A summary of healer issues

[Iedarus]

Just had an A12 E11 queue with a White Mage party whose rotation was Medica 2! have 5/8 people fall off on every Fire-charged BurntStrike.

My Dosis percentage, despite the fight being an absolute cluster, was still well above 50%

Best design ever. *chef's kiss*, dunno how they could possibly improve on this. idk either i think they've peaked, this is the pinnacle of healer design /s

Not like spamming healing would have done anything. I give Expedience and a crit spreadlo to my whole team on Rubi EX and they still get RKO'd by the in-out-in mechanic.

[Absurdity]

And in typical CBU3 fashion, instead of simply reducing the boss hitbox they made it more convoluted by increasing every single job aoe to 30y Except Asylum and Sacred Soil for some stupid reason. . .

This has essentially been CBU3's modus operandi for this entire expansion, make a change for no reason (or for the sole reason of appeasing the absolute lowest common denominator), find out said change had a bunch of negative knock-on effects, sell us a solution to the problem they created in the first place.


Let's make giant hitboxes for basically no reason.
Oh no, now melees have 100% uptime with no effort required, better increase the dps checks.
Oh no, now certain party compositions can't mathematically clear the dps check, better nerf that into the ground and then buff them.
Oh no, because of our giant hitboxes people may occasionally miss buffs when they have to move, better increase the buff range to cover the entire arena to make it extra braindead.
Oh no, since melees have 100% uptime in every fight they are completely trouncing the ranged dps' output, better buff all of tho-...oh wait, they didn't do that, instead they just buffed Blackmage and told every other ranged to go pound sand.

[Semirhage]

oh wait, they didn't do that, instead they just buffed Blackmage and told every other ranged to go pound sand.

Ah, a fellow connoisseur of the art of watching a Monk sit on the floor for ten seconds, eat a weakness debuff, and still take a massive dump on your damage output despite having similar party utility I see. Truly the job balance that knows no parallel.

[Iedarus]

Let's make giant hitboxes for basically no reason.
Oh no, now melees have 100% uptime with no effort required, better increase the dps checks.

And this screws healers even more because despite the vision being "healers only healing" healers are now expected to DPS even more to get clears.

"Yoshi, we do nothing but mash 1; what is your solution?"
Yoshi: "Healers should only heal."
The actual content: "Mash 1, HARDER!!!!!!"

[Semirhage]

I know we've heard a lot about body checks and their increasing prevalence, but I think the notion of a "soft" body check gets lost in the quibbling over what constitutes a "true" body check. Body checks, for the few people unfamiliar, are a functional-yet-obnoxious way to create difficulty. You design a mechanic in such a way that you kill the entire party if one person messes up or is dead. Towers in P10S is one; there are 8 towers. If ONE person is out of place or dead when the 8 slots open up, it explodes and basically kills everyone. There are no shields or mitigation that rescues it. You watch the empty spot, look at your healing and support kit and think, "well great. I can't do anything to stop this. We're all just going to die." Body check mechanics have been devaluing reactive play and caster raise utility all expansion.

What I'd call a "soft" body check is perhaps even more prevalent than "true" body checks. Sometime after Heavensward, I can't remember when, Square changed a piece of design philosophy, presumably to curb cheese strategies. E.g. if someone gets a stack marker and dies, the stack marker just moves to someone else. Light party stacks that target both healers: if one healer dies, well good luck. The other stack is going to hit a random person and you have zero way of telling or truly mitigating the effects from it. While the ubiquitous (and getting rather stale, come on Square) Healer Light Party Stack With Magic Vulnerability isn't exactly a body check, since you probably won't wipe to it, it's still yet another mechanic that the healer defensive kits can do sweet F-all about. Sure the party may or may not wipe...but some random Dragoon might get the party stack alone in the corner, with zero forewarning and a guaranteed instant death even if you unload what you can. Partner fire stacks in P9? If one person's dead, sucks to be you. Someone might take it alone and just die. It might move onto a random pair and just kill those two, no saving them other than the Raise afterward.

Difficult content should be difficult, sure, but Square's design philosophy hasn't done jack to alleviate the boring healer job design. As much as I harp on boring kit design (and BOY is it boring), the fight design is really hostile to player agency. Potential to rescue a flagging run is more often down to how fast you can raise people and heal them up, not how well you can keep the party actually consistently alive. That part is pre-planned. Mistakes are punished by death, followed by the unpreventable death of 1-7 more people because soft and hard body checks are waaaaaaay too rampant.

[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.

[Renathras]

And this screws healers even more because despite the vision being "healers only healing" healers are now expected to DPS even more to get clears.

"Yoshi, we do nothing but mash 1; what is your solution?"
Yoshi: "Healers should only heal."
The actual content: "Mash 1, HARDER!!!!!!"

Come now, sometimes we mash 2. Occasionally 3.

This has essentially been CBU3's modus operandi for this entire expansion, make a change for no reason (or for the sole reason of appeasing the absolute lowest common denominator), find out said change had a bunch of negative knock-on effects, sell us a solution to the problem they created in the first place.


Let's make giant hitboxes for basically no reason.
Oh no, now melees have 100% uptime with no effort required, better increase the dps checks.
Oh no, now certain party compositions can't mathematically clear the dps check, better nerf that into the ground and then buff them.
Oh no, because of our giant hitboxes people may occasionally miss buffs when they have to move, better increase the buff range to cover the entire arena to make it extra braindead.
Oh no, since melees have 100% uptime in every fight they are completely trouncing the ranged dps' output, better buff all of tho-...oh wait, they didn't do that, instead they just buffed Blackmage and told every other ranged to go pound sand.

Extremely correct. Like, legitimately, no sarcasm, this is exactly right.

The thing is, all the "initial" changes are for no good reason or don't actually do the thing they were supposed to do. At that point, the answer SHOULD be to revert the changes, instead, they go through several iterations of "fixes" for what could have been solved by a mere reversion.

They also are weird in that SOME changes they are willing to go back on - often the ones that are mostly fine and just need some little tweaks. But the changes they really SHOULD go back on, for whatever reason, they stick to their guns on THOSE. I honestly have no idea why they stick to their guns so hard on some of the most inane stuff, but then stuff that's more or less fine, they decide have to be changed. Or perhaps worst of all - where they change one thing but not another like thing, even though the change makes perfect sense. Like how Crafter scripts now stack to 4,000 as does Hunt currency, but Tomes, even Poetics, are still locked at 2,000. Like...WHY?!

[ForsakenRoe]

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.

In a hilarious twist, during 12S prog I found that, during Limit Cut (yes another one) the range on Medica is not enough at 15y to reach the other side of the arena to heal between LC dashes. My workaround? To use Medica 2 and purposely clip the HOT, because it has 5y extra range (and matches Rapture's range). The boss isn't targetable during the phase, so the 'loss of damage' isn't a factor, and people have to be healed between each damage instance such that the 3 (maybe 4 cos of chargetime) Lilies you get are not enough. So if Rapture/Med2 are 20y, why is Med1 still 15, is my question. And if it's for parity with AST (Helios/AspHelios/CO are 15y), then why was Rapture made to be 20? Confusing my poor brain. But yeh point being, my 'strategy' wouldn't work if I had a 15s CD on Med2 as suggested, and I'd have to do something else for it. I can't go more middle cos there's proximity baited lasers, so it's kinda weird to work around. I have taken to purposely holding Asylum and Temperance both for that part, just in case I'm still missing people with the casts because I'm too busy looking at numbers and dashes and lasers to see if I'm hitting everyone with my heal, which is probably not optimal but hey it (was) week 1 so optimal can bugger off for a few weeks

If you wanted to 'childproof the healers' and stop people from clipping their HOT by spamming Medica2, rather than 'forcing it' ie with a CD, massively incentivize the alternative. For example, we see people using Freecure because they see they got a trait that says 'oh you have a chance to get a Cure2 for free!'. So add a trait that says 'When you are affected by Medica 2 or Regen, your Cure3's MP cost is halved'. Ok, so now you're incentivized to, instead of spamming Med2, put up just one for the party regen, and then you can push more Cure3. And because Medica2 is 250p on cast (or maybe it's 150 when you first get it, idk anymore cos of that 85 trait), and Cure3 is like 550 (later 600), the BIG GREEN NUMBER from Cure3 will tickle the newbie healer's dopamine receptors and make them go 'yes I am god' moreso than the smaller green number being caused by Medica2 spam

MP economy discussion is a whole other can of worms

Or perhaps worst of all - where they change one thing but not another like thing, even though the change makes perfect sense. Like how Crafter scripts now stack to 4,000 as does Hunt currency, but Tomes, even Poetics, are still locked at 2,000. Like...WHY?!

We've had our melee die to using LB when the boss in 12 doorboss takes away platforms, because DRG/MNK LB moves your character's position. This, in the same patch that fixed HighJump and Jump to specifically NOT do that. I guess they thought 'oh DRG can't do it's burst on time if Jump is delayed by a bind' but they didn't consider they could accidentally fall through the damn floor if they LB at specific times in the fight, classic SE oversight.

As for tomes, I assume the reason they don't up the cap on uncapped (so, astronomy last tier, currently causality), is that, for example one week ago when the patch went live, I could trade my 2000 stocked Astronomy into 500 Causality, allowing me to effectively stockpile 2500 'uncapped tomes' for crafting stuff. If that limit was upped to 4000, even for uncapped only, that'd go to 3000. Maybe it doesn't affect much of anything but SE probably sees it differently. Poetics has zero excuse, since it's for old stuff only and you can get like 400 at a time by just doing MSQ roulette each day. It'd help people with older relic grinds too, being so stocked on poetics when they decide 'you know what, I kinda like the look of the bingo ball AST wep from HW'.

Now, you want a 'real' tome related change, here's what I'd do: change the name of Poetics to 'Allagan Tomestone of Histories', to link it to how it's for old stuff. I get that Poetics was the final tier of tomes from ARR but come on, have some theming about it