Shadowbringers Healer Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

[Recon1o6]

A good healing player out damaging a bad or medicore dps player is a sign of a good balance I would argue. That opens up those dps players without extra responsibilities to do different mechanics thereby making battles more interesting...at least in theory.

Ideally Tanks/healers and dps would balance a party's damage output with 40% tanks/healers and 60% dps players. Each dps bringing 12% damage and each tank or healer bringing 10% damage. That level of gap between a dps and non dps would cause overworld and solo gameplay to not be as much as a chore for the none dps. Maybe a couple of gcds, maybe not because not stopping to heal or pull mobs.

The fact remains healers desperately need better dps kits and a culling of the excess healing options. But the former is much more important than the latter as currently that is the bigger issue. You can remove redundant heals from your hotbar and still keep everyone alive, but removing heals without adding dps options will result in gameplay still be as stale as the doughtnut my brother left out for two days.

[Liam_Harper]

The point is: Healers should be healing/buffing/shielding 60-80% of their time, and the rest in DPS. The way encounters and healing works right now is 90-95% in DPS and a minimum in healing.

It's hard to put exact numbers on this tbh. The difference between a BiS team with perfect heal and mitigation mapping is worlds apart from a fresh team on prog. Top teams can heal e12s with 10 or less GCD heals between them the entire fight where the average player on prog would need to healbot fairly hard. It's nearly impossible to reach a level of incoming damage where everyone would need to heal 60-80%. Encounters need to be designed around the average player at min ilv during progression so even though we could certainly bump damage up more than we have now, I'd expect we'd still see 75% downtime at least when fully optimized even if the average player is at 20-40%.

This is why engaging dps kits are equally important to having more to heal. Because there will always be more and more downtime as your team optimizes. Especially given both how FF14 is designed and the fact that we're very rigid on 2 healers per 8 players, where games like WoW are flexible with how many healers they bring as they progress.

Ironically it's the casual 0 dps "I play healer to heal" healbots who would be the biggest roadblock to having serious damage intake because they wouldn't be able to handle it. They just spam Medica II or Succor and stand idle for 70% of a fight and while that works for most content, it's just not going to cut it against constant heavy bleeds or a series of hard hitting raidwide bursts in quick succession with the tank melting away rapidly. Nor should it, it would be extremely boring to just spam the same aoe heal over and over. But the casual healbot would be out with pitchforks the moment we had real constant damage to heal because they'd have no idea what to do.

[Deceptus]

It's hard to put exact numbers on this tbh. The difference between a BiS team with perfect heal and mitigation mapping is worlds apart from a fresh team on prog. Top teams can heal e12s with 10 or less GCD heals between them the entire fight where the average player on prog would need to healbot fairly hard. It's nearly impossible to reach a level of incoming damage where everyone would need to heal 60-80%. Encounters need to be designed around the average player at min ilv during progression so even though we could certainly bump damage up more than we have now, I'd expect we'd still see 75% downtime at least when fully optimized even if the average player is at 20-40%.

There can be and needs to be a middle ground though.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Take the new dungeon, Paglth'an. The final boss, Lunar Bahamut hits like a freaking wet noodle. His Akh Mourn attack? Can be healed with a single OGCD. I checked the damage and each hit does a measly 7K damage. 21K total. That's less than 25% of your total HP. No one in that dungeon goes in there with less than 100K HP so there is zero functional reason why those 3 blasts can't do 50K each or more. Tank busters SHOULD chunk tanks for 75% of their HP. Boss Auto Attacks SHOULD hurt.

That is just a few examples but if SE wants healers to actually heal this NEEDS to happen.

Otherwise, we're back spamming a single filler DPS spell for 80% of the fight.

[Irenia]

There can be and needs to be a middle ground though.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Take the new dungeon, Paglth'an. The final boss, Lunar Bahamut hits like a freaking wet noodle. His Akh Mourn attack? Can be healed with a single OGCD. No one in that dungeon goes in there with less than 100K HP so there is zero functional reason why those 3 blasts can't do 50K each or more. Tank busters SHOULD chunk tanks for 75% of their HP. Boss Auto Attacks SHOULD hurt.

That is just a few examples but if SE wants healers to actually heal this NEEDS to happen.

Otherwise, we're back spamming a single filler DPS spell for 80% of the fight.

I am running off the assumption that the dungeons are meant to be clearable for 98% of the player base. So a bad tank and bad healer paired with bad DPS, essentially. Whether or not this should be the case is up for debate, and unfortunately will probably involve this game's business model more than I'd like to admit.

I say this because I think that this is the only way the dungeon design in this game makes any sense haha.

[Allegor]

There can be and needs to be a middle ground though.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Take the new dungeon, Paglth'an. The final boss, Lunar Bahamut hits like a freaking wet noodle. His Akh Mourn attack? Can be healed with a single OGCD. No one in that dungeon goes in there with less than 100K HP so there is zero functional reason why those 3 blasts can't do 50K each or more. Tank busters SHOULD chunk tanks for 75% of their HP. Boss Auto Attacks SHOULD hurt.

That is just a few examples but if SE wants healers to actually heal this NEEDS to happen.

Otherwise, we're back spamming a single filler DPS spell for 80% of the fight.

I think the last actually challenging dungeon was a certain dragon around the end of SB

[Semirhage]

But you can't tell me any game you've played, has healing DPS required this high to clear a fight.

No, because most games I've played don't design around this bizarre need to control the minutiae of every single encounter. Tight enrages with damage thresholds significantly higher than a group of four DPS with perfect parses at minimum item level can output is the main villain here.

No, being a Cleric should allow you to deal with those type of situations where you have the tools to make time to find more room for damage and your healer being complementary to the situation and your Job design. Again, Savage and Ultimates in mind. I'm not sure why you'd think these things are mutually exclusive. Healing via DPS, Preemptive healing/shielding. There can be many ways to make Jobs work and interesting. In both ways, healing and DPSing. An interesting dynamic in Job design would help this out. It's working in other games, why can't it here?

Because that's not how FFXIV works. In order to solve this tug-of-war between "I want to spend most of my time healing" and "I think healing should be 25-40% of my multitasking juggle", you need to do away with some of the base design decisions Square Enix consistently uses when making this game. One fantastic example is the need to make all standard party compositions viable. Not just barely clearing by the skin of your teeth viable, but with a comfortable buffer viable. The implications behind that design kill a lot of design space for healing variety. WHM didn't (and in several ways still doesn't) have a real identity because of this. "Healing more" isn't an identity in this game. Because by definition it's never necessary. It can't be, because the lower-output healers need to comfortably clear things too. That design decision is one of many factors that contribute to the inescapable fact: DPS is king in this game. Whatever beats the enrage timer faster is what you bring. We've seen what happens with that kind of balance tinkering in XIV: Astrologian. It was supposed to be the lower HPS healer that spent time juggling cards and healing more. This turned out to be unviably low in the healing department. And now through constant adjustment we have the bloated monster it is today. King of damage contribution, king of healing output, king of buffing.

There's also a hesitation I sense on Square's part. Not something they've said out loud, but I get the sense that they *really* don't want to make the healing baseline difficult or complicated. The logic goes something like, low DPS can slowly drag you across a finish line as long as there's no enrage. Bad healing will wipe groups over and over again. If the basics of healing are too inscrutable, it'll wipe low-skill groups and lead to loss of subs. Now, we've seen with DPS classes that it's possible to take a simple baseline and build it into something cool, but remember they have like 2.5 people designing these jobs, and it's pretty clear which role they know the most about.

You want that kind of uptime in ultimate? Sure, sounds like a challenge. I'd definitely want the healing kits to not be the snores they are now for handling that. I don't see that happening, but it'd be nice.

One major thing that often gets me to narrow my eyes here on the forums is that I loathe attrition healing (I find very few of its implementations fun), and it's the healing design used by a lot of WoW-inspired MMOs. It's one of the many factors that drew me to XIV in the first place, and not to those other games. I hear things like "60-80% of time healing" and "I play healers to heal", and those are common tells of someone accustomed to attrition healing. I play(ed) a healer because I like to multitask and help a party survive. I've been told before (on these forums no less) that I'm not a "real" healer because I think spending 80+% of my time healing sounds like boring whack-a-mole with two spells. I really hope that never becomes standard here. Having that kind of healing uptime in ultimate? Cool. Lots of the forum-goers I've read here? Nah, they say they want it everywhere. No thanks.

There is no reward for the non existing efficient healing either, it's a requirement.

I get you. You're pissed that damage dealing as a healer is mandatory in Ultimate. Can't really help you there. They've painted themselves into a corner with tight enrage timers, absurd unreachable damage requirements at minimum item level, etc etc. Square is really married to controlling the heck out of how every single encounter flows. It wrecks the flexibility necessary to play to the strengths of a role that does more than just UNGA BUNGA DAMAGE, or can flow between different priorities. There's a lot of bad to fix here. Giving me a more complex damage rotation and leaving healing as a minimal side-task in my multitasking game would at least show me they're designing in the right direction for once. Then I can spend my time moaning about the rest of the issues.

[Liam_Harper]

There can be and needs to be a middle ground though.

Of course, I agreed on that. But focus should be on both aspects, damage to heal and downtime, not just one or the other. Because downtime will always exist.

I am running off the assumption that the dungeons are meant to be clearable for 98% of the player base. So a bad tank and bad healer paired with bad DPS, essentially.

Level cap dungeons are in a strange boat though. They are miles easier than leveling dungeons. Holminster for example, hits like a truck and even a decent healer will need GCD's and some tank cd's to handle a wall pull. You wouldn't just faceroll it with a Warrior and 3 dps in less than 15 minutes, but you can do that easily in Matoya's or Paglth'an. They seem to have those rather mixed up.