A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

I disagree.

If you are playing as a non-healer support in a game, your focus is maximizing the value of the utility you offer. You are playing a class or a character with limited offensive potential. While dealing damage is still a part of your responsibility, whether you are a healing support or a non healing-support, if you are not taking advantage of your utility, you're doing a disservice to the rest of your party. Obviously, what's important is that you're doing your best, but if you're playing a character like Thresh in League of Legends, your focus is not specifically attacking--it's snaring and trapping opponents. You want to do as much damage as you can while doing that, but the objective of your gameplay is to lock other players down so your team can land kills. The same is true for a healing support character. Nami is not only trying to top people off with her heal, she's trying to also poke and harass enemies and lock them down. This also applies to Final Fantasy.

While we don't have a designated support role, we have jobs like Red Mage who are capable of providing a small amount of situational utility that you should be prepared to take advantage of when needed. As a Dancer, I communicate with my raid group's to establish where my healing cooldowns best help them conserve resources. I don't want my Curing Waltz and Improvisation to go to waste if a healer is just going to overheal around my cooldowns anyway, so I try to establish when I can take extra weight off their shoulders. And if you're playing as a healer, you need to ensure the safety of the party, and that takes priority over attacking. Most of the time these days, that doesn't mean you stop attacking because 90% of all healing actions are OGCD, but you need to be ready to stop and hard cast a heal if it's needed.

[Banriikku]

...le snipp...
While we don't have a designated support role, we have jobs like Red Mage who are capable of providing a small amount of situational utility that you should be prepared to take advantage of when needed. As a Dancer, I communicate with my raid group's to establish where my healing cooldowns best help them conserve resources. I don't want my Curing Waltz and Improvisation to go to waste if a healer is just going to overheal around my cooldowns anyway, so I try to establish when I can take extra weight off their shoulders. And if you're playing as a healer, you need to ensure the safety of the party, and that takes priority over attacking. Most of the time these days, that doesn't mean you stop attacking because 90% of all healing actions are OGCD, but you need to be ready to stop and hard cast a heal if it's needed.

But there is no weight and this why we are discussing what can be done. What you discribe is the ideal but not the reality. Besides the very rare moments there is no need to "support" from anyone. Support is not limited to "the healer" job in FF14 and can be done by many jobs, you are right at that, but here we are discussing the healer jobs (WHM, SGE, AST, SCH).

Most encounter need DPS and almost only DPS, very rare you get the dispel or the extra Feint. Most of the time it is do the dance (mechanic) correct and DPS the Boss down. The healer job is an afterthought. In my opinion give the DPS a little more selfsustain and you could delete all healers and still play all content. We are "full healers" but healing in this order of magnitude that all healers provide is not needed.
So most of the time in an extreme or savage fight, i sit there and torture my keyboard every 1.5 seconds the same button and every 30 seconds the extra buttons for "tha allmighty DOT" ( i did Bab EX for the mount and got an 80% dosis spam at the end. I think if i would focus more i could push this even more).

So what i would like to see is, make the healer job a "Supporter" with an actual DPS-Rotation plus utility and reduce the healing of these jobs.
The other way i can see is double down on the "you are a healer" is to make it necessity to heal so GCD healing dont feel so bad.
In all cases give the healer job in genral more Utility to work with. But no matter what change would come the encounter design needs a change to allow (the need for it) for that much utility or healing.

[Post]

This discussion makes it clear why fight design is so important to the feel of the jobs

My favorite part of healing is where I get to bring the utility of saving someone with actions like lustrate or benediction in quick response. This generally only happens on errors on their part, and it's now also a capability every tank has.

Slowly healing the party between hits to get out more damage using fight knowledge doesn't feel as rewarding when that damage is just 1 1 1, I think, but also when I don't even have to plan to have an oGCD because I have so many.

The more they want to put in longer, more complex mechanical dances, the less damage usually comes out because often damage is tied to failing those dances and there can only be so many minutes in a boss fight.

Job designs even beyond healers affect how it feels to bring their unique support, too, though. Like, every new expansion RDM gets a longer combo making it more disruptive for them to provide their rez support, and likewise SMN used to have passive egi and DoT damage continue while rezzing but now has an incredibly tight window to spend everything. And if it weren't for the fact we've gotten so little else, I almost want to say that Expedient should have just been a pRange or BRD cooldown. Peloton already exists, and they were the o.g. Swiftsong, after all.

[Shurrikhan]

For the record, the role in Overwatch is explicitly and solely called Support, not Healer.

The difference is that while virtually all heroes in Overwatch have something that can be leveraged as support (a sniper, if otherwise uncontested, denies potentially the largest amount of space in the whole game which can then split or funnel the enemy to the advantage of flankers/divers/CQB heroes, and even when removing the hugely synergetic value of damage profiles... there's CC, ally-affectable healing, shared sight, barriers, etc., etc.), the Supports offer the least amount of value by themselves / are generally the most dependent upon others to exploit their full potential.

(Arguably tanks are just is bad in encountering a team capable of countering them, but, there's no more reason for a tank to 1v5 without some compensatory advantage than for Lucio to specifically hunt down a Tracer, etc.)

I.e., over there, every difference in profile actually matters, because TTK is tight enough, the undermechanics are many and varied enough, and the environmental contexts are significant. That's your biggest part of allowing for support (varied value based on coordination) in a general sense.

Of course, a healer in such a place --who taps into those allowances significantly-- especially when deaths are possible, as to allow for decisions of "Keep up A, over B", is pretty much bound to become a Support, not just a healer /heal-bot, if exploiting their kit to full effect.

But, that's also a PvP game. Having player-versus-player levels of available depth is PvE is... not easy.



Sidenote: I wish we could kind of scrap the clear-cut role breaks in FFXIV in favor of more of a spectrum, or at least allow greater divergence and versatile spread from those starting points.

Sure, every tank pair ought to be able to survive whatever tankbusters are thrown at it with, at most, a non-CD-gated barrier or a preemptive heal (landing after TB but before the AA immediately following it).

But, is there anything wrong with a Summoner being able to half-tank or half-heal by spending more time in and resource on Titan or Phoenix, respectively? A Monk rushing the CD on an empowered Mantra to allow for solo-healing? A healer with minimal 'free' healing being truly able to pump during raidbuff damage windows? Is there anything wrong with having a Stagger system (in the sense of suppression, not likely XIII/XVI damage multipliers) that could allow physical and magical damage each to suppress the enemy's physical movement or magical capacities, so that even Ifrit and Garuda, Drill vs. Empyreal Arrow, would feel different from each other, in a greater sense than just their relative potency?

[vetch]

Adding to that mitigation imbalance, increasing the range of all oGCD mitigation and healing tools to account for the increased sizes of hitboxes or increased demand on movement or spreading requirements puts an even heavier imbalance on against direct healing, as those same tools that generally require a healer to be stationary have a smaller range than even non-healer cooldowns now.

I think range as a dimension of gameplay to consider is currently being eroded much like MP economy, enmity, dispelling, applying status effects shielding for prey, positionals etc.

Hopefully they have something equally or more engaging to take it's place, or else it may feel like there's less to consider at every level of gameplay.

It's extra fun because Earthly Star is now unusable while soloing FATEs, quest battles, and exploration zones unless you want to pull every mob within 20 yards down on your head. It's cool though, AST wasn't lacking for personal damage, right?

Lazy raid design is actually making the rest of the game worse.

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh now I see my confusion, there was a 'subrole' of heroes called 'Healer', but the actual role was called 'Support'. but everyone and their mother referred to them as 'the healers' because the heroes that were supports, were also healers, the two 'categories' were identical in terms of who was in them. Shoutout to the OW fandom for just refusing to use the official terms



Well, they took the last one away from us when SCH lost Virus, but I'd say we're 3/4 on 'doing support stuff in raids' here in FF14 land (AST actually had all four in HW, including a way to disable enemies literally called Disable), so can we stop trying to argue that 'because the role is called healer, it must be pigeonholed into having more healing tools than it needs', the two terms are basically interchangeable. The only thing that would be an issue if they renamed our healers to 'Support' is that we'd have to come up with a new term to mean 'tanks and healers' for callouts, ie if 'tanks and healers have a debuff to resolve' we say 'supports'

edit: wait scratch that, we actually do have all four still, because Repose still exists. It never gets used on bosses, but it exists

the small bit

This was the original plan I think in 1.0, since DRG and MNK could crossclass weird things like Savage Blade (the second step of the PLD aggro combo) and SkullSunder (same but WAR). A random uncombo'd Aggro generator skill seems very out of place, but I think the idea was that if the tank died, the melee would be able to pick the boss up and pseudo-tank it for a couple of GCDs to restabilize the tank HP. That got thrown out because A: it's kinda silly, B: there's no way you'd predict that the tank would die in the first place, so using it proactively to make sure you're 3rd on aggro wasn't really a good idea (it's a big damage loss), and C: boss autos clonk a DPS way too hard to survive. Maybe they were lower back then, or could survive easier because Keen Flurry existed, but it seems like just a relic of a bygone age of design, before Jobs became a thing

[Shurrikhan]

This was the original plan I think in 1.0

Kinda, yeah.

Sorry for the likely TMI, but back then, there weren't really class-set roles... period. There were... roles insofar as a thing people would do, but usually in rotation, as to maximally exploit their kits. Instead, there were simply... threads, for lack of a better term, with different components of each of what you'd usually expect to go into a tank, DPS, healer, etc -- never having all of them, and always extending in some pretty organic fashion into domains we'd usually consider a side-role.

For instance, GLD had... pretty shitty threat generation, but had the best counterattack damage. Taunt... was a Pugilist ability, and both PGL and GLD were built to some extent around tag-teaming (with GLD having more benefit on the swap-in and being more able to reliably and burstily soak damage, but with PGL having more of the snap threat and sustained mitigation).

Your sustained raid heals? They were arguably best on Lancer (via Life Surge who had an effect similar to WoW Paladin's Judgment of Light - healing for a flat amount per attack against the enemy), though that was on a shared cooldown with suppressing enemy TP (generated, at different modifiers per enemy, off of damage dealt, taken, and certain other factors -- similar to our LB gauge now).

What we'd think of today as "healers" were just "casters" with versatile kits, and practically each playing their own Challenge Mode of the game: one an all-elements elementalist (CNJ), and the other probably the craziest class XIV design has ever seen and would today look more like a whacky base-holding PvP build out of RIFT -- the selectively stat-stealing, HP/MP-stealing, HP-spending, debuff-shifting, CC-heavy, void-blasting Thaumaturge (think a Shadow Priest + Affliction Warlock with the optional ability to nuke heal).

Your 'pure' DPS? There kind of... weren't any, since the non-DPS value they brought to the table was always significant enough for those classes not to be interchangeable, and that everyone could pump, within their ideal circumstances.

A tank? Which kind? Dodge-tank, especially able to specialize against Earth, Wind, or Fire? Able to just soak up damage of any kind when that damage isn't yet predictable? To take big hits? To simply harass and keep in check the enemy while easing the job of everyone else? A kiting tank able also to interrupt casters and bind adds? A caster-juggernaut that fed off the most recent add wave to bolster stats to ridiculous levels? A stoneclad elementalist that can just keep drawing enemies in with mass heals and then repeatedly Flood them back? Pick your poison. There were some who could anchor that position easier than others, but the game seemed content to let every class carry a useful niche.

*Obviously, little of this got fleshed out to quite the point I may make it seem here, as the game basically lacked any significantly capable physics engine, even, but that the kits definitely show a tendency towards Classes first, with roles an afterthought left to the community to figure out (which... would mostly come down to wasting those class's potential in order to reduce gameplay/"stress", much like anyone asking that a Paladin in SB waste Sentinel and Rampart from the OT position just to get a slightly stronger Intervention).

[vetch]

Sorry for the likely TMI, but back then, there weren't really class-set roles... period. There were... roles insofar as a thing people would do, but usually in rotation, as to maximally exploit their kits. Instead, there were simply... threads, for lack of a better term, with different components of each of what you'd usually expect to go into a tank, DPS, healer, etc -- never having all of them, and always extending in some pretty organic fashion into domains we'd usually consider a side-role.

For instance, GLD had... pretty shitty threat generation, but had the best counterattack damage. Taunt... was a Pugilist ability, and both PGL and GLD were built to some extent around tag-teaming (with GLD having more benefit on the swap-in and being more able to reliably and burstily soak damage, but with PGL having more of the snap threat and sustained mitigation).

Your sustained raid heals? They were arguably best on Lancer (via Life Surge who had an effect similar to WoW Paladin's Judgment of Light - healing for a flat amount per attack against the enemy), though that was on a shared cooldown with suppressing enemy TP (generated, at different modifiers per enemy, off of damage dealt, taken, and certain other factors -- similar to our LB gauge now).

What we'd think of today as "healers" were just "casters" with versatile kits, and practically each playing their own Challenge Mode of the game: one an all-elements elementalist (CNJ), and the other probably the craziest class XIV design has ever seen and would today look more like a whacky base-holding PvP build out of RIFT -- the selectively stat-stealing, HP/MP-stealing, HP-spending, debuff-shifting, CC-heavy, void-blasting Thaumaturge (think a Shadow Priest + Affliction Warlock with the optional ability to nuke heal).

Your 'pure' DPS? There kind of... weren't any, since the non-DPS value they brought to the table was always significant enough for those classes not to be interchangeable, and that everyone could pump, within their ideal circumstances.

A tank? Which kind? Dodge-tank, especially able to specialize against Earth, Wind, or Fire? Able to just soak up damage of any kind when that damage isn't yet predictable? To take big hits? To simply harass and keep in check the enemy while easing the job of everyone else? A kiting tank able also to interrupt casters and bind adds? A caster-juggernaut that fed off the most recent add wave to bolster stats to ridiculous levels? A stoneclad elementalist that can just keep drawing enemies in with mass heals and then repeatedly Flood them back? Pick your poison. There were some who could anchor that position easier than others, but the game seemed content to let every class carry a useful niche.

This smells like Guild Wars 1 with aggro management sprinkled in.

[Allegor]

It's extra fun because Earthly Star is now unusable while soloing FATEs, quest battles, and exploration zones unless you want to pull every mob within 20 yards down on your head. It's cool though, AST wasn't lacking for personal damage, right?

Lazy raid design is actually making the rest of the game worse.

Something something "why are you even doing that with a healer?"

[Renathras]

I think there's a misunderstanding going on here. Overwatch refers to their characters as Tank, Healer and Damage because Blizzard has a history of making an MMO. But the Healer could just as easily be called 'Support'. The Tanks could be 'Defender' or 'Guardian' or whatever synonym. Getting hung up on what 'being a support vs healer is' doesn't really get us anywhere.

This is an argument of semantics, and one that is arbitrary. A “healer” is any “support” that restores HP. “Support” characters/classes have low overall damage in exchange for brining utility—non-damage related effects that make encounters easier: healing, mitigation, crowd control, mobility, cleansing, dispelling…

They're relevant because they're distinct. It's like Tank and DPS. All Tanks in pretty much all games with a role system do DPS. Have rotations (or what in that game passes for one), etc. But they do less DPS, tend to have simpler rotations, but have more defensive (and often agro-generating) abilities, and thus slot into a different part in a party.

Look at Everquest Cleric vs Everquest Enchanter.

Clearly the two are not the same. There is very much a distinction. Calling them both "Healer" or both "Support" would be akin to calling a Tank "DPS" or a DPS "Tank" (hey, every DPS can tank at least for a little while! Sometimes "little while" means "one hit"). At that point, you may as well not have names or categories at all.

The difference isn't just "fills HP" and "does other things that are non-damage related"; again, Tanks and DPS must be the same role if we're using definitions that broad. Healers provide mitigation and recovery to party members, Support provide battlefield control (which is why Pantheon is using Control for the name of their fourth role, since they recognize that "Support" in their context can also include "Debuffing", which isn't very "supportive"; the role is more focused on control). It's a similar distinction like that which exists between "tactics" and "strategy", two words that initially seem similar, but are actually talking about completely different things that only seem similar to the uninitiated.

I will note that players who would prefer a Support playstyle often try to make this argument that they're the same - it would benefit them if we kept only three roles if one of the three was the one they'd rather play - but that doesn't make the two identical or just a difference of "semantics". A doctor dressing wounds in a combat situation and a logistics truck bringing in a supply of fresh ammunition are both "supporting" the front line troops, but they're obviously not performing anywhere near the same service, and one wouldn't expect the latter to do the former nor the former to do the latter.

The solution is clearly NOT to rename the entire role to Support.

The solution, honestly, is to institute an actual Support role. Besides, you can argue we use very little of our healing kit, but we use even less support, and all support spells in the game that aren't on DNC and BRD are also oGCDs: Chain Strat, Divination, Draw/Play are all oGCDs. At that point, you might as well rename your Support into DPS, if you're using the metric of "what do most of your GCDs do?" You'd also rename Tanks DPS, and the entire game would just be DPS. At that point, it'd be GW2, and then everyone would quit FFXIV to just play GW2...because it actually has the Trinity roles. XD

.

At its core - I've said this here before and been attacked for it, even though I wasn't the one that made any demands or anything related to it (that was Semi) and I didn't say it in any way disparaigingly - the problem is that the Trinity is a gimped Quaternary, and FFXIV encounter design isn't made to work with either. Tank, Heal, Support, Damage. Changing the names of the middle two doesn't fix the problem, and more poorly reflects what's happening (AST is the only arguably Support of the four; SCH has only Chain Strat, a 2 min oGCD, and WHM and SGE have no support abilities). But people still very much like that type of gameplay. I pointed out before that the Pantheon MMO polls routinely find between 20-30% of players want to play the Control/Support role (Enchanters, Bards), and in games without Support, try to find the "best fit" for themselves among DPS or Healer (and sometimes Tank) classes. In FFXIV, I'd wager PLD, AST, RDM, DNC, and BRD are favorites of those types of players.

The answer is for a game to actually embrace that. Pantheon seems to want to, we will see how it pans out if they ever get out of pre-Alpha...

Which, just like "make healing more demanding/interesting", would require a change to encounter design - something I fully support, obviously - so all paths to a lasting solution go through "change encounter design".

So we have a "Healer" class design, a DPS heavy Encounter design and with the flaw that support with utility will break it very fast so only DPS support will work properly
If we have this, then changing the current healer classes to support (aka dps with heal options) or "full heal" will not help or change it. In the end that means the encounter design is flawed and needs changes before we even can touch classes ?
Also does this mean "holy trinity" is not properly used in FF14? Because all this problems seem to stem from the idea of "holy trinity" but with a terrible execution.

Yes.
And...Yes.

...

I mean, solo Deep Dungeon runs are "difficult content", and CC there is pretty relevant. But I don't mean JUST crowd control.

I think once an expansion is over, overgearing is fine. During an expansion, it's limited based on the gear/ilevel inflation over the course of that expansion. If the overleveling is too much, it means the intra-expansion gear inflation is too much and needs to be reigned in. Once the expansion is over, there's no reason to insist the content maintain that, especially since players generally don't want it. Again, who here REALLY wants to do Aurum Vale circa 2013? A lot of people may be quick to raise their hand, but don't forget to add "...every day in roulette" to the end of that question. Maybe you still want to, but I would wager a majority - and I will actually use that term here as I think it does apply correctly - would really rather not do that.

Personally, I'm not a fan of "gotta go fast". Every time I suggest Tanks don't need to double pull here or on Reddit, though, I get downvoted into oblivion. CLEARLY the playerbase - including present company - have spoken on that issue, and people don't want slow/long runs of routine content (e.g. anything you do for tomes/roulettes). You have things like Criterion trying to break out of that, but those have been a total failure. "The rewards aren't worth it" is another way of saying "We don't want long content for the sake of long content; we only want it for rewards".

Me personally, I still love OG Blackrock Depths with the NPC bar inside the instance and the entrance to a raid tucked away in a dungeon the size of a Capital city...but apparently, I'm an old fossil MMO player. God forbid someone wants a dungeon craw to feel like crawling through a dungeon. <_<

I do agree with your last point, though; that content really needs to allow (and arguably require) Support (as well as Healing and Tanking) to make it valid. Heroics in Burning Crusade REQUIRED crowd control. You just couldn't do it without. Of course, this made DPS that could do it must-have (and those that could not, sidelined), so that's not so good. But one could argue that's because WoW didn't have a full on Support fourth role. Everquest was in the baby days of MMOs, and so wasn't exactly...designed...well; but games since that tried to carry on that style were. Granted, larger party sizes. In a 6 person party (also what Pantheon is going for), your party is 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 1 Support, 1 DPS, and 2 flex roles that you can fill to taste (or with whoever's available in /shout or /general); another Tank for extra defense, another Healer for extra safety, maybe one of each for a party that will be slow but more or less guaranteed not to wipe unless everything goes wrong, or maybe you carry 2 more DPS if you're camping a relatively safe area and just want to grind out levels quickly, or another Support for more control of situations in dangerous areas, etc.

You really need at least a party of 5, and ideally 6, to have another Role. And then you need to full on develop it. Then you need to design content to where it's expected you'll have at least one of each role in the party.

Semantic ? No, i try to make the diffrence clear:

You're perfectly clear. I'm not trying to start a fight, but I think the issue is there are a lot of people that prefer a Support playstyle that want FFXIV to have it, feel that FFXIV will only have three, and so want one of them (Healers) converted to their preference (Support).

The distinction is crystal clear and everyone in this discussion knows the four roles because it's part of MMO history. Everquest had them, WoW for YEARS talked about/flirted with adding them, most MMOs with a Trinity, when the devs are asked "If you ever added a fourth role, what would it be?" would answer "Support", and Pantheon, an MMO in development, is outright making the fourth role (they're calling it Control but recognize it as Support as well), is trying to follow after EQ's footsteps.

Anyone this deep in the weeds as we are here knows what the distinctions are. Some people just want to try and blur that line so they can get more of what they want. But it's not a failure on your part to explain, it's that some people don't want to accept the difference that we all know exists. It's the difference between knowledge and belief, where someone can know a thing, but refuse to believe/accept it if it causes them issues with their worldview or desires.

But in either case, you're right; whether we call it Healer or Support, or add both, the issue at the core is encounter design.

FFXIV already has a borderline Support role, it's the Ranged Physical (less MCH since the rework in ShB), and arguably RDM.

Granted, even there, they don't have to be absolutely solidly cut. In EQ, Shaman were healers that also had some buffing/debuffing. Paladins were tanks with some healing. Rangers were damage dealers with some (token) healing, and so on. Pantheon's classes seem to have 4 in each role (more or less) with each having a bit of a subrole they can shift to in a pinch. Of the Healers, Cleric has strong heals and barriers, and seems like it can do some Tanking, Shaman HoTs with some ability to dabble in Control, Druid seems like it's going to be a technical class like ARR SCH (complete with a pet of sorts), but be able to do decent Damage. Its other roles likewise seem to be similar (like Rogue is a DPS but can swap to a more Control posture at the cost of doing less DPS). Granted, pre-alpha, so take of that what you will, but EQ's versions were kind of like that as well.

...but someone above mentioned how these things can be a spectrum, and it is entirely possible to make that work as long as the game's encounter design and class design are made with that as the goal.