A summary of healer issues

[Renathras]

So, how little downtime do you think healers can have while ensuring that content is clearable by its intended audience

A LOT LESS THAN NOW.

Need I point you back to Sabezy's timeline of the Byregot fight's damage profile? The content has the same intended audience as the Halone fight, which already has something like 2x as much damage and is still clearable.

There will be people bored no matter what, but for people playing content designed for their skill level, the answer is a lot less. Ex 5 is an Extreme yet there's a point in that fight where there's something like 45-60 seconds with no unavoidable damage. You think that's a good idea for fight design?

The across the board argument is the problem. You would need a full on DPS role (not "DPS at home") rotation before many people would not be bored running casual content. That's always going to be true. The answer is simply to give people that are more hardcore more hardcore content to run instead for their farms. Even WoW has normal dungeons and LFR difficulty raids, and did even back when healers were designed to not use DPS abilities in groups (high Mana costs making them prohibitive).

Healing requirements in casual content could be 2x or even 3x what they are now and still be survivable with literal Medica 2 spam.

Overheal Weed

Lol, never heard this before, but I love it.

When a raidwide happened, and it's safe to just wait for Rapture/Assize, but your cohealer is spamming AHelios/Medica II (heal over time? what's that?), or the melees are turning on Bloodbath..... I'm not a "but did you die?" type healer but some people just REALLY can't stand an HP bar being below 90%

To be fair, most avoidable damage does something like 70-90% (depending on role) of a health bar's worth of damage, meaning not having people at 100% means any mistake is death. It also means that unavoidable raidwides (which do 50-80% depending on role and mitigation used) are also death if not healed. You have all the way until the next attack to get people to 100%, but if people aren't 100% (or close-ish to it) when that attack comes, people die. It's the way damage is stupidly tuned now to be infrequent but very very high instead of frequent but smaller in magnitude.

EDIT:

The internet either ate part of my post...

Fair. My bad. I was thinking of / looking at the earlier version without the active modifier cast. This, for the single button gained, gives up a bit of responsiveness and weave space, but... that's nothing awful. Would probably keep the current version over that since we'd only be saving one button for that loss, but it's fine.

My apologies, Ren.

I...thank you.

Honestly, if we could free up 2 buttons, we could add Aero 3 and I'd be more or less content. One for Afflatus, one for Cure 1 -> either Cure 2 (lower MP so that WHM actually is "the efficient healer" again) or Esuna (as discussed before). Then have Aero 3 in there, upgrade to Banish if we need to keep the holy element theme for whatever reason, done. Everyone wins. I think.

Not saying that's the end-all-be-all, but...seems like an idea that could be worthwhile, anyway.

EDIT2:

I had it the other way round: After using a specific new GCD heal tool (costs 50 of a new gauge),...

Please no.

Not every Job needs an Oath/Beast/Blood/Dragon/Ninki/Kinki/Shroud/Battery/WH-BLMana/Faerie Gauge that goes from 0-100 and has a spender that costs 50. Please no. We need the ones that currently exist to have interesting uses before we add more. Beast/Blood/Dragoon/Ninki/and mostly Kinki already are almost identical (blow during burst, don't overcap, spenders cost 50 each) to the point they're extremely samey. Let's not get more of that. Find ways to make Faerie Gauge legitimately useful first.

.

A simple solution, if we REALLY want this, though:

Filler spam spell: Earth
DoT: Aero
AOE: Water

Under Presence of Mind, empowers all your damage spells:

Filler: Glare
DoT: Dia
AOE: Holy

...granted, this doesn't have a spot for Aero 3, but it is what it is. Make PoM into Requiescat/Manification where it uprates your spells to more advanced forms. That would already be more unique than a gauge with 50 point spenders.

[AmiableApkallu]

A LOT LESS THAN NOW.

Need I point you back to Sabezy's timeline of the Byregot fight's damage profile? The content has the same intended audience as the Halone fight, which already has something like 2x as much damage and is still clearable.

Read my linked comment. I was asking for answers to the questions posed therein. Or, alternatively, pushback against my own answers to my own questions. Because we can all handwave and go "A LOT", "2x", "3x"…, but at the end of the day, when I plugged in what I thought were reasonable answers (at least at the time), I cranked up required healing to a measly 30 seconds out of every 60. Which is probably approaching a literal order of magnitude more required GCDs spent healing than what "casual" content requires now.

There will be people bored no matter what, but for people playing content designed for their skill level, the answer is a lot less. Ex 5 is an Extreme yet there's a point in that fight where there's something like 45-60 seconds with no unavoidable damage. You think that's a good idea for fight design?

I never said Byregot or EX5 were good fight designs?

I literally linked to a comment proposing more outgoing damage in agreement. My own comment that I linked is literally a framework for thinking about how high we can crank up required healing.

A DPS kit that needs to fill only 5 seconds out every 60 can look very different from a kit that needs to fill 55 out of 60. Is it not interesting to think about where on that spectrum we should be designing for?

The across the board argument is the problem. You would need a full on DPS role (not "DPS at home") rotation before many people would not be bored running casual content. That's always going to be true. The answer is simply to give people that are more hardcore more hardcore content to run instead for their farms.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for the day SE delivers on that vision.

[ForsakenRoe]

There will be people bored no matter what, but for people playing content designed for their skill level, the answer is a lot less. Ex 5 is an Extreme yet there's a point in that fight where there's something like 45-60 seconds with no unavoidable damage. You think that's a good idea for fight design?

The across the board argument is the problem. You would need a full on DPS role (not "DPS at home") rotation before many people would not be bored running casual content. That's always going to be true. The answer is simply to give people that are more hardcore more hardcore content to run instead for their farms. Even WoW has normal dungeons and LFR difficulty raids, and did even back when healers were designed to not use DPS abilities in groups (high Mana costs making them prohibitive).

Not every Job needs an Oath/Beast/Blood/Dragon/Ninki/Kinki/Shroud/Battery/WH-BLMana/Faerie Gauge that goes from 0-100 and has a spender that costs 50. Please no. We need the ones that currently exist to have interesting uses before we add more. Beast/Blood/Dragoon/Ninki/and mostly Kinki already are almost identical (blow during burst, don't overcap, spenders cost 50 each) to the point they're extremely samey. Let's not get more of that. Find ways to make Faerie Gauge legitimately useful first.

No, I don't think having such massive gaps in unavoidable damage is necessarily a good thing for fight design, but consider that it's not because the boss is doing nothing, he's doing multiple instances of avoidable damage. Dodging those avoidable attacks feels good because 'I'm helping the healer by not taking this damage, so they don't have to worry about saving me from death constantly'. The ratio of avoidable/unavoidable damage might need some work, but just making there be more 'unavoidable damage' might actually be a worse feeling overall. Imagine every 5 seconds, Golbez stomps his foot and a shockwave does 10k damage to everyone. It's 'unavoidable damage', it eventually stacks up, it gets to the point where it's a threat in combination with an avoidable mechanic (eg it drops people low enough that failing to dodge the halfroom slice would kill), but it sure as hell isn't going to be creating 'interesting gameplay'.

Again you claim people like me would need DPS-Adjacent levels of complexity, despite all the times to the contrary. Oh well. As for the 'solution' here, lmao, simply. 'Instead of the dev time of giving more hardcore players an extra section of the job kit to optimize (something that takes dev time for expansion launch and, if well balanced, can be left alone for the whole expansion), we should instead be giving them more content, that takes more dev time from the whole team, and requires that time every patch because players can eat through content faster than devs can cook it up'. Why didn't any of us think of that? If you mean that there should be more 'midcore' content to act as a bridge into Savage since one EX trial every 4 months isn't cutting it, yeh agreed but that's not the point here.

For gauges, yes it sucks that certain gauges have one use and exactly one use. But that's SE's fault for not capitalizing on them more. Beast is a good example. It used to be used for Upheaval and Overpower, but some people who were not good at WAR complained so hard that 'it sucks to use the gauge for the gapcloser also it's a damage loss waaah' that now we have to spam 3 of them in raidbuffs and the gauge is now only used on FC. WHM having a 0-100 gauge barely even counts as an issue IMO, because it's current gauge is so hollow as it is. Functionally, you could just have Solace say 'has 3 charges, 20s recharge time, shares a CD with Rapture' and vice versa, and its the same thing, just with a pretty flower picture to show it. Adding an extra gauge would take a bit of dev time, art team has to draw a pretty version etc, but it opens doors to actually have more interesting things. An AOE heal is the suggestion, yes, but there's other things that could be added to also spend gauge on. Maybe shields, maybe a more powerful regen effect, maybe mitigations. Also, you know that the Fairy gauge is a second gauge on SCH right? We have Aetherflow gauge too. So it's not like there's zero precedent for adding a second gauge element to a healer. And yes, I would like to see Fairy gauge get more uses. But the current lack of uses of that gauge, doesn't immediately lock us out from other things on an entirely separate class, especially one who's only gauge can be turned off entirely and still play almost identically.

Also, while Beast and Blood are very similar (because DRK became WAR2 after all), Ninki had previously a cost of 80 iirc for TCJ (now removed), Kenki used to have Kaiten at 20 Seigan at 15 Guren at 50. Two are removed, and one's been reduced to 25, equal to Shinten. Dragoon's gauge doesn't even 'spend' anything, it displays a timer. But basically you're asking for Stormblood back