Final Fantasy XIV’s healer problem and how it’s kind of unsolvable

[tinythinker]

A take on healing and a new healer job in FFXIV at Massively OP: https://massivelyop.com/2020/05/18/w...of-unsolvable/

Seems to summarize some core issues pretty well.

[Deceptus]

The thing is, though… well, there’s a problem with that. See, while the acquisition of gear and power makes every job better at its role, healing becomes better at the same rate it becomes less necessary.

Yep, saw someone say this once and I 100% agree with it. Healers are the only role in the game punished with worse gameplay for playing their role well / efficiently.

[Semirhage]

I agree with the article insofar that what it says is *a* problem. Definitely. The healer role has a weird Gordian knot of several interconnected problems that reinforce one another, which I suspect is why trying to fix them onesie twosie as *THE* problem hasn't cut it.

[Tulzscha]

That was a painful read.

The tl;dr is healers are boring when there's nothing to heal, which occurs with greater frequency toward the end of a raid tier, and they can't be made more interesting because some people suck at healing.

Yes there will always be times when healing is boring which is why it's important to have something else to do, especially in FFXIV. Different encounters are different, some require less healing, some groups take less damage, and of course with practice and gear you learn and are able to use fewer healing spells. This game in particular is extremely scripted so you always know this amount of damage is coming in at this time and where you need to be and so on, only exacerbating the issue and making the importance of healers having more to do that much greater.

No they should not be trimmed down to the bare minimum for the weakest players. I don't know if that's conjecture or the dev team's thoughts on the matter but I think it's hella wrong. If someone is so bad at their job they get overwhelmed and confused by a couple extra dps buttons and can't keep their group alive, they're not going to be doing difficult content - or at least they really shouldn't. And if they're not doing difficult content there's absolutely no need for a healer to dps, they can safely ignore those abilities until they get used to healing then eventually work them in. Y'know, learning. It's a thing that (some) people do.

So yeah it'd be great if healers had more to do during downtime, whether it's dps or buffing or managing resources or playing with cards or themselves or whatever just something. That's all.

[basketofseals]

As a result of all this work, each DPS player deals 10% more damage, each tank takes 5% less damage and deals 5% more, and each healer deals 5% more damage and heals for 5% more

...

Based on all of these changes, your party-wide DPS has increased by 60%.

That's.....really not how math works.

[EaMett]

That's.....really not how math works.

Thanks. I wanted to say a few things and this was one of them. Also, it's not a new or different take on anything. It's exactly what everyone in this forum has been saying for the past x years. So if you haven't bothered reading the article, you essentially saved yourself some time.

Also, while we're at it. It's only unsolvable if the only solution you accept is healers being pure healers. Which everyone in here at this point understand is not even close to a solution. There are plenty of other solutions that inject uniqueness to jobs and stuff to do during downtime while keeping things balanced. These downtime activities just aren't healing related.

[AnotherPerson]

This problem is compounded by the fact that… well, there are lots of healers who are not very good as healers. You don’t really want to encourage the “I’m green DPS” dude to not pay any attention to actually healing the tank, especially when his assumption is that the tank will last just fine into three-digit HP based on nothing more than thinking it’ll probably work. Better to lean too hard on healing over dealing damage, then.

This one is iffy. That's partly because to be a good healer, you have to take risks. This applies to DPS and amount of healing required. No other role requires to take risks besides maybe tanks who pull big in order to improve their gameplay. A lot of good healers are made only through the deaths of a lot of party members to figure out their general baseline.

A Green DPS over dpsing is based on multiple reasons. It's a problem with everyone involved. Healers who over DPS is either tunnel visioning to eek out more DPS and assumes the tank is alright for x GCD or so, may it be because they forget about the incoming non-avoidable damage, or assume the tank would avoid the incoming orange AoE spot/mitigate/invuln on the incoming tankbuster. This is not inherently bad because it means the healer is trying to improve their overall contribution to the team. It means they misjudged their baseline for healing, which frankly is not uncommon because healing damage is dependent on multiple factors: gear, knowledge of the run (hurts first-time players and those not knowing the mechanics), the ones who are actively avoiding damage, the ones who failed to dodge damage, and damage that can't be avoided.
Every party in Duty Finder is different - healers adjust to this inherent difference by adjusting their baseline of when they heal and at times, on the fly when players suddenly start dying more often. This is the difference in the mark of a good healer than one who just spam heals at 90%.

However, this baseline technique takes time to get used to for any healer who are starting out because it really becomes developing a sixth sense and paying attention to how well your party does mechanics. Everyone is prone to making some mistakes and for healers - this is the mistake they make if they're trying to maximize efficiency to play better and contribute more by overestimating their team's ability to handle damage. However, people expect healers to be always a 'pro' at healing, or make assumptions that healers are just not doing their job effectively by not topping everyone off every time. Healers are criticized if they don't preform well or cause deaths, which also leads into the factor of responsibility and not wanting to take risks when trying to reach that standard. Only by trial and error and lots of practical experience (and with potential wipes) will a healer figure out where their baseline is and become a 'good healer' who can do both dps and keep everyone alive.

After experiencing the baptism of healing, only real issue is the downtime gameplay and lack of DPS rotations.

[Gemina]

I don't have a whole lot to add to that. It states a lot of things myself and others have been saying for quite some time now. However, if that same article was a translated response from Yoshi, my eyes would be glowing with heart emojis.

I think most of us know that they have a total clusterfork to deal with, and it is far easier and safer to leave healing as is. Being complacent and uncommunicative is definitely not the answer though. There's a lot at stake with 6.0's release. I greatly fear that if healing is not addressed properly, there won't be many left to run the high-end content, and that would be disastrous.

[Deceptus]

I don't have a whole lot to add to that. It states a lot of things myself and others have been saying for quite some time now. However, if that same article was a translated response from Yoshi, my eyes would be glowing with heart emojis.

I think most of us know that they have a total clusterfork to deal with, and it is far easier and safer to leave healing as is. Being complacent and uncommunicative is definitely not the answer though. There's a lot at stake with 6.0's release. I greatly fear that if healing is not addressed properly, there won't be many left to run the high-end content, and that would be disastrous.

I'm just glad to see SOME sort of media attention about FFXIV healers because that seems to be the only way to get to the development team. Because their hand picked "influencers" didn't ask more than 3 questions about healers during the lead up to Shadowbringers and most of those questions were waved off.

[Saefinn]

I am glad they are a media acknowledging there are problems with healers and draw attention to the complaints and in that sense are publicising a problem. But I don't agree with their conclusion and I think there are points they misunderstand or overstate as an issue.

From reading, they dismiss the easiest solution with this:

The reason I noted this was kind of unsolvable is that… you can move the needle, but the same problems are still there. Increasing incoming damage more to force healers to heal more is not permanent; creating more elaborate DPS rotations takes the focus off of healing and encourages worse healers to cause larger problems. You nudge things, but you always are nudging things.

This I feel is a non-argument. A few points:

• Was it ever *THAT* big of a problem? In my experience, it never has been. You once in a while got unlucky, big deal, people are new, are learning, make mistakes and so on. It's a learning experience. And sometimes people just aren't very good, which is gonna happen, but we should focus on helping them instead of sucking the fun out of things to make them too easy
• Risk/Reward can be a part of the fun
• It hasn't solved the problem
• Sometimes healers just make mistakes. Still happens, I've done it with our super dumbed down rotation, but the complexity of the rotation wasn't the issue, it was misjudging how much DPS I could get in. EG: your tank might be undergear or not using cooldowns and you've misjudged how quickly their HP is dropping. No matter how dumbed down your DPS is, it's not going to prevent that from happening.
• If there is a problem, making it easier for people to overcome the problem is surely better than dumbing it down (as evidenced, the complexity of a DPS rotation is not the only reason it happens). Expand the Hall of the Novice if they must, training on managing healing & DPS and prioritising healing. I also put forth the idea of a Training Log, mixing the two, could be good way of going "this is what you should practice" and "here's a dungeon to queue to practice it".
• If there are people who find this aspect too hard to deal with, a 4th healer with a dumbed down DPS would have accommodated for those people

The premise of the article I think is wrong, it is solvable. Just something will have to 'give' in order to solve it.

A more complex (and not even a heavily complex) DPS rotation in their downtime is the easiest and least offensive solution that causes the least disruption whilst respecting this game's design.

However that paragraph is followed by this:

We were told at the start of Shadowbringers that, functionally, healer changes were aiming at healers being meant to heal. That makes sense because it helps bring all three of the healers into the same basic space in terms of how they are designed. Before diversifying further, you want to bring basic efficiency into a comprehensible baseline and get everyone accustomed to what the “core” toolkit is meant to be.

This is a fallacy. Whilst I can maybe understand to a degree a more complex rotation might have some players focusing on completing their rotation and mistakenly miss their heal trying to squeeze it out.

But it is here I think they show they misunderstand the problem, in RE to the aim of making healers being meant to heal and people becoming accustomed to that core kit. Scrapping or keeping a DPS kit affects nothing about how they design our healing kit.

Shadowbringers does nothing to bring more of a healing focus. This is a misconception I keep seeing thrown around. I can explain why it is wrong.

For demonstration purposes, let's make a few assumptions (all numbers are made up for the sake of illustration of the principle of how it works and not accuracy and it's late, so not gonna be a pedant):
For a typical dungeon:
60% of my downtime is filled with: 8 DPS spells I have some rotation on, such as Broil, Miasma, Miasma II, Bio, Bio II, Ruin II, Shadowflare, Bane
40% of my downtime is filled with: 8 healing spells, such as Adlo, Indom, Lustrate, Succor, Physick, Whispering Dawn, Excog, Fey Union

We look at the problem and think, "there's too much of a DPS focus" here. What number should we focus on?

We'd want to lower the 60% and increase the 40%. To then tip the scales to be less of a DPS focus and more of a healing focus. What affects it? Two things. What the content requires in terms of healing and the tools you have to manage it. Your DPS rotation is not a part of that equation, why? Because your primary focus is healing.

However, what ShB did was more like this:
Reduce the 8 DPS spells down to 3.
Increase the 8 healing spells to 15

And then it looks like "we now have much less of a DPS focus." But if we assumed that then we're looking at the wrong numbers.

What it actually means is:
60% of our downtime is: Broil, Ruin II, Biolysis
40% of our downtime is: those 15 healing spells

Therefore it did nothing to address this balance.
The change means there's more at our disposal at the 40%, but the 60% is a lot less interesting.

But taking that one step further. By adding more healing spells and thus increasing healing efficiency, there is another knock-on effect here. Actually, there are two:

The 60% is now 70% and the 40% is now 30%. Meaning, we have more of a DPS focus and less of a healing one.

This is because very little of the content out there has been adjusted to accommodate for the fact we have this extra healing efficiency.

It also means, that much of those 15 healing spells end up as bloat and are under-used for a lot of content, because you have plenty at your disposal to accommodate that 30% up time without any need to use them to their potential. Because it's not like a DPS rotation where you're rotation through your different abilities but using only what's needed to get health up. So what does that mean? It means that 30% doesn't feel so engaging either.

To me that's what the healing changes mean and feel like in a nutshell. I feel like I have less of a healer focus than I used to whilst also having much less to do when I am not healing.

By a weird twist of fate, the healing job I found with the highest healing focus is Blue Mage (with a healer stance) with ~4 healing spells and a butt load of DPS ones, because Blue Mage is less efficient at healing...and Blue Mage tanks are also less efficient at mitigating damage than real ones.

[Edit]

And taking one step further. Those of us advocating more of a complex DPS rotation would be proposing this:
Accept that the downtime is a thing and the steps needed to address it would be too complicated.
So they would be saying the 60%/40% balance is just what it is for much of the game's content.
Then for newer content (possibly higher content if they want to keep progression beginner friendly), if more healing focus is wanted, then use the challenge of the content to push that balance in favour of healing, eg: 30% DPS, 70% heal. Encounter design would be what'd drive that.
But people get better, get better gear etc. and that 30/70 weighs more in favour of DPS, or for content when DPS is already more heavily weighted.
For during that time of DPS focus, bring our DPS skills back up to 8 again, or heck, be adventurous, make it 10.