Dear Square Enix, do something with GCD healing please.

[Charganium]

You know something, I'm not completely against healers doing some damage during an enrage timer, but the whole fight isn't that is it? [...] You would think the enrage timer is 20 minutes of a 20 minutes fight.

It literally is.

[Kabooa]

Now, just as far as personal preference goes, I'd rather go the opposite way, making MP an actual mechanic (rather than simply removing it for its being a pretense on 80% of jobs). [LIST]

• Given LD currently only exists to keep a GCD locked caster from going OOM, might as well remove it, yes.
• I have no opinion on this. Having Haste increase MP regeneration seems unnecessary, as does changing its tick rate. This to me falls under needless complexity without something to truly take advantage of it.
• I don't agree with this unless it was one specific Job's gimmick. You end up with a very real risk of being trapped in a death spiral through no fault of your own. A job designed around breakpoints with specific bonuses and ways to both build and dump MP to place itself within those breakpoints would, in my opinion, be quite interesting to toy with though.
• This really just goes back to MP only being a cap on raises. IMO we should remove Swiftcast lock on Raising. Free up Swiftcast, and then grant a 60/120s 'Charge' for Raise to bypass its cast time, while being normally available at other times. The abundance of raising as it stands is something we should move away from, but Healers being your best source of it should be the norm / stay.
• I don't agree with this. MP costs were already a % of maximum MP, the 10,000 cap just formalizes it for easy reading.
• Remove the MP cost from GCD actions for Healers (other than raise) and then applying costs / altering cooldowns to their OGCD is the primary path I would take, as this is already how the multitude of other jobs are designed with their MP-like gauges primarily interacting with their OGCD kits while being built by their GCD kits.

[Shurrikhan]

I have no opinion on this. Having Haste increase MP regeneration seems unnecessary, as does changing its tick rate. This to me falls under needless complexity without something to truly take advantage of it.

To clarify, my concern there was simply that if we want to make MP a mechanic, we can't rightly allow a stat that players might not even be able to avoid... to break it. By scaling it to the GCD, Spell Speed no longer punishes relative MP efficiency on GCD heals. (And if you put MP costs on healing abilities then at least the rate of MP gen is affected by Spell Speed, thus allowing for a greater frequency, nearer to their CDs, of actual MP-neutral usage.)

I don't agree with this unless it was one specific Job's gimmick. You end up with a very real risk of being trapped in a death spiral through no fault of your own.

I would think the opposite. I suppose I should have included more detail (I skimped because I'm usually harangued for including too many technicals) there, but the idea would be that the costs lower more quickly than the potency, and the maximum potency loss would be, well, that of Brink of Death (-50%). As such, one could not be starved or otherwise forced into a death spiral even as much as is presently the case.

This really just goes back to MP only being a cap on raises. IMO we should remove Swiftcast lock on Raising. Free up Swiftcast, and then grant a 60/120s 'Charge' for Raise to bypass its cast time, while being normally available at other times. The abundance of raising as it stands is something we should move away from, but Healers being your best source of it should be the norm / stay.

Again, at present that's the case, but MP being a real and broader mechanic (more than merely a weird, unintuitive equivalent to rez charges) could allow for far more party-saving utility from non-healers than just Rez. (Of course, in BLM's case, something like a returned and not CD-limited Apocatastasis would likely have to cost maximum MP instead, and there's a ton more to consider in the case of jobs that haven't traditionally had any kind of significant party-support utility beyond number-shuffling / rDPS.)

Of course, I'd be totally up for even, say, all rezzes having some manner of granular charge system by which to reduce relative uptime costs -- cast time increased by 8 seconds after use, decreasing by 1 second's cast time for every 10 seconds since last use, with obvious polish for the remainder value, etc., for instance.

I don't agree with this. MP costs were already a % of maximum MP, the 10,000 cap just formalizes it for easy reading.

If there weren't additional opportunities thereby barred by having one value shared across every role, I'd agree, but...

Remove the MP cost from GCD actions for Healers (other than raise)

Should all GCD actions be considered the same, though? A Cure III's potentially 4800 potency of healing to be no more costly than Cure II's 800? I'd rather most be net-positive, but if we remove their costs altogether despite passive MP gen (likely increased in the wake of losing Lucid) then we end up leaving that much more currency to oGCD casts. I'd rather oGCDs have an apparent resource cost beyond merely each other (in how close to their hard cooldown each may be cast), even if that difference might not amount to much outside of emergencies.

[Kabooa]

Should all GCD actions be considered the same, though? A Cure III's potentially 4800 potency of healing to be no more costly than Cure II's 800? I'd rather most be net-positive, but if we remove their costs altogether despite passive MP gen (likely increased in the wake of losing Lucid) then we end up leaving that much more currency to oGCD casts. I'd rather oGCDs have an apparent resource cost beyond merely each other (in how close to their hard cooldown each may be cast), even if that difference might not amount to much outside of emergencies.

There are other ways to assign 'cost' to them that aren't related to MP, such as longer cast times, actions that build the "MP" gauge for the OGCDs, etc.

It's pretty hard to summarize what would be a long and complex endeavor, but the short answer is that you have, even now, 2 other costs you can adjust (Cast time and Recast time) along with a potential third (The "OGCD" resource.)

Cure 3 might be a 2.5 high potency AoE, but throw it on a 60 second cooldown and the use becomes more strategic. Likewise if you set Medica 2 to a 5.0 cast no cooldown, Medica 1 to a 1.5 cast, 30 second cooldown, +10 "MP" that you bank later to fire off Tetra during high single intake on the tank, etc etc.

[Shurrikhan]

There are other ways to assign 'cost' to them that aren't related to MP, such as longer cast times, actions that build the "MP" gauge for the OGCDs, etc.

Put longer cast times on, say, Cure III to make it more punishing than Cure II and you might not get the cast off at all. Similarly, if we just certain have actions build MP with no healing GCDs having MP costs... what's the difference between that and some actions having higher MP costs than others, save that one is now punished for downtime?

you have, even now, 2 other costs you can adjust (Cast time and Recast time) along with a potential third (The "OGCD" resource.)

Both are badly constraining, though, in real content. Put a cooldown on Cure III, even with a second charge, and many of what few places in which its niche could shine would no longer provide it with unique opportunities.

Cure 3 might be a 2.5 high potency AoE, but throw it on a 60 second cooldown and the use becomes more strategic.

Its use, sure, but it therefore becomes that much less unique a tool, ready to just be another filed under "like AST's, but worse."

if you set Medica 2 to a 5.0 cast no cooldown

Then you get very few new healers willing to use it in prog for the simple fact that they won't know if they'll be able to keep casting that mere primarily-a-HoT for 5 whole seconds (with no emergencies or required movement interrupting it).

+10 "MP" that you bank later to fire off Tetra during high single intake on the tank, etc etc.

I'd rather not turn MP into another NinKenBloodBeastSoul gauge. I don't see any issue with is having some slight benefit to/from full downtime and having more than a single category of spenders.

[Silver-Strider]

That would be a disaster.

You can't just "make healers heal 80% of the time". A 20:80 ratio of dps and healing for a reasonably new player in min ilv prog would be a 75:25 ratio for an experienced player in BiS with a good group using mitigation. The difference between a new player and a well geared and optimized player is massive. It's impossible to set a fixed percentage on how much a healer should heal and design exactly that.

The main difference now would be that the experienced player would have to afk half the fight because their mana pool can't even support half the amount of Glare casts.

You claim it would be a disaster but that's kind of how it was in Coils back in ARR. We didn't have the plethora of oGCD healing abilities back then and had to actually utilize your GCD for Healing/Shielding as appropriate. Sure, there was moments of levity to throw on Cleric Stance and do some DPS but it's not as though you could do that for 80% of an encounter and be fine like you can today. If it was possible back then, then I fail to see why it would suddenly be impossible now, especially given that every role now has much more group utility than they did back then.

[WaxSw]

You claim it would be a disaster but that's kind of how it was in Coils back in ARR. We didn't have the plethora of oGCD healing abilities back then and had to actually utilize your GCD for Healing/Shielding as appropriate. Sure, there was moments of levity to throw on Cleric Stance and do some DPS but it's not as though you could do that for 80% of an encounter and be fine like you can today. If it was possible back then, then I fail to see why it would suddenly be impossible now, especially given that every role now has much more group utility than they did back then.

Because the incoming damage isn't high enough to make healers heal (Ex can be cleared without healers, the P1N solo tank clear, dungeons being cleared with just tank heals...) and changing the damage to make healers heal would cost a lot of resources rebalancing all the game content, because that design punish good play and efficiency since the good players that heal just enough (cause overheal is not valuable) would have worse MP economy and would encourage more players to bad play, or in other words, curebotting, because a design like that is a hell to balance and make the barrier of entry bigger as Liam_Harper said since what is "high enough" for a good healer is "way too high" for a novice one, because it would make gearing feel worse as the more geared=the less damage party recive and less heal they need=more dps actions=more chances to go out of mp and not interact with the content

There are many more reasons why a healer design like that does not work and modern MMOs move away from there, its simply flawed.

[Liam_Harper]

You claim it would be a disaster but that's kind of how it was in Coils back in ARR. We didn't have the plethora of oGCD healing abilities back then and had to actually utilize your GCD for Healing/Shielding as appropriate. Sure, there was moments of levity to throw on Cleric Stance and do some DPS but it's not as though you could do that for 80% of an encounter and be fine like you can today. If it was possible back then, then I fail to see why it would suddenly be impossible now, especially given that every role now has much more group utility than they did back then.

Looking back at Coils in ARR is like Classic WoW syndrome. People have rose tinted glasses about how great it was. Less people scoured information online on every aspect of the game. Bosses weren't as complex as today and like you said our toolkits were much more limited too.

I don't see that type of gameplay as an improvement. Taking most of our oGCD's away and giving us a barebones weak GCD system would indeed artificially force us to heal more, but it'd be boring. You'd really start to feel that 2.5s GCD. I'd much rather they embraced the current battle cleric design of DPS support with a wide array of healing spells to smoothly weave in. Its faster-paced, more rewarding gameplay. The main flaws for me are that the GCD dps aspect is severely lacking and the bosses don't hit near hard enough to put my fancy toolkit to full use. That and they really need a healer designer on the team, because certain design choices really need a look at (AST cards, WHM in general, Energy drain compared to Addersgall, ect.)

The other flaw with a slow GCD based heal system and ridiculously expensive dps spells is that a LOT of content would need to be redesigned. Things like E7s doing nothing for 2 minutes, or the current EX1 only having 5 unavoidable raidwides. You'd absolutely be reduced to Glare spam and go OOM in the first 2 minutes of the fight. It'd be horrible.

Dps is always useful. oGCD's create faster, flowing gameplay. It's about time they accepted, embraced it and designed for that gameplay instead of putting their fingers in their ears and pretending we still Medica II spam.

[Shurrikhan]

Dps is always useful. oGCD's create faster, flowing gameplay. It's about time they accepted, embraced it and designed for that gameplay instead of putting their fingers in their ears and pretending we still Medica II spam.

No one has called DPS less than always useful. No one is asking for Medica II spam. But what is this "embracing" oGCDs even supposed to mean? If having to use GCD heals occasionally (and the bottleneck to DPSing Silver is referring to is not MP, but literally just your party's survival), a la Coils where we actually had more incoming damage than oGCDs alone could deal with, is so wretched... What then?

I'd much rather they embraced the current battle cleric design of DPS support with a wide array of healing spells to smoothly weave in.

How is that any different from what we have now? Do you just want healing to solely be oGCD (assuming you mean abilities, not spells, here) and we spend even more time just turreting?

[Silver-Strider]

Looking back at Coils in ARR is like Classic WoW syndrome. People have rose tinted glasses about how great it was. Less people scoured information online on every aspect of the game. Bosses weren't as complex as today and like you said our toolkits were much more limited too.

I don't see that type of gameplay as an improvement. Taking most of our oGCD's away and giving us a barebones weak GCD system would indeed artificially force us to heal more, but it'd be boring. You'd really start to feel that 2.5s GCD. I'd much rather they embraced the current battle cleric design of DPS support with a wide array of healing spells to smoothly weave in. Its faster-paced, more rewarding gameplay. The main flaws for me are that the GCD dps aspect is severely lacking and the bosses don't hit near hard enough to put my fancy toolkit to full use. That and they really need a healer designer on the team, because certain design choices really need a look at (AST cards, WHM in general, Energy drain compared to Addersgall, ect.)

The other flaw with a slow GCD based heal system and ridiculously expensive dps spells is that a LOT of content would need to be redesigned. Things like E7s doing nothing for 2 minutes, or the current EX1 only having 5 unavoidable raidwides. You'd absolutely be reduced to Glare spam and go OOM in the first 2 minutes of the fight. It'd be horrible.

Dps is always useful. oGCD's create faster, flowing gameplay. It's about time they accepted, embraced it and designed for that gameplay instead of putting their fingers in their ears and pretending we still Medica II spam.

I'm not really arguing that it would be an improvement, rather that it was possible to do. Claiming that it was impossible or would be disastrous is hyperbolic since it's been done before. My only real take on GCD healing is that there needs to be a system in place so that they should be made DPS neutral and that our oGCDs should encourage GCD heals in some way.

Just a few examples.
Say that Tetra grants you a Lily upon usage. Now, have Afflatus spells grant you a stack of Cleric Stance, that upon using Misery would expend the stacks to increase your damage by 10% for 20s.
Say that under Dissipation that Addlo/Succor were instant cast skills. Now, have Addlo/Succor upon breaking turn Ruin 2 into Rumination as an AoE attack with 575 potency with 50% fall off.
Say that Celestial Intersection, upon breaking, would guarantee that Benefic 2 Crits. Now, have Benefit 2 grant 15% Crit or D.Hit to the target healed for 15s.

These types of changes would be more interesting than want we currently have, which is shafting GCD heals in place of oGCDs, and giving Healers an actual chance to be more engaging.