Making Duties Fit for Healers

[Ayche]

Any debuff that inhibits your ability to move would just make the person hit by a mechanic become more likely to get hit by more of them, snowballing into death. And then you would have to raise the person rather than just heal them. Bosses that chain together moves are not uncommon. Also is part of the suggestion that mechanics would not really do much damage anymore, because if they are hit even with debuffs, they would still need to be healed.

[ty_taurus]

If your talking about progging savage content, that is a horrible basis to use for fundamental game balance because much less then half the population even attempts that content. So not to be rude but I really don't care if it makes savage harder for players and I would guess most of the player base doesn't care either based on savage clear rates. If you just mean new content in general I don't see what the issue is with content actually being hard. I think it's safe to say at this point the only way to make healing more challenging is to make gameplay more challenging because they need players to take more damage to keep healers healing instead of dpsing. If they could think of more mechanic based ways of making fights more difficult for healers they would have done it by now. They either need to accept healing is more and more boring and keep content easy or make content harder and keep healers engaged. It's so odd to have to argue that its a good thing people takes more damage so that HEALers have to heal, it would be like saying monsters should have less hp because it makes dps more challenging when they have to actually utilize cooldowns and proper rotations.

There are some other good points mentioned, but something else to remember is that a lot of fights are more challenging at first, but ilevel trivializes those fights. Just look at Titania and Innocence--level 80 content that you can now steamroll fairly easy despite being extreme trials because of the ilevel difference. What I'm alluding to is that they don't want initial difficult of content to require a more frustrating grind, especially for the people doing blind runs to learn the fight when it's brand new; however, these fights very quickly lose that challenge the moment better gear becomes available.

It's absolutely not the only issue, but I really wish gear ilevel jumps were in increments of 10 instead of 20.

[Lyth]

AoE healing is generally uninteresting because there's no target prioritization associated with it. Exceptions are when you're required to identify a vulnerable player who could die to a follow-up attack (i.e. T9 double Raven dives).

If you're healing in a PvP game, players usually try to focus fire or burst down a single vulnerable player to eliminate them. AoE can play a part in this, but it's more as a setup such that you're left with too many low health targets for you to react in time to all of them. That's where triaging and coordinating with your co-healer comes in. This is also why PvP healing tends to be much more interesting than standard MMO PvE healing. That and the fact that everything is trying to kill you while you do this.

The problem with healing is also partially a tanking problem. There needs to be a real and ever-present risk of tank death. And when a tank dies, it has to have raidwipe potential. Without it, the only consequence of any death is just the dps loss. There are two lose conditions: Fail a mandatory mechanic check, or raid dps attrition.

The reason why this is unlikely to change is because SE feels that if players feel stressed out over performing their role as a tank or healer, then they won't want to play those roles. You can't mess things up. Eat a raw tankbuster? No worries. There's a backup who is sitting around waiting for the chance to actually tank something again. The backup's dead? No worries. The DPS can be healed through the autos while you come back. Dust yourself off, the fight continues on, and everyone gets their loot at the end for participating.

[Dearche]

And SE has a solution for this in their toolbox but they refuse to use it.

The Normal debuff is Vulnerability UP. This does nothing but make the healers job harder.

Lately SE has been choosing to put a Damage Done DOWN debuff on players who miss / ignore mechanics.

If SE put the Damage Down penalty on every missed mechanic, players would be more likely to do them. Miss a mechanic? YOU are responsible for YOUR mess up. Not another player.

I really like this idea, however it only really works in EX/Savage. It's not like DPS checks really matter below that. Healers don't even run out of MP during wall-to-walls in dungeons like they did as recently as SB (especially the earlier dungeons) so there's no strong push to make sure that everyone's playing at a decent baseline.

And if there's no reason to pay attention to the debuff, people do get shocked when they realize that it's a major thing in high end raids and might end up shying away from the because of it.

Though, that's a very thin balance issue and maybe beyond consideration for us players as it's also effected by SE's vision of the game.

But aside from that one issue, I do love the idea of Damage Down debuffs, but only if DPS checks show up more often in raids. Not just the last duty of the tier, but it's especially important for the check to show up early in the beginning of the tier so people are more aware that this is a thing that's expected, even if it ends up being pretty lenient.

[Dearche]

One way to solve this would be to make actual healing combos where your basic heal (Cure 1&2, Medica 1&2) branches off into different heals that are either more powerful or provide other beneficial effects.

The annoying thing about this is that we kinda used to have this sort of thing. Cure has a chance of proccing Free Cure, and Benefic has a chance of proccing Enhanced Benefic 2. I remembered a time when this was part of the core healer gameplay, as these procs were very important for the sake of maintaining your MP pool.

It's really unfortunate that the potency of the basic heal spells are so low that it's not worth fishing for the procs over just doing Cure 2/Benefic 2 instead, on top of the lack of worrying about your MP anymore.

[Semirhage]

I have no idea why anyone wants MP management back with the way healer kits currently work. I've said this in several other threads, but I'll repeat: MP management is only interesting if it creates choice. You choose between being efficient but weak, or powerful but resource-intensive, or some sliding scale between the two. What would you do in FFXIV if your spells cost so much mana that your recovery tools couldn't keep up? I can tell you, because that was WHM in Heavensward. Just casting Stone 3 would eventually bleed you dry. What could the player do in this circumstance to mitigate this mana bleed? Well there was one solution: just stop casting. And sit. Like in Everquest. There *is* no more MP efficient Glare. There isn't a more economical Dia. As it stands now, advocating for MP attrition is advocating for jumping in circles between heal casts to get your mana back.

I can't imagine how simply adding hefty MP costs on basic abilities would make encounters in this game more interesting with the embarrassing dearth of choice the kits have.

[Dearche]

I have no idea why anyone wants MP management back with the way healer kits currently work. I've said this in several other threads, but I'll repeat: MP management is only interesting if it creates choice. You choose between being efficient but weak, or powerful but resource-intensive, or some sliding scale between the two. What would you do in FFXIV if your spells cost so much mana that your recovery tools couldn't keep up? I can tell you, because that was WHM in Heavensward. Just casting Stone 3 would eventually bleed you dry. What could the player do in this circumstance to mitigate this mana bleed? Well there was one solution: just stop casting. And sit. Like in Everquest. There *is* no more MP efficient Glare. There isn't a more economical Dia. As it stands now, advocating for MP attrition is advocating for jumping in circles between heal casts to get your mana back.

I can't imagine how simply adding hefty MP costs on basic abilities would make encounters in this game more interesting with the embarrassing dearth of choice the kits have.

Sorry if it sounded like I was actually advocating MP management as something that should return. I was simply stating that the proc system for the basic heals were actually kinda interesting thing to have that was a bit similar to a healer combo system.

MP management was interesting and even fun at times, but not something which I want back. Not even as a SCH that didn't suffer greatly from a lack of MP like WHM did. I don't want days of bringing BRDs to every raid for the sake of Ballad or something. Not like Ballad restores MP anymore, but that's besides the point.

Things have changed since the old days, and it's almost to the point that I think SE should do away with MP like they did with TP if it wasn't for a few jobs that actually make good use of the MP bar. PLD, DRK, BLM come to mind, and I think maybe more jobs should use MP in more creative ways like this.

I also don't actually advocate a proc system like that's still on Cure and Benefic, as I personally hate proc systems, but doing some sort of synergistic system between the various heals we have is kinda interesting, but the whole reason why I made this thread was to think about making healing fun from a duty perspective rather than simply fixing the jobs themselves.

All the threads tend to look at things from that side alone and only passively complain about duty design after all.

[Semirhage]

I'm one of the voices that pushes back in the duty design threads. Not because I think there hasn't been a decline in creativity (come on, how many times can we do Hello World/Grand Cross/Relativity), but because I want to caution against the idea that "it's just encounter design guys! The kits are fine, we just need to be forced to heal more", because I've seen encounter design threads turn into that around here. My two cents there: Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil isn't encounter design.

[NobleWinter]

I would really love to see a very clear distinction in what healers are for. Healers should be for healing first, mistake correction second, and damage third. Right now healing and mistake correction tend to be the same thing. But imagine if avoidable aoes didn't all do damage but instead some left debuffs that couldn't be purged by Esuna until it had stacked high enough. Things that impede movement annoy me becuase it causes one mistake to lead to another like was mentioned before but things like damage down are great because it feels bad to the player in error and not just the healer. I think a stacking debuff called "Allegiance" would be perfect to implement across all content. It could cause damage down that increased from 2% for one aoe to 4% for the next and 8% for yet another while a final aoe would result in all damage dealt now healing enemies instead as your Allegiance has fully shifted to them. The fourth stack of Allegiance is when Esuna would become available. Imagine how much more focused people would be on dodging if they new their rotation had a chance to heal enemies. Of course this would mean eating aoes to get to a cleansable debuff would become the goal for some players but if aoes had only a 50% chance to cause Allegiance it would make things very interesting. You might survive unexpectedly and only suffer a stack of Allegiance but in a game so focused on damage dodging everything would take on new importance.

[Lyth]

I'd love to do a boss fight where your opponent had interesting lifesteal mechanics which you had to mitigate effectively in order to prevent their HP pool from increasing.

MP management is not a bad thing, and it certainly doesn't have to mean sitting around waiting for your MP5 to kick in.

It's interesting how reliant this game is on vulnerabilities and oneshots to create raidwipes. If you can maintain your full healing throughput indefinitely and have unlimited access to raises, then fight designers can't cause a raidwipe using sustained damage alone. The point of MP management systems is to force you to take a moment to stop and 'reload'. It doesn't have to be very long pause; you could even have an on demand action that restores all your MP but has a cast time attached. Alternatively, you could force the healer in question to dps in order to absorb their missing MP back. The specifics of the pause doesn't matter. It just has to be long enough for bad stuff to happen.

I know that a lot of the 'resource management' gets shifted on to each job's secondary resource system, but it doesn't actually have to be that way.