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

[loreleidiangelo]

Hell, even WoW has started to slightly embrace healer DPS by giving some damage spells they can spam at no MP loss. And you don't have to gimp your healing by 70% unlike OP's suggestion.

For what it's worth, I'd say it's less that WoW is "embracing the healer DPS meta" (have you seen how little damage their healers are actually doing during raids compared to ours?) and more that they're realizing that "standing around waiting for mana to regen" is a tremendously boring activity and that healers would also like to push their buttons as many times as mechanics allow. That's why healer DPS moves don't cost any MP - they can use them when no healing is required to mitigate some of the previous boredom that they'd have standing around doing nothing otherwise, because of mana constraints.

Their healing checks easily blow anything out of the water we've seen here, and progression numbers reflect that. The 60k DPS you're seeing from Restoration Druids is basically nothing more than keeping Moonfire and Sunfire up on the boss between healing casts. (Compared to the 1.2 million DPS seen from the highest DPS jobs...)

An MMO I've been following a fair bit, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has run into a bit of an issue where they're adopting the ol' "sit down to regen mana between mob pulls" nonsense, and even some of their staunchest fans are taking issue with that. Sitting passively while your group pulls the next pack and starts whaling on it is seen as a huge nuisance, healers don't exactly enjoy that sort of gameplay, and I feel like the recent changes to healer DPS abilities in Legion kinda reflect that.

[RichardButte]

that aside, if something is bad for the players, its bad for everyone

They've made enough decisions in the past that have been purely worse for players while being better for the development team (ie no glamour logs, terrible housing setup, "our database can't handle that!", etc.).

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

Thank you for realizing the true purpose of my post.

They need to shit or get off the pot when it comes to healer DPS. Either make it a requirement and blame bad DPS who stand in AoE for wasting the mana of healers, or make it irrelevant somehow.

But they need to CHOOSE. They cannot continue saying "We don't factor in healer DPS" when healers do enough DPS to thoroughly destroy DPS checks that would otherwise be challenging.

For what it's worth, I'd say it's less that WoW is "embracing the healer DPS meta" (have you seen how little damage their healers are actually doing during raids compared to ours?) and more that they're realizing that "standing around waiting for mana to regen" is a tremendously boring activity and that healers would also like to push their buttons as many times as mechanics allow. That's why healer DPS moves don't cost any MP - they can use them when no healing is required to mitigate some of the previous boredom that they'd have standing around doing nothing otherwise, because of mana constraints.

And this would also be a welcome change.

The conservation of mana via doing nothing is never going to be a fun game mechanic. Even if healer DPS was next to nothing, actually pressing buttons is infinitely better than standing there, waiting for a HP bar to drop.

And since the devs can't seem to figure out what they want to do here, they may as well make healer DPS spells cost nothing and then factor healer DPS into DPS checks.

[Sebazy]

But they need to CHOOSE. They cannot continue saying "We don't factor in healer DPS" when healers do enough DPS to thoroughly destroy DPS checks that would otherwise be challenging.

Vertical gear progression is going to destroy those DPS checks regardless. This is something that super savage will be able to tackle as it's a pretty safe assumption that that's going to be tuned to iLvl 340 or perhaps even higher.

It's also worth noting that SE have been down this road before with Gordias, the DPS checks there were stern enough that they were still a very real challenge at 210 with healers contributing as well. You only have to look the damage A3S and A4S did to the mainstream raid scene to appreciate that it wasn't a good decision.

They need to shit or get off the pot when it comes to healer DPS. Either make it a requirement and blame bad DPS who stand in AoE for wasting the mana of healers, or make it irrelevant somehow.

Perhaps you could clarify as to why you feel it is such an issue now when this has been a thing for the past 4 years?

[RichardButte]

It's also worth noting that SE have been down this road before with Gordias, the DPS checks there were stern enough that they were still a very real challenge at 210 with healers contributing as well.

And that's exactly the problem I've been pointing out...

Don't factor in healer DPS and raids get cleared day 1. Factor it in and it murders the ability of 80% of the community's ability to do them.

Perhaps you could clarify as to why you feel it is such an issue now when this has been a thing for the past 4 years?

You answered your own question with your previous sentence. As to why now, it's an issue because it was always an issue. Healers in a raid being able to DPS or not DPS (due to not having to do as much healing of avoidable damage) has always divided the raiding community.

Maybe the real answer here is "Super Savage", where hopefully healer DPS will 100% be factored into the equation (we'll see, I suppose).

[Aomine1992]

Poor healers lol you guys just can't get a break

[Sebazy]

Don't factor in healer DPS and raids get cleared day 1. Factor it in and it murders the ability of 80% of the community's ability to do them.

Gordias was the way it was because of a very significant oversight in SE's internal testing. The infamous and oft quoted 'We don't factor healer dps into the equation' actually came about because of the uproar over the DPS checks in both A3S and A4S. It wasn't a conscious design decision, rather the testing team were just playing phase by phase rather than trying the encounter as one entire fight (confirmed by Yoshida) and it's believed that they were going into each phase with fresh cooldowns and such.

Fun fact for you, do you realise that there are only 2 truly legitimate clean kills of A4S uploaded to logs? Literally every other last kill is exploiting a loophole with a key mechanic.

Healers in a raid being able to DPS or not DPS (due to not having to do as much healing of avoidable damage) has always divided the raiding community.

I think you're overstating things, it's more of an issue with the casual community and here on the forums than it is with the raiding scene itself. Rather handily I was helping a friend try to get an O4S clear last night in PF, mechanically the group was fine but the DPS wasn't quite there (23.5k combined, literally 500dps or less short). My DPS was middling and the ASTs was worse still, we hit enrage 3 times, two of which were 1% wipes. There was no blame gaming, no one called out the healers (or any of the DPS for that matter) whatsoever. We just kept pushing as hard as we could for the entire lockout and it's a shame we didn't get the kill as the group earned it imo.

[technole]

The OP apparently doesn't know that Sudo, the O3S/O4S raid designer and YoshiP gave a thumbs-up to Angered on Instagram for their world first clear. If they weren't happy with such, they'd keep it mum.

Ever since Gordias Savage, YoshiP made it clear they didn't want another gear wall for world progression. A4S was absolutely gear-walled because Elysium saw enrage pretty early, I think it was during the 3rd leg. It's a pretty lousy method to wall the best raiders. It should always be reliant on skill and crafted effort over being able to get enough gear within 4-weeks.

A3S you needed to pump out a lot of raid damage with minimal mistakes, it was said they probably didn't test this out too well because they test these raids with god-modes too. What we meant by lot of damage includes healer and tank DPS. Like there was no way you were clearing with your Dark Knight or Paladin in full-VIT right side gear and in Grit/Shield Oath the entire fight either. Remember we healers had to deal with Slaying>Fending as much as possible, or even better the crafted right sides with over melds.

I think the OP doesn't have the insight of what it takes to even get at that level to clear Savage in the early weeks. Take Sebazy's FC for-example, Angered, world-progression FC that is responsible for two world firsts and has several teams. So they have some of the best insight on the subject. Ever since the stance of no more tome gear walls to savage, crafted gear is the means to get through the last floors in the first weeks of Savage. The effort to even make it requires a quite a large effort free-company wide. You have your raiders attempting to clear the first floors right on the alarm clock when the servers come up. Then you have your FC crafters working around-the-clock with the newest recipes and to get everything crafted for their the world progression teams. Usually they should have some pieces ready by the time they clear the first floors, and the whole package by the time they get into the 3rd-4th where the gear really makes a major difference. I didn't even mention how much work and a pain in the butt it is to pentameld either. It's absolutely a huge gain to be able to over meld a VI materia in each gear piece, it's almost like gaining another substat. There is also the issue of having a large warchest of gil to make this happen. But you are silly if you think world progression raiding is just as simple as going into Savage and just grinding it out for hours.

[Penthea]

They've made enough decisions in the past that have been purely worse for players while being better for the development team (ie no glamour logs, terrible housing setup, "our database can't handle that!", etc.).

Not all decisions that ended up being bad for players were made in the spirit of being positive for devs.

I don't know if you know XIV's history but the tldr is 1.0 was a disaster, another team took over and had to very quickly rebuild the game which culminated into 2.0. XIV is built on the foundations of a horrendous game but SE didn't have much choice as they had to work quickly to not completely lose the fanbase. There are still relics of 1.0 around and it's not unreasonable to think some of them may make developing certain things very difficult or even impossible. Unlike most gaming studios, SE have to work on maintaining current features, creating new ones AND purging the parts of 1.0 that remain.

Even without this in general it's pretty naive to say decisions that are bad for players were made in order to have a positive effect on the devs.

Studios rarely tell you everything. Most of the time you're not going to know about a new feature being developed until the devs have already worked on it for quite some time because it's bad pr to talk about something that could potentially get cancelled or delayed. Additionally what you may think should be a priority for the good of the game isn't necessarily what SE also think. Housing has been a controversial subject for some time and while I'm passionate about housing, I recognise that content such as dungeons and raids are far more important.

And personally I think the housing was a decision based on a lack of foresight rather than a decision based on making the devs happy instead of the players. The devs are human, they make mistakes.

SE were once in the habit of frequently making decisions without thinking about the player and the result of that was the catastrophic 1.0. It was so bad the entire company was in trouble, not just the slice that managed the mmo. They definitely learned from it as now XIV is one of the most successful mmorpgs in the world.

As for the healer role, I think you're forgetting it's still perfectly playable even if it isn't perfect. I have dealt with significantly worse balance in other games so I can happily deal with the somewhat controversial fluidity of the demands of playing a healer. Even sch which is very noticeably undertuned right now is still viable, though as long as it's in the hands of a careful player.

And even though healing is my primary passion in this game, I don't think that fixing it should be top priority. Right now there are some dps classes suffering far more than any of the healers and I'd prefer SE fix those first. Also if the dps can do more dps, it does decrease the dps healers have to squeeze out...so that would help healers anyway.

[VanilleFang]

This is a terrible idea.

Too lazy to make a wall of text at the moment.

[VanilleFang]

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

With the OPs idea Holy would have a base power of 10. Increasing that by 500% would make it 60... so a massive nerf of 30% of what we have now (like others have mentioned).