Could we do without healing Potency?

[NobleWinter]

Getting stronger gear is always the goal in a MMO. It separates those who can invest hardwork and time from those who can't and serves as a badge of pride. Unfortunately for healing in FFXIV our healing kits are extremely bloated and become less and less useful as we gear up. It's kind of sad to fight for better gear and then have less fun healing in it. Savage fights and extreme trials are perfect examples of healers being pushed at minimum item level and then having very little to do once the gear score rises. Our single buttons dps rotations then become the focus of our time and the monotony is unbearable for many.

A possible answer to this would be to do away with healing potency altogether and let every ability restore fixed percentages of health. Some may remember there was a time when Scholar's Lustrate restored a fixed percentage of health to the target. Imagine if Medica restored 15% of all party member's health and Medica II Restored 30% over 15 seconds as an example. If every ability functioned like this it would mean a healer would need to map their healing efficiently over every fight no matter how they were geared and use their toolkit more as intended.

A side effect of this would be tool tips that don't have an abstract potency for their descriptions. Healers could communicate exactly how strong their regens are to each other and the party and resist the urge to over heal by throwing everything they have out at once.

Currently, better gear makes content easier and it could continue to do this by its increase to maximum defense for the party and dps output as well. Taking less damage does reduce the healing burden but stronger heals and stronger defense together are already making healing unnecessary in many encounters and that invalidates the whole purpose of healers. If we did away with the improved healing half we could have better balance between the dps and healing aspects of the toolkit.

If healer gear was strictly for a dps increase it would finally make the distinction clear that healers are intended to support their party with personal dps. Healing efficiently would be much more rewarding for players too as it would be clearly evident without gear creep making healing a one button and done event for every raidwide.

Healing with percentages instead of potency would further mean that stepping into high end content as a healer is safer at minimum item level. You know your healing doesn't depend on your gear but your resource management.

I don't think dps and tanks should have percentage based healing tho. Things like Clemency and Vercure should scale with gear while healers alone interact with health in a more economical way to distinguish the role.

[Dzian]

You cant fix healing as long as encounters stay heavily scripted and predictable.

When you know your parties only ever going g to take raid wide damage every 37 seconds then its always going to be the same answer. Toss a single medica or something and just let the regen effect top everyone off. Then repeat 37 seconds later.. or at whatever predetermined time frame for whatever encounter your in.

Changing heals won't achieve anything as long as encounters stay predictable and scripted. You can see this because the same thing happens every time the devs try to make healer more important the exact same thing happens. Oh hey its 1 extra god heal and then straight back to 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 until next week where new gear will negate the need for that extra gcd heal.

If you want to make healing more engaging and fun you need to break the scripts and make damage unpredictable. So on the one hand you might only get 1 raid wide boom every 40 seconds. But on the other hand you might get 3 of them in 15 seconds...

Older mmos were much better for this as fights were a lot more randomised and lot less scripted..
Even XI (75era at least) bosses were much more random they could any of there ability in any order they chose and it kept players on there toes a lot more.

Newer mmos you can often dodge a mechanic 30 seconds before it's even started because you know exactly when it will happen and knownexactly where you need to be to avoid it

[Anhra]

The idea itself is pretty good, but since fixed healing values are under normal circumstances quite overpowered, it would usually require some sort of drawback, like having a long CD/cast time/high mp costs.

As for the matter of Healing itself, i mentioned this on a few Threads already (and i hope you forgive me in doing so)but so far, every Dungeon in this game can be healed by a conjurer with only cure1&2 and medica 2, even with big pulls. Next, i am going to test this on regular trials and see how far two Conjurers get (If any experienced Endgame Raider with a masochistic vein and natural stubborness could test this in Eden/Omega Raids synched or Unreal content, it would be much appreciated).

But back on the matter at hand, i think Healers would be far better off if they had at least 7-8 out of their 15 healing abilities replaced by utility and/or offensive spells.

[ItMe]

A possible answer to this would be to do away with healing potency altogether and let every ability restore fixed percentages of health. Some may remember there was a time when Scholar's Lustrate restored a fixed percentage of health to the target.

I also I remember that SQEX renoved all % heals after people were using them to cheese mechanics in Rhamu EX and we haven't see another since. So I wonder if this isn't something they'd ever go back on.

[LeonKeyh]

I definitely understand that there are some issues with healing, I'm not sure that % heals are a good solution to those problems though.

I understand the reasoning behind it to an extent. Whenever gearing up through progression, getting more gear makes the fight exponentially easier people take less damage, healers need to heal less (especially when their heals keep getting bigger), healers get to do more damage as well as everyone else so the fight end sooner. I feel like % based heals would just mean that healers heal more when other people gear up instead of them.

I also understand the desire for more randomized fights so that everything isn't so scripted. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that have problems with the scripted fights, but I feel like it results in success being based more off skill than randomness. There are certainly ways to deal with it, but random fights typically mean random difficulty. The more randomness you inject into a fight, the more of a difference between an "easy' and a "hard" pull and it makes it a lot more difficult to balance and keep those 2 extremes "tight." Again, not an insurmountable problem and I'm not even sure if people care about that, but it's something to bring up.

Personally, I think it would be leaning back into status effects that should be cured. Status effects that greatly decrease how much health is healed (e.g. -90% incoming healing) that will need to be spotted and cured before attempting to heal the person who received it. It would nice if the healers were rewarded with paying attention to these effects and curing them. Maybe bombs that would go off and require a bunch of healing but if you cure it in time it just costs that one GCD; curable status effects that cause increased damage (basically, curable vun stacks).

The idea would be that a healer that is just casting heals would _maybe_ be able to keep everyone up, but one that is paying attention to status effects and curing them would have a lot more time to DPS and would be much more comfortable with healing.

Really though, a lot of people talk about "fixing" healers, but I don't think that everyone has a single definition of what's wrong with healers. There are a lot of people that want different things with healers.

[WaxSw]

If you want to make healing more engaging and fun you need to break the scripts and make damage unpredictable. So on the one hand you might only get 1 raid wide boom every 40 seconds. But on the other hand you might get 3 of them in 15 seconds...

Have to disagree with this, random damage spikes would suck since the game is not designed with constant and unpredictable healing in mind due to how taxing and suboptimal gcd heals are mp and dps wise and how boring anything past CD heals are (they're basically another version of 2-1-1-1-1-1-1).

There is also the problem that for those healers that want to try to push the limits of their job suddenly that optimization work would become an rng farm (more than now), "oh fuck the rng aoe happened 3 times in 15s F for the parse" would be very common and frustrating (letting alone that people eating aoes and such is also another form of random damage spikes and its not something most of the healers are fan of), and that the healer problems would persist at lower levels and in normal mode which dont push healer gameplay that much (and looking how the devs design things, won't do ever) so we're left with the boring dps rotation.

The problem in this game is not the predictability but the fact that what we do the most is not interesting, if we dps 80% of the time the devs have to make sure that the dps rotation is fun and engaging or we will be bored 80% of the time (which is what happens now) and looking how the game refuse to challenge healers in 90% of the content what they should do imo is to embrace the "green dps" mentality because contrary to the healing kit, the dps/support part of our kit is static and not affected by "how much damage this does" so could be engaging at any difficulty level.

[Jaelommiss]

HP restored per potency scales with gear at almost the exact same rate as maximum HP. 100 potency of healing is worth roughly 4.0-4.5% of a healer's max HP and has been for the entire expansion.

As long as maximum HP increases with gear and mechanics deal integer damage, the percent HP dealt by a raidwide will decrease as gear improves and the effectiveness of a flat percentage healing spell will be equivalent to current healing spells. The only change would be that a healer will be more effective healing a better geared player and less effective healing a worse geared player.

Suppose a healing spell that restores 20% HP. On a player with 100k HP it'll restore 20k. On a player with 150k HP it'll restore 30k. If an attack deals 90k damage then restoring those two players to maximum HP will require 4.5 casts on the lower HP (less geared) player and 3 casts on the higher HP (more geared) player. The healer's own gear no longer impacts their effectiveness.

Edit: Making healing a percentage of the healer's max HP would work the same way as what we have now while still keeping the healer's gear relevant. That might make it easier to think about numbers, though difference between max HP on healers and max HP on melee or tanks will still complicate it.

[LeonKeyh]

Suppose a healing spell that restores 20% HP. On a player with 100k HP it'll restore 20k. On a player with 150k HP it'll restore 30k. If an attack deals 90k damage then restoring those two players to maximum HP will require 4.5 casts on the lower HP (less geared) player and 3 casts on the higher HP (more geared) player. The healer's own gear no longer impacts their effectiveness.

Edit: Making healing a percentage of the healer's max HP would work the same way as what we have now while still keeping the healer's gear relevant. That might make it easier to think about numbers, though difference between max HP on healers and max HP on melee or tanks will still complicate it.

Also, the player with the updated gear would take less damage in addition to having higher health. It would also make the difference in survivability between tanks and nontanks even bigger than it is now and the survivability difference between well geared and poorly geared people would be a lot bigger.

The more it's discussed, the more it shows that it won't fix anything, just move around the problem.

[Dzian]

There is also the problem that for those healers that want to try to push the limits of their job suddenly that optimization work would become an rng farm (more than now), "oh fuck the rng aoe happened 3 times in 15s F for the parse" would be very common and frustrating (letting alone that people eating aoes and such is also another form of random damage spikes and its not something most of the healers are fan of), and that the healer problems would persist at lower levels and in normal mode which dont push healer gameplay that much (and looking how the devs design things, won't do ever) so we're left with the boring dps rotation.

From a design perpective and given the official stance on parsers, any content changes that would mess up a parse are a none issue. the devs wouldnt even consider parsers in any potential design changes.
As for the green DPS i can't see them ever going down that path because there's a pretty large crowd of people who play healers to heal. if they want to dps they'll play dps jobs... making healer dps more mandatory would effectively alienate a significant chunk of the playerbase.

[LeonKeyh]

As for the green DPS i can't see them ever going down that path because there's a pretty large crowd of people who play healers to heal. if they want to dps they'll play dps jobs... making healer dps more mandatory would effectively alienate a significant chunk of the playerbase.

Sure, except the game is designed with healers DPSing in mind and specifically tells healers that they should be DPSing whenever they aren't healing. Healers that don't DPS because "they play healers to heal" ultimately aren't playing the game the way its intended and quite frankly are being toxic if they're refusing to even try.