A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

It's really bizarre, the way healers and content continue to be designed in opposition to one another.

They want healers to have the responsibility of repairing mistakes. We know this because of several reasons: regardless of the offensive tools available to healers, they output the lowest damage (including offensive support), so their value naturally has to come from what they do beyond damage, which is to say, healing and utility. Combat has been designed with the philosophy that unavoidable damage is rare and avoidable damage is frequent. The amount of healing required for unavoidable damage is low enough to where non-healers are capable of handling it in many forms of content, thus the extra healing and utility provided by healers seems intended to respond to avoidable damage. Yet difficult content largely makes avoidable mechanics result in wipes, so even when a party doesn't do something correctly, that excess healing can't resolve the problem.

It's not even like healers are actually designed to be that child-proof. In many ways, they have child-proofed various healer elements, but there are still several things that seem designed to hold back the novice healer while providing nothing of value to the experienced healer. Take MP for example. MP restoration is effectively automatic--it's sustained through the on-cooldown Lucid Dreaming and resource management systems of every healer with most actions that cost MP only costing incremental MP taxes that are otherwise resolved by the automatic MP you get from just playing your job correctly. An experienced healer isn't particularly concerned with running out of MP outside of raise-heavy circumstances, but the novice healer is the one who might sit on their resources or forget to use Lucid Dreaming. The vast majority of healing tools we get are OGCD healing tools which require weaving to maximize their value. Who's the one who's most likely going to idle or clip their GCD? The novice healer. If they really wanted to child-proof the healers, they'd do things like give Medica II a 15 second cooldown so you literally can't recast it until the regen has finished.

[Shurrikhan]

It's really bizarre, the way healers and content continue to be designed in opposition to one another.

The funny thing is that 1.x actually had something of an incidental mitigation for this issue:

All enemies had TP, and enemy TP was generated (variably) in the same ways that LB is now -- damage dealt, taken, mitigated, healed, or upon specific conditions, etc.

The downside (or upside, in this particular case) of this is that the faster your burned down an enemy, the faster their damage potential would be dealt back to you. While you could fudge this on mobs by TP-draining them or stunning them before a would-be big hit as you finish them off, on bosses, higher raid DPS could very easily equate to higher raid/tank damage taken.

Of course, we could say the same also for damage quickly coming out at the start of each %HP-based phase, with protections against later damage spikes being so easily skipped over by pushing into the next (each phase opener hitting harder than later spikes therein). But alas, we've since embraced our lord and savior, the statically timed script.

[ty_taurus]

It’s also worth noting that 2.x content frequently had anti-DPS checks. Bosses had phases based on remaining HP, and if you pushed them too fast, they’d just wipe the party. I remember encountering this while farming Ifrit extreme especially. Farm parties were often still messy, and I recall even just the echo boosting damage a little too much that everyone needed to stop DPS and let the boss do the next Hellfire before continuing.

[Banriikku]

This thread needs more attention. *BumP*

I am not very hopefull for any change because nobody of the SE Staffs, with decision power, plays healer (i know some claim to but the changes and plans for healer tells me otherwise). Period. It is desigend from the perspective of a DPS/TANK that needs healing because the "holy trinity" demands it. A slot to be filled. If people of the Dev-Team would play active healer they would know about the GLARING problems but it is ignored. Remeber SCH is sooo good now they don't even know what to change ??? Like what ?

[ty_taurus]

How Ranged tax should work in general is that the tax should compensate for the damage melee jobs otherwise lose due to needing to move around--or more specifically, the average amount of DPS that melee is expected to lose. Optimal melee gameplay would still make melee overall stronger than ranged, particularly the better your teams strategy gets at maximizing uptime.

[ForsakenRoe]

A solution would be, even with these massive hitboxes, that melee have more damage swing. Between +5% over a ranged, and -5% over a ranged, based on how competent the melee player is at doing melee-specific things like, idk, positionals? So if you just stood on the boss's arse as a melee, you'd do the same damage as a same-skilled, same-geared ranged. If you do the positional dance, you eke out a little extra damage from your class. Except SE is deathly allergic to things that give players a way to express skill like positionals, hence they keep adding more ways to avoid having to deal with them, up to and including having bosses that just don't have any at all

[Semirhage]

The justifiable reason is that range is still an advantage, even with huge EW hitboxes. Melee is the most populous dps role, with the most individual jobs. If physranged were equal to melee in damage there would be no reason not to run 2 of them in every fight. So melee dps being ahead of anything with range and mobility is healthier for pf and (theoretically) for job playrate distribution. Are there other solutions? Obviously, but the difference isn't completely nonsensical.

If that were the case, why are casters behind melee? Endwalker Standard Fight Design is rapid, constant movement back and forth across the arena, left foot in, left foot out, left foot in, turn around, hokey pokey move move move move move gameplay that throws caster gameplay into the dirt, yet casters are balanced as if they're significantly easier to play than melee.

[tearagion]

If that were the case, why are casters behind melee? Endwalker Standard Fight Design is rapid, constant movement back and forth across the arena, left foot in, left foot out, left foot in, turn around, hokey pokey move move move move move gameplay that throws caster gameplay into the dirt, yet casters are balanced as if they're significantly easier to play than melee.

because we have one physranged pretending to be a caster, and a half-caster that is permanently shackled to them for all balance decisions. BLM dps is about where it should be imo.

[Semirhage]

because we have one physranged pretending to be a caster, and a half-caster that is permanently shackled to them for all balance decisions. BLM dps is about where it should be imo.

See also the "But Verraise" thread in the DPS section. RDM is being thrown to the wolves for utility Square has done its level best to make as irrelevant as possible, while also creating movement profiles that hate hardcasts with a passion. Monk has similar utility to RDM, and yet it gets to do way more damage. Because lolMeleewalker, all fight design absurdly caters to melee and Square gifts them huge damage bonuses they keep buffing more and more with each patch, for difficulty they keep stripping out more and more each patch.

[tearagion]

See also the "But Verraise" thread in the DPS section. RDM is being thrown to the wolves for utility Square has done its level best to make as irrelevant as possible, while also creating movement profiles that hate hardcasts with a passion. Monk has similar utility to RDM, and yet it gets to do way more damage. Because lolMeleewalker, all fight design absurdly caters to melee and Square gifts them huge damage bonuses they keep buffing more and more with each patch, for difficulty they keep stripping out more and more each patch.

I'm not debating balance, I'm inferring what I could reasonably believe SE's balance policy to be based on role distribution and developer comments, which is admittedly still spotty especially in RDM's case. Either way I don't think it contradicts my original assumption.