Please Nerf Shield Healer Pure Heals

[hythrain]

Heyo, first post on the forum. Wanted to get involved in this since I've been reading what people want and I wanted to suggest an idea for how barriers could be made well without causing issues for things others have pointed out.

To me, the way to make "barrier" and "pure" work is to give multiple barriers with different strengths, some tied to heals and others not and make these spells interact different for each job. Ill use SCH and non-Aetherflow spells to explain with a possible idea for changing the kit.

First, Adloquium. Keep it as a barrier tied to a heal. Remove the critical strike function (No Catalyze, no basing its strength on the strength of the heal) and instead give the shield just a raw amount. Galvanize from Adloquium lasts 30 seconds.

Second, new spell: Catalyze. Instant cast spell that invokes a shorter GCD (say, 1 second vs. the base level) and has a short duration. It puts a strong barrier up. This barrier is stronger than Adloquium's barrier but weaker if you add in the healing. Give it a 15-20 second cooldown, so you can't just chain it and HAVE to use Adloquium. This barrier is also Galvanize, meaning it doesn't stack with Adoloquium.

This gives you two barrier spells to work with. They provide the same barrier but differ in use.

Now for Succor. Give it the crit treatment that Adloquium got. Next, change the barrier name so it's no longer Galvanize (Let's call it Bar-a for now), BUT you cannot have a target with it AND Galvanize. If you use Adloquium or Catalyze, you overwrite Bar-A since Galvanize should always be stronger.

Now take Emergency Tactics. Instead of it being a pre-cast to Succor or Adloquium, it's a post-cast to Succor only. AOE, it consumes Bar-A and heals based on how much of the barrier remains. THis way, it doesn't work as well when people are getting their barriers eaten up quickly but DOES work for those "the whole party dropped to 1 HP and needs to be healed or we die" situations. It heals more than the barrier is worth and can crit, but has a longer cooldown so you can't abuse it.

Finally: change barrier mechanics so that they are NOT affected by damage reduction buffs that the target has but they ARE affected by tenacity. Example: Tank takes a hit that, after tenacity, does 20k damage. They have a buff that reduces their damage by another 20%, making it 16k and a barrier that absorbs 8k. Instead of cutting the damage down to 8k total, you remove 8k from the 20k hit and THEN apply the 20% damage reduction. The damage after the barrier is now 9.6k and you've created a difference between barriers and heals, allowing for stronger barriers.

From here... balance the numbers. This set-up would give the tools for a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling without just throwing more DPS.

And you could probably work Aetherflow into this too. Maybe turn Excogitation into that instant-cast barrier, making you decide between if it's more valuable to use it or to wait and use Lustrate.

[EaMett]

This is why I am in the "give us more DPS abilities or support abilities" camp. You can use these to raise the skill ceiling without touching the skill floor.

This is part of the issue for the devs (and as a result, us). They don't want a bigger gap in DPS between skill floor and ceiling. That's why they simplified the dps in the first place. I'm hoping they decided against this design but part of me highly doubts it. t

[Feidam]

This is part of the issue for the devs (and as a result, us). They don't want a bigger gap in DPS between skill floor and ceiling. That's why they simplified the dps in the first place. I'm hoping they decided against this design but part of me highly doubts it. t

Could players have a hand in this issue too? In that if a class has a high ceiling players then, in my experience, expect to be rewarded with higher performance if theycan hit that ceiling. Which can in turn cause stigma towards another class and lower it’s representation as folks refuse to take that job. It’s a conundrum that I don’t envy any game developer. Just wondering if and how much this comes into their design philosophy.

To make the barrier heals work I feel they are going to have to change the strength of the barriers and how content is fundamentally run by players. I love the barrier heal idea. Loved scholar from day one, but I can see some issues that they need to tackle to make this work.

[Ekesack]

I think there are a lot of great ideas in this thread. However, I have a sinking feeling that they will keep things pretty simple. My guess would be that there will be a single target vs aoe heal/shield dichotomy in play. Meaning all 4 healers can do pretty much everything for single target but, for aoe'ing the pure healers can heal the entire party a lot and the shield healers protect them. They possibly wouldn't have much, if any, options for aoe'ing the opposite side of the shield/heal spectrum outside of maybe a weak heal or a % based protection skill like temperance. This would keep all of them able to heal dungeons just fine whilst "requiring" harder content to bring one of each because of the generally more raid-wide dmg taken there. I dunno hopefully I'm wrong and it gets more interesting than this.

[Payadopa]

Dear Zodiark, let at least be pure and barrier healers be different to one another. :/ I would like to have two healers as opposed to one with 4 different variations of [particle effects].

[elioaiko]

This seems obvious to any career healers. But they seem to be lacking that within their team, and no influencers really match that role short of momo. Who, might I add, wasn't considered part of that demographic last expansion. Also, momo is just one person who has a very pragmatic approach to healing. So for example, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, AST card changes were a great improvement for him since they guarantee much more consistent results for speed runs compared to the previous system. That's absolutely valid but it's probably not the majority choice since there are many other opinions surrounding that change that are just as valid.

I agree that they need more input from career healers who have a better idea of how healing works rather than those who reinforce the stereotype that healers are there to mainly heal. SE can't have healers mostly healing. For as long as the content is scripted, less GCD heals being used will always be optimal. There's really no way around it. At the end of the day, you'll be trying to squeeze out another dps spell than figuring out how to heal this and that. Raising raidwide dmg is not the way to go tbh, we saw that in E12S and honestly, it's more frustrating than anything else. Because it's not about how much you heal, it becomes how fast you can everyone up so they don't die from the next one.

Also your last point about Momo, while he knows his stuff and is a great healer, he's very much in the mindset of optimization is fun so it's doesn't really matter how different the healers are. Not that this is a bad thing, but it definitely doesn't reflect what the majority of the community wants. And the card changes did not sit well at all with the majority. I expect a return of sorts to the old cards, though not all of it.

[Payadopa]

This is why I am in the "give us more DPS abilities or support abilities" camp. You can use these to raise the skill ceiling without touching the skill floor. To me it's the best compromise that respects how the game is designed too. I am hoping if balance suddenly becomes easier there's better room to add more of this kinda stuff.

Shield healing will increase the skill floor a little, but only in that it requires you to approach healing differently, but is not a difficult concept at the same time.

I'm starting to see it similarly. Problem is that I chose healer (AST main) to heal. Otherwise I'd play RDM.

I do savage every now and again and I finally managed to beat Ramuh (E8S or whatever) but, boy, is it boring as a healer once everyone knows what you have to do. Whole minutes go by where I just use Malefic etc.

I prefer more constant damage and maybe a few little healing abilities for DPS classes. Mitigation and healing should be required more. This DPS > rest mentality is getting us nowhere.

[Saefinn]

I'm starting to see it similarly. Problem is that I chose healer (AST main) to heal. Otherwise I'd play RDM.

I do savage every now and again and I finally managed to beat Ramuh (E8S or whatever) but, boy, is it boring as a healer once everyone knows what you have to do. Whole minutes go by where I just use Malefic etc.

I prefer more constant damage and maybe a few little healing abilities for DPS classes. Mitigation and healing should be required more. This DPS > rest mentality is getting us nowhere.

I feel it's problem in that the devs want it two opposing ways.
They want healing to be easier for accessibility. But they also want healers to be focused on their healing. But by making it easier they reduce the healing requirement and increase the space for DPS.

Either:
They accept that down time is a thing and give us more to do during that time.
Or
They rebalance the healing requirement and the tools for dealing with it to significantly reduce downtime.

Or possible both. Because they could still balance new content to increase the requirement without touching old content and have a little more in the way of our down time. For me this would be the best option.

I got into healing because I enjoy healing and I like have to balance DPS with it, But, 70% DPS 30% heals is a really bad ratio, which feels like the average.

[ty_taurus]

One way to increase the healing/DPS ratio in favor of healing without having to reduce "mistake space" for casual players or new healers is adding in more cleansable debuffs. We have Esuna right? Why don't we use it?

More fights could benefit from doing things like spreading a DPS Down debuff on the party--one that ultimately equates to more DPS gained from removing it than using selfish DPS. If this were done, it's important that the fight would need to be scaled around the notion that the debuff will NOT be cleansed, meaning players who are using their "mistake space" to catch up aren't feeling threatened by even more damage.

There's also something to be said about adding in Dispel as a Role Action and including buffs that can be removed to speed up the fight. What if more bosses are applying regens and shields to themselves that you can remove with Dispel? Again, if it's assumed the players will need to deal with this for DPS checks, then it adds a layer of DPS contribution in a support-oriented way that experienced healers will benefit from that won't necessarily punish learning healers.

[hythrain]

Additional note I felt I should include: If the idea of going through every dungeon, trial and raid to rework their numbers for the sake of healing seems big, allow me to tell you what WoW has done. For its newest expansion, Shadowlands, Blizzard performed a level squish. Anyone who was at the top level of 120 became level 50, and the new expansion now went from 50-60. A result of this was that they had to rebalance every single dungeon and raid for everyone (not just in a way to affect healers), because otherwise old raids wouldn't be doable. I opted to do the numbers on how many encounters this is. Not counting dungeons for either side (so WoW raids only vs. our raids and trials, though WoW has over 40 dungeons over FF14) and not counting alternate difficulties for WoW but counting Savage and Extreme for FF14, we have currently 209 encounters. By comparison, WoW has 214 encounters by the end of its fourth expansion (an expansion that released in 2012). The three expansions after add 107 encounters for 321 encounters... just in raids. Imagine adding the dungeons, which also are typically more than 4 per compared to us.

In short, the idea of "well that's a lot to rebalance" is a poor excuse. They would have a smaller job than the WoW team did, both in the number of encounters and the job itself. And honestly, if they want to make healers do more healing then they need to do it across the board and ensure people learn THAT way of healing from the beginning.