How to easily have healers dps engaged ( yet another thread)

[Renathras]

We have to also consider, a great portion of new Players also comes from World of Warcraft and I can't see many of them staying engaged with the healer design of this game in the long run, compared to what they knew. WoW Healers are much more diverse and complex in terms of their different playstyles than they were at any point in FF14. Somebody who played Discipline Priest in Wow and jumps to Sage in FF14 because its advertised as similar will probably have a rough awakening after the first honeymoon phase. And that isn't really a process that only affects veteran.

I somewhat agree with this. It's long been amazing to me that WoW had such differences between their healers with them still being relatively well balanced and viable outside of some weirdness here and there (I remember in Vanilla/BC when Disc was "the leveling spec" for Priests until they could respect to unlock Shadow Form because it increased wand damage -and yes, you read that right. Mage was like that with Arcane, and there was even a meme in a machina video at the time, and I quote, "I'm gonna...WAND you to death!!!"). They all feel different, but generally good.

I think part of that is due to the raid size, though. When the game is tuned to encounters where you have 4-7 healers (and the number can be kinda variable based on party, team, encounter, etc) AND where players can easily swap specs (so healers can quickly swap over and DPS or Tank on fights then swap to Healer on the fights they heal), where it can be assumed you have all of them at the table together in most encounters, it's probably easier to balance than if you have only 2 and you have to balance based on (most) combinations of the two.

Though I really do agree that it would be nice to get more diversity between the Healers. There's no reason they should all have the identical "rotations" they do today.

EDIT:

Honestly I think it's a bit unfair to completely discard the opinions of the veteran players who truly have a passion for this game to have played it and engaged with the community for years in favour of newer players who have no real "loyalty" to the game or community and might leave once another shiny new MMO comes out. FFXIV doesn't have new players because of current healer design, it has it in spite of it. We will lose these new players very quickly if jobs are continually homogenised and sterilised.

Good thing...I'm not doing that, then?

I didn't say to "completely discard" them. I'm saying you have to weigh them against others. For example, my main in SB _WAS_ SCH. Want to know the two things I hated about SB SCH?

1) DoTs - because I hate DoTs in general as a gameplay mechanic.
2) Having to macro Eos.

In ShB, they removed the latter and MORE OR LESS removed the former. So not every veteran agreed with the concensus position. Moreover - and this was my point - many people warmed to it after playing it a bunch (especially later in ShB - 5.3 and on) and many new healers or people that newly picked up SCH liked it as well. But people are often very passionate about changes, even if after living with them for a while, once those emotions die down, they reevaluate if their complaints were valid or if they were emotional responses. That was the point I was making.

I'm not saying discard their opinions, I'm saying the dated polling/survey is likely not reflective of the current situation AND likely captured a lot of emotion/passions of the time.

I also contend, to the last point, that a lot of people DO like FFXIV's healer design. I personally believe it can be improved on, but it appeals to a lot of people, including new players.

[T-Owl]

I somewhat agree with this. It's long been amazing to me that WoW had such differences between their healers with them still being relatively well balanced and viable outside of some weirdness here and there (I remember in Vanilla/BC when Disc was "the leveling spec" for Priests until they could respect to unlock Shadow Form because it increased wand damage -and yes, you read that right. Mage was like that with Arcane, and there was even a meme in a machina video at the time, and I quote, "I'm gonna...WAND you to death!!!"). They all feel different, but generally good.

I think part of that is due to the raid size, though. When the game is tuned to encounters where you have 4-7 healers (and the number can be kinda variable based on party, team, encounter, etc) AND where players can easily swap specs (so healers can quickly swap over and DPS or Tank on fights then swap to Healer on the fights they heal), where it can be assumed you have all of them at the table together in most encounters, it's probably easier to balance than if you have only 2 and you have to balance based on (most) combinations of the two.

Though I really do agree that it would be nice to get more diversity between the Healers. There's no reason they should all have the identical "rotations" they do today.

As we agree on one thing, I think one important difference to be pointed out is just how healing works technically. WoW always had a pretty good makro system that had to be reigned down quite alot in its past actually and was always open for addons, which it will occassionally adapt, which lead to mouse over healing becoming pretty much the norm for WoW. It should be a standart feature. Having to regularily switch targets manually is just not comfortable and the shorter gcd makes healing actually more flexible. Then there is stuff like Damage profiles, damage is far more frequent but individually usually smaller in WoW, which makes regen healing more valuable because it serves the purpose of overall smoothing out the parties health bars. And in modern WoW, healing is really a maintanance and management game, one important aspect of WoW Healing is maintaining your healing tools on the party, with healer dps, often synergizing with the way Healers heal or being enabled by their healing style.

FF14 healing is not only extremely streamlined because differences in healing toolkit aren't that distinct, its also extremely clunky. Not to forget that it is counter intuitive. While Sage can teach some basic, especially White Mage by its design teaches inefficent, bad healing. And by virtue of being the only level 1 healer job and being the most iconic FF healer, this will most likely affect most beginner healers. Its even worse since FF14 lacks any dedicated skill system or anything like that, so there isn't even that to encourage new players to look into outside ressources.

[Conchoidal]

Personally, I think DoTs are very good design for healers (since it allows them to still contribute DPS whilst GCD healing), especially for Scholar considering how it played in FFXI and the general class fantasy. They also provided a lot of depth to the class in a way that makes it accessible for casual players and gave more "professional" players more chances to optimise and generally provided an engaging gameplay experience for all different types of players.

I also think it's perfectly fine for some players to feel emotional at a class they enjoyed being changed for no real reason, considering that 3 years later in Endwalker healing requirements are still incredibly low (meaning that the removal of DPS tools was mostly pointless). Good for those players that somehow enjoy spamming broil/glare/dosis/malefic as well new players who play healer, but the current design is completely unsustainable for the longevity of the game.

[Renathras]

As we agree on one thing, I think one important difference to be pointed out is just how healing works technically. WoW always had a pretty good makro system that had to be reigned down quite alot in its past actually and was always open for addons, which it will occassionally adapt, which lead to mouse over healing becoming pretty much the norm for WoW. It should be a standart feature. Having to regularily switch targets manually is just not comfortable and the shorter gcd makes healing actually more flexible. Then there is stuff like Damage profiles, damage is far more frequent but individually usually smaller in WoW, which makes regen healing more valuable because it serves the purpose of overall smoothing out the parties health bars. And in modern WoW, healing is really a maintanance and management game, one important aspect of WoW Healing is maintaining your healing tools on the party, with healer dps, often synergizing with the way Healers heal or being enabled by their healing style.

Yeah, kind of agree with all of that overall. I wonder if part of it is due to WoW straddling the era of "old school" MMOs and modern thempark ones. When WoW came out, it was originally a semi-Everquest clone that was (irony) catered to casual players (what counted as casual at the time - how far we've come, eh?). When it launched, FFXI had been out about a year or so. There were no DF/PF type tools, no Wikis, theorycrafting didn't exist - even the Devs had no idea what was going on; look at the 1.0 talent trees sometime or how tank gear would have agility DPSer stats, etc. It was just a total mess.

And no one cared because it was this immersive world that they got into and had fun with the people they met in it. Sure, most of Molten Snore was braindead easy, a third of the raid DCing due to dial-up sucking and mom having to make a phone call, some classes (particularly Hunter) just auto-attacking entire fights (you think one BUTTON spam is bad, imagine NO button spam!) because bosses had limited debuff spots (so no Windbite type procs allowed, Hunters! Other classes had more important debuffs than you!), and don't forget the only healer that healed was Priest. Paladins were for buffing, Druids were for Innervating the Priest to make sure they didn't run out of mana, and Shaman were for Tremor Totem or something. And note I didn't mention spec - if you were a class with a healing spec, you were in the "healer" slot (for your class), you didn't do damage or tank. That would be absurd. Only Warriors tanked - and also did fantastic damage, go figure.

The whole thing was a mess, but it was a glorious mess when the general playerbase had either never played an MMO before or their "MMO" experience was text based MUDs or Runescape.

EDIT (for space):

But, because of that core, I think it was allowed to grow in different ways that FFXIV's Jobs have not. FFXIV was born once the themepark era had taken hold. While not EXCLUSIVELY, that's probably PARTIALLY the reason 1.0 failed so miserably. It wouldn't have been a great game with all its issues, but if it launched in 2002, it would probably have been a decently successful game because players - frankly - just put up with more back then. 2.0+ was built around being in that new era, and counteracting 1.0's attempt to be an updated FFXI. And this was iterated on in 3.0 and 4.0 to move further from that core and paradigm.

I can't be sure, but I feel like WoW kind of got lucky in that sense and I'm not sure FFXIV can repeat that luck IN THAT WAY because of the different era it exists in. WoW can get away with those legacy systems because it just kind of carried them on, though there were absolutely complaints when they did things like remove spell ranks on Holy Priest (and everyone, but I REMEMBER that one being a big deal) and talent trees, substituting in new systems that supposedly did the same thing (but Cata healing paradigm sucked, even if it was supposed to replace downranking, because the encounter designs didn't reflect that). FFXIV, on the other hand, has tried to get away from 1.0 and arguably 2.0.

Hence why WHM leveling design teaches "bad" healing - because it was designed in ARR, when that was actually GOOD healing because oGCD healing didn't exist as it does today. Level 50 WHM had, what, Benediction? Its other oGCDs were Presence of Mind and Divine Seal, neither of which is an oGCD heal.

SGE does that job of teaching better because it's designed entirely in the new paradigm.

Personally, I think DoTs are very good design for healers (since it allows them to still contribute DPS whilst GCD healing), especially for Scholar considering how it played in FFXI and the general class fantasy. They also provided a lot of depth to the class in a way that makes it accessible for casual players and gave more "professional" players more chances to optimise and generally provided an engaging gameplay experience for all different types of players.

I don't disagree that DoTs can allow healers to do other things while the damage is still going.

I DO disagree that it makes it "accessible for casual players". One of the biggest healer "mistakes" of casual players is their DoTs fall off. All the time. And since a good chunk of their damage is from their DoTs, when the DoTs fall off, that's a pretty big hit. It seems that, in practice, DoT upkeep is actually an advanced skill that casual players aren't good at. So if anything, they're bad, not good, for casual players. The only way to fix that would be to reduce their part of damage contribution, but if their potencies were too low relative to the nuke spells, then there'd be no reason to use them. So it's kind of a Catch 22 there. But at the least, I think it's safe to say DoTs are inaccessible for casual players. DoT uptime and snapshoting is something that experienced and high skilled players excel at, not lower skilled and casual ones.

I also think it's perfectly fine for some players to feel emotional at a class they enjoyed being changed for no real reason, considering that 3 years later in Endwalker healing requirements are still incredibly low (meaning that the removal of DPS tools was mostly pointless). Good for those players that somehow enjoy spamming broil/glare/dosis/malefic as well new players who play healer, but the current design is completely unsustainable for the longevity of the game.

It's understandable, but it's probably wrong to draw assumptions that weight that too heavily and apply them to the role and playerbase as a whole.

As for sustainability and longevity of the game, it's not unsustainable at all. It's not GREAT, though. I think this is another case of hyprbole. FFXIV could keep this healing model for 2,3,6 expansions and be fine. The question should be "Is 'fine' good enough?", and I think the answer is "If it can be better...why not make it better?"

The overstatement of the doom of the game is a problem, but arguing for changes to make it better is something entirely worthwhile, imo.

[Conchoidal]

Yeah, kind of agree with all of that overall.
I DO disagree that it makes it "accessible for casual players". One of the biggest healer "mistakes" of casual players is their DoTs fall off. All the time. And since a good chunk of their damage is from their DoTs, when the DoTs fall off, that's a pretty big hit. It seems that, in practice, DoT upkeep is actually an advanced skill that casual players aren't good at. So if anything, they're bad, not good, for casual players. The only way to fix that would be to reduce their part of damage contribution, but if their potencies were too low relative to the nuke spells, then there'd be no reason to use them. So it's kind of a Catch 22 there. But at the least, I think it's safe to say DoTs are inaccessible for casual players. DoT uptime and snapshoting is something that experienced and high skilled players excel at, not lower skilled and casual ones.
.

In Stormblood, healing requirements were higher in all tiers of content and MP economy was a more important factor due to the cost of some spells. Obviously, in an environment where healers are expected to heal with GCDs more it makes sense that less experienced players would prefer to play safe and occasionally lose dot uptime in ensuring the party's survival. Experienced players which understood when specific instances of damage would occur and when they would be expected to heal would work around this so there would be a clear differentiation between "bad" players and "good" players. This environment no longer exists due to the plethora of oGCD heals now available, the removal of meaningful MP economy, and the reduction in healing requirements. There is no real way to "improve" as a healer if at all levels you will be doing the same thing (spamming nuke spell, and reapplying a 30s dot), with the exception of optimising your healing tools (which matters much less due to how many we have, and the aforementioned reduction in healing requirements).

It is not a satisfactory gameplay experience to be forced to spam 1 nuke, 1 dot, and rarely use your healing tools meaningfully. It gets boring incredibly quickly, which is why I don't really think such a design is sustainable (let along for another 2+ expansions), especially if all healers play more or less the same. What's the point in trying a different healer if they usually only have one or two unique gimmicks, and play roughly the same? The MSQ can only do so much to keep players subscribed, and there needs to be a fulfilling gameplay experience with enough depth for players to remain engaged and subscribed.

[Renathras]

quote

Yeah, in SB there was more going on, but this still rings true today. A lot of players don't manage DoTs well. Contrast a 30 sec DoT with WAR's 30 sec buff from Storm's Eye. DoTs are a tiny icon on the enemy. Yeah, you can mess with the UI to make it larger and more visible, focus target and so on, but how often do CASUAL players do this? I didn't even use Focus Target until Memoria because I needed a way to reliably see what Solus was casting even while I was targeting different players for healing. On the other hand, WAR's buff is on their own healthbar. You can clearly see it in your buff list at the top of your screen and on your party bar. If we had to bet money, which do you doubt casual players drop more often and don't remember to reapply? I'd wager DoTs. And, the best part of WAR's buff is you can stack it twice (up to 60 sec), so if you fat finger it early, it isn't a DPS loss unless you're just using SE combo over and over.

And note that this is WORSE with DoTs that have different timers, like the old 15/18/etc second ones, since it's easy to not mentally track different length timers.

DoTs tend to widen the gap between casual and skilled players, not make it smaller. That was the point I was making there.

As to the sustainability argument:

Well, we're now on expansion #2 of this model, and we're not seeing (yet) some mass loss of healers. Indeed, we're more prone to lose healers by encounters being harder (e.g. the nasty bleeds) than from healing DPS rotations being boring. Moreover, this is really closer to expansion 3 or even 5 of this for WHM. WHM had one more DoT reliably used in SB (Aero 2 - a lot of people thought Aero 3 was only a DPS gain in AOE and so didn't use it in single targets) which is partly countered by them having Misery how (hit about 1/3rd as often). HW and ARR also did this, but one could argue that (a) the DoTs were used more often (shorter CDs), (b) more healing was GCD (so it broke up the "rotation" more with other button presses), and (c) there were other interactions (Cleric) that weren't true in SB and beyond. But the point is, we've had this for a while and it's been sustainable thus far. While past isn't always prologue, it doesn't seem to have been horribly detrimental for the game (in terms of numbers and content clearing/filling healer slots) to date, so it PROBABLY isn't doomed, per se.

EDIT (for space):

What it's likely to do is, over time, drive the people that enjoy DPSing on healers to other roles, which isn't a great thing, but that's not the same as causing a shortage in the role itself, since there are still a lot of people that are either fine with, or even attracted to, that playstyle of healers that aren't main DPSers and don't have DPS-like rotations. Though YET AGAIN I'll point out that this is why I DO argue for having different healers have different rotations, so that we have Jobs that appeal to these different playstyle. With 4 healing Jobs, there's no reason that we can't have different rotations between them.

I aggree with the sentiment that WoW probably came out in the right time and did the right things right.

Mhm. We agree on a lot of this. Though I am one who disagrees that healers as DPSers should be a thing in all cases (thematically it DOES fit in some cases, like Paladin, but much less so with, say, Holy Priest or arguably Druid), and I'd say BC is really when healers in WoW (except Disc...) came into their own with developed and functional niches. Disc flirted with being functional in Wrath as a tank healer substitute and damage curve smoother because of shields, and then in...I think it was Mists or Warlords where it shifted into being the RIFT Chloromancer healer that healed through dealing DPS after slapping/rotating that heal buff thing onto allies.

To be honest, I don't think that the problems of FF14s healers go that deep in.

I kinda do, and I think it includes what you mentioned - that the key Devs likely don't play Healers or don't play them much. I would argue it's catered to people that don't enjoy DPSing. Which makes sense to a point as, of the 19 Jobs in this game, 11 are explicitly for DPSing. It's reasonable - despite some people insisting otherwise (not here, but like on Reddit I've literally seen the phrase "If you don't like DPSing, don't play healer", which makes zero sense conceptually; that's like saying "If you don't like carrying a gun and shooting people, don't become a doctor")

The problem is that ENCOUNTER DESIGN assumes healers are DPSing, so the game has this conflicting, Spiderman pointing at other Spiderman-meme thing going where healers are expected to DPS per encounter design, but they aren't given tools to make that DPS interesting or even...distinct. ONE healer being DoT + Nuke is probably fine. FOUR doing so is kind of silly.

Then we have the second role conflict that we discussed in that other thread (I think) where you have GCD heals where oGCD heals look like, based on when you get them leveling and how powerful they are, that they're suppose to be "break glass in case of emergency" - like how Vanilla/BC WoW, Paladin's Lay on Hands ability had a 60 minute CD, and so did Druid in combat battle raise, I think Shaman Reincarnate, etc; and FFXIV has some ultimate abilities with 4 HOUR cooldowns. And yet, the FFXIV "emergency" tools are somehow supposed to be our first-use go-tos? The first button a SCH should hit to deal with party damage, for example, is Fey Blessing or Whispering Dawn, despite them being instant cast and on a moderate 1 minute CD.

Conceptually, this leads to the weird situation where the "emergency" abilities have become the "routine use" abilities, the spamable, routine use abilities have become the emergency ones, and new players are taught to use them exactly the opposite way of this. And because oGCDs so rule, it means all those GCDs you'd have spent on Cure 2 or Medica or Succor and etc are free now. So what do you fill them with?

...Glarespam.

It's that there are just backwards/opposed/competing elements all over the place - Are healers supposed to DPS to beat enrage or not? Are GCD heals or oGCD heals our emergency tools? Are healers for people that don't like to DPS or for people that do like to DPS but oddly won't play a Red icon Job? - that it leads to this bizarre design that WORKS, but conflicts and clashes all over the place.

[T-Owl]

part 1

I think healer dps is just the inevitable reality of healing downtimes in games which don't actively enforce to be passive in those, like old WoW did with their stand 5 seconds still for mana regen rule, which I think we all can agree was horrible. Where I think it can vary is how much dpsing is actually involved in healing. Holy Priest for example is pretty similar to most ff14 healers, the healing toolkit is mostly there for downtimes and outside of the kyrian covenant ability, which is sadly tossed out in DF, its really something you do inbetween heals. Restoration Shaman feels a bit more aggressive and is bit more maintenance heavy, but mostly the same though it gets some neat boons in Dragonlight, for example causing its ground targeted hot field to also cause damage. In some cases it is heavily involved with the act of healing itself, fistweaver monks, melee holy paladins and discipline priests and in the case of Restoration druids, it is kind of a reward for proper hot management. You have your hots up on the party and their LP are smooth, time to catweave which is kind of a nice minigame inside the class where you get a simplified version of the feral druid toolkit. Fun note on Discipline priest, their dps healer playstyle was actually created because they couldn't balance it being a shield healer well, for the most part it was just too good in reducing incoming damage which frustrated the more reactive healers.

part 2

Its actually both and pretty self-contradictory. SE doesn't wants to push high healing uptime because they are afraid it will drive away the casuals which creats high dps uptime which they take into account by adjusting enrage timers with high dps uptime in mind and yet at the same time they don't want to cater towards this high dps uptime playstyle by giving healers more tool because they are afraid that it will make casual healers feel forced to dps. I think it boils down to why I say healers are the role of low expectations: They are designed this way because whoever is responsible for this obviously seems to consider healing more of a chore.

And personally, I would say yes, Healers always should be expected to dps during downtimes. Its basically the only productive thing that you can make them do during inevitable healing downtimes, anything else would just boil down to occupational therapy, especially since healers need dps tools for solo play. I think the differences boil down to how much healers would be pushed to dps and how much it affects their gameplay loop, where you can have varrying degrees. In terms of wow healers, you could have the holy priest who can just push some dps inbetween heals without worrying you much. Then you go a bit further, like restoration druid, where you can chose your dps style and on the extreme you have holy Paladin, who is what Zenos would play if he was a healer.

[T-Owl]

Part 1

I aggree with the sentiment that WoW probably came out in the right time and did the right things right. It was the casual players MMO and one part of its appeal was, that it had plenty of solo player quests that allowed players to reach max level without grinding mobs for prolonged periods of time or being forced to play in a group, they could just level on their own and get groups when it was to their convenience. Though actually most healers being that restricted was mostly a problem for the first raid tier, even during Vanilla WoW, Blizz managed to give the healers each a strong distinct identity in what they are doing. Druid was the HoT healer, Paladin was already going in the direction of chunky single target heals and becoming the most effiicent tank healer by the time Naxxramas hit, Shaman was the group aoe healer and Priest was the all in all Jack of all Trades. Thats all in all more than we can say about the FF14 healing classes and healers roughly kept their identities while at the same time transitioning to a more modern action-focussed playstyle that added to that identities. I think in that regard, WoW also did the transition to healers dpsing quite well, which I think is an inevitability for a modern MMO in which mp-management isn't enforcing total downtimes. Especially since in WoW, healer dps actually improves on the class fantasies. Paladins and Monks should be on the frontline, battling foes while healing their enemies, the discipline priest feels like some sort of Inquisitor balances light and darkness and Druids cat- or owl-weaving is making this old fantasy of the versatile druid who can fill in different combat roles. Being a former Paladin Main myself, modern Paladin design is my absolute favorite, because why shouldn't a holy Knight in full plate armor with a hammer and a shield not being out there in the melee?

Part 2

To be honest, I don't think that the problems of FF14s healers go that deep in. There are some superficial problems with the games design, but I think the biggest difference is, that it just doesn't feels like the devs have anybody in a position of authority who actually plays or understands healers. Healer Design feels catered towards people who don't even main healer, but who pick the role up to get faster invites at the occassion and don't want to be bothered and pushed to heal too hard. It doesn't help that the devs obviously adapted dps checks to the reality of healer dps, but never bothered to look into the issues and reality of that playstyle. Healing overall feels like designed for people, who consider the role a chore tbh, when in reality, it should be easy to pick up and just engage with casually on the starting level and from then on allow for more and more complexity up to its highest levels, which I feel like is left out.