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

[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.

[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.

[Dzian]

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.

yes and no.... i think the issue there is the lack of dev clarity, the game does indeed tell you hey do some damage when ya not healing but until recently healer dps wasnt even accounted for when tuning encounters. and one of the reasons healer dps got so dumbed down is because they didnt want healers to feel pressured into doing dps.. with the general attitude of press this button if you can. if you can't do worry about it..

but either way. changing or buffing healers dps doesnt solve the problem with the actual healing and that is the overall lack of things to actually heal....

The whole role is a mess honestly.. personally i'd kill toget my dots andbane back but i'd also kill to actually have uses for my healing skills.

the real issue imo is the devs clearly have this vision of what they want healers to be... but at the same time theyre so afraid of even a hint of challenge that there vision just falls apart everysingle time they try and do something about it.

[ASkellington]

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.

No, I agree with Dzian's stance. If I wanted to play a dps I'd play a dps not a healer. Does that mean I won't dps at all in a fight? absolutely not. What I want as a healer is not to fill my 90% down time doing dps with more dps buttons!!! I don't want more dps buttons. I want less down time.

I get it that SE for some Twelvesforsaken reason doesn't want to address this issue, and thus more dps buttons to press would "fix" said issue. My thing is, no. I don't want to settle. And I shouldn't have to either.

[WaxSw]

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.

Not saying that they would do that just for parses, I was just adding another reason (with other 2 more) about why it would be a bad idea that could frustrate a good amount of people (once again, every healer who doesnt like people to die to avoidable damage woudnt like this) and woudnt really solve the issue, what they mustn't do is design the game around people who dont know how/want to play the role properly because then we end in the situation we are right now. Healers must dps, from high end duties to hall of the novice and all the solo quests, all the healers are told to dps so those who dont want to do it imo shoudnt be listened when it comes to design the job as they lack the proper knowledge/experience on how really the role works, would be like balancing football rules around those who want to play using the hands instead of the feet.

In the way I see it the devs basically caged themselves, if they dont want to touch the dps and want healers to have a proper design then instead of giving random spikes of damage they should change all the GCD heals so they are no longer the heal version of the 2-1-1-1-1 and increase the hps requirements for every kind of content in the game, requiring a lot of work as it should be a retroactive process to not make the content from lv1 to 80 dull and boring and furthering from their goal of having an accesible normal mode. Thats why I think dps/support should be the most reasonable paths devs could follow for healer change (and the one modern mmos tend to follow) as mastery of those shoudnt be critical to do casual stuff (newbie friendly), ideally would reward players that have experience and play properly (higher skill ceiling) and no matter the challenge of the content it would work as its an interaction that doesnt depend on external factors, while healing depends on the upcoming damage.

[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.