The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[ForsakenRoe]

So I was doing a trials roulette a couple of days ago, and I was playing SCH, and the RNG machine spat out Seat of Sacrifice. Worse, the other healer was ALSO a SCH. This was a potential issue because of the very first mechanic in the fight, a sudden HP-to-1 with a 'are you 100% healed' check very quickly afterwards. Naturally I threw out quite a lot of stuff to counter this, Fey Illumination, Recitation Indom, Seraph into Consolation, etc, and with the help of the other SCH doing similar, we cleared the check and the fight, and thought nothing more of it. And so I went to bed later that day, but while trying to sleep, the thought wouldn't leave my mind: 'Why is 2 SCH able to do 'Pure healing' like that, when WHM has no answer to shielding issues? Why are there 'Pure healing' heal checks in the game, but no 'shield checks' outside of inconsequential ones like Ifrit's Vulcan Burst, or actually important ones like 'Ifrit's Vulcan Burst but in Ultimate' where you'd 100% have a shield healer anyway?'

So for the past couple of days, my mind has been slowly churning, thinking about the idea of 'What would the game be like if WHM had some shielding options too?' and rolling with that train of thought until it crashes spectacularly, mostly due to 'well that would not work because the game engine can't handle it'. Nevertheless, I post my mad ramblings here in case they give SE some ideas, or are just interesting for people to read. If everything seems 'out of order', it's like 6AM at the moment and I'm writing this as something to do while I wait for PFs to appear so I can do some prog raiding

[ForsakenRoe]

"Not all roles are created equal"

The issue with the healer role as I see it, is that it is homogenised beyond belief in some ways, and not enough in other ways.

All four healers have a very similar DPS thing going on, one spell that is their 'spam filler', one dot that is 30s long, maybe an extra thing like Assize or Phlegma. There is very little variety in HOW we get our damage out as a healer, and as much as SE really, REALLY tries to avoid insulting/scaring away the 'curebot' type players, in my opinion they really need to just bite the bullet and tell the playerbase more firmly that 'if you dont need to heal, do damage, that is part of your job as a healer too.'

To prove my point, imagine a tank that only gets aggro on the enemy, then stands AFK until they're about to lose aggro, and re-secures it with one more AOE before going AFK again. Their reasoning? 'It's the tank's job to mitigate damage and position enemies, doing damage is a DPS's job'. And it's technically true if you think about it, so why do tanks keep getting cool new DPS actions like Confetior, Primal Rend or Double Down, when 'doing damage' is a secondary part of their role, but healers are stuck with the same base rotation at level 90 as they had at level FOUR?

There's no variety in our DPS options, we have four flavors of glare and dia to choose from but they're all used in the exact same way between all four healers. On the flip side, we are expected to use these extremely limited toolsets for DPS, for anywhere between 60% and 80, maybe even 90% of our casts in fights depending on our level of optimisation and gear. We even get to the point where we do not need a single GCD heal across an entire Savage fight, which leads to insane looking logs where you see a WHM with more casts of Glare than autoattacks from the tanks, because that's our rotation, just Glare spam and maintain Dia, until our 2min burst window where we... Glare faster due to Presence of Mind.

While it's hilarious to suggest to tank mains who don't really understand the healer plight 'yeh so imagine if SE just removed all your DPS skills, so you only had uncombo'd Goring Blade once per 30s for the DOT, then Atonement spam for the other 27 seconds', I don't actually want that for tanks because it's boring as heck, and no role should have to suffer this rotation. The DPS are noticing how boring it is with how SMN is basically 'press Gemshine over and over lmao', but us healers have had it like this for a while and it's not shown any signs of improving yet. Hopefully that can change, the potential is there, it just requires SE to take the chance on it.

[ForsakenRoe]

"The dichotomy issue at hand"

So, before Shadowbringers came out, I remember there being some interviews and such where Yoshi-P dropped hints that with GNB being added to the game as our 4th tank, we'd likely see a split in the tanks, where two would be more MT focused, and 2 would be more OT focused. This, however, did not happen, and all 4 tanks are now capable as MT or as OT equally, with the playerbase being the ones who have made decisions on which tank suits which role better (EG GNB prefers OT because moving a boss inside Continuation windows was not a fun time)

However, we look at healers, and the same dichotomy got applied, two 'main healers' (or Pure), and two 'off healers' (or Barrier). You can even divide them up in a 2x2 table like so:



As we go through the tier though, people get more gear, and we run into the eventual issue that seems to occur every raid tier: the two healers with raid buffs, SCH and AST, scale off of not only their own gear, but the gear of other people due to Chain Stratagem and Divination/Cardspam. This leads to them pulling ahead in RDPS, the metric that everyone cares about. It's all well and good saying 'oh well you see, WHM has a lot of powerful healing tools to save a run when things are going badly' but healing is a very binary thing in this game, you either have enough healing to clear, or you wipe. WHM's 'powerful healing tools' are also not very numerous, usually referring to just Cure3/Curaga, while other healers have a lot more options to mix and match at their disposal.

As a personal example, I usually play WHM for various reasons, but one time I decided to try out AST for a reclear of P4S. The final mechanic, Curtain Call, a series of 8 raidwides, a big raidwide, then 8 more raidwides, one big heal/mitigation checklasting around 90 seconds. There, as WHM I would have Temperance, 3 Afflatus Rapture casts, Asylum, and one Lilybell (Assize maybe but that is primarily used for DPS, lets be real). After running out of stuff, it's Medica spam, because Cure3 didn't even reach far enough to hit everyone! As AST however, I had access to Earthly Star, Horoscope, Celestial Opposition, Collective Unconscious at the start before everyone bolts, Macrocosmos, Neutral Sect, maybe even a Lady of Crowns depending on RNG. Better yet, 5 of the listed tools are mere 60s cooldowns, meaning you can use them on the second set of thorns too!

[ForsakenRoe]

The Spectrum Solution (maybe)

To link this long winding mess back to the original point, the 2 SCH in Seat of Sacrifice, all that? So as mentioned before, I've been thinking for a couple of days now about how, despite SE saying they are going to have 'one Pure healer, one Barrier healer' soft-enforced by fight design for harder content, it hasn't actually played out that way. Like, at all. There's already clears of P8S that have run SCH SGE, DSR is apparently extremely heavy on mitigation checks and lax on throughput requirements (or so I hear, I didn't do it yet), this tier is, while we have no gear, definitely nice due to the bleeds on the raidwides and tankbusters, but once we get gear those will be very ignoreable. I can already use Soteria/Krasis on a WAR who's using Bloodwhetting and that's enough to completely ignore the TB bleed in P7, and that was with week 1 gear.

On the one hand, SCH has Recitation Indom, Fey Blessing, Whispering Dawn, a regen trait on Sacred Soil for some reason, all this 'Pure healer' kind of kit, but on a Barrier healer. Worse for SE's weird Pure/shield split paradigm, they gave Sage Pneuma, a whopping 900 potency heal when buffed by Zoe, one of the strongest single heal effects in the game (macrocosmos is macrocosmos tier, and you could pop a lilybell right away for 1000 but why would you). On the flipside of this in PureHeal City, you don't want to run WHM AST because they just dont have enough mitigation between them early on. Temperance, Neutral Sect and CU once per minute just aren't enough to match the fight design that expects Soil/Kerachole with their 30s cooldowns.

So why exactly do the Barrier healers have such good 'Pure healing' options, but the Pure healers have little to no answer when it comes to Barriers? When the split was first announced I was ecstatic, I thought to myself 'yes, we'll have the jobs be specialists in the two halves of healing, SCH and SGE will be masters of buffing allies and debuffing enemies, Disable, Addle, Virus, Eye for an Eye, etc'. Instead we have this supposed line between Pure and Barrier that is so blurry it makes me ask if I need new glasses. Bad jokes aside, this blurred line is a problem, but not one that cannot be fixed. A lot of people would likely want to see the split enforced more rigidly, and personally I would too. But, once the playerbase has had a taste of something, they will not want to give it up easily. Just look how many times we've had Energy Drain removed, then given back a couple of weeks later...

Furthermore, unless SE is going to just... Never add a healer class ever again (which is within their rights but damn it'd kinda suck), their careful adherence to patterns has damned them already. Their reasoning given for 'why Reaper?' was 'well DRG didnt share gear with anything yet so there you go' kinda made sense, until you realise that A: Ninja also doesnt share gear with anything yet (new scouting class 7.0 confirmed????) and B: we've got the above table of 2 Pure, 2 Barrier healers. If they're gonna add a new healer, where's it gonna go? I assume it'd be Pure due to Sage being Barrier, but then we are imbalanced with a 3/2 split. What can we do to solve this?

So I thought about the 'why can WHM no shield?' and started to think, wonder and dream about what the game would be like if we had, not a table of 'Pure vs Barrier' like above, but a 'spectrum' of healing styles:



'But Samanthaaaaa' I hear you say, 'This is just homogenisation and makes all the healers play the same' On one hand, yes it does blur the line even more. On the other hand, Sage is 75% SCH reskin, 20% salvaged offcuts from Noct AST and 5% Panhaima, so I think we're a little beyond the point of 'prevent homogenisation' being a defense. In fact, I believe that by doing this small 'homogenisation' we would open the door to a larger identity expression, on the DPS side of the classes. Furthermore, by having every class able to 'Pure heal' to varying degrees, SE was able to put in heal checks like in SOS. So by adding the ability for every class to 'shield' to varying degrees, we'd potentially have the design space opened up for more 'you need a shield on for this mechanic' like Vulcan Burst.

Now remember, the idea here is that SE is good enough at balancing that we can do any content with any combo of 2 healers, but that some combos will be more synergistic. For example, while it's possible to do a fight as SCH SGE, it'd be easier with the throughput of swapping one for a WHM or AST. Similarly, you could clear with WHM AST, but the stronger shields of a SCH might be nice to have instead.

[ForsakenRoe]

SIDE TANGENT THAT IS ACTUALLY RELATED I SWEAR

A while ago I used to play a Battle Royale game with friends, called Apex Legends. Now I'm bad at shooter games, hence I dont play anymore, but one thing that has stuck with me is the characters. Each of them fell into a 'role' of 'Assault', 'Defense', 'Support' or 'Recon'. Sound familiar? Each of those roles would have some additional perks, such as Recon characters being able to use communication antenna around the map to scan where the next Ring would end up. You could choose to roll a team with just Assault characters and go heavy on aggressive plays, or a mix of roles to balance the strengths and counter your own weaknesses, your choice. Despite being in these roles, however, each character had their own two skills to give them identity. The reason I bring this example up is not just the roles, the skills, but something else the characters have. Each had a small two or three word 'description' that told you the identity of the character in a super easy to understand format. When I looked at my main, I saw 'Caustic - Toxic Trapper' (yes I played Caustic) and I can tell right away 'yes, I think this guy will have traps in his kit'. Or 'Bloodhound - Technological Tracker' will probably use technology to track his enemies like a hunter, following footprints, broken twigs, etc.

Why do I bring completely unrelated game into this? Because I feel like SE needs to, if they dont already, come up with a 'descriptor' for each of our classes that sums up what their identity SHOULD be, and then design around that, as it stands it feels like I'm looking at the kits of some classes to find a descriptor that matches, rather than it feeling like the descriptor came first. So with that in mind, I tried to come up with some Apex style descriptors of the healers, to try and guide my thinking on what their DPS rotations could/should look like in a big overhaul.

[ForsakenRoe]

White Mage - Nature's Warden, Nature's Wrath

White magic in older FF games has been very mixed and matched, depending on the game. It's always had restorative magic like Cure, it's sometimes had 'nul-element' spells like in 10, it's had Holy be named as 'the ultimate white magic' in 5. What comes to mind when I think of White magic, however, is burst. No, not Burst the high level thunder spell, burst as in 'lots of number in small timeframe'. Burst healing, Burst damage, throwing Curaga out and massively healing the whole team always felt good in older games, so we can keep leaning into that, as WHM definitely can pump heals when it needs to.

Unfortunately, SE has definitely painted a lot of floor on WHM's design so far and we're pretty tucked into the corner on this one. It really feels like they wanted to have WHM be the 'starter healer', the 'simple healer' but that has left it with very little room to actually grow, forever held back by it's training wheels. Even so, with a bit of lore-abiding (probably) design and looking at it's past as a Conjurer, my brain spat out this:

WARNING: I AM NOT A THEORYCRAFTER I AM GOING FOR FEEL AND AESTHETIC HERE NOT EXACT POTENCY VALUES, IF POTENCIES SEEM WONKY THEY PROBABLY ARE, BUT CAN BE CHANGED EASILY

Plenary Indulgence moved to level 74
Afflatus Rapture moved to level 70 (now available in UCOB!)

New skill: Stoneskin (learned at 52 alongside lily gauge), GCD that puts a shield on the target equal to 300p heal, costs 1 lily
New skill: Afflatus Tragedy (learned at 62 just because there's a gap there), basically a downgrade from Misery, does 800p damage (4 stone3's is 880 so its a small loss still), this is just to help new players get into the idea of 'use lilies, get big hit that compensates the lost dps', upgrades to Misery at 76
New skill: Afflatus Bastion (upgrade from Stoneskin at 70), increases the shield from 300 to 400p
New skill: Afflatus Sanctuary (Learned at level 70 alongside Afflatus Rapture), GCD that shields all nearby party members equal to 200p healing, costs 1 lily

By keeping the potencies on the shields low, it lets the 'shield healers' be more specialised at shielding, but still giving WHM options to shield if it absolutely has to

Returning skill: Divine Seal (learned at 40), 2min CD that buffs healing actions by 20%, so 'Temperance without the damage mitigation', becomes Temperance at 80
Returning skill: Protect (learned at 10 or something), 60s CD that gives 5% damage mitigation for 10sec, upgrades to Plenary at 74. Plenary would retain the 5% damage reduction, in addition to it's current effect.

Returned from the dead skill: Fluid Aura (now renamed Water to fit better), now an instant cast GCD with a separate 15 second recast (affected by spellspeed), scaling damage like Stone, becomes Banish at Glare/Dia levels, does 40p more damage than Stone/Glare equivalent at any given level (say Glare3 is 310, maybe this could be 350?)

Aero/Dia changed to be 12 seconds duration, potency adjusted to balance, to mix up how often we're using Glare vs Dia (and to give the rotation a more 'bursty' feel) edit: 150 + 70per tick would total 430, while still keeping the base damage of the cast low to prevent spamming early application?

A new HUD element, the 'Nature Gauge' (name is WIP), a simple 0-100 gauge that fills by doing certain actions. Stone/Glare gives 1 point. Aero/Dia gives 1 point on cast, and 1 per tick (5 total over full duration). Water would give 5 due to being used less often than Stone. edit: Forgot dungeons exist, perhaps something for Holy like 'Each enemy hit by Holy grants 2 gauge' so bigger pulls = more gauge per Holy bomb thrown, the 2 instead of 1 would be to compensate for the fact we're probably not multi-DOTting in a pull of 8+ mobs. As a side note, Dia's ticks giving gauge would only count for the first enemy, so having multiple mobs DOT'd would not increase the speed you gain gauge. This is important to note for later

Upon reaching 50 gauge, you can use a new skill: Blessing of the Elementals (also WIP). This would be a new GCD AOE heal that heals for 500p, restoring 500MP to the WHM, and granting them 3 buffs. These buffs can stack, so if you need to use the skill twice back to back for some insane burst AOE healing, you won't be kicking yourself for losing stacks. The buffs would also have no duration, so they'll last as long as needed during downtime, and be consumed the next time you're able to hit the boss. These three buffs would be named after the three elements the WHM controls, maybe 'Rage of the River, Ire of the Earth and Wrath of the Winds' or something like that. The three buffs would essentially be consolation prizes so that casting the GCD heal isnt a DPS loss. The 'water one' would turn the next Water/Banish into Flood (yes Banish would go back to being an elemental spell for a second, because our natural roots shouldn't be completely forgotten in favor of pretty lights), 'earth buff' would turn the next Stone/Glare into Quake, and 'wind buff' would turn the next Aero/Dia into Tornado. These skills would replace your Glare, Dia and Banish keybinds for the next cast, similar to how Inner Chaos replaces Fell Cleave on your bars when you have the Nascent Chaos buff. No button bloat worries.

Since Glare3 is currently 310 potency, losing one cast of it to cast 'BOTE' is the potency I aim to offset, so my thinking is simply this: Quake is a 100p boost over the current level of Stone/Glare you have, Flood is a 100p boost over the current level of Water/Banish you have, Tornado is a little different, and is 20p per tick of the DOT stronger than your current Aero/Dia, with it's base cast being 30p stronger. The 4 dot ticks total 80, the cast is 30 to make 110, add that to Quake and Flood being 100 each, there's your 310 fully refunded. Additionally, these skills would generate Nature Gauge at the same rate as their regular counterparts, so Quake is worth 1, Tornado is worth 1 plus 1 per tick, and Flood is worth 5. As noted above, here is 'later', and Tornado's AOE-spread DOT would not give multiple ticks of gauge, only 1 per server tick regardless of mobs hit

The power of the healing of BOTE is intended to be a WHM themed answer to the, lets be honest, insane power of Earthly Star for AST. WHM has nothing that can really compete as it stands, so I came up with this as a way to reward WHMs who diligently protect nature with the power of violence. In my mind, a fully optimised run would get to the point where the WHM is able to deal with all the required healing using only their OGCDs, Lily heals (Rapture) and this new BOTE. Some things would be on the GCD yes, but the point of using OGCDs isn't because GCD bad, it's because 'GCD that loses damage bad' so DPS neutral skills are A-OK.

edit: More dungeon stuff: Quake, Tornado, Flood can all have AOE around target, with 50% damage falloff. This makes it so that after using the heal of BOTE in a dungeon pull, spending the buffs granted on Quake Flood and Tornado would be a DPS gain over throwing more Holy's, spicing up our 1 button rotation in AOE too. Tornado could even apply the DOT in an AOE, albeit at the 50% reduced amount. This would still be a big amount of damage to add to any trash pull though, and would give us back Aero 3's AOE DOT potential (but in a new form). Based on the current potency values, and the idea above, the potencies for these AOE effects would be: Holy, 150p to all targets around you. Quake, 410 to main target, 205 in AOE. Flood, 450 to main target, 225 in AOE. Tornado, 180 to main target, 90 in AOE. Tornado's DOT effect, 90 per tick on main target, 45 for all others.

Furthermore, if my maths is right (its probably not), we would get 24 GCDs per minute assuming a 2.50 GCD. 4 of these would be Water/Banish, giving 20 gauge. 5 of these would be Aero/Dia, refreshed once per 12s to give 25 total gauge. This leaves us 15 Stone/Glares per min, giving us 15 gauge, for a total of 60 gauge generated per minute. This would allow for roughly 1 BOTE cast per minute, with some leeway built in (not intentionally, this is pure coincidence) to allow for eg, dropping a Glare to use a Rapture to heal the team, casting your Misery, etc. Because you neither 'lose' nor 'gain' damage from using the BOTE skill, you'd also not need to worry about overcapping due to not needing to heal. Giving the option for super skilled WHMs to shift their BOTE healing vs Lily healing timings around to allow them to get both Misery AND the new Quake/Tornado/Flood into raidbuffs for more raid-DPS is a nice optimisation trick that gives depth to the class for those who seek it

edit again: I decided to try and do the maths on potencies and see how close I could get to the current potency per minute (PPM). As a baseline, not including any buffs like Presence of Mind, external buffs, prepping Misery's, anything, just me VS the dummy in a Glarefest. Currently 1min of combat looks to be 2 Dia's and 22 Glares, totaling 8140 potency. With the addition of Banish and the change to Dia's duration/potency, we'd theoretically get 5 Dia applications, totaling 2150, 4 Banish's at 1400, and the rest is 15 Glare's at 4650, with a grand total of 8200. If I really wanted to, I could probably work out maths to make it match the current total exactly, but I think it's close enough (and it being 8200 looks nice and neat)

Overall, I think what I got here still fits well within the cramped confines of SE's 'simple starter healer' idea for WHM, while giving it's barren treetrunk of a design a few branches, and some extra room to grow from there.
Edit: I've made videos! Don't expect production quality though, they'll be as crappy quality as my MSPaint diagrams. These are to illustrate the Fun Healer Gameplay we get to experience during the downtime of a boss, when no healing needs to be done, and the Potentially Slightly More Fun Healer Gameplay where I try to illustrate how the addition of one button (and the adjustment of one DOT's duration) can very easily spice up an otherwise dull rotation. I probably 'dropped the DOT' or 'clipped the DOT' or whatever because Dia's currently 30s, and I had to mentally picture it as being 12s, so it's kinda wonky gameplay, but I hope it helps to show the idea in motion.

edit: Cure1 evolves into Cure2 (700p, becomes 800 later, 500mp cost), Medica evolves into Medica2(300p, becomes 300p + 150p per tick, then later becomes 400p + 150p per tick). Cure 2 generates 5 Nature Gauge on cast. Regen generates 4 Nature Gauge on cast, and 1 Nature Gauge per tick (total 10). As with Dia above, Regen-ing multiple people will not give extra gauge. It'll give the 'on cast' part, but the ticks will behave as if only one person has the HOT. Medica 2 would generate 3 per tick (total of 15 over full duration), but it'd only consider the copy of the HOT on yourself (no multi-HOT benefits). Cure 3 generates 10 Nature Gauge on cast.

another edit: Additionally, when Medica 2's HOT effect is present on the WHM, the MP cost of Cure 3 is halved (from 1500 to 750), to encourage using it over just spamming Medica 2 over and over (as it'd be changed to 400p, plus 5 ticks of 150p due to combining with Medica 1). This allows for you to generate Nature Gauge even during high pressure heal situations such as end-of-fight enrages, and allows for more use of Cure 3 which is criminally underutilized as it stands

edit: As a further illustration to show the effect of 'what GCDs we use in a 60s loop', we have the top image right now, and this pitch would create the bottom image:

Only 7 Glares a minute! 8, if you want to count Quake and Glare as the same thing (they would share a button ala Inner Chaos on WAR), compared to the 18 we have now per minute

[Seraphor]

So, before Shadowbringers came out, I remember there being some interviews and such where Yoshi-P dropped hints that with GNB being added to the game as our 4th tank, we'd likely see a split in the tanks, where two would be more MT focused, and 2 would be more OT focused. This, however, did not happen, and all 4 tanks are now capable as MT or as OT equally, with the playerbase being the ones who have made decisions on which tank suits which role better (EG GNB prefers OT because moving a boss inside Continuation windows was not a fun time)

However, we look at healers, and the same dichotomy got applied, two 'main healers' (or Pure), and two 'off healers' (or Barrier). You can even divide them up in a 2x2 table like so:



As we go through the tier though, people get more gear, and we run into the eventual issue that seems to occur every raid tier: the two healers with raid buffs, SCH and AST, scale off of not only their own gear, but the gear of other people due to Chain Stratagem and Divination/Cardspam. This leads to them pulling ahead in RDPS, the metric that everyone cares about. It's all well and good saying 'oh well you see, WHM has a lot of powerful healing tools to save a run when things are going badly' but healing is a very binary thing in this game, you either have enough healing to clear, or you wipe.

I'm not opposed to this way of categorising healers. I think they could make healers more 'unique' and break down more of that 'homogenisation' yet still maintain these dichotomies of Pure/Shield and Personal/Raid DPS. I don't think that's a bad way of doing things.
However as you rightly say, there is currently a problem with how raid dps or 'party utility buffs' are calculated.

These buffs need to be impactful for both Light Parties and Full Parties, the problem is the more players you add the more impactful they become, so you either end up with OP 8 man or weak 4 man buffs.
The solution could be introducing some form of scaling system.
Something like it calculates the buff according to how many players it affects.

AST is better in this regard because it buffs one party member most of the time. Maybe SCH could have Chain Strategem nerfed to make way for a single target player buff.
And/or their party wide buffs could scale. Something like +10% for a Light Party and +5% for a Full Party.

Then, once dps contributions are more consistent, you can go to town with diversifying healing kits without as much risk of forming meta comps. Baring the issues with shielding of course, which they have the tools to deal with already, they just need to tweak them so that SCH/SGE doesn't become either too good at mitigating or inefficient at healing.

[Supersnow845]

I'm not opposed to this way of categorising healers. I think they could make healers more 'unique' and break down more of that 'homogenisation' yet still maintain these dichotomies of Pure/Shield and Personal/Raid DPS. I don't think that's a bad way of doing things.
However as you rightly say, there is currently a problem with how raid dps or 'party utility buffs' are calculated.

These buffs need to be impactful for both Light Parties and Full Parties, the problem is the more players you add the more impactful they become, so you either end up with OP 8 man or weak 4 man buffs.
The solution could be introducing some form of scaling system.
Something like it calculates the buff according to how many players it affects.

AST is better in this regard because it buffs one party member most of the time. Maybe SCH could have Chain Strategem nerfed to make way for a single target player buff.
And/or their party wide buffs could scale. Something like +10% for a Light Party and +5% for a Full Party.

Then, once dps contributions are more consistent, you can go to town with diversifying healing kits without as much risk of forming meta comps. Baring the issues with shielding of course, which they have the tools to deal with already, they just need to tweak them so that SCH/SGE doesn't become either too good at mitigating or inefficient at healing.

The problem of this system is that it’s never balanced

SCH is dominating the other healers right now and the tier has barely started and it will only scale more strongly later on, if square won’t dynamically adjust the selfish healer DPS over the course of the tier then this type of box chart is never going to be properly balanced and will always bias the buffers in 8 man and the selfish in 4 man

[Seraphor]

The problem of this system is that it’s never balanced

SCH is dominating the other healers right now and the tier has barely started and it will only scale more strongly later on, if square won’t dynamically adjust the selfish healer DPS over the course of the tier then this type of box chart is never going to be properly balanced and will always bias the buffers in 8 man and the selfish in 4 man

I mean, I literally covered this.
SCH is dominating because of it's party damage buffs.

I basically said "fix this one aspect and the system is fine" and you reply with "but the system can't work because of this one aspect."

[Supersnow845]

I mean, I literally covered this.
SCH is dominating because of it's party damage buffs.

I basically said "fix this one aspect and the system is fine" and you reply with "but the system can't work because of this one aspect."

You mentioned scaling of buffs between light parties and full parties but nothing about how in full parties buffs always dominate and that causes SCH to be endlessly meta, it would honestly be easier to make all or no healer buff healers than trying to have aDPS healers because square has shown that they have never got it right ever with healers is more my point