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

[Saraide]

The complete lack of auto attacks also contributes to making single target heals feel completely useless if they aren’t passive heals like eos or kardia

AOE heals are basically already stronger than single target heals and the lack of auto attacks and the tank healing means that about the only use you get out of single target heals would be correcting mistakes (ie triage) but then that’s made useless by the fact that mistakes lead to wipes in the body check heavy raid design

Like seriously when was the last time you pressed tetra and felt like it was a meaningful addition to your healing

The lack of autos also means tanks have all their mit left to either kitchen sink or invuln tank busters further reducing the attention they need. Bosses need to start auto attacking again and thanks to P3 we know SE has the tech to keep autos up through casting.

[vetch]

Coils had a lot of healing at the time. If you look at old clear videos, most of the damage you're healing is tank damage because bosses had spicy untelegraphed cleaves and they could crit, also tanks didn't have that many defensive options back then. If you redesigned those fights the same way but with our modern kits, we'd very likely still spend about 70% of our time pressing our filler damage button.

Yes, modern healer kits are bloated beyond reason and need serious pruning. They're basically complete by level 60 and almost all heal skills gained after that are redundant.

I don't need to look at clear videos because I still do the raids and I know how often the boss damages the tanks versus how much it damages the party. T9 and T13 have a great balance of tank versus party versus random target healing, for example.

You can even see how the WHM spends time idling occasionally and the SCH sits in Cleric Stance almost all the time.

MP regen was slower during ARR and SCH could afford to be in Cleric Stance a lot more because Lustrate's %-based HP restore ignored CS's healing penalty.

Once again, FFXIV is not a game built for attrition healing, we never had that kind of healing that people are asking for, and we never will, the game simply cannot support it with the current way it functions.

I am asking for Coils-level healing, which the game very much had. And this is a thread about changing how the game functions.

Coils was designed very differently to modern fights and even then still had a lot of damage done by the healers (especially the SCH)

Regardless you are acting like we wouldn’t want that. Take an old clear video, look at all the times the healers spent healing or idling to recover mana vs all the times they do damage/sit in cleric stance, I bet you 99/100 people on here would prefer that current distribution than what we have now………that still doesn’t preclude reverting the boring as sin DPS button changes

lmao, I've seen you post about Coils and I trust you, specifically, to want a better healer experience, but there are a lot of people in English discussion groups who have given up on getting that and are satisfied with bothering YoshiP to give healers tank rotations or something equally tedious while whining about 'Sylphies' out of the other sides of their mouths. It's definitely not 99/100 people who want what you and I want.

[Aravell]

The lack of autos also means tanks have all their mit left to either kitchen sink or invuln tank busters further reducing the attention they need. Bosses need to start auto attacking again and thanks to P3 we know SE has the tech to keep autos up through casting.

I wouldn't say lack of autos is absolutely a bad thing. Take Neo Exdeath, widely regarded as one of the best fights in the game, does not autoattack at all, but he DOES stress the tank by having 3 different tankbusters, and they happen quite often too.

I am asking for Coils-level healing, which the game very much had. And this is a thread about changing how the game functions.

I am well aware of the history of the game, so that's why I'm asking "What would that alone change?".

So we get the healing requirements from Coils back, yeah? What then? Let's take T13 for example. Bahamut does his Flatten and then Flare Breaths, back then you had to Stoneskin the Flatten and heal during Flare Breaths. But now? WAR can just Rampart+Bloodwhetting the Flatten then Equilibirum during the Flare Breaths, maybe they need Thrill too, that's it, healer input not required. Maybe regens would be required again, bosses back then did autoattack more than now, but other than that, you'd still be spamming that same filler button for 70% of the fight because tanks have insane defensive value now.

If you want to fix healer gameplay, calling for a healing requirement increase alone fixes nothing. You need to actually fix healing bloat, tank sustain, MP economy, incoming damage, healer downtime and also give healers a cohesive kit, THAT would fix the healer role, not just bumping up healing requirements and nothing else. People can say "Healers HEAL" as much as they want, but that's not all healers do in this game, and I'm tired of people claiming that that's all they need to do.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, we actually do have the Flatten into Flare Breaths in recent times in UCoB phase 3. So what do people do for it? They Holmgang, then they Equilibrium, that's that solved.

[ForsakenRoe]

If you want to fix healer gameplay, calling for a healing requirement increase alone fixes nothing. You need to actually fix healing bloat, tank sustain, MP economy, incoming damage, healer downtime and also give healers a cohesive kit, THAT would fix the healer role, not just bumping up healing requirements and nothing else. People can say "Healers HEAL" as much as they want, but that's not all healers do in this game, and I'm tired of people claiming that that's all they need to do.

It's only been 3 pages but I'll relink this again. It's very pertinent and every time someone says 'healers HEAL and should heal more, that's the way to make them more engaging', we have to ask the following

- How do you expect us to heal more in harder content, where we're already having to spam Succor and Cure3 to handle healing at certain times for week 1 prog (Harrowing Hell Savage, the 11-hit Styx in Savage)? If the solution is 'heal more often' (eg by having raidwides happen more often), has the potency of skills been considered? EG, we can pump out 4000 potency a minute as WHM by just maintaining 100% uptime on Medica 2. How hard and how fast do we need to be hit to actually challenge our total accessible healing potency?

- If we are forced to heal more, has the increased MP cost per minute of our healing been factored in? If we have to use Medica and Cure2 more often (due to having not-enough Lilies to heal everything without damage loss), has their MP cost been factored in, or are we looking at going OOM without a massive amount of Piety added to our gear, or MP cost adjustments across the board?

- Would the 'increase in healing required' affect casual content like EX roulette? If so, has it been considered how it would affect lower-skilled players, and how many would no longer be able to keep up?

- If the 'increase in healing required' does NOT affect casual content, what is there to make that content more 'engaging' for a higher-skilled player? Or is the 'increase in healing required' solution only a solution to a certain difficulty of content? In which case, how does it 'solve' the problem, when it wouldn't be doing anything to the content that arguably needs 'a solution' the most?

- If people become more practiced at the new healing requirements, what stops them from reaching the current plateau, of 'I have X% of my time spare to DPS, so I'll just DPS during it'? If we go from 70% of our GCDs being damage related to... say, 50%, does that 'solve' the issue? If we are always going to have 'some time to deal damage', what ratio of 'GCDs spent on not-damage' to 'GCDs spent on damage' is the 'fix'? And is this 'fix' still forgiving enough to give time for recovery from mistakes, and forgiving enough to allow for less-skilled players to have breathing room (amount of breathing room dependent on content difficulty level)?

- Going forward, if we cannot have 'more damage buttons in rotation' because that is not our role (just ignore that tanks get new ones every expansion, despite it not being 'their role', I guess? Love double standards), what suggestions of 'new additions to the job' are there for later expansions? Is there any new 'thematic' ways to add new non-damage buttons to the healers that feel unique and novel? If a button adds a 'utility' (eg Expedient), how does said utility's effect balance 'feels good to use' with 'is not so strong that it makes the job mandatory for certain content'?

- Finally, would this 'increase to healing required' be going forward, or retroactively applied to all content? If the former, how will people adjust to a sudden increase of healing required when it has never been asked of them (compared to previous content of the same difficulty level)? If the latter, how much extra dev work has to be done to make sure that the jobs can clear old content, with the new adjusted kits, and the new healing required?

The idea of 'healers should have to heal more', on its own/as the only factor in a proposed solution, runs into so many additional 'well then what about the X/Y/Z knockon effect that'd cause, and the main issue IMO is the 4th paragraph. Let's have Coil healing back, sure. But that's a raid. We would never get Coil style healing in something like an EX roulette, so for that content, the solution doesn't solve anything. And the bigger the gap between player skill level and the skill level demanded by the content, the more 'needed' a solution is for that level of content. Making healers 'more engaging' is more pressing to do for something like EX roulette or Maps, because not only is the skill level gap larger there, there's more people interacting with that content.

But also, if we have to heal like it's Coils again, in current Savages, how much time would we spend on GCD healing so as to run our bloated healing kits out of free OGCD options? And then the knockon effects from that are 'how does this suddenly screw our MP economy, and how do we counteract the sudden real threat of going OOM', or 'how does such a change correctly balance the fine line between feeling challenging, while also leaving enough spare GCD space to allow for recovery eg ressing', or 'isn't this going to screw the healing playerbase count, because of the sudden increase in healing required going into X expansion? We saw Abyssos, and a sudden jump in healing required, along with WOW's jump from 'overgeared full epics' WOTLK into Cata where the healing required suddenly spiked. We have several evidence cases of such a proposal (increase healing required suddenly) and it seems to be a pattern that the playerbases of said games don't react well on the whole, instead choosing to move off the role rather than step up to the plate.

Instead we should have a bit of everything:

- Rather than 'make us use 70% of our GCDs on heals instead of the current 30% (a 40% increase)', a bit of 'increased healing required' so we're at like, a 50/50 split (this still would not solve the EX roulette issue, hence the next part). This also requires SE to realize that there's a world of difference between 'more healing required' and 'more mitigation required', otherwise we would just end up with SCH/SGE being way too strong a comp compared to bringing a regen-healer

- Rather than what some people ask for, an 'actual tank rotation' of like 9-12 buttons actively used once per minute or more, I would like to see just... a bit of 'increased variety in what buttons we press for our damage' (note: not an increase in damage output) of either reworking current buttons to be used more often than currently, or the addition of 1-2 short-CD buttons (example, shortening a DOT from 30s to more like the 12s for Aero2 we had in ARR/HW, readding a DOT button to SCH, reworking SGE's Toxikon to be more integral to the rotation, etc). While having a healer that is 'the GNB of the healer role' would be cool, we don't need them all to be that technical. We can have one (probably WHM lets be frank) get comparatively smaller changes, like previously mentioned 'change Dia duration to 12s, add a 15s CD GCD' and then build systems that have interplay from that (Eg 'do damage to build gauge, spend gauge on heal, heal is damage neutral by giving access to Quake/Flood/Tornado)

- AND more interactivity between the damage/healing halves of our kit, and I don't just mean 'Pneuma is damage neutral cos it does 1x Dosis damage'. Misery is a good idea, giving access to damage because of utilizing your healing, while also allowing you to 'bank' said damage, either for raidbuffs, or if SE were to actually use such a concept more often, being able to instantly blow up a priority add (imagine if we had Misery in SB, cleaving the Worm's Heart in Shinryu EX, or the White Flame in O3S, the 'Load Program' goons like Dadaluma in O7S, etc). So it makes a lot of sense to me that SE could look into a sort of 'reverse Misery', where it gives access to strong healing by doing damage, so that you can get into a sort of flowstate, where each feeds into each other. The above 'do damage, get gauge, spend gauge on heal, refund via elemental burst damage spells' is such an example, the damage feeds the healing, which feeds back into damage, which feeds healing...

If we have a 'jack of all trades' esque solution where everything gets touched on a little (rather than going all in on one part), it allows SE to get feedback on all aspects of the solution at once (people can say on the forums 'hey I like doing the new damage rotation, but the increased healing GCDs required haven't really felt very impactful, I still heal the content pretty much the same way I used to', so SE can then see that and go 'ok we ramp healing required a little more' or 'ok more healing isn't really working so much so we should focus more on the damage side of things', etc), but also, it avoids the issue somewhat of 'sudden increase of X required'. If we ramp healing GCDs needed so instead of 30% of our casts are healing related (as currently) to, say, 70% of them being healing related, people will get caught out by it and we'll have the Abyssos problem again. If we increase it to 40%, or 50%, then it gives time and room for the playerbase to adjust to that new amount. If that amount is satisfactory to play content in, then it can remain there, and if not, SE can take the data from that smaller increase, and again, analyse whether to adjust it, or decide that increasing healing any further has too much risk of the 'Abyssos incident' and look into alternative design paths

[Aravell]

The idea of 'healers should have to heal more', on its own/as the only factor in a proposed solution, runs into so many additional 'well then what about the X/Y/Z knockon effect that'd cause

That's why I view "Give back the healing we had to do back in Coils/Alexander/Whatever" to be a flawed premise from the start.

Let's look at Earthshakers from T13, the DPS have to get a heal from the healer or they die. Now let's look at it again with our current kits, WAR puts Nascent Flash on one DPS and the PLD puts Intervention on the other, no heals required during the mechanic anymore.

Let's take another example, Blazing Scourge in A12S, hits 2 DPS and will kill them if not healed in between hits. WAR places Nascent Flash on one and DRK places TBN on the other, the danger is gone.

In order to return to the healing required back then, we can't just simply redesign the same fights and call it a day, all the factors have to line up again. Like why does the WHM have to Stoneskin the Ravensbeak in T9? Because the PLD did not have Holy Sheltron. Why did we have to put a regen on the burn in O7S? Because the WAR couldn't simply dump Nascent Flash and make it a non-issue.

If we want Coils healing back, a lot of things have to be cut, it's not as simple as make T9/13 again.

[Ardeth]

Honestly, if you want more engaging content in a meaningful way, go play Elden Ring. It's a better game for its difficulty and way more accessible. Plus, it is a gateway to much more content in the other souls' game. I know that's not what FF players want to hear, but playing Elden Ring is more ideal than having to vett 7 other people to enjoy something
Also, the idea of a 20-minute fight that is super tight when it comes to failure sounds like a nightmare I don't want to be a part of.

[Maltothoris]

It's not only just even if we got back coil Era healing, but it would still be limited to only savage or ultimate. It also means that the game wouldn't even be able to prep you for it. Remember, for these accessibility is the big thing for them. It's also important to remember that besides the lack of ogcds, healers were weaker back then too. Cure 1 was 400 and cure 2 650. Regen was also 150 for 21 seconds. There are other things but there are so many angles to the problem itself.

[ForsakenRoe]

Cure 1 was 400 and cure 2 650. Regen was also 150 for 21 seconds.

Medica2 was 50p per tick for 30s, as a prime example too, extremely slow trickle of healing compared to current (150p for 15s)

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Just wanna say that I find it funny SGE was literally something that they conceived accidentally one expansion prior: 5.0 SCH, the proto SGE.

[ty_taurus]

Just wanna say that I find it funny SGE was literally something that they conceived accidentally one expansion prior: 5.0 SCH, the proto SGE.

I genuinely believe Sage was designed differently where Toxikon was OGCD and not useless, there were different Kardia effects, and that Toxikon II was set to be a different attack, but someone at SE said “too much fun” and clobbered the job into the train wreck we have now, and we can see remnants of this in PVP Sage and the instance with Alphinaud.