A summary of healer issues

[IDontPetLalas]

Sorry for another tangent, but a little before the "If you want engaging healing content, go play Ultimates" line I asked about the current state of healers in the JP forums, and one of the responses mentioned YoshiP's said they're trying to avoid making healer dps from having much variance as that can greatly affect content completion.

I haven't looked hard enough to verify the source, but at the time I thought he was .**snip*

If I can speak to this part "I thought he was doubting the players' ability to actually execute a complex dps rotation on top of a heal plan. Now I'm thinking it's more an issue with balancing the game since it'd make the amount of damage we deal wildly fluctuate based on how well the entire party is doing, even more so than it does now.

Speaking to this "they're trying to avoid making healer dps from having much variance as that can greatly affect content completion"

I could understand that if the overall DPS contribution that was necessary from healers in order to beat enrage was capped at a specific percent. However that is independent of

"I thought he was doubting the players' ability to actually execute a complex dps rotation on top of a heal plan. " The reason being that DPS can be contributed via a number of ways, which does not necessitate the complexity of the DPS jobs -as a number of people have argued it could closer to that of the tank jobs.

Regarding the next part "Now I'm thinking it's more an issue with balancing the game since it'd make the amount of damage we deal wildly fluctuate based on how well the entire party is doing, even more so than it does now." Well, yes the amount of damage could hypothetically fluctuate, just as per any job. The "wildly" is a matter both of the individual skill, the design of the encounter, and the job design - for example, what if some healing skills also dealt damage (like macrocosmos).

Finally "it's far easier to measure how much damage a healer will output when it's largely just 2~4 moves that are disjoint from each other." I would substitute "lazy" for easy. Basically it's no one who is a healer designer, just whomever draws the short straw.

[Azurarok]

I could understand that if the overall DPS contribution that was necessary from healers in order to beat enrage was capped at a specific percent.

Not beating enrage may not be that much a concern but I also don't think they really want a good team to beat content far faster than what they expect. It could also lead to a larger chunk of the playerbase to complain they made things too easy.

The reason being that DPS can be contributed via a number of ways, which does not necessitate the complexity of the DPS jobs -as a number of people have argued it could closer to that of the tank jobs.

I did say at the time, so I don't now. Don't quite understand what else you're trying to say here.

The "wildly" is a matter both of the individual skill, the design of the encounter, and the job design - for example, what if some healing skills also dealt damage (like macrocosmos).

That's why macrocosmos is just the same potency as malefic, and pneuma the same as dosis. They're barely different from just having yet another oGCD heal (outside them being a gain against large pulls).

To be clear I'm not saying it's okay that things are the way they are, but I sure would like to understand what their reasoning is if there are other things than just "they're lazy".

[Aravell]

To be clear I'm not saying it's okay that things are the way they are, but I sure would like to understand what their reasoning is if there are other things than just "they're lazy".

I don't think they're lazy, I just think they're designing healers from the perspective of a DPS player. If you look at the changes made from the start of SB until now, you can see them very slowly removing anything that can distract us from healing while giving us more and more healing tools. There's no nice way to say it, they're designing heal bots, not an actual enjoyable role.

The cynical part of me had a thought, Mortal Flame on BLU might be a test to make healer DoTs into a permanent duration so it's just set and forget. This would further their mission of making healers as fail-proof as possible by making them always ready to heal and never having to delay heals by having to refresh a DoT.

[Azurarok]

I just think they're designing healers from the perspective of a DPS player. If you look at the changes made from the start of SB until now, you can see them very slowly removing anything that can distract us from healing while giving us more and more healing tools. There's no nice way to say it, they're designing heal bots, not an actual enjoyable role.

Ah, yeah I do see that a bit. Kinda reminds me of how a good handful of older Tales games don't actually make their healers nearly as fun to play as others.

the gauge I suggested is for a healing skill that is damage neutral (like how Lilies pay for themselves via Misery's refund), and is damage positive only by spending the refund skills in buffs ala Misery (since the refund is tied to casting Glare/Dia/the other one, this would mean using the gauge at X:58, else you'd have to AFK til the buffs go out), and B: I rewrote it to also include non Lily heals, such that if there's a hard HPS check (Harrowing Hell for example), the player can still build gauge, because it seemed silly to be locked out of building towards a healing tool because you were too busy healing. I wouldn't want to have a gauge spent entirely on 'damage positive skills' on a healer. Rather, I think the way to do it would be what I went for, a gauge that gives access to more healing or mitigation tools, that, if used well, can increase the player's DPS indirectly by removing more 'damage-loss GCD heals' like Medica 2. Well, at least for WHM

This is kind of the point I was wanting to get back to, circling back to my first post in this thread regarding SGE's Toxicon and GCD heals in general. I think we need more designs where different attacking and healing skills interact with each other so that they somehow lead to the healer being dps neutral to even positive on a personal level for the role to be fun to play in all ranges of content. And by that I mean not only have healing help your attacks, but have ways attacking can also help with healing (e.g. make Glare also have a chance of proccing Freecure)