Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Saefinn]

If, by 80%, you mean the damage side, because of the difference in target for healing (AOE aside), maybe they want it simple so that you can switch to heal anytime you feel you need to (though ideally you would know when that would be and can plan for it).

Maybe yes, they want it to be simple, but the problem is, it's made it dull and un-engaging, hence arguably it's a problem that needs fixing. And in fairness, the change I am advocating for the most keeps it simple from a healing perspective. It respects current design, it keeps a low skill floor, it just raises the skill ceiling. Which is the compromise I've arrived at. More DPS abilities won't make healing hard. But it will break up that 80%, it means they can keep simple content simple, they can respect the inexperience of newer healers, but not bore more experienced healers at the same time. It also means in more healing heavy fights, they're not compromised because they'll just DPS less and heal more.

Out of curiosity, when was that?

It was Shadowbringers mainly. Stormblood showed symptoms and WHM was already in a bad place for it. SCH healed too well and had a little pruning DPS-wise in SB, but not much, hence I never complained. But the big changes were on Shadowbringers release.

WHM was already underwhelming in their downtime and lost Aero III in addition to that and couldn't stack Aeros no more. But at least they fixed other problems on the healing side of WHM from Stormblood, because that was full of problems, so it flows a lot better, but still, their downtime is mostly filled with Glare or Holy. Devs maintained a philosophy of White Mages should be the healiest healer, which is a concept that was made redundant as far back as Heavensward, this really only worked in A Realm Reborn when Scholars were less efficient at pure healing because they were the "shield healer" (a concept that barely exists anymore with how efficient oGCD's are). Heavensward patched that by making SCH get health up almost as quickly and added AST, which combined SCH's and WHM's niches. I've seen WHM's call for "more to do" since then, maybe just some utility just to bring more in line with SCH and AST. It's these kind of changes are why you might see some claim healers are homogenized.


For SCH we saw a huge gutting of their DPS skills in exchange for more healing-related abilities. They removed the functionality of Selene, who contributed to their downtime activity. You'd use Selene if healing intensity was low to give the party a bit of a DPS boost, you'd have Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Bane, Shadowflare, Miasma II, Energy Drain, and you'd add your Broils. And it wasn't even complicated. Now? It's Biolysis with Broil/Ruin II spams (or Art of War for AoE) and the occasional Energy Drain, the latter of which has just been nerfed because Yoshi P says the devs want us to be prioritising our aetherflow stacks for heals not Energy Drain.

With faerie abilities being turned into player actions means an element of faerie micromanagement is gone (where you weave their abilities during your own, which you might do in a DPS rotation). The effect of all the Scholar changes is that it just feels like you're spamming the same ability over and over when you don't need to heal.

For AST their card system was simplified fairly heavily and all cards now have the same effect as each other. AST used to have a problem with useless draws, but this was fixed through Minor Arcana in Stormblood. You had a system where you'd think about what you'd do with the card you drew, whether it is to Royal Road it, whether it was to use it, whether it was to hold it for later or to redraw or use it as a Minor Arcana. The most effective card was The Balance, so yes, there were people who fished for The Balance. So now ALL cards are in effect, The Balance. Which, funnily enough the "Seals" system they added didn't stop the fishing problem (only changing Sleeve Draw in 5.3 alleviated that). The only "choice" element is who to give it to. It also meant they lost a DPS ability from Minor Arcana because now that's just a more potent version of The Balance. There's no Royal Roading anymore, which allows you to modify your next card whether to extend the effect, make it stronger or spread it. And the ability to extend the duration of cards and to stun enemies has been replaced with another oGCD heal. But at least they still have their card system, which is why when I heal now I don't heal SCH (which was my main) but I use AST instead, just because it has a bit more to do.

For all healers the original Cleric Stance is gone, it was changed to something else in Stormblood (a temporary DPS boost) and removed entirely in Shadowbringers. This was an ability that added an element of risk and reward to healer DPSing, but got complaints because people forgot to turn it off when they needed to heal.


When you look at what has changed and been dulled or simplified or removed, it's quite significant, and it changed how interesting they were to play. But the thing is, they weren't that complicated either. I mean, there were varying levels of difficulty, with WHM being the lowest and AST being the highest, but that's a good thing. Because variety in design and complexity is the main advantage of having multiple jobs for the same role, you can appeal to what works for different people better.

I think some of the changes would have been fine on their own - I mean, yes, I miss Cleric Stance but I can understand why they removed it and would have the consolation of "I've got these other things that keep me interested", but sadly is not the care because of all the other changes too.

[linayar]

More DPS abilities won't make healing hard.

A couple of considerations:

1. There is a limit to the number of abilities they want to have, so more DPS abilities would take the place of some healing abilities.
2. As I said before, depending on how these DPS abilities work together, it might feel bad to interrupt them to heal. It would be a similar reason to why they remove cleric and tank's DPS stances.

[Saefinn]

A couple of considerations:

1. There is a limit to the number of abilities they want to have, so more DPS abilities would take the place of some healing abilities.
2. As I said before, depending on how these DPS abilities work together, it might feel bad to interrupt them to heal. It would be a similar reason to why they remove cleric and tank's DPS stances.

In counter to this.

Speaking as a controller user, who are supposedly more limited in space for abilities, on WHM and SCH I still have space for more abilities. The same sort of space AST's card abilities take up. AST doesn't need new abilities, it needs reworking of existing ones.

Given there is bloat in the number of healing-related abilities versus what we actually need, there's wiggle room here to swap them for other abilities. After all, they took up the space that DPS abilities took before.

And of course, the main important point: we did just fine before.

As I've played since the game's BETA as a healer, I can tell you what it was like for all these DPS abilities to work together, it didn't feel bad to interrupt them. Because it didn't flow in the same way as say, a Dragoon or a Monk, which can feel terrible when your rotation is interrupted. When you think of it this way, Gemina's comment about not comparing healers to tanks, because tanks too have a rotational flow like DPS jobs have. Healers never did, but what they did have, was more abilities they could use in their downtime.

And it wasn't clunky like turning Cleric stance on and off. Because there was no combo bonus nor any buffs to keep up through your abilities.

You could cast Miasma, heal then cast Bio and Bio II after. So the flow could be more dynamic that a standard DPS rotation, likely because they've considered that you might have to heal.

So your flow as a SCH might be:
Physick -> Miasma -> Physick -> Bio -> Bio II -> Bane -> Broil -> Ruin II -> Fey Wind
Or it might be
Succor-> Miasma -> Lustrate -> Bio -> Bio II -> Bane -> Shadowflare -> Adloquium -> Miasma III
Or
Miasma -> Bio -> Indomnibility -> Bio II -> Bane -> Shadowflare -> Miasma III

It really depended on what needs casting at the time.

[linayar]

In counter to this.

...

Ok, I understand now. You just want more variety of independent DPS abilities rather than actual DPS combos. I guess that's workable, though I wonder how that would work in practice.

On the one hand, you have healers who don't like to deal damage. Would having more DPS abilities have a bigger negative impact on the party's total DPS requirement when these same players still won't use them?

On the other hand, you have healers who only like to deal damage. Would having more DPS abilities make them heal even less? (I actually had this experience on yesterday's trial where I was tanking Zurvan normal and no one was dying and yet the two healers can't seem to keep me (or the other tank on one occasion) alive and I've used all my CDs.)

In the end, will the dev trust the wider healer community to handle more DPS abilities? Maybe or maybe not it seems.

GNB can execute Gnashing Fang combo without interrupting Keen Edge combo. DNC can execute dances without interrupting combo. Same with NIN's ninjitsu. And many of MCH's attacks. There's plenty of precedent of non-combo-breaking abilities, so the same could be applied here (as long as you don't abandon the DPS combo for too long - but if you do need to do enough heals back-to-back that the combo is abandoned, then the heals were probably more important anyway).

Indeed, but will people end up complaining about healers who don't know when to interrupt their DPS combo for a much needed heal or even for healers who don't even do their combos and thus losing out on DPS?

[GrimGale]

On the other hand, you have healers who only like to deal damage.

I doubt there is a big group of play who play healer to *only* deal damage. The support role fantasy has always been present in RPGs and a lot of players enjoy the idea of helping others while remaining a core part of the group. I am not saying healers should only heal though. As a support oriented player, in my view, I want to "always be useful" to my group. If I have to heal or deal damage to support my group that's fine.

That being said, DPS and Healing are not the only ways a Job/Class can support their group. They can apply CC, they can cast buffs on allies, debuffs on enemies and shield from or remove ailments. In that sense, I think AST is the most interesting at this point (And a big part of disinfranchised healers would seem to agree with me, even with the streamlining of the card system.)-

AST juggles with three things: Their cards, their dps and their healing spells. And for that is the busiest and most interesting of the three healers. Now, I am not suggesting we give the other two healers the same homogenized buffs, but having a third "thing" to manage could serve to help to balance out their potential and help homogenization.

For example: SCH: Collects tactical data from enemies, and uses it to apply debuffs on said enemies. Applies debuffs that increase critical chance and direct hit chance- Maybe even some damage reduction to compliment shields.
WHM: Manages self-buffs in a way similar to BLM does while weaving damage and healing together. While it doesn't throw direct damage buffs or debuffs the other way, it's personal rotation and spell weaving allows it to equal the other two in terms of personal dps and healing.

[Saefinn]

That being said, DPS and Healing are not the only ways a Job/Class can support their group. They can apply CC, they can cast buffs on allies, debuffs on enemies and shield from or remove ailments. In that sense, I think AST is the most interesting at this point (And a big part of disinfranchised healers would seem to agree with me, even with the streamlining of the card system.)-

I'll concur on this. This is the exact reason I went from SCH to AST in ShB for my healing needs. Yes I didn't like the streamlining of the card system, BUT, it was a question of, do I Broil/Ruin II ad infinitum or do I Malefic with occasional Earthly Stars and weave in card mechanics?

Plus, you are absolutely right, DPS isn't the only way.

Going back to A Realm Reborn's SCH their DPS abilities applied debuffs. Not just that but you had Virus, whilst it was a cross class ability (and has now been moved into 'Addle'), SCH got a trait to make their version better.

Your 2.0 SCH could do the following:
- Silence
- Slow
- Slow Movement Speed
- Blind
- Reduce Healing Taken
- Reduced stats through Virus

Because Miasma II applied a disease effect (slow movement speed + lower healing taken) I used to use this on big pulls so the tank would have slower enemies and take less damage on that pull.

Although the implementation wasn't that potent, say, compared to BLU's equivalents (it was a more "every little helps"). I think this laid some groundwork for something they could have explored better with SCH. Especially as these are all debuffs thematic to Final Fantasy.

One of the SCH change suggestions I had was to bring these back but not have to tag the DPS aspect and just make them a little more useful. I mentioned earlier in the thread about my idea of a Selene version of the Seraph, this would be the kind of thing I would have in mind for such a Seraph (and for Selene's other abilities). I liked a suggestion I saw from a previous poster about "Libra" for Scholar, which would take to your idea of collecting tactical data and applying debuffs - me I'd probably make that the Selene version of Seraph maybe. I think there's so many ways we can play with this TBF.

[Saefinn]

Ok, I understand now. You just want more variety of independent DPS abilities rather than actual DPS combos. I guess that's workable, though I wonder how that would work in practice.

On the one hand, you have healers who don't like to deal damage. Would having more DPS abilities have a bigger negative impact on the party's total DPS requirement when these same players still won't use them?

On the other hand, you have healers who only like to deal damage. Would having more DPS abilities make them heal even less? (I actually had this experience on yesterday's trial where I was tanking Zurvan normal and no one was dying and yet the two healers can't seem to keep me (or the other tank on one occasion) alive and I've used all my CDs.)

In the end, will the dev trust the wider healer community to handle more DPS abilities? Maybe or maybe not it seems.

In terms whether it works in practice, it already has. As for how it impacts the overall raid DPS, it's something that can always be balanced and accommodated for (and was previously accommodated for) Heck, as one person put it in the healer forums: I'd rather have Miasma at 35 potency and a Biolysis at 35 potency than a just a Biolysis at 70 potency.

With regards to healers who only like to deal damage - or seem like they do, I find these are a minority and don't think the healing community as a whole should be punished for the actions of the few. I say "seem" because I don't think this is something you can tell unless they explicitly say it, because what seems like a healer who only wants to do damage could just have a poor healing/DPS balance. And if there are people who are really like that, I've yet to come across one in my 7 years of playing. I expect I might assume it if I see a healer not ever case a healing spell. But yes, I have seen healers who maybe DPS too much at the compromise of their party.

We also have tanks and DPS who don't do their jobs properly and cause wipes. But I don't think is just refusing to do their job, there's people of all experiences and people make mistakes. I've mistakenly let people die, this isn't because I've been too DPS focused or because of anything complex, it's just misjudgment on whether I should heal or not. You might find that tanks aren't using their cool downs, so you have to adjust for that, you might find that tanks are in poor guy and have to adjust for that, or people have eaten avoidable AoE's and you have to adjust for that. They're all things you can misjudge (just as people can misjudge said AoEs, or pull the number of mobs they pull misjudging the healer's ability).

The thing is, this is no less a problem today than it was in ARR, HW or SB. As I covered in a previous post, maybe DPS complexity isn't the issue here. It's about focus and prioritizing heals at the end of the day, if you're focused on DPS, it doesn't matter if you're casting Broil over and over again or whether you're casting Miasma -> Bio -> Bio II -> Shadowflare -> Broil. The requirement is that you don't cast your next DPS spell and instead cast a healing one.

By contrast. It seems very common when I get Titania in a roulette that the DPS's of the group fail the DPS check. This is because they're either not doing enough DPS or because they're not dodging AoE's. Dead DPS means not meeting a DPS check, so these situations can be make or break on the success of a run. This is because the requirement is for the DPS to simultaneously maximize their DPS and dodge.

There are tanks who poorly position the boss or go as far as facing them to the party and cleaving them. Many cleaves are tank busters that'd kill many healers or DPS. Like Shiva's, I've have had a few lately where tanks have done this and killed both healers.


I just don't think we should make the game easier because of inexperienced players, bad players or players who refuse to fulfill their role properly. My general view here is, if people find parts of the game inaccessible, it's better to offer tools to help them learn rather than to dumb things down. Because we start thinking about how we can patch people's mistakes, we're going to start making things mindless.

And it's something I've praised the game for in its design, if you look over A Realm Reborn dungeon design and trial design, you'll notice there is a gradual progression of difficulty and the occasional skill check. It aided how people learned. Taking something like Satasha, the first dungeon, it's very forgiving if you tank or healer messes up. Anybody can tank the damage in Satasha. Heck, once, I was dumb and forgot to repair my gear as a healer and it broke...we still made it.

One suggestion I have had before is "Training Logs", something in addition to the Hall of the Novice, something that may teach you a certain principle and gives you a dungeon that suitable for practicing it in.

And to be fair, out of all the ways you can "fix" healers, arguably the DPS option is the most beginner friendly one. Because inexperienced healers don't /have/ to DPS until Savage really and some EX fights. Sure it /helps/ but the game is lenient on DPS checks enough to not be an issue Heck, you can watch my Titan EX clear on YouTube, I committed the cardinal sin of doing 0 DPS, because I was more focused on learning the and remembering the fight. Subsequent runs I did throw in DPS.

But it means we can keep the healing difficulty exactly as is. Even if more DPS moves means reducing some of the healing bloat if they needed to compensate, they can boost potencies of heals or/and reduce recasts.

[Liam_Harper]

On the other hand, you have healers who only like to deal damage.

Extremely rare. In most cases you have healers who enjoy contributing as much as possible to the team and juggling damage and efficient healing to be of even more value is fun. More often you have the panicking co-healer topping everyone off immediately after raidwides and stressing over tanks dipping to 50% who thinks the other healer only cares about damage, when in reality they have it fully under control. High dps healers enjoy healing too.

The problem is that it's not rewarding to be good at it. Juggling dps involves spamming one button in-between your heals and healing itself is hardly needed once you gear a little.

[linayar]

I doubt there is a big group of play who play healer to *only* deal damage.

Right, I don't mean that they literally don't heal at all, but that they may play the how-low-can-you-make-the-tank's-hp-go-without-killing-the-tank game and then for whatever reason (inexperience or distraction) they lose at it. And this would apply to any non-healing spell they'd be using instead of a healing spell.

I just don't think we should make the game easier because of inexperienced players, bad players or players who refuse to fulfill their role properly.

That's a fair opinion, but do you think that the game's direction agrees with you? And to be fair, fun is subjective, while there is some objective measure toward making things easier to reduce potential conflict between different types of player. That said, I'm not saying that simplifying tank/healer has to be because of this one specific reason. There could be others or even a combination of factors. Nevertheless, there seems to be an overarching theme from making it easier to complete solo quest to simplifying crafting/gathering, etc.

So when you say that it's worked in the past, the devs might not agree because they probably saw a problem to fix.

Extremely rare. In most cases you have healers who enjoy contributing as much as possible to the team and juggling damage and efficient healing to be of even more value is fun. More often you have the panicking co-healer topping everyone off immediately after raidwides and stressing over tanks dipping to 50% who thinks the other healer only cares about damage, when in reality they have it fully under control. High dps healers enjoy healing too.

The problem is that it's not rewarding to be good at it. Juggling dps involves spamming one button in-between your heals and healing itself is hardly needed once you gear a little.

In addition to my response to GrimGale, I didn't intend to imply that they're necessarily malicious in not healing, but the result is still a lack of healing.

As for rarity, I think sometimes people can make a small problem bigger than it is. Regardless of my stance on how certain things should or could be done, I rarely ever see problems in the nearly four years I've been playing this game running dungeons, trials, and raids. And of those problems, most are simply annoying but you can get through it and still finish the content just fine and leave.

But one thing is for certain, and that is when playing with random people, you don't always get near ideal situations. And considering the roulette is a major content in this game where you can potentially meet different players of various experience, mindset, skill, or even preparation, the statement "healing is hardly needed" depends on many factors.

[Saefinn]

That's a fair opinion, but do you think that the game's direction agrees with you? And to be fair, fun is subjective, while there is some objective measure toward making things easier to reduce potential conflict between different types of player. That said, I'm not saying that simplifying tank/healer has to be because of this one specific reason. There could be others or even a combination of factors. Nevertheless, there seems to be an overarching theme from making it easier to complete solo quest to simplifying crafting/gathering, etc.

So when you say that it's worked in the past, the devs might not agree because they probably saw a problem to fix.

I mean the devs aren't infallible, sure it may or may not follow the direction they want to take it. The general feeling has been there seems to be a disparity between how the devs think healers should be played and how healers actually play them. I feel Yoshi P's reading of the patch notes I think illustrates some of their misunderstanding when it comes to addressing healer issues.

He said that the nerf to SCH's Energy Drain was because they want healers to reserve their Aetherflow stacks for healing spells and not for DPS. The reason people asked for Energy Drain back after they removed it in 5.0 is because they have too many stacks to spend. But in reality, people will still use Energy Drain, it'll just means their DPS output will be lower, but is still better DPS than not using it. So it doesn't actually address the problem they've set out to do. I've put earlier in this thread how they can make adjustments that'd achieve what they set out to do.

I have found from their comments on healing and the changes they've made to healing shows they are focusing on the wrong numbers. Because they seemingly want healers to well, heal more. Which is absolutely fine, I mean if the balance is 70% DPS and 30% healing, you might find that's a bad balance for a healer role. Their way of addressing it has been to add more healing spells and reduce or dis-incentivise the DPS aspect. But that's not how it works because healing becomes /more/ efficient and exacerbates that problems and DPS just becomes more frequent and even duller (which is what has happened).


And I think a part of this comes out of the perception that this balance is because healers try to focus on their DPS too much. When in reality, the way to make people heal more and DPS less is to either increase the healing requirement or reduce healing efficiency. The problem with doing it that way is that it'd raise the skill floor, therefore make healing less accessible, which I don't think they want to do either. Which comes back to "maybe we should do more in our downtime" instead. Changes nothing about the healing, but breaks up any monotony, respects existing game design and we already know it works, because it's how the game was already designed.

But the devs do listen to player feedback on job changes and job direction and accept that they don't always get it right either and the forums is one place they look to for this feedback, because we have seen changes come out of it.

The same has applied to other jobs where they find a change or direction doesn't go down too well and they change it. For example, in Heavensward the direction they took for Bard was to make it a "bow mage", but found people didn't like it and reworked it in Stormblood. In Stormblood MCH was incredibly unsatisfying to play and was completely redesigned for Shadowbringers and people tend to find it a lot more fun to play now. MNK have been complaining forever about how their job plays (a lot of it doesn't fit together, has redundant abilities etc) and they've just got a patch with the aim to fix some of those issues MNK's complain about. They thought they fixed it for Shadowbringers (as per Yoshi P's comments on the Shadowbringers media tour) and found they hadn't and have made additional changes in patch 5.4.

Whist yes, fun is subjective. And in fairness, when I make suggestions/feedback, I am trying to consider the direction they've taken it. Hence my DPS suggestion here actually changes nothing about how the healing jobs have to heal.And really, those who like how healers play ATM, could technically still play it that way. But you can make changes to appeal to more people. And it's one of the big advantages of having a system where there's multiple jobs for each role, you don't have to think "how do all healers play?" you can look at how AST plays, how SCH plays and WHM plays all as separate entities. And really all those who like the pruned downtime of healers could have been given a 4th healer with a pruned downtime and kept any existing WHM, AST and SCH happy.