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

[Payotz]

I'm saying they already showed - when they DID the stat squish - that they have a method of quickly changing past content all at once to accommodate the altered healing numbers.

And again it won't really change anything. The numbers aren't the problem, it's the design.
The healing numbers itself aren't the problem. It's the instances of healing damage. It's how the damage goes out.

They can tune Ancient Quaga to have 4x damage right now and it wouldn't change anything. It's still spiky damage.
They can tune Ancient Quaga to have less damage right now, and it wouldn't solve the problem. It would make things worse, since now you don't need to top up the pary as much.

What they can do is change it so that Thordin just casts Ancient Quaga 4 times, to fit the new healer design, but that require reworking the fight, because now the fight takes too long and the cooldowns don't line up, so now they'd have to adjust everything else. That's what I meant by "not feasible".

No, you wouldn't - because those can be covered by GCD heals as they already exist in game at those levels. Like let's say they do this from 7.0 on. oGCDs heal for less, Tanks/DPS have less healing. Let's say that's all they change (for the sake of ease of illustration).

So now you jump into P5S synced.

Can you still clear it?

Well...yes. An Emergency Tactics Succor + Medica II can heal your party pretty well. A Cure 3 if you can stack. Nothing at all needed to change. Your DPSers might have to be slightly more on point to make up for lost Broil/Glare casts, but even synced you'd be running the content in functional 640 (or whatever the sync will be to) gear, so that should be more than sufficient to clear the content.

That was my point in pointing out how little healing is actually needed. If a party can clear TOP without a Healer at all, then surely two Healers using GCDs can clear it as well, yes? No retuning required!

I'm sorry I have trouble understanding what your argument is.
Are you arguing that they don't need to overhaul content to fit the healer design because a single GCD heal can cover most of the healing?
"Nothing at all needs to be changed" is not the goal for an overhaul. If anything, I'm arguing that the "overhaul" that the game needs requires breaking the healer design that the game has relied on for a very long time.

[AmiableApkallu]

That was my point in pointing out how little healing is actually needed. If a party can clear TOP without a Healer at all, then surely two Healers using GCDs can clear it as well, yes? No retuning required!

A priori, this isn't obviously true, especially if we replace TOP with <other encounter>. One might suppose that replacing the healers with jobs that deal greater damage would allow the party to skip troublesome mechanics that would otherwise require healers to be present and on their S-rank game, etc. etc. (In the specific case of TOP, I guess not, but I think my point still stands.)

[Renathras]

I'm sorry I have trouble understanding what your argument is.

That's kind of my point, I don't think you are.

I'm saying we can change healing ENCOUNTER DESIGN going forward (less spikes of damage, more frequent damage, oGCDs weaker and more for augmenting your GCD heals than replacing them). This fixes the problem in 7.0+ content.

Your argument is that wouldn't work, because they'd HAVE to change EVERY encounter from 2.0-6.55. Not that the change WOULDN'T work, but that the change WOULD work at the top, but make lower level content unplayable/unclearable.

My counter-argument to that is that you don't need all this healing IN current content, meaning the 5.0-6.55 content we already know would still be clearable without them needing to make any changes at all. This counters your argument that they would need to change EVERY encounter from 2.0-6.55, negating it. You might bring up 2.0-4.55, except 2.0-3.55 was already built in an era where Healers had less oGCDs/less powerful oGCDs AND could clear content using GCD heals...and can do so now. Nothing needs to change there, either. This is also true of 4.0-4.55 content.

In other words, the downside/prohibition against changing things like this GOING FORWARD is "It would be too much work as they'd need to update all past content". The point is, if they DON'T have to update past content, they can make this change and there won't be any problems.

My arguments are centered around explaining why they wouldn't have to touch/update past content, thus negating the one downside argument you insist.

This clears the way for the change going forward of having future fights have more consistent but weaker damage and oGCD heals being weaker in 7.0+ content.

Meaning it can work just fine without any issue in older content.

.

EDIT:

In the absolute worst case scenario, they can lower boss health across the game by 5-10% to make up for the lost Healer damage (which would also be extremely easy since it would be done with an algorithm and is a really simple change). But this is still basically the same end result of "this would work just fine".

.

A priori, this isn't obviously true, especially if we replace TOP with <other encounter>. One might suppose that replacing the healers with jobs that deal greater damage would allow the party to skip troublesome mechanics that would otherwise require healers to be present and on their S-rank game, etc. etc. (In the specific case of TOP, I guess not, but I think my point still stands.)

This generates a Shrodinger's problem: Either healers aren't needed right now (so we can nerf heals and content is still clearble) or healers are needed right now (in which case there's no problem and no changes needed). It can't be both at once.

.

EDIT2:

Oh I addressed this in my first post. I wouldn't want this to happen cause it would alienate a lot of the healers that do like the healing right now, and is the new core. I know how much it sucks to have something you love taken away from you, so I wouldn't really want that for anyone.

Then how is that any different than the alternative?

It.. doesn't really counter it?

It...completely and directly counters it.

.

You're arguing for EXTENSIVE changes, which I'm not. I think that may be the issue. You think I'm arguing for the changes you're proposing, which I'm not.

I'm arguing for nerfing oGCD heals on Healers, for nerfing DPS and Tank healing/mitigation, and for shifting the combat model GOING FORWARD (7.0+) into having reduced damage spikes but more frequent damage and be designed around the new Healer kits, knowing that the past content can still be cleared even in that case with minimal or even no modification.

...though, ngl, I like the idea of 1.5 sec GCD for heals...

[DayHealer]

Why yes, I love my 1 spam, my dot and my Holy spam. Now go away, you fake healer son of a dps.

Now, if you bring to the table more unavoidable damage in content and a nerf of tank self healing so we can actually heal more, then we can start talking...

[Payotz]

That's kind of my point, I don't think you are.

I'm saying we can change healing ENCOUNTER DESIGN going forward (less spikes of damage, more frequent damage, oGCDs weaker and more for augmenting your GCD heals than replacing them). This fixes the problem in 7.0+ content.

Oh I addressed this in my first post. I wouldn't want this to happen cause it would alienate a lot of the healers that do like the healing right now, and is the new core. I know how much it sucks to have something you love taken away from you, so I wouldn't really want that for anyone.

My counter-argument to that is that you don't need all this healing IN current content, meaning the 5.0-6.55 content we already know would still be clearable without them needing to make any changes at all. This counters your argument that they would need to change EVERY encounter from 2.0-6.55, negating it.

It.. doesn't really counter it? Yeah sure, it's more than enough healing right now. It's probably more than enough healing with a 20% nerf.
I'm arguing that there needs to be a fundamental redesign with how healing works.

I'm not talking about just numbers. I'm talking about how the healing abilites would function.

I'm talking forcing Succor to not heal and just do very weak barriers. I'm talking making Medica and Medica II type skill only function with the 3 nearest players around the healer. I would make the highest potency heal to just be 200 potency. I'm talking deleting 80% of the OGCD healing abilities in the game.

I'm also thinking about deleting the 2.5 GCD lock for GCDs for healers and turning the recast time and cast times to 1.5 seconds. I'm talking the fact that healing gcds are so few and precious that you have to figure out who to heal first.

I'm talking every 30% mitigation skill in the game to be deleted. I'm talking the Tank passives not having built-in mitigation, rather they HAVE to do their rotation perfectly to keep their 10% mitigation up. I'm talking Tenacity actually being needed in your gear cause the auto attacks of every boss in the game actually putting a physical vuln up on you. I'm talking deleting every invuln in the game.

When I say overhaul, I really meant overhaul. Like actual breaking the bones type of stuff that is never gonna happen in FFXIV.

And a LOT of old content needs to be reworked to fit that design, and that's not gonna happen in FFXIV either.

[fulminating]

Everyone seems to be glossing over the average competence of healers and how utterly hilarious the fallout of requiring healing would be.

[BRVV]

Everyone seems to be glossing over the average competence of healers and how utterly hilarious the fallout of requiring healing would be.

I see tanks that dont use mitigation, healer curebots, white mages fishing for that sweet free cure II in a shadowbringers dungeon and black mages that go fire <-> ice

Your point being?

[Shurrikhan]

Everyone seems to be glossing over the average competence of healers and how utterly hilarious the fallout of requiring healing would be.

If a more significant portion of the game's tanks couldn't be bothered to pop even a single defensive, would that be reason to forever thereafter constraint the game around their ineptitude?

Or... would you just indirectly force them to git gud, even if it has growing pains on their and their unfortunate victims/party members' part?

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh this is a Dragonflight bluepost. They were addressing the fact that they had to bump player HP up by 30% because of how much damage they're adding into the content and how strong healers are. Or at the very least, that's what I remember the context being.

This part is important for a specific reason and everyone needs to understand this: Going into DF, blizzard bumped player HP and mob damage by 40%, while keeping healing output the same. Effectively, nerfing healing as a percentage of the HP bar by 40%. This was done in response to how little healing GCDs were being needed in highend content at the end of the previous expansion. ONE PATCH LATER, and they had to do the same process again, this time for 25%. You'd think this should dispel the myth that 'oh we need to increase the healing required of the party!', as gear makes us so strong so fast that we always, ALWAYS, outscale the raid damage to a ridiculous degree. But we keep hearing people going 'no we should have to heal more!' and then when we had to actually 'heal more' (and by that I mean mit more thanks SE) this tier, a lot of people could not keep up. Increasing the requirements on a binary pass/fail like keeping the party alive is just going to cause animosity when newer players struggle to keep up. Of course, the natural response to that is 'well of course we don't mean making ALL the content hit harder, casual content would not be affected by this change'.

Okay sure, lets say SE make ultimates hit harder. What about the other 99% of the content in the game? The issue for many of us disgruntled healer mains is not just that 'savage feels kinda bleh once you are on farm', but that 'all content below savage doesn't even get to be interesting in the first place', because people who clear Savage are at a skill level where they can often infer what a mechanic is going to do, even when 100% blind. Enemy faces a certain direction? Probably get behind it. Can't tell you the number of times I've seen a donut or circle AOE in a dungeon, and, like the doll in Lapis, instinctively moved into the AOE after it goes off, expecting a followup (ie, donut goes off, move into the donut expecting a quickfire circle AOE).

So what is the solution that would make content across all difficulty levels more interesting? Adding a slightly more in depth rotation to the healers to make them a little more equal to tanks without the 123 (for example, I've previously suggested WHM getting one new button on a 15s CD, and changing Dia to 12s duration) would be a potential solution. I find it very curious that there was no massive outcry of 'how healer kits are bland and boring' back in Stormblood, when SCH had all of it's DOTs and AST had interesting cards. No, the complaining back then was about how trash the WHM Lilies were (100% justified). As for 'well then what if people can't adapt to a new rotation(lol) and they cause enrages???', balancing passes can be done to make the current gameplay of 'refresh DOT when needed, spam Glare' be very close to 'the optimal new rotation' in output, I'm not on the dev team and I still managed to get the difference between my conceptual rotation, and 'my conceptual rotation but you don't press the new button at all' to be within 2%.

The classes are the lens we view the game through, that we interface with the content through. If the class feels crappy to play, it doesn't matter how good the content is. Moving the skill ceiling away from the classes and making encounters more technical doesn't make for satisfying gameplay, as when we run into content that is below our skill level (ie, if you're a Savage clearer and you go into an EX), if your class was only fun because the raid boss was challenging, then going up against Scarmiglione is not going to feel satisfying. Instead, for us healers it's just several minutes of pressing 1 over and over. And I've done the maths on a run I did of, I think P8S P1? Removing every, EVERY, OGCD healing tool from the run, I still had over half of my casts being damage skills. I sometimes feel like the people asking for 'more healing requirements', 'remove/reduce OGCD heal access' and the like, do not fully grasp just how much would have to be changed to make that design work. not to mention all the heal checks which are currently based on 'this design we have now'. Imagine for a second, we remove every OGCD skill, and reduce the power of every GCD heal by 25%. How do you keep up with J-Waves in TEA? How do you keep up with all the Pantokrator wave cannon stackmarks? It's such a massive undertaking with such a high risk of going badly wrong, compared to an alternative like, idk, adding back SCH's DOTs.

If a more significant portion of the game's tanks couldn't be bothered to pop even a single defensive, would that be reason to forever thereafter constraint the game around their ineptitude?

[fulminating]

I see tanks that dont use mitigation, healer curebots, white mages fishing for that sweet free cure II in a shadowbringers dungeon and black mages that go fire <-> ice

Your point being?

None of those are inherently lethal. If the party runs out of hp then it's a wipe. It won't matter how good the rest of the party are if they have no hp because the of healer. You can't really play around being dead.