshn]

500% buff to Holy spam? Fucking yes, we have reached maximum carnage!

+500% off his proposed new base of 5% current. So really 30% of current. And you lose even that as soon as you have to heal at all.

[Penthea]

500% buff to Holy spam? Fucking yes, we have reached maximum carnage!

As awful as op's suggestion is, I have to admit this would be glorious.

[RichardButte]

It gets kind of old seeing people with little to no savage experience (From what I can see at least, no Windup Louisoix, no Gordias/Creator mounts, no logs, nor even any normal alex/omega minions if I'm not mistaken, by all means correct me if I'm wrong) making suggestions involving sweeping changes that would effectively remove a very significant portion of the gameplay healers have in the end game.

I don't need any Savage experience to know that the developers could not possibly be happy with the fact that Omega Savage was cleared the very same DAY it was released.

And it's not exactly rocket science to know why this sort of thing happened when they've said time and again that they don't factor in healer DPS when balancing raid encounters (someone please correct me if they've reneged on this statement somewhere, but last I saw this was still their policy).

I know full well that this suggestion is terrible: It would make healing even more boring than it already is, but it WOULD fix the underlying issue that arises from healers being able to put out roughly 50% of the damage of a full blown DPS (with correct numbers: 500% isn't enough, as folks have pointed out).

No matter how you slice it, though, healer damage is too powerful to simply pretend it doesn't exist when balancing bosses. The day one clear of Omega Savage showed us that because there's no way in hell it should've been doable on day one due to gear gating alone.

Is the suggestion terrible for the players? Sure, but it would absolutely ensure the devs can balance raids without having to worry about healer DPS throwing off their calculations.

[Kabzy]

Is the suggestion terrible for the players? Sure

Is the suggestion terrible for the players? Sure

I just can't even right now.

[QooEr]

stuff

Not really. people are literally clearing these fights day 1 because people complained about shit being hard too much. you know how much time it took a8s world first? a4s world first? they took WEEKS. in fact, gordias dps checks were so tight that healer dps was almost a necessity. you clearly know nothing of what youre talking about

that aside, if something is bad for the players, its bad for everyone. maybe the devs should start considering healer dps instead of pretending it doesnt, because that way healers would have to like. put some effort. this would stop me doing about 7 times more dps than my shit cohealers

[Parawill]

Is this real life?

[Fernosaur]

I don't need any Savage experience to know that the developers could not possibly be happy with the fact that Omega Savage was cleared the very same DAY it was released.

I don't have the exact quote, but the developers have a good estimate on how long it will take the top groups to clear the Savage raids for the first time, and most of the clear times (including Omega) have fallen into their predictions from what I've read in past interviews.

They don't balance the fights thinking about World First racers, they think of the community at large, and they have stated they made Omega "easy" so that more people would get into raiding. Guess what? They succeeded.

Also, what you're suggesting would literally kill the healing role. No one except really bad players would stick to healing, and the game would die.

Just stop defending this suggestion, please. It's evident even you know it's pretty bad, hahaha.

[Sebazy]

I don't need any Savage experience to know that the developers could not possibly be happy with the fact that Omega Savage was cleared the very same DAY it was released.

But savage experience would help you appreciate where the issues actually are.

1 FC cleared it on day one (Mine no less, yay!), with a good number of kills on day two. More typical high end/midcore teams have been taking around a week to a month to get their clears with many solid teams still progressing.

I genuinely don't think you understand the complexities and subtlety of raid design and the math behind it, nor do you appreciate the impact of what your suggesting.

As you acknowledge, world progression teams rely on healer DPS to allow them to pass DPS checks long before they are at the item level the content is designed for. By removing healer DPS as a route to go down you're effectively crippling and dumbing down the top level of play.

This would leave Yoshida's team with two options:

Release content that is mathematically or mechanically unkillable upon release. You only have to look back as far as Gordias to see how badly this went down, Twintania was another example, WoW has also done this on occasions and again, it's never been a popular move.

Lower the bar very significantly to the point where a flawless run with top tier DPS players can kill the content at the base item level for that tier. This would trivialise the content in the long run and likely introduce issues akin to what we saw with Creator once people begin to significantly overgear it.

No matter how you slice it, though, healer damage is too powerful to simply pretend it doesn't exist when balancing bosses. The day one clear of Omega Savage showed us that because there's no way in hell it should've been doable on day one due to gear gating alone.

Another factor you seem to be missing entirely is as such:

VIT melded accessories play almost as substantial a part in enabling these early clears as healer DPS does. These week 1 clears generally require very significant amounts of crafted gear with extra VIT in the accessories to survive certain mechanics.

If SE truly wanted to gate these encounters behind gear then they could simply remove VIT melding altogether and tune the encounter AOEs to a specific item level to achieve that. Thankfully they don't, because it would be incredibly unpopular and I suspect it would pretty much wipe out the top tier raid scene.

Personally I do think healer DPS is taken into account in their designs, but rather they use that data to strike a balance where a certain level of 'over optimisation' is required to clear the encounter at min ilvl, but the encounter isn't absolutely reliant on healer DPS to clear once you hit the ilvl and dps performance requirements. By increasing the amount of optimisation and healer/tank dps that's required, they can effectively increase the difficulty of the encounter for the progression teams whilst still ensuring the content is accessible to more mainstream players once they have the tome/24 man gear further down the line.

Is the suggestion terrible for the players? Sure, but it would absolutely ensure the devs can balance raids without having to worry about healer DPS throwing off their calculations.

On the contrary, they still have to factor in for vertical gear progression which is pretty much the same story.

I'm rather surprised that you think that destroying the endgame experience for pretty much every midcore and up healer out there is a worthwhile trade off vs the two encounters that were significantly 'broken' by the additional dps healers could bring. Pushing additional DPS to clear soft enrages or push through dangerous phases is nothing new and pretty much every raid tier going has a decent example of this in action, to name but a few:

Pushing past the Twister/DK phase in T5
Pushing phase 1 to minimise the number of meteors and jumps in T9
Pushing phase 1 to conserve healer mp and tank CDs in T13
NOT YOU GORDIAS
Killing Brute Justice before J Waves start getting nasty in A8S
Killing Alex Prime before the tethers+fountains mechanic in A12S

Zurvan and T11's issues were as much a fault with design and how the phases were laid out. T10 was just as heavily phased but didn't suffer for it because the mechanics within each phase were better planned and arranged IMHO. Omega (and the primals to boot) demonstrates that SE have learnt their lesson from this and adapted well. The raid scene is in a good place right now, the progression teams got a race that wasn't life destroying, whereas more mainstream teams are still progressing a month down the line. Hopefully the upcoming super savage encounter will answer the only remaining question with regards to the ultimate difficulty of these raids.

So again, no, I don't think your suggestion would achieve anything other than haemorrhaging the raid healing community from midcore up.

Holy moly that was longer than I expected, afk to sit down after that =(

[Connor]

OP you need to understand that healers will not ever change. I understand your suggestions and even agree with a lot of what you've posted before (to some extent at least).

The cold fact of it that healing in FFXIV is always going to revolve round minimising healing, minimising GCD healing, maximising DPS and maximising oGCD healing for more DPS. Being able to clear Savage before it's 'intended' (i.e at lower item levels) by utilising and maximising healer DPS is not a new thing and will continue to apply to allraid content because it's working exactly as intended.

No amount of Cleric Stance changes, GCD support abilities or healing requirements are ever going to change this.

The majority of XIV's healing community doesn't want high healing requirements, nor does it want to dedicate its GCDs to supporting the party. People don't want to use their GCDs on Cure/Physick/Benefic instead of Stone / Broil / Malefic. They want to 'weave' their healing with their DPS (on all three healer jobs and all subsequent healers)

I know it sucks because I generally agree with the base of what you're saying (Cleric Stance changes aside) but that's the way this game works. If you want to really enjoy FFXIV, I suggest playing a DPS class. If you want to really enjoy healing, you need to find a different game, because it's not how healers work here.
I know the last part sounds harsh. I competely understand what it's like when you have an idea of what a 'healers' role should be in battle, but you just invite disappointment and agitation upon yourself by trying to push healers into a more healer oriented role