A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

EDiagnosis loses you 330 potency, because the toxicon it gives is only 330. to be damage neutral it'd have to either be 660 (holy crit variance batman) or be OGCD which is... why isnt it OGCD? doesnt really make sense why it had to be on the GCD. anyway as it stands, getting toxicon charges is in the same boat as 'dump lilies outside of raidbuffs to power a misery in raidbuffs' but worse, because you want to put up diagnosis'es when the boss isnt targetable, in order to not lose damage in the first place

TBN i hear people complain that 'oh if i use TBN too much i dont have the mana to dump edges in raidbuffs' but im not a tank main anymore so im not 100% on how that works, but the point is, you cant really make things 'refund damage' because of raidbuffs. if you make it damage neutral, people will find a way to move the damage from 'outside' to 'inside' raidbuffs, as we see with misery. if it's 'slightly weaker so the raidbuffs compensate the rest of the way to neutral' it just means the way to use it is to put it in raidbuffs which hampers how players can use it effectively. the solution is imo to make it neutral like misery, and just accept people are gonna find ways to get creative with how to eke out more damage from their skills, it just adds more interesting-ness to the otherwise bland role

I have some theorycrafting builds for the healers in another thread, but one alternative to fixing Toxikon that I have come to really like (amongst other ideas) is to give SGE a new OGCD damage button called Toxikosis. Toxikosis has a potency of 110 and requires a special proc to be used. Casting Toxikon grants you 3 of these procs. It softens the crit issue, gives you mini burst weave windows, and also slows you down with storing and spamming Toxikon during buff windows as you want to use all your procs before using Toxikon again.

[ForsakenRoe]

Toxikosis

hmm it sounds fairly good on paper, i'm just not so sure about it being 3 stacks, it sounds kinda close to energy drain which, i guess is the point? but i wonder if it'd be too much of a cluster F to do that, and mit/healing, and eukrasian healing if needed, if stuff all ends up lining up on top of the 2 min window like manifold flames can do sometimes. Would a 3 tick dot work better, i wonder?

[ty_taurus]

hmm it sounds fairly good on paper, i'm just not so sure about it being 3 stacks, it sounds kinda close to energy drain which, i guess is the point? but i wonder if it'd be too much of a cluster F to do that, and mit/healing, and eukrasian healing if needed, if stuff all ends up lining up on top of the 2 min window like manifold flames can do sometimes. Would a 3 tick dot work better, i wonder?

I can't imagine it would be. There's not a time limit on the procs in this concept, you just want to avoid reusing Toxikon before you spend all 3, however long that takes you. Perhaps that puts a bit more pressure on optimal play during buff windows, but I really dont' think that's a problem. SGE is supposed to be one of the hardest disciplines in the game's lore and can afford to have some challenge to it. There's nothing wrong with having one healer that feels busy for the players that want that. It doesn't compete with any healing resources though, so it's meant to feel more like a Continuation lite rather than Energy Drain.

[ForsakenRoe]

yeh i see it, and dont get me wrong im all for stuff that gives us more to do, but afaik lots of AST players swapped to WHM this tier because it's just so much effort to get the same performance as WHM, especially when the fights love to throw every mechanic under the sun at the party specifically at 2min windows (like p8 lmao) so id just worry this idea would contribute to a similar issue. i suppose that it's got the benefit of not needing to retarget every GCD like AST has to with it's card stuff though, so that might make it a lot more fluid to execute

[TheDustyOne]

I disagree with that take on healing.

It's one thing to argue that healers should DPS when they're not healing and that their DPS kits should be more involved than one-button spam. That, I agree with. It's quite another to treat healers actually pushing a healing button for a GCD as some sort of burden that the game needs to design around. That's precisely the interesting question: is the party's continued DPS best served by me throwing another stone or by me casting a heal?

I might even go further and say that WHM shows how not to "refund damage." The goal should be to reward thoughtful, necessary use of an ability, à la SGE's Eukrasian Diagnosis or DRK's Blackest Night. Finding an optimization for feeding the Blood Lily when everyone is at full health just feels silly.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, I probably should've added that such refunds should be time and/or resource gated like lilies currently are, it sounds stupid that someone merely spamming cure and regen would be casting near back-to-back Misery just because they got rewarded for bad spamming. I very much agree with you that it should reward thoughtful healing rather than just spamming heals.

As for finding optimizations like feeding Blood Lily, I don't think that's a major issue and would depend on how they handle refund mechanics. I'd rather take ForsakenRoe's position of just accepting that some people are going to get creative and find interesting ways to take advantage of it. Considering how much the skill ceiling has caved over the last few years, a few people here would probably welcome it. Hell, feeding the Blood Lily during downtime is something I like about current White Mage.

[viola_vilgrantz]

I've been thinking about these issues and I've been wondering honestly, aside from the clear need for more identity for each healer (which they used to have, but it is what it is), that maybe they should honestly drop the whole 1 damage button, 1 DoT deal they have now, and replace it with a 1, 2, 3 combo, but instead of making it just that, have it where if you do your combo, you actually get a proc to your heals/regens/shields or something. I mean, if the incentive is to do more DPS, at least they can make a proper rotation that -also- aids your main healing abilities to make them stronger, right? Rewarding one with the other. Maybe even conversely proc'ing your damage buttons with your healing buttons too.

[ForsakenRoe]

Maybe even conversely proc'ing your damage buttons with your healing buttons too.

Exactly what i tried to lay out in a thread i made, at least for WHM. to sum up (and shill the idea again cos i think its a good one):

- new gauge, 0-100. stone gives 1, aero gives 1 + 1 per tick (aero is now 12sec so 4 ticks), new skill water (becomes banish later) gives 5 but is a 15sec CD. this averages out to (by my maths) about 60 gauge per min, assuming zero GCDs spent on non-damage, giving a bit of leniency in case you need to throw lily heals or something

- 50 gauge lets you use new skill 'Blessing of the Elementals' (name is WIP). 500p GCD heal, aoe, due to it's semi-enforced CD of 'sorta kinda near 1 min' due to gauge charging time, it's intended to be a competitor to Earthly Star in power

- using BOTE gives 3 new buffs, corresponding to earth, water, wind. these turn stone water and aero into quake, flood, tornado for one cast each. the buffs stack to 2, so if you need to use 100 gauge back to back, you dont lose out on stacks

- quake/flood are 100p stronger than their current elemental equivalent. tornado is 30p on cast, plus 20p per tick, totalling 110. this, added to the 100 from quake and flood, totals 310, the potency of a glare 3. as such, BOTE is damage neutral overall

- people would have a new skill expression, as BOTE's refund mechanic hits harder than the regular glare spam, moving quake and tornado inside raidbuffs alongside misery via clever lily/BOTE planning will allow optimisers to have a new thing to optimise

i do think the idea of a 'cycle', of dps feeds healing > healing refunds dps is a good idea, we have the second half already with misery being the refund for the lily heals, now we just need a way for our dps to feed into our healing, and i propose something like the above, this idea only needs 2 buttons added, so just make cure 1 upgrade into cure 2, and medica 1 upgrade into medica 2, and problem solved. Or remove cure3 and replace with BOTE, but i think people might riot at that one

[Recon1o6]

I cleared barbie ex a couple of days ago, and one thing I've noticed is that unavoidable damage is much more frequent in it than most fights for a number of years. I ended up using crest of borrowed time and occasionally feint. Abilities I otherwise barely used in shb or ew so far.

That was with a really competent group as well.

What's notable though is that I've never seen a practice group faceplant due to the increased healing requirements, only mechanic failure. Also luckily no sylphies. If the sylphies have been driven away by the msq trial let alone the scroungers in pf being unable to clear p7s, then great.


We know yoshida has heard about the pf difficulty for savage because all the freeloading healers have quit but also people like healing having some modicum of challenge at last in savage.
I haven't heard anything on barbie's trial yet other than its a really fun trial.

Is it fun to use the healing kits? because if it is I can't remember the last ex that was fun to heal that wasn't unreal

[Ketojan]

Commenting to put my voice in the pool that healing these days is a shell of itself, like many classes but I feel it more so as a healer because I was a healer main. Not anymore since we got told to go play ultimate.

Ever since they simply took the Esunas from SCH and AST (Leeches and Exalted Detriment) I felt the uniqueness bleeding away until here we are, every healer is essentially the same thing, same boring dps skills, same boring heals, same heal rotations no matter what. I also ask, is rng so bad to have? What was so wrong with the little happiness or annoyance of getting balance or spire cards respectively? What about the feeling of tossing a boosted arrow on the BLM? Id argue this was a flavor that is now lost and I miss that AST the most.

Please look closer into healers and other classes who suffer from this blandness and rethink this path. FFXIV is a wonderful mmo and I have many memories on it, I just want to have fun and feel different from healer to healer, not like if I played one, I played them all.

[Recon1o6]

Late night musings: though my question was butchered in the 6.1 live letter to be about lack of healing to do, we did still get something to heal at least this patch in the regular trial, the ex and savage. possibly some bits of criterion too but i aint seen enough yet
We know yoshida has heard about the lack of participation of healers, but also heard from 2 healers that they did like the increased healing requirements

I'm seeing 2 possibilities here the devs will take forward
1. they lower healing requirements to beg back sylphies but not to the degree it was in the last tier
2. they sustain the increased healing requirements but reduce savage loot to be less grindy to gear. maybe even role locked loot if lucky

perhaps next time there's a q&a from the forum I will have to make my question purely "Can healers get damage buttons and cards returned? The removal made healers boring since shadowbringers and turned off many veteran healers"

after all, they did give more healing this patch