What if we did away with healing duos...?

[NorthernLadMSP]

They're still going to be a horrible tank or dps, I can only imagine your uncalled for response indicates that you would be weeded.

LOL my response of supporting the OPs suggestion is uncalled for? OK.

If you don't like what I have to say block me and move on.

[Cyrocco]

Completely for this. Healing really has been made too easy by the extreme amount of oGCDs, running dungeons is trivialized and raids come down to use oGCDs exclusively. It would be much easier to balance the healers as their own self contained job, rather than needing to complement each other healing job as they develop. Losing that other healer slot also makes mistakes in raids less forgiving and really, just a touch harder. Raids can be balanced towards the standard healing power shared by all healers, and from there, whatever each individual kit offers would allow for different clear times, safety during heal checks, and DPS uptime.

Lots of people solo heal content now anyway. I think this is a good idea.

[Gemina]

It is quite rare that I synergize with my co healer. I often find myself solo healing these things anyway, and don't get the support I need from my DPS happy healers. Also of note; raise competition is a thing in PUGs, believe it or not.

However, if this was to work healers would need a re-raise ability to ensure that a healer KO isn't an automatic failure for the raid. DPS that can raise are not always present in the party. Certain mechanics are also designed for two healers. Even then, I still send Eos where I am not and support both tanks. SE likely doesn't see it this way, so I don't see this happening, but I am totally game if they did.

[MintnHoney]

To be honest, this wouldn't solve the issues currently being discussed throughout the healer forums.
To summarize, AST and SCH have party damage buffs and WHM does not, so WHM would be less utilized. Even with all the healing centered around one person, since every healer has to be able to perform to expectations, it means that, apparently, very few people would value a stronger healer over more party damage potential.

[Hysterior]

1 tank 1 heal and 6 DPS by default?
Hum... no thx

[Risvertasashi]

To be honest, this wouldn't solve the issues currently being discussed throughout the healer forums.
To summarize, AST and SCH have party damage buffs and WHM does not, so WHM would be less utilized. Even with all the healing centered around one person, since every healer has to be able to perform to expectations, it means that, apparently, very few people would value a stronger healer over more party damage potential.

I don't think that's the main idea, even though the OP did mention it in his post. But rather, he seems to think it will simply... simplify a lot of things. Including healer balance, but it's not specifically for healer balance. At least that was my reading of it.

However, the implications are much more detailed than "can still meet the required HP/S checks in most fights"; it may create more problems than it solves. Kind of hard to address everything without writing a wall of text but making 8-person content solo healed definitely isn't simple.

[Brandedblade]

This is a terrible idea, I understand some fights can be solo healed if the group is sufficiently competant. But solo healing should stay as it is now, an optional challenge, not a mandatory thing that will pretty much kill the use of certain healers if the balance of the healers isnt fully adjusted.

[Erakir]

I'm not on board with such a direction as, sure, you can balance around it and then try to rune the healers specifically around solo healing everything - but by removing a healer slot from the equation you severely limit your future encounter design possibilities.

If we're down to one tank, fights like M/F suddenly can't be created. Anything involving splitting tanks up, no longer an option. While it's true a healer is often in range of everyone, there are plenty of games with fights that split people up, and some of them I found quite enjoyable in my years. I am all for more encounter diversity.

Certain parts of fights like Yogg-Saron, gone or heavily modified/nerfed. I forget the 3 wind guys before Al'akir in cataclysm, but that involved entire raid splitting throughout the whole encounter with some back and forths. Even Al'akir's first phase had everyone spread out heavily such that a healer was only covering ~40% of the raid. I don't want to sit here and cite a bunch of WoW examples since people will inevitably lead to "But this isn't WoW" - but the point remains. There becomes less room for interesting and creative decisions for healer mechanics if you're limited to "now there's only one."

In fact, one of the unfortunate parts of XIV's smaller raid size is that healing decisions become less flexible to begin with. There were so many fights in other games I've played where you could argue dropping a healer for one more DPS or shoring up healing if your group needed it for whatever reason. Fights with soft enrages saw this a lot and how good your raid was at healing and surviving in general was a factor. As it is going from 100% standard available healing to 50% is a serious commitment, particularly because much of XIV danger comes in short bursts making GCD economy more important than basically anything else. It doesn't necessarily matter if we spend 80% of our time DPSing if we don't have the raw GCDs to burst people up in the 10s they need it as a solo healer - and that's the current challenge to overcome in solo healing. Not just DPSing less and healing more over the course of the whole fight.

Plus, for aforementioned reasons I don't think it's a healthy decision either. Not only if the healer dies do you basically wipe - but you're even more reliant on things like connection issues. As things stand in normal mode trials and raids - which are extremely important to consider for this game's population - if a healer disconnects the other can power through. Heck, enough fights are designed to be healer-carryable to begin with, and by eliminating a second healer slot now the entire onus rests on that duty roulette group getting a single solid healer. Two not-great healers can currently get through content if the rest of the party is decent, and one good healer can carry all but the worst combinations of duty finder stuff. This is all due to how little utility the rest of the jobs have, leading to healers being far and away the ones with the most ability to carry groups through stuff. True, red mages, paladins - they have some options for clutch, but when it comes to hard carrying in this game's normal content you're pretty much looking at the healers.

Yes, by forcing more responsibility on a single healer slot you would eventually see an uptick in the general skillset of healers as they'd have to improve or die, but I don't think it's great for the health of the game to subject roulettes to a coin-flip of "Gosh I hope that one is decent." I also don't believe many healers would react too well to how easily they'd be blamed for things going wrong at that point. To lower that responsibility, the healing itself would likely be made significantly easier so a solo okay-healer could get through without much pain, so the "I love the challenge" wouldn't really be there anyway. Just like dungeons. They don't want to push people away from this role any more than they already are. To me, it's a ton of modification to end up basically in the exact same place, except now healer is directly balanced against each other which makes us all even more similar (while very easily pushing one to god-king status) and we risk losing more difficult mechanics seen in trials and the like.

[deadman1204]

What would this solve?

The problem is getting enough tanks normally. This would just make healing harder

[Coltvoyance]

Some very diverse reactions >.>. I feel like I should also state that this wasn't an emphatic "Everything would be better this way" kind of post, it was more of an idle musing to see peoples thoughts... I also feel like some posts didn't read that I listed the lack of a dedicated back-up resurrection in the Cons already. And that SE could potentially solve that through either a reraise or some other methods... some much more convoluted than others.

As for diversifying battle encounters, requiring two healers for certain mechanics would be really cool... if they still made mechanics that require two healers; they did in Ifrit EX kinda, but they haven't done something like that for a long time. Someone mentioned "splits" but really, splitting the party in two using healers as the targets isn't so much a "we need two healers" thing as it's "we need two people" thing. It could just as easily pick two random DPS. But it's likely easier for players, and programmers, to just have it target "two healers". I'd love to see a mechanic that requires both healers to solve. Really ANYTHING that throws a wrench into how I heal or requires me to do it differently.

But more than anything what I'm hearing is the need for that extra safety net that comes from an additional healer. Whether its a death, disconnect, poor skillset, etc. which is valid. A point of failure that can wipe the whole party is cause for concern.

But, if a DPS is bad or gets itself killed during a DPS check, or if the Tank fails or is disconnected during a Tank swap like say, the one in Seiryu, the whole party wipes as well... it's still just one person who has to mess up, but because it's not a healer... it's different?

I mean, true at least there's another Tank/other DPS. But that also feels like the problem when healing. When you're healing during a fight, you pretty much behave as if you're the only healer anyway. There's very little to no incentive to plan, coordinate, or strategize who heals who or what with the other healer. It's literally just "who get's there first". So it just feels.... unfulfilling? I guess?

Meanwhile, when I solo heal fights it feels very fulfilling... so...hmm