A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

I don't see how what I said implies that.

Well, the initial post I was responding to, you mentioned what you like about 1 button DPS nuke + 1 DoT was that it didn't waste buttons. Whether or not this is how you perceive the situation or were trying to imply, it essentially comes across as "the good thing about what we have now is that we aren't wasting buttons on DPS." This implies that adding DPS is a waste of buttons, which I contested. That may very well not be how you feel, it's just how I took that statement.

After that, you mentioned in response to Semirhage that someone earlier was using tank 123 filler rotations as a comparison. My point is ultimately that this is irrelevant. Whether or not someone else is bringing up 123 filler as the "solution" doesn't meant that's what most of us are asking for when we talk about expanding on DPS actions. If you aren't writing off other discussions about DPS buttons as nothing but 123 filler, then why not clarify where the misunderstanding occurs?

I keep citing PVP because I think that's the best direction we should head in. We should minimize the bloat, we should ensure every button has a purpose, and for those who like hitting 6 different keys for their manual auto attacks, you give options that conserve key space for those who don't.

We stop taking things away in favor of systems that reduce the keybind pressure.

I don't think I'm being unfair in that perspective, nor do I think it's incompatible.

You want more damage buttons.

I want them to be meaningful.

I agree on some level, hence what I was saying earlier. Buttons need to be meaningful. That said, I would just add for clarification that PVP and PVE are not the same, and PVP toolkits can be a lot more shallow because they're built around regular, quick engages with unpredictable opponents whereas PVE encounters are very long, and involve consistent and predictable opponents. There is some overlap where we logic from one translates to logic of the other, but there is a reason why PVE toolkits have a lot more buttons.

To be fair, though, I do feel that a lot of jobs have a lot of unnecessary bloat. I really dislike the complete departmentalization of AoE buttons and having entire AoE rotations in a game that offers almost no AoE scenarios outside of FATEs and dungeon trash, for example, and would rather AoE rotations be built into your single target ones---i.e. having buttons like Afflatus Misery that just happen to be AoE but are still useful for single target, or providing a value in single target to AoE spells for healers, where the AoE spells are spammable for trash, but offer some type of utility or self-buffing for single target so they are still a part of the rotation.

[ForsakenRoe]

Also, as for tanks...
-> War filler is 2 combo + fell cleave
-> Drk filler is 1 combo + Bloodspiller + shadow edge
-> Gun filler is 1 combo + Burst strike + hypervelocity
PLD is a bit out here because is much more a full loop than a mix filler + burst option.

WAR is two combos which have to be decided between depending on whether you need to refresh the buff or not, Fellcleave which can be pooled for raidbuff windows, Onslaught charges which can be pooled vs used for mobility, Upheaval which is kinda just there admittedly, Infuriate charges which get refreshed by Fellcleaving, and can be pooled to change GCDs inside raidbuffs into Inner Chaos, Inner Release for an impactful raidbuff window rather than WHM's 'Glare but faster', Primal Rend which has to be thought about when to use it, because you want to put it in raidbuffs but you need to be cautious about it's forced gapclose effect

DRK has a filler combo, Bloodspiller which can be pooled, MP management in general (as shallow as it is now compared to old days) with making sure you have enough for a TBN if needed, purposely banking a Dark Arts charge for raidbuffs to get 5 Edge of Shadows inside buffs, changing priorities on when to use what based on targets (unleash>stalwart soul, spend on bloodspiller is a gain on 2, U>SS, spend on quietus is a gain on 3, used to be that Abyssal Drain was only a gain on 4). Shadowbringer, Living Shadow are kinda just 'press em in raidbuffs', but everything added together means DRK's raidbuff window is very busy, and means mitigating during a 2min window means having to potentially shift things around. Heck, there's been times I've gone into Delerium/Blood Weapon at high Blood, and not remembered until too late that Delerium's Bloodspillers don't cost blood, meaning the +10 per Blood Weapon hit overcapped me. My mistake to be sure, but it's still another small thing to consider, and a lot of small things to consider add up to make 'complexity'.

GNB is very on-rails, but it still has more than just burst strike. Keeping enough ammo for your next Gnashing Fang is not hard but it's still more than healers have. Pooling ammo to afford both GF and Double Down each 60s, keeping Blasting Zone on CD every 30s, putting Bow Shock and Sonic Break in No Mercy, even the existence of Continuation after each GF combo hit means you have to think more about your mitigation, as you cant double weave mitigations there (since one weave is the continuation hit). GF is also a gain on 2 targets over Fated Circle from what I hear, so there's some DRK-esque 'rotation changes depending on 1vs2vs3 target fights'.

Since these class's role is to tank, mitigating the boss's damage and positioning it is the 'primary job', 'doing damage' is as secondary to a tank as it is to a healer. Despite this, even with the 'simplest' of the options here, WAR, there are 10 buttons that are an important part of it's 'downtime rotation'. Heavy Swing, Maim, Storm's Path, Storm's Eye, Infuriate, Fell Cleave, Inner Release, Primal Rend, Upheaval, Onslaught. Even if we remove Heavy Swing and Maim, so there are no combo actions, that's still 8 buttons. WHM has Glare, Dia, Misery, Presence of Mind, Assize. Only 5. SCH is Broil, Biolysis, Aetherflow, Energy Drain, Ruin 2 (lol), again 5 buttons. You could argue that 'oh but what about Dissipation for more stacks in opener, or Chain Stratagem for raidbuffs' but I'd argue the difference here is that you press those very rarely, 180s and 120s respectively. All of the WAR skills are, at maximum, 60s, so they're a lot more often. SGE is the worst offender, Dosis, Eukrasia, Phlegma, Toxicon. Wow, just four buttons!

This is part of the problem with trying to build a case for 'why healer downtime is boring', it's very easy to just jump to conclusions on things, like 'oh people want more buttons to press? clearly they want 123 and that's boring too'. As others have said, it's plenty easy to make a more engaging filler rotation without using 123 combos. For example Taurus has made ideas of their own. I've made a WHM idea that does nothing more than adding a new GCD to press once per 15 seconds, and rescaled the duration of the DOT from 30s down to 12s. I even attempted to demonstrate it here, using Bozja Actions. I made an idea for SGE that would add a single new button, and instead shift what spends your MP from the filler Dosis spam and GCD heals, to the augment spells like Soteria, Krasis, Zoe, meaning MP management would be the identity for SGE. Misrepresenting how simple/intricate tank rotations are doesn't help anyone. It's actually surprisingly fun to come up with ideas for new identities/skills/rotations for classes, and defaulting to 'well clearly the solution is to give healers a 123' is probably the first idea every one of us threw out the window because as everyone points out, there's no real difference between 123 and 111.

[Kabooa]

That may very well not be how you feel, it's just how I took that statement.

If you aren't writing off other discussions about DPS buttons as nothing but 123 filler, then why not clarify where the misunderstanding occurs?

Right here.

The short answer is I don't think the fault lies at my feet, so it's not my responsibility to clear it up for you.

PVP toolkits can be a lot more shallow because they're built around regular, quick engages with unpredictable opponents whereas PVE encounters are very long, and involve consistent and predictable opponents

The only thing that has to be considered between PVE and PVP is whether or not the numerical scaling has to change.

Guild Wars 1 not only had extremely robust PVE kits consisting of 8 actions, nearly all of these actions were present in PVP, and only a relative handful of them required numerical adjustments.

Sleep obviously shouldn't last 30 seconds, Double Down shouldn't DCrit for 100% of a DPS's health, etc. Very little about FF14's PVE kits or PVP kits would be unable to be translated to the the other game mode and not work.

Calling the pvp kits shallow is inaccurate. I think it's more appropriate to call them condensed, because they aren't taking 20 buttons to do what 8 can.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think it's more appropriate to call them condensed, because they aren't taking 20 buttons to do what 8 can.

They dont fulfil the same jobs, because the objective is completely different in PVP. I can't keep my whole team alive in PVP as a WHM because that'd make it impossible to fight against any team with a healer, so my healing is limited to 2 casts of Cure 2, and a Cure 3 after Seraph Strike. Conversely, it's a PVP mode where 'do damage to beat the enemy players' is the goal, so we have more damage kit, Misery is a 15sec CD instead of needing to bother with lilies, I can polymorph people to lock them down, we have BIG LASER every 1 min to pressure or secure kills. You're right that if we moved the PVP kit into PVE it wouldnt work, but that is because the PVP kit isn't designed for PVE, it's designed for PVP. We did see once what PVE kits in PVP looked like, in HW. AST was actually an issue back then, as Noct shields meant it could move and shield itself. I survived against 3 DPS whacking me for far too long to be considered 'balanced' back then, when the Garo event first came out.

So yeh, I'd give credit to PVP kits for showing you can make the classes feel very distinct with few buttons. But we can't just transplant them wholesale, there does need to be some adjustments to make them work in PVE too. I can't imagine trying to do UCOB with PVP SGE for example, since it needs an enemy target to hit to apply it's shields, and the boss loves to leave for each trio in that fight.

[Kabooa]

So yeh, I'd give credit to PVP kits for showing you can make the classes feel very distinct with few buttons. But we can't just transplant them wholesale, there does need to be some adjustments to make them work in PVE too. I can't imagine trying to do UCOB with PVP SGE for example, since it needs an enemy target to hit to apply it's shields, and the boss loves to leave for each trio in that fight.

Fair points.

Certainly easier said than done.

[ASkellington]

Calling the pvp kits shallow is inaccurate. I think it's more appropriate to call them condensed, because they aren't taking 20 buttons to do what 8 can.

I would still call them shallow. There isn't enough in the PvP kits to make good PvE classes. You're still going to have to add more buttons.

Just because GW2 can do it doesn't mean FFXIV feasibly can. GW2 was built upon the idea of having ~5 buttons (times that by 4 for Elementalist) because on top of that, they also have weapons that do different skills AND a weapon swap (with added customization from the other 5 or so skills that you gain from your class/race). ESO was pretty much the same.

FFXIV was NOT built on that design. Its design is closer to WoW and Rift. There is no way you're gonna condense a kit all the way to ~8 buttons. Realistically, you're looking at a minimum of 15-20.

Further, not everyone wants condensed skills. In 6.0 GNB's Continuation got condensed to 1 button. Kudos to those who wanted it that way, but I sure as all seven hells did not. And there is no way for me to change it back. (Thank you SE btw for screwing up my muscle memory!).

[ForsakenRoe]

In 6.0 GNB's Continuation got condensed to 1 button. Kudos to those who wanted it that way, but I sure as all seven hells did not. And there is no way for me to change it back. (Thank you SE btw for screwing up my muscle memory!).

I ended up just putting a duplicate button of Burst Strike where the 3rd hit of the combo used to be, and Double Down where the second hit used to be =( Also on the subject, I've heard people complained about how Hypervelocity makes it really annoying to weave mitigations, and also made it hard to move the boss using Burst Strike as a filler (which is now slightly fixed by the Continuation range change), and I thought to myself 'How can we make this fixed', and it seemed so simple:

-Move Double Down to 86
-Move Hypervelocity to 90
-Make Hypervelocity chain off of Double Down, change potency to 600 (since you only get one per minute now, this is to make up for the multiple burst strikes per minute, i estimated 3, adjust as needed)
alternatively make it lower and add a dot component to make it total the same
-Change Double Down to two hits of 600 potency, instead of one of 1200, to reduce crit variance (it'd now have two chances to crit)

How does SE keep making weird designs and then going 'wow i cant believe this design is kinda janky i wish someone could have told us', and why do they keep adding so many big hits with four digit potency values? We know crit variance is a big issue so why do we need 1200 potency this, 1000 potency that, back in my day we saw Carve and Spit was 450 and we thought 'what the heck that's so much' now 450 is 'tickles the enemy's feet a bit' weak

[Hellebore_Ghrian]

snip about tanks' gameplay

Totally agree.

Thanks for explaining my last post in more words

[ty_taurus]

I would still call them shallow. There isn't enough in the PvP kits to make good PvE classes. You're still going to have to add more buttons.

Just because GW2 can do it doesn't mean FFXIV feasibly can. GW2 was built upon the idea of having ~5 buttons (times that by 4 for Elementalist) because on top of that, they also have weapons that do different skills AND a weapon swap (with added customization from the other 5 or so skills that you gain from your class/race). ESO was pretty much the same.

FFXIV was NOT built on that design. Its design is closer to WoW and Rift. There is no way you're gonna condense a kit all the way to ~8 buttons. Realistically, you're looking at a minimum of 15-20.

Further, not everyone wants condensed skills. In 6.0 GNB's Continuation got condensed to 1 button. Kudos to those who wanted it that way, but I sure as all seven hells did not. And there is no way for me to change it back. (Thank you SE btw for screwing up my muscle memory!).

I think SGE's PVP kit is a ton of fun, but that's also because engages tend to end by the time I run out of non-Dosis based resources: Pneuma, Eukrasia, Toxikon charges, and Phlegmas. There really isn't much there, but because PVP is all about jumping into fast-paced engagements that end quite quickly, all or most of my charges are back up by the time I reengage. This isn't how PVE flows, and while Pneuma and Toxikon feels so much more fun to use in PVP and could realistically translate far better into PVE than something like WHM's Force of Nature or most other PVP job mechanics, I don't think that would really be enough to make PVE content fun enough. It would still need a bit more, because you spend much longer in a consistent state of combat. So PVE kits definitely need more actions to work with overall, but that doesn't mean a good PVE kit needs to be bloated either. We could reasonably have really engaging and exciting PVE kits in less actions than we currently use if they're better, thought that doesn't meant we should necessarily be afraid of having more actions either.

That said, healers have a big problem as well with having toolkits that have no real interactivity that allows for better button optimization or depth. WHM is not a bloated job in terms of numbers in comparison to other jobs, but... Cure, Cure II, Cure III, Medica, Medica II, Regen, Afflatus Solace, and Afflatus Rapture... There's a lot of unnecessary fluff in that pile and it could easily be consolidated to create something slimmer but also more cohesive, especially when building more tools into it.

[ASkellington]

I think SGE's PVP kit is a ton of fun, but that's also because engages tend to end by the time I run out of non-Dosis based resources: Pneuma, Eukrasia, Toxikon charges, and Phlegmas. There really isn't much there, but because PVP is all about jumping into fast-paced engagements that end quite quickly, all or most of my charges are back up by the time I reengage. This isn't how PVE flows, and while Pneuma and Toxikon feels so much more fun to use in PVP and could realistically translate far better into PVE than something like WHM's Force of Nature or most other PVP job mechanics, I don't think that would really be enough to make PVE content fun enough. It would still need a bit more, because you spend much longer in a consistent state of combat. So PVE kits definitely need more actions to work with overall, but that doesn't mean a good PVE kit needs to be bloated either. We could reasonably have really engaging and exciting PVE kits in less actions than we currently use if they're better, thought that doesn't meant we should necessarily be afraid of having more actions either.

That said, healers have a big problem as well with having toolkits that have no real interactivity that allows for better button optimization or depth. WHM is not a bloated job in terms of numbers in comparison to other jobs, but... Cure, Cure II, Cure III, Medica, Medica II, Regen, Afflatus Solace, and Afflatus Rapture... There's a lot of unnecessary fluff in that pile and it could easily be consolidated to create something slimmer but also more cohesive, especially when building more tools into it.

I mean I never said the kits couldn't be pruned. I'm just saying the pvp kits do not have enough buttons to cover PvE. You're gonna need more. And the minimum is likely to look like on the side of 15-20 buttons.

As far as PvP kits go, I don't want AST's without changes either. The cards are nice, but I hate how the dualcast for AST is set up. I would rather it be a toggle between Diurnal/Nocturnal or if I am forced to have dual cast, give me the shield FIRST. Never understood that either. In PvP I would want to mitigate the incoming hits first and then use the dual cast regen to restore while some hits are being mitigated.

I'd comment on the other healers, but I also haven't played PvP since the latest update. /shrug