A summary of healer issues

[Shurrikhan]

I miss the days when potting on cd used to be worth it, but with the full alignment every 2 mins design they wrought, it's no longer worth using pots at any moment outside of burst. Wouldn't surprise me if they did make the new pot align perfectly though.

Aye. Something like...

NQ - 5 minutes' recast time (but maybe a higher portion of the HQ stats)
HQ - 4 minutes' recast time

/sigh

[Sebazy]

Honest answer?

I think the encounter design teams. They want to make more fights where players have to move all over and spread and such, and they want to keep the DPS checks relatively tight, which means they can't have Melee/Tanks stuck in Narnia spamming their ranged attacks for long periods of time. Same reason they made Healer effects bigger. It's not to help Healers, it's to allow the mass arena combat encounter designs to work.

I think you're close but not quite there on that one.

We've had large scale fights that forced people to spread out around an significant arena literally right from 2.0. BCOB T5's original arena is literally the palm of a hand and you had to make use of almost all of it when placing puddles, dodging twisters or avoiding snowballing from a Dreadknight. There's lots more examples over the years as well. Go watch a video of A6S or A7S.

However I do agree, I think this change is for the design team and fits into the overall trend of the game neatly. IMO I think it's to allow easier tuning of fights around the assumption of a given level of DPS from a raid team. Getting good uptime on a melee was historically the hardest part of getting your DPS from 'good' to 'top tier' back in the day and on Coil/Alex, you'd see a pretty significant swing between a decent and outstanding melee's damage depending on if the fight was more of a static target dummy or something that forced a lot of movement and disconnects. Making the hitboxes super large pretty much deletes that variable bringing a good player closer to the top tier in the same way that removing Cleric Stance narrowed the gap for healers as well.

It all comes back to SE's quest to get the skill ceiling down to floor level.

[Shurrikhan]

In a game design space where DPS >>>> all, you CANNOT have Jobs overly distinguished (within a role) by damage, otherwise one will always be brought over the others.

Again, though, that's literally what happens if you make jobs that are less difficult and more reliable have the same on-paper damage as jobs that are more difficult and less reliable. Since, even if both the individual and their party went through all the effort of optimizing the latter, there'd be no reward, so the 95+% of players would be obliged to pick the easier job for the sheer damage increase it'd bring.

We should be balancing around maximizing the breadth of competitive jobs --in what content actually needs optimizing-- for reasonably skilled but imperfect and in-progression players, not BiS parse speedruns.

Same reason they made Healer effects bigger. It's not to help Healers, it's to allow the mass arena combat encounter designs to work.

Except mass arena combat encounter designs already work even without the range increase. They just require moving in and out or split-grouping, both things with higher skill ceilings than just both healers launching their CD-AoE heal from center-stage and hitting everyone no matter the timing.

There are 4 DPS slots. Not 2 Melee, 1 Ranged, 1 Caster. They're all DPS. You want one of each for the % bonus, then one wildcard slot. That slot shouldn't be reserved for Melees.

Except, there is no difference to raid design between physical ranged and any job that can maintain a few consecutive GCDs of uptime, as literally every non-melee DPS is capable of.

There are, for all intents and purposes, just two DPS Roles despite the five Armor Classes. Physical Ranged haven't brought any unique capacities since Shadowbringers launched, and even those utilities have been mere awkward tack-ons since Stormblood rather than anything interestingly leverageable or an element of the jobs' own gameplay.

We have 4 Tanks, 4 Healers, 5 Melee DPS and 6 Ranged DPS. No, BLU does not count.

[Post]

The ironic thing in this is that they had more diversity in function early on. T1 and T2 had interrupts required. T5 had an add you wanted to stun, heavy and disease. T7 had one you wanted to disease or bind.

These design choices were drifted away from because some jobs could not adequately fill these roles, yet these actions are still part of some role toolkits because they wanted to make sure everyone could do them.

Often their job design and battle design teams seem to try and solve the same problems working from opposite ends. When their efforts are taken in concert, they overcorrect so that the mechanic they were tweaking erodes from the game completely.

I understand them not wanting to go down that path to make the jobs diverse again, though, because they don't want to impose artificial game design choices on the way a job feels to play, except when it comes to shields v pure healers

[Tint]

Often their job design and battle design teams seem to try and solve the same problems working from opposite ends. When their efforts are taken in concert, they overcorrect so that the mechanic they were tweaking erodes from the game completely.

WAR had a dps buff which gave himself a debuff at the end.

Then that was removed and WAR got Shake it Off, which originally was a self dispell.

Then people complained and they removed the self dispell and changed it into the party shield, while they added a tank buster mechanic in the very same patch which could be mitigated with a dispell...

[Iedarus]

...Of all the possible examples... ???

They didn't "dig their heels in" on Bow Mage. They refused to do more than a single buff's worth of reiteration and instead threw a tantrum, getting rid of it outright and fully re-saddling physical ranged with their then-unmitigatable "mobility tax".

Example of actually "heels dug in": doubling down on changes favoring the lowest denominator when the first few rounds of changes having affect the floor less than the ceiling, to further reduction of the skill ceiling; doubling down on homogeneity between jobs when prior homogenization and difficulty decreases left no differences of note between jobs of most roles except their overall damage; homogenizing encounter design further after initial homogenizations make players consider every job as interchangeable to the point of featuring "take the job, not the player" biases despite even minute differences; doubling down on decisions to make MP a non-mechanic via oGCD bloat because actually using the oGCDs they decided to make the center of healing gameplay... is apparently too hard for their imagined average healer; neutering tank agency further just because they couldn't previously be bothered to balance rDPS gains of even sparse defensive play; refusal to deal with the game adding roundtrip ping's uptime cost to every action (ignoring obvious highly lucrative QoL fixes) and instead GCD- or stack-ifying everything; etc.

Hey don't get mad at me; I'm on your side. If you want to give Bard some heavy hitting standing and charge-up attacks I'd be all for it if it had good flow and felt impactful. I'm just trying to use examples of the team being out of touch with what the playerbase wants. I've reiterated time and time again that 1111111111111 is boring to the nth degree and we need more skill expression but SE still refuses to bring more hands on deck to deal with the increasing balance workload.

[Absurdity]

WAR had a dps buff which gave himself a debuff at the end.

Then that was removed and WAR got Shake it Off, which originally was a self dispell.

Then people complained and they removed the self dispell and changed it into the party shield, while they added a tank buster mechanic in the very same patch which could be mitigated with a dispell...

Let's be honest, even if they kept SiO the same it probably wouldn't have worked on the debuff, because it already didn't work 50% of the time.

[Aravell]

So, I finally got around to clearing P11S (I know I'm late, feeling a bit burnt out, so just casually pugging, no rush to clear), I did a lot of safety shielding just for the clear, final tally was 167 Broils IVs, 32 Ruin IIs, 25 Succors, 23 Biolysis, 5 Adlos, that's a 66.27% rate of spamming 1 button. That's with a Succor before every mechanic and at least 2 Succors every cast of Styx. Would be nice if we had some other buttons to press once in a while.

[SilversLyu]

Imagine behaving like Healers dont need to focus on dps as much, but tanks do and can with having their own rotation even. That is coming from the dev team, in a game where every job in truth is a dps. Bruh. As much as I actually love the combat of FFXIV and the idea of the jobs.. it's indeed a convoluted dumpster fire.

[Nizzi]

So, I finally got around to clearing P11S (I know I'm late, feeling a bit burnt out, so just casually pugging, no rush to clear), I did a lot of safety shielding just for the clear, final tally was 167 Broils IVs, 32 Ruin IIs, 25 Succors, 23 Biolysis, 5 Adlos, that's a 66.27% rate of spamming 1 button. That's with a Succor before every mechanic and at least 2 Succors every cast of Styx. Would be nice if we had some other buttons to press once in a while.

Clearly, Savage is so hard that juggling Miasma, Miasma II and Shadow Flare along with Broil and Bio would just be too hard!

I've cleared every bit of high end content that has been released this expansion with the exception of TOP and P12Sp2, and the latter I assume we'll clear in the next week or two and I'm not stressed about it. With that being said, I can say safely say that there isn't a single bit of content in this game where healers couldn't not have a few more DPS buttons. It doesn't exist. The 5.0 gutting of Scholar has been a failure and the developers need to take a hard look at this role because it is not fulfilling its primary duty to be fun and engaging to the player at all levels of play.