Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[GrimGale]

Or at least call it what it is, a pure nerf. SCH has this unique affordance and you want it gone.[/B]

This I dont understand though. How would having the 100 potency of ED integrated into the 295 Broil potency be a nerf? Isn't it numerically the same? Wouldn't that be like having ED available at all times every 20s without losing access to your heals? I get it would remove skill expression by removing choice but isn't it numerically identical?

[Nizzi]

I just wish they didn't take the MP gain off ED, I liked the flavor of it and it was great to immediately get a bunch of MP back after dying or having to spam heals/resses to clean up a mess

[LyraleiManagem]

It’s a nerf in two ways:
You will no longer be able to spam ED in a buff window;
DPS loss due to downtime.

It’s the same logic how making whm’s lily dps neutral a huge buff —“store” you damage during downtime and burst during buff window.

[QooEr]

As much as I wish for the same, I don’t think they really want to do this.

Personally, I’m not even wishing for some hardcore healing requirement. Something as subtle as:
• Dzemael last boss turning at random player for random damage.
• Mobs that ignores tank’s enmity and latches onto non-tanks in Amaurot.
• Random critical hits from auto attacks.
• More AoEs like Pharos sprites casting Banish IIIs.

I’d kill to have those slight randomness.

more fun from the game that got used like once or twice and then never again:
- first boss of gubal library that just autoattacks whoever
- aurum vale bosses & a11s giving the entire party a dot for a relatively long time
- urths fount in general just giving debuffs like slow to random people so esuna isnt a waste of space
- brawler in a6 changing the order of tankbuster/raidwide/randomly targeted attack so the healing plan isnt always static and boring
- punishing medica ii spam like in leviathan extreme so you have to actually think about what youre doing as a healer

[Reylah]

To be fair, there's no real mutual exclusivity here --Are we meant to heal OR are we meant to deal damage?-- except when those two things share a resource ...

Time was the resource it was looking at and mostly from a overarching "when I play this job what is expected of me" stance for that particular sentence.

Is it any weirder, though, than oGCD heals?

Ugh this is where my wishful thinking shows because I still fall into the trap of thinking that the oGCD on heals is to make it a better emergence heal so you can panic and hit it without having to think about the consequences on your GCD time. But as a consequence of the power of those oGCDs relative to the GCDs they can often replace the need for GCDs in a particular heal check and then its just a matter of is the cooldown of in time for the next one and can you stagger your oGCDs so cover all of the heal checks.

That still would change very little, though, save in that this would ...

Oh my primals. Suddenly I realize I have not played WHM since Stormblood and lilies aren't actually generated by abilities anymore so scratch the lily generation ideas for now, I goofed big on that. That said:

1. scratch my lilies ideas, I need to rethink them
2. you're right but that's because of the scuffed damage centric paradigm this game has. If rng is the problem make it stacks. Try things dang it. I feel like the devs are too afraid to experiment with minor mechanical tweaks and wait until there is a build up before doing a sweeping rework.
3. Downtime is already punished under the ABC mentality. The purpose of this is luring players who aren't into always casting with rewards and give more to those who are.
4. this speaks more to the need for the mp cost reduction for WHM than anything else. if they won't give WHM actually bigger heals they should at least give them bigger heals per MP.
5. What option? I don't recall a free AoE heal unless you mean free from costing damage
6. what were you using those for? healing or dmg? at a certain point the fact that you have to make a choice isn't actually a bad thing.
7. ^
8. That's either a dot you cast twice a minute or an AoE. what is the lost? the AoE is worth more than Glare on 3+ targets anyways and that dot should have higher priority for dps over a glare. Again I don't think its a bad thing if you have to make a choice.
9. Button bloat is an excuse the devs use all the time I was trying to avoid that. I am beginning to understand that because oGCDs CAN be woven after a cast that has been taken by players as it should be so I shouldn't count oGCDs as free of GCD consequences but rather requiring a GCD to be rolling to be optimal. My mistake. I guess you could drop the oGCD part and see how that shakes.

The numbers and fine tuning of all the mechanics SHOULD be up for grabs and subject to change I honestly don't care about the specific numbers without the ability to test feel. The core of what I'm going for is that I think the devs should consider adding a reward for auxiliary behavior that ties into core behavior so that the auxiliary feels better to do beyond the "yay I am contributing damage because I hit my damage button". I realize that sounds a tad shallow but I swapped from WHM to AST in Stormblood (when I was but a whee healer that only healed until I became bored while nobodies health dropped) because I was tired just casting Stone and the Cards gave me something I could do that rewarded me for learning about the game like what cards did for other jobs. If casting stone gave me something for whenever I had to go back to healing it would have felt less like I was casting it just to not be bored.

You're right, in the end, that all this revolves around a scuffed approach to combat design. The impression the devs have been giving is that they don't want new healers to be too stressed so that more people will pick up healing. The problem is the only thing that stresses me during a fight is when I am new and don't know what the damage profile is but the damage is almost always either deadly so I can't solve that with healing or so low I can solve it in 1-2 GCD. As you learn the fights you get better, sure, but I so infrequently see the same dungeon fight that I rarely memorize any given fight. If they don't want to stress me they shouldn't always drop hp bars below 30% for dramatic effect, giving me a heart attack because I can't tell if we scuffed a mechanic or not.
The devs need to stop designing combat for healers like a bad haunted house, relying on cheap jump-scares that mean nothing after the first few times through.

[ty_taurus]

I would love to talk point for point but these blasted character limits. The real gist is that I think the

You can type up your full response, then copy the majority of it and delete that. Post the first part of your response, then edit your message and paste in the remaining text and you'll be able to share your full thoughts. That's how many of us bypass the character limit.

The devs need to stop designing combat for healers like a bad haunted house, relying on cheap jump-scares that mean nothing after the first few times through.

There's an issue with changing how content is designed at this point which is that it fails to address all of the content that currently exists. If we were to adjust future fight design to compliment the way healers are currently designed, it would do nothing to address the issues with healing design vs content design in everything that led up to now. Changing how healers work is far more logical because reworking them in a way that compliments the current content design model can enable them to always be fun and engaging if done correctly, not just in content that we add from this point forward.

[Reylah]

You can type up your full response, then copy the majority of it and delete that. Post the first part of your response, then edit your message and paste in the remaining text and you'll be able to share your full thoughts. That's how many of us bypass the character limit.

Thanks.

There's an issue with changing how content is designed at this point which is that it fails to address all of the content that currently exists. If we were to adjust future fight design to compliment the way healers are currently designed, it would do nothing to address the issues with healing design vs content design in everything that led up to now. Changing how healers work is far more logical because reworking them in a way that compliments the current content design model can enable them to always be fun and engaging if done correctly, not just in content that we add from this point forward.

Unfortunately that holds for any design change not just content or healing. That's why we rarely see utility changes to classes and when we do its always in the new level bracket. If they make changes to how healers play before lvl 50 that effects the synched min ilvl no echo whatever runs of Coil and the whole point of those is that you can "experience it as it was" to a certain degree and FFXIV end game relies a lot on being able to redo old content in various forms to make up for slower a new content pace. At a certain point something has to give if any big change is to occur. If you check out the old non-MSQ dungeons and raids from ARR and HW they still have an older design requiring more healing and dispels with more Damage over time effects. If they only make changes that won't affect older content then we will only see new abilities or traits for the new expac content and while that will be fine for that stuff I guess, it will lead to a weird stratification of the healing experience as you level and whenever you get synced.

[ty_taurus]

Thanks.



Unfortunately that holds for any design change not just content or healing. That's why we rarely see utility changes to classes and when we do its always in the new level bracket. If they make changes to how healers play before lvl 50 that effects the synched min ilvl no echo whatever runs of Coil and the whole point of those is that you can "experience it as it was" to a certain degree and FFXIV end game relies a lot on being able to redo old content in various forms to make up for slower a new content pace. At a certain point something has to give if any big change is to occur. If you check out the old non-MSQ dungeons and raids from ARR and HW they still have an older design requiring more healing and dispels with more Damage over time effects. If they only make changes that won't affect older content then we will only see new abilities or traits for the new expac content and while that will be fine for that stuff I guess, it will lead to a weird stratification of the healing experience as you level and whenever you get synced.

Honestly, the biggest difference between old and new content is the removal of enemies landing critical hits and how certain enemies will stay facing in the direction of their target when casting certain actions (this matters for tanks as they can dodge things like conal cleaves and whatnot by walking through the boss or enemy). There really aren't many instances of cleansable debuffs early on, especially ones worth cleansing. DoTs, as you brought up, deal so little damage outside of Savage that it's a waste of time cleansing them.

Regardless, healers and and should be designed in a way that provides players with a consistent gameplay loop regardless of the amount of healing required. That is the only way to not only make all content more enjoyable, but also make healing more enjoyable for solo instances and the MSQ. I'd be down with seeing more damage in the future but I don't want there to be this schism between old and new content where healing becomes unplayable when synched down to a certain point.

[Shurrikhan]

This I dont understand though. How would having the 100 potency of ED integrated into the 295 Broil potency be a nerf? Isn't it numerically the same? Wouldn't that be like having ED available at all times every 20s without losing access to your heals? I get it would remove skill expression by removing choice but isn't it numerically identical?

Back, sorry; I hadn't seen your response earlier.

First, the affordance I was speaking of was the ability to trade excess healing for extra damage. That would not be changed by ED being a 395 potency GCD so long as it remained a spender, not a generator.

But, your 395 potency GCD ED wasn't an spender/option; it was a generator, a step to getting access to your heals, not a means of trading them out.

If balanced, then, the maximum performance from something with cost (a trade) and something without cost (no choice, no trade) would not be the same. Present ED requires an consumption of (healing) resource, excessive though it might otherwise have been. Your suggested ED, since you've used it only as a generator, does not.

Consider, for instance: in a given possible buff, extra potency awarded through Third Eye and extra potency awarded through SAM's every GCD would not always have the same output. Theirs could only be the same if every situation, every fight, allowed one to fully maximize the potency from Third Eye (i.e., to mitigate raid damage precisely every 15 seconds).

Because that will not typically be true, and balance tends instead to target the average situation (note the SCH's rDPS would be overtuned if we were to consider it as balanced for zero ED usage, meaning that most of that damage is truly extra), the maximum performance of the context-dependent capacity will be higher than that of a universal one.

Put more simply, if you make a contributing tool baseline/inescapable/non-optional, you have to budget the job's baseline power for it. Otherwise, you're just slapping an rDPS buff onto the already rDPS-strongest healer, at cost to choice and skill-gap. Unlike the previous choice, that would not be a unique affordance, but simply a tuning error.

[GrimGale]

Back, sorry; I hadn't seen your response earlier.

First, the affordance I was speaking of was the ability to trade excess healing for extra damage. That would not be changed by ED being a 395 potency GCD so long as it remained a spender, not a generator.

But, your 395 potency GCD ED wasn't an spender/option; it was a generator, a step to getting access to your heals, not a means of trading them out.

If balanced, then, the maximum performance from something with cost (a trade) and something without cost (no choice, no trade) would not be the same. Present ED requires an consumption of (healing) resource, excessive though it might otherwise have been. Your suggested ED, since you've used it only as a generator, does not.

Consider, for instance: in a given possible buff, extra potency awarded through Third Eye and extra potency awarded through SAM's every GCD would not always have the same output. Theirs could only be the same if every situation, every fight, allowed one to fully maximize the potency from Third Eye (i.e., to mitigate raid damage precisely every 15 seconds).

Because that will not typically be true, and balance tends instead to target the average situation (note the SCH's rDPS would be overtuned if we were to consider it as balanced for zero ED usage, meaning that most of that damage is truly extra), the maximum performance of the context-dependent capacity will be higher than that of a universal one.

Put more simply, if you make a contributing tool baseline/inescapable/non-optional, you have to budget the job's baseline power for it. Otherwise, you're just slapping an rDPS buff onto the already rDPS-strongest healer, at cost to choice and skill-gap. Unlike the previous choice, that would not be a unique affordance, but simply a tuning error.

I see, so If I understand correctly, I would have buffed the class beyond the brackets of its skill floor and skill ceiling by making something that was previously considered part of the skill ceiling (AF management with ED) essentially integrated into the skill floor. And that would merit a reduction, for the sake of balance, to the other parts of SCH kit.