Healers need an overhaul

[Eisi]

Unfortunately, Yoshi P and the Devs are aware of the opposed arguments. Both the "more damage buttons" and the "more healing requirement" ones. So, too, are they likely aware of the "leave things alone" arguments.

Yes, but those arguments are not contradicting each other.

The first one, more damage buttons is the argument in favor of casual healers, those who play content with low incoming damage, solo story missions, FATEs and the like. Healers should be fun regardless of the difficulty level of the content they engage in and even outside of parties. A lot of new healers are not comfortable with healing large amounts of incoming damage (aka having a lot of responsibility for the team) and modern MMOs want to make the game fun for casuals as well just in general. Healers shouldn't be the "elite" jobs who only start being fun in difficult group content.

The second one is in favor of more pro healers who want to have more responsibility for other people and feel generally comfortable enough to heal more difficult content, which is also very valid.

I think those two can easily be combined and aren't really at odds. MMOs need both types of player. The "keep things as they are" position I find not to be healthy for the game. It means keeping healing requirements low in all content, aka have healers be effectively dps with a few healing opportunities even in hardcore content, yet keeping the dps kit of what is jobs effectively engaging in dpsing all the time frustratingly boring.

Also healing and dpsing shouldn't be seen as at odds. Players who want to gcd heal without losing out on dps for example should be taken seriously. I think there's probably nothing weirder than healers having to be forced to use healing spells by sheer incoming damage because in any other case than players literally dying it would be suboptimal play. I think that's a ridiculous design decision.

[Renathras]

Apologies for the length, but I think it's a discussion worth having:

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Yes, but those arguments are not contradicting each other.

True, but I think the problem is that a lot of people don't necessarily like the same things.

For example, you say more damage buttons is more fun for casual or new healers. Is it? For some it probably is, but for others, it's not. What is a thing many new healers do? Stay hyper-focused on health bars and not even cast damage spells. Probably being way more focused on health bars than they need to be. But what are they NOT engaging with or taking part in? Oh right, damage buttons. So why would more damage buttons appeal to all of them? Moreover, healing doesn't have to be DIFFICULT to be engaging with the healing side of things. For example:

Imagine for a moment a fight with no in-combat auto healing. Every 7.5 seconds or so, the boss does an AOE 150 potency (vs Healing potencies) damage attack. And every 10 seconds, they hit a single target for 250 potency. And that's it. Just pretend. This is MSQ or something.

That means casual healers would need to use an AOE heal every 15 seconds or so (and the more obsessive every 7.5, so every 3rd GCD), so at time 15, 30, 45, 60, etc (or 7.5, 15, 22.5, 30, etc), and then they'd also need to use a Cure 1 every 4th GCD (10, 20, 30, 400, 50, 60) if they're obsessive, and might be able to risk not doing it until a specific target has been hit twice.

That's super lax healing. Someone could just spam Medica and take care of it without a problem. More optimization focused people would spot heal with Cure 1, or save until a person was hit 2-3 times for a Cure 2. It's not HARD, so it doesn't make new healers uncomfortable, but it breaks up the Glarespam since they have a lot of other healing to do.

"But what about oGCDs?"

The game doesn't teach you about oGCDs. Or weaving. Ever watch a super new player heal? They treat oGCDs like GCDs. And, regardless, you only have so many oGCDs in a 1 minute time period.

But the point of this exercise is to more demonstrate how consistent healing needs can be added to encounters that AREN'T uncomfortable for even novice healers to heal. The most novice healer is probably going to address this problem with a Medica every 10 seconds, or upkeeping Medica 2 every 15 seconds and occasionally spot healing someone with Cure 1. Hardly overwhelming. It's ENTIRELY possible to increase healing needs in even casual content without making new healers run for the hills.

...moreover, that entire argument is predicated on the thought that new healers AREN'T afraid of damage rotations. Interestingly, no one that proffers that argument ever justifies that assumption other than, when called on it, a hand-wave about how "if they don't do enough damage, it doesn't matter because no enrage", failing to explain how a healer TOTALLY NEW TO THE GAME, who doesn't even know what an oGCD or weaving is, is supposed to have arrived at the conclusion they don't need to do any damage or engage with this DPS kit and shouldn't feel bad or bothered by not touching it at all.

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I think the fundamental disconnet is what people find fun.

As a Healer, I've never found damage buttons fun. It's why I don't play DPS unless I need to and rarely play Tanks. "Oh, I perfectly pulled off this burst opener and did 500k dps. /yawn How was that different than last expansion where I did 230k DPS doing the same thing?" I don't get a dopamine hit from that. It's not fun. It's tedious.

Some people enjoy it. It's the reason I propose the "4 Healers model" because I explicitly recognize that.

What boggles my mind is why the people who like DPS (but want to play Healers) arguing the contra position seem incapable of realizing that some people GENUINELY don't enjoy pressing DPS buttons or seeing red numbers on the screen instead of green numbers. Like, is it so hard a concept to believe that some people legitimately don't find DPSing fun? Why is this such a hard ask to just acknowledge?

That is, for casuals (okay, I'm more mid-core, but same thing for the purpose of this argument; I only VERY rarely do Savage content and only do a bit of Extremes), not all of us find it "fun" to press damage buttons. Therefore, "Healers should be fun regardless of the difficulty level of the content" isn't solved by "more damage buttons". "more damage buttons" isn't, as it turns out, "the argument in favor of casual healers".

Indeed, most of the people I see make that argument (most, not all, but most) are people that are Savage raiders complaining about THEM - not casuals, hardcore raiders - being bored. It's "the argument in favor of hardcore healers", not casual ones.

Most super causal players seem to enjoy Healing as it is right now, shockingly. I find causal content pretty enjoyable right now, honestly.

Now, understand what I'm NOT ARGUING here:

As I said, SOME do want more damage buttons and a damage rotation. Some do. Which is why I advocate having one or two of the Healer Jobs work that way.

But what of those that do not? Do they just get told to pound sand?

What is the harm, then, in having of the other two Healer Jobs that they do not? Giving one a buff gameplay style and the other leaving it with the gameplay style it has now would address all players at once. Indeed, it's the ONLY solution that does.

The second one is in favor of more pro healers who want to have more responsibility for other people and feel generally comfortable enough to heal more difficult content, which is also very valid.

Again, incorrect. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong here. Most of the "more pro healers" are making the "more damage button arguments". I'm one of the most casual healers on the Healer forum here, and I'm one of the few consistently asking for more damage to heal rather than more damage buttons to be added. So it seems to be the exact opposite of what you say, at least from my experience.

People like me who enjoy healing and not damage dealing are the ones that want more healing to do. It's not a "pro/hardcore" vs "casual/midcore". It's a "healer" vs "support" vs "hybrid" vs "DPSer" mindset.

And we have 4 Healer Jobs, enough to cover all four of those bases. I'm content to just have one that suits me (probably WHM, I suppose).

I think those two can easily be combined and aren't really at odds. MMOs need both types of player.

I agree. Hence, again "4 Healers model".

The "keep things as they are" position I find not to be healthy for the game. It means keeping healing requirements low in all content, aka have healers be effectively dps with a few healing opportunities even in hardcore content, yet keeping the dps kit of what is jobs effectively engaging in dpsing all the time frustratingly boring.

This is, again, incorrect/a disconnect.

Even the people who ARE arguing to not change ANY of the Healer Jobs want encounter designs changed. I haven't seen a single person in any of these kinds of discussions saying "don't change anything". You're arguing against a position which does not exist/a strawman, here.

Also healing and dpsing shouldn't be seen as at odds.

They always will be because they're a fundamentally different mindset on the part of the player.

If you see someone in a crowd attacking people, what is your response?

(1) Confront the person and try to distract them from harming anyone else?
(2) Attack the person and try to take them down?
(3) Hope someone else does that and try to care for those with life-threatening wounds from the attack to keep them alive until ambulances can get there?

Some people would do different things in different situations, but it comes down to kind of what your focus is on, saving lives or ending them, as it were. And note I don't consider any of the answers to be the wrong answer and do think the context of the situation is relevant (e.g. does the person have a gun or are they merely strong/armed with a dangerous melee weapon; etc), but the two are distinct in terms of how you think and approach them. Going from one to another often requires one to "switch gears", which some people do really well and others only grudgingly.

Players who want to gcd heal without losing out on dps for example should be taken seriously. I think there's probably nothing weirder than healers having to be forced to use healing spells by sheer incoming damage because in any other case than players literally dying it would be suboptimal play. I think that's a ridiculous design decision.

Agree with this 100%. It's one reason I really like WHM in ShB/EW. Instead of going the "maintain DPS weaving oGCD healing", it goes the other way, actively using GCD healing (Lilies) and that actually being a DPS increase over not doing so (if you put Misery in the burst windows). It's a tidy solution to that problem.

It's kind of ironic to me that WHM plays the most distinctly of the Healers, yet is often maligned for doing so. And it boggles my mind why anyone would want to go back to SB WHM when it was worse in every way possible. "Aero 3" wasn't THAT good of a spell, and we could always just add Aero 3 in 7.0 and otherwise leave the Job alone other than tyding up a few things that don't make sense (e.g. Cure 1 upgrading to either Cure 2 OR to Esuna [which would also heal for Cure 1's potency], Medica upgrading into Medica 2 [which is always an HPS gain, even on the first tick], give it a bit more partywide mitigation [my favorite pitch on this is giving it Protect traits into Proshell traits into Plenary Indulgence which gives 5% physical, 5% physical and magical, 5% physical and magical + its current AOE heal boost, respectively, as it traits up as you level up; this would give WHM a parallel to Collective Unconscious that has a very WHM flair and addresses the one glaring hole in its current kit], and imo all their GCD heals should nourish the Blood Lily, as this would actually make WHM able to use more than just Lily heals without "being suboptimal"). I'd be fine with that, though I honestly hate DoTs and always have.

As I said before, we have 4 types of people that play Healers, in large part (oversimplification, but one that captures most everyone):

1) Those that enjoy healing and not doing damage/damage rotations.
2) Those who enjoy buffing (and healing).
3) Those who enjoy healing and doing damage.
4) Those who enjoy doing damage and want some healing utility for their friends.

We have four Healer Jobs. And they're already kind of primed for this; WHM, AST, SCH, and SGE are ALMOST set up for those four. It's like in The Matrix where Morpheus points out 3 ships, 3 crews, 3 objectives.

And the thing is, FFXIV did this before:

ARR.

In ARR, WHM was (1) and SCH was (3) and it worked pretty well with most people pretty happy with it.

There's zero reason we can't do that again, this time with 4 Healers to address those other two categories of people, too.

[IDontPetLalas]

Switching gears - otherwise referred to often as decision making - is frequently seen as a core aspect of healer design.
The "s I said before, we have 4 types of people that play Healers, in large part (oversimplification, but one that captures most everyone):

1) Those that enjoy healing and not doing damage/damage rotations.
2) Those who enjoy buffing (and healing).
3) Those who enjoy healing and doing damage.
4) Those who enjoy doing damage and want some healing utility for their friends."

As you say, it's an oversimplification, there are additional categories and there are likely people who would not agree with your definitions of healing vs utility, i.e. this "healer" vs "support" vs "hybrid" vs "DPSer" does not presently exist. However, you neglect to mention or cite a very good survey attempt that (unless my memory fails), virtually every healer job indicated a preference for more damage skilling and note that none of them indicated that they did not want or would not be able to maintain their ability to heal.

Should this be done, that doesn't mean that mean that those who don't want their current job are left to "pound sand". It means that they need to adapt, however in the current state there are healers who fall into category (1)- and in a great deal of content it still gets completed with them.

However, in the current content, those healers who want more- THEY actually are being told to "pound sand" as they cannot find engagement or optimize with their current job and encounter design.

[Maltothoris]

onestly hate DoTs and always have.

As I said before, we have 4 types of people that play Healers, in large part (oversimplification, but one that captures most everyone):

1) Those that enjoy healing and not doing damage/damage rotations.
2) Those who enjoy buffing (and healing).
3) Those who enjoy healing and doing damage.
4) Those who enjoy doing damage and want some healing utility for their friends.



ARR.

In ARR, WHM was (1) and SCH was (3) and it worked pretty well with most people pretty happy with it.

There's zero reason we can't do that again, this time with 4 Healers to address those other two categories of people, too.

I can say one reason why 1 really doesn't work out so well and you say its the fault of elitists or what-not.

Ultimately towards the end of HW by near the start of patch 3.4 many statics were abandoning the model of the off-healer and the main healer that is somewhat described here. The reason for that was they found out it was better to split the healing burden between the two healers instead of it all being taken care of by one. The reason for that was they found out that two healers dpsing together was a much higher dps gain than just one healer and here was an example. In the fastest clear of a12s back when it was relevant, the astro and the sch together did a combined total of 2400 dps with the dps split between the two as 1200. This is still on the forbidden site but you need pay a subscription to the site to see any logs dating back two years but it was still something that remained in my head. For comparison the highest clear by whm, which was a minute slower, the total combined dps was about 1965, the whm did 1200 dps while the noct astro did 765. As you can see the benefits of both healers dpsing becames very apparent.

Therefore category 1 is very much in danger of falling behind when you need to meet dps checks starting from extreme, even if those checks at that level are very lax so to speak. Indeed if I recall, there were more astro clears in creator and alphascape than there were whm clears. Heck don't forget that they buffed whm in 4.5 when they were falling behind including probably the most ridiculous ever in the history of ff14 with assize getting 15 seconds cut from its cd, and a gain in both damage and healing by 100 potency.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Apologies for the length, but I think it's a discussion worth having:

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True, but I think the problem is that a lot of people don't necessarily like the same things.

Which is probably the largest issue with healer class changes. Because they've pigeonholed themselves into basically dictating every job within a role needs to operate almost exactly the same and have the same tools they can't vary the healer jobs to appease different people in the role. They want every job to perform the exact same in every situation in game instead of giving us a wide array and variety of options and leaving us to figure out how to work the system for the best benefit for each scenario. Sure the majority of people going into high end or endgame content is just going to follow their favorite streamers self proclaimed pro's ultimate guide of how to git gud which is usually stuff they found online posted by other people that they're taking credit for. However a number of other titles have proven that there is still a substantial amount of players that like having those systems to play around with and new discoveries can often shake up or change the meta without need of the devs to alter the game content via patches.

[Aravell]

I'm going to say something that's probably going to be incredibly unpopular and may get some disagreement from some on the healer forums, but it needs to be said. The constant push towards making healers log friendly and introducing damage neutral healing is a mistake and has completely stunted the design of the healer role.


Let's look at the common complaints about the healer role:
The healers are too homogenised
The healer role is locked into a framework of not losing damage from healing, they have to be designed in such a way that people don't "feel bad" when they heal. This is a problem because they can't design any interesting things into the kit without making it either damage neutral or a damage gain, this means bloating the kit with OGCDs that lose you nothing or taking any GCD they add in and tacking on a potency equivalent to your spam nuke (such as Macrocosmos and Pneuma).

There's no decision making
Of course there's no decision making when all they've been doing lately is removing all the wrong decisions, when you get a multiple choice question with only 1 answer, everyone is right and nobody needs to make a decision. They're forced into this kind of design where everyone has to be correct because people will complain about the slightest amount of damage loss (See how people complain about having to lose a lousy 100 potency to use Sacred Soil). Since they have to design every answer to be the same, there's no room for creativity.

The kits are too bloated with redundancy
When the only thing they can do is add healing at no loss, it severely limits whatever they can create, bloating the kit with free OGCDs is the easiest route to achieving this. They can't even introduce meaningful GCDs without making sure it doesn't cause the player to lose any damage. They can only add different flavours of OGCD or upgrade existing skills or they risk making players angry when another healer does slightly more damage.

There's too little damage to heal in content
They can't design fights that stress healer kits to the point of having to dip into GCD healing or players will complain that they're losing damage. They have to design every fight to be easy enough to heal with the OGCD kit. The log mentality is extremely damaging on this point.

There's no skill ceiling
Part of being skilled at healer in previous expansion is cutting down on the amount of necessary healing that you do, that frees you time to help the party do damage. By making everything damage neutral or a gain, you lose this meaningful part of mastering a healer. Anyone halfway decent at any other role can easily pick up a healer and do almost as good as any veteran because there is no wrong decision to make.


With all that said, I'm not against damage refunds like Ruin II and old Misery. Those are trade-offs for things that you need (movement), making everything neutral means you don't need any experience to play healer, thus making any veteran feel like there's nothing to improve upon. If you're given an exam and the correct answers are all already marked for you, would you find that exam engaging?

I firmly believe that they need to reverse course on this trend immediately. Wrong decisions need to exist, strong abilities need to come at a cost, if you feel bad about using your kit because it loses you damage, I think that's your own problem.

[Absurdity]

*snip*

Making things "log friendly" is in my opinion a completely nonsensical design idea to begin with. The fun in logging comes from trying to achieve job and fight mastery, if there is no mastery to be achieved because there is no "wrong way" or "better way" then it loses the only aspect that made it desirable in the first place.

The 2 minute meta and giant 100% uptime hitboxes are incredibly awful design for that exact same reason.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm going to say something that's probably going to be incredibly unpopular and may get some disagreement from some on the healer forums, but it needs to be said. The constant push towards making healers log friendly and introducing damage neutral healing is a mistake and has completely stunted the design of the healer role.

I don't really get this idea that these changes are intended to make healers "log friendly".

Misery's damage returns weren't increased because it was "log-unfriendly"; they were increased simply because otherwise WHM had lower free healing than other healers, which then meant that the devs' only other option --balancing its damage around that fact-- meant that WHM would be superior to other healers (other than SCH) in rDPS as soon as it could cut out even Lily heals, effectively making use of that excess healing potential by being compensated for it (much like the function of Energy Drain).

The problem, imo, isn't that WHM and other healers are now more closely matched. It's that the match was made in the wrong direction. The more free healing relative to healing requirements, the less one log differentiates itself from another by consequence of optimization in the healing itself:

Rather than giving space for optimizations in knowing when precisely to place a Regen as to meet the next eHP threshold without waste, how to pre-cast heal to follow-up a near-fatal tankbuster before the trailing AA can finish off the tank, etc., that overwhelming amount of free healing means that healing is increasingly reduced to memorized schedules of heals, and healing optimization increasingly shows little result in one's logs beyond that initial cliff. Whether Misery crit or not becomes a bigger factor than any would-be minor healing optimization beyond "Did I avoid casting any at-cost heals?"

And that's before even getting into the issues of that design path bloating healer kits with redundancies such that healers feel like they merely have (A) a schedule and then (B) a couple actions at a time of "trickle-down" for increasing levels of fan-flung **** that probably won't ultimately be recoverable anyways (due to vuln-stack guaranteed deaths, immediate OHKOs, and eventual MP attrition to just Raises itself given insufficient non-BLM casters).

But I see no reason to call that change "log-friendly". It seems nearly the opposite. And I don't think the dev changes have ever been intended as a means of dealing with an "issues" pertinent simply to parsing/parses.

(Rather, those changes merely hammered down the one nail sticking out... rather than taking that moment to wonder if maybe the board itself was thinner than it ought to be given that the three others were already sticking out the far side unintentionally.)


On all else / in all other regards, fully agreed.

1) Those that enjoy healing and not doing damage/damage rotations.
2) Those who enjoy buffing (and healing).
3) Those who enjoy healing and doing damage.
4) Those who enjoy doing damage and want some healing utility for their friends.

In ARR, WHM was (1) and SCH was (3) and it worked pretty well with most people pretty happy with it.

The simple fact that WHM's filler ppgcd was literally 80% higher than SCH's at the time meant that it accentuated doing damage at least as much as SCH did. WHM had fewer DoTs to manage, yes, but in terms of rDPS it was far more punished for excess GCD healing than SCH was as its spending every GCD it could on offense meant far more to it than it did to SCH.

While many a SCH would decide to "chad" their co-healer back then since Lustrate was originally only a 20% HP heal and Energy Drain 150% of a filler GCD attack, iirc, actually maximizing rDPS across a WHM-SCH pair would usually mean making sure that they could not only both maintain their DoTs with full uptime (2 vs. 4) but also that the WHM wasn't giving up Stone II casts when the SCH could cover the GCD heal instead.

As such, no, we've never particularly seen this split paradigm you suggest.

Which is probably because having a more DPS-focused healer isn't really possible unless the given healer is also more capable of rDPS (otherwise, you just shift priorities from maximizing offensive uptime --as when damage potential is more spread out-- to meeting offensive rhythmic checks --as when damage potential is more densely clustered into CDs/DoTs/infrequent_spenders), neither of which is any more DPS-focused than the other, exactly.

(And, in the ARR context, where pre-healing, MP management, etc., were more entwined, those opportune healing moments themselves on WHM contributed in mirror to a sense of DPS rotation. That, almost if not equally as much as the loss of the short-duration DoTs on WHM, is what makes Glare-spam so comparatively uninteresting relative to old Stone spam. [Yes, I stand by the idea that Cleric Stance had very little impact on that sense of 'rotation' unless one's latency and/or packet loss was especially bad, in which case... it reduced reasonably available nuance at least as much as it added to it, for a net increase primarily just in bloat and annoyance.])

And if one healer is capable of greater rDPS than the others... well, the best one can hope for is that the others are better than it in early prog before being replaced by it for farm; regardless, longevity of choice will be reduced.

[Aravell]

Misery's damage returns weren't increased because it was "log-unfriendly"; they were increased simply because otherwise WHM had lower free healing than other healers, which then meant that the devs' only other option --balancing its damage around that fact-- meant that WHM would be superior to other healers (other than SCH) in rDPS as soon as it could cut out even Lily heals, effectively making use of that excess healing potential by being compensated for it (much like the function of Energy Drain).

I'm aware that the change to Misery was made because most WHMs would just not heal at all because they lose so much damage (along with the MP issues that brings), I just completely disagree with the solution they decided on. Instead of making Misery damage neutral, they could've bumped up the potency to be 930, matching the damage refund that old Misery had, then cutting down on the amount of free tools the other healers have along with that. My main point is that free healing is limiting to the healer design, damage refunds give room for growth and improvement, making everything free does not give room for improvement.

I didn't mention Misery when I talked about log friendly changes, I only listed Misery under damage refunds, which I find to be a good system. Refunding some lost damage through things you had to do is a good system in my opinion, completely free damage is not a good system.

EDIT: I think it's best that I re-clarify. What I meant by log friendly changes being pushed is stuff like Macrocosmos and Pneuma. Normally, such impactful skills would require some amount of planning and come at an opportunity cost. Look at Deployment Tactics, it's incredibly powerful, you plan beforehand where you want to use it, and it has an opportunity cost (1 GCD spent on Adlo). Macrocosmos and Pneuma don't have any opportunity cost, they're basically another flavour of Malefic/Dosis with a powerful effect tacked on.

[GayRobot]

I'm hopeful that something will be done soon, because even casual healers are starting to realize that their role is defective and optional. I've had way too many dungeon runs recently where the healer dies midway through a boss and we just...kill it anyway, easily. Sometimes it gets a ">:[" type message out of them.

I healed until the end of Shadowbringers and dropped the role because of how unrewarding it was, at a perfect intersection between "near-zero skill expression" and "near-zero innate party impact". Now when we're stuck on the same mechanic for 3 weeks of raid, at least I have Hypercharge to keep me occupied.