The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ForsakenRoe]

Yeah, but that's making a lot of assumptions. For example, perfect play. You never need a SMN or RDM Raise with perfect play. With adequate gear and perfect play, you shouldn't need Pots, and players should be able to clear all encounters the first time in min ilevel gear.

Yet we find in the field, that isn't the case. People often like having spares. I was in an Ex5 group earlier where someone swapped to a SMN so we'd have a third Raise to push prog. Many groups even on farm make occasional mistakes. People continue to equip better gear despite the min ilevel gear being sufficient. While healing is an either you have enough or you do not, many groups want the added comfort of having more. For progression and for early clears with a group, I often layer more shielding than I do once we have played the fight a lot and have sufficient gear to not be inches from death if a mitigation is missed.

We're back to the original problem, that is, prog is fun-ish for us. We're learning new mechanics, people are dying to stuff, we're triaging as well as triage can work in this engine. The issue arises when we're trying to reclear. Knowing the fight lessens our healing required, and ups our Glare time. Not standing in bad lessens healing required, and ups our Glare time. As we improve at a fight, the variance in what we press actually goes down, in an inverse relationship. We drop safety shielding, we drop spot heal GCDs on tanks, we drop that Regen I used to use for Natural Alignment, and replace it with another Glare. This idea doesn't fix that, is my point. I'm not saying it's a 'bad' idea, I'm just saying that I don't believe it'd work in this game for various reasons. And that even if it DID work, the gain would be so little, SE wouldn't consider it a viable use of resources to implement. Which is why I aim at other, smaller scale stuff.

Some Tanks do complain. And complain a lot. When we went from SB to ShB, Tanks complained about losing their agro tools, which didn't do as much damage (e.g. they were, in effect, asking to do less damage). This was as big of a bombshell with the community as the SCH and AST changes were. To this day you can skim through any Tanking forums on this game and people wills till bemoan not having agro tools and agro management not being a part of a Tank's core identity anymore, and many Tank players complaining they feel like a "Blue DPS".

So, in fact, yes, that is happening, and has been for 4 years. Surely you're aware of it? If you've seen the legendary 0 DPS healer that runs away from enemies before using Assize, you must have seen the far more common Tank who complains about being a Blue DPS and not doing "Tank things" like managing agro and positioning bosses? It is not "Only healer" which has this split. If you'd like, I could probably find you some posts on the Tank section of this forum of Tanks complaining about not having agro (and others telling them they're dumb to complain about it), as well as on r/ffxivdiscussion and YouTube. Very much an active thing.

I'll save you the trip: I miss aggro and positioning as tanks. One of my favorite bosses in WOW right now is Kurog, who has 'the quarter of the arena he's stood in gives him a different moveset'. Fire drops puddles of lava, Ice has 2 stack markers, Earth has adds, concentric circle AOES and heal absorbs, and Storm has TwinBolt from O1S, and Towers to soak. Basic in theory, but very fun to execute. But I'm not saying 'find a tank who wants to have aggro as a mechanic', because a lot of them do, myself included. Back then 'pushing more damage' felt like a reward, for skating the line between defense and offense. Even if DPS checks were made with 100% DPS stance uptime in mind

What I mean is, a tank who wants ONLY aggro mechanic, all of their moves converted to say 'generates X potency' instead of damage, etc. I don't doubt there's someone out there who would want that. But like healing, aggro is binary. You have 'enough' and therefore are the one with the attention of the mob, or you don't and you don't have the attention of the mob. Likewise, you have enough healing and you're alive, or you don't, and you wipe

GNB is kind of an exception to this rule since it was a Tank specifically designed to appeal to DPS players.

...oddly, SGE was supposed to be this for healers. I don't understand how they got it so right with GNB and so wrong with SGE, though...

By playing it safe to avoid upsetting people who would panic if the kit didn't contain a Medica analogue, is my guess

Are you a 1% hardcore static party pushing world firsts and trying to set speedrun records? Then you'll ask players of ALL Roles/Jobs to switch. "I know you like WAR and it was good for the clear, but now we're pushing speed runs and you have to swap to GNB or DRK..." "I know we had you on RDM for clears and you love the rotation, but you have to swap to BLM now or get out of our one Caster spot..." The 1% do this. The rest of the community doesn't.

The community love to hear one thing said by one 'big name' and run with it. MCH cleared Week 1, even with the scuffed HP values, but people still go 'dead job omegalul'. Yeh it needed some buffs because it was behind a little compared to DNC or BRD, but a clear's a clear. Doesn't stop some tools in PF locking MCHs out of their week 16 P5S 'going for clear uwu' party. Same has happened in the past. WAR dead this tier, DRK dead in UCOB and then magically getting worldfirst, MNK dead at various times because the NIN DRG BRD MCH comp was too good, people never seem to understand that 'viable' and 'optimal' are very different beasts. Anyway, the point is less about how some groups say 'swap from SGE to SCH cos it's 100 dps more', this idea runs the potential for people to say 'swap from Dedicated to Support, cos it'll get us literal thousands more DPS'

No, it remains unchanged from today. Overall, because mitigation abilities don't JUST exist on Healer Jobs (and Healer Jobs don't have enough of them for min ilevel or near min ilevel runs), it's a party-wide responsibility. You can argue people would blame the healer instead of the DPS who didn't use Feint...

You really wanna see toxic midcore players who have no idea how to understand what caused a wipe, throwing shade at a 'Dedicated Healer' after a wipe even harder than they currently do? Because I can almost guarantee they will. I reckon I can even predict what they'd say, something along the lines of 'your only f*** job is to heal us and you cant even do that right', something like that? Doesn't matter if 'people blame healer already', more responsibility for HPS lumped onto one healer will mean more blame when things go wrong. Like I said, if we die to lack of mit, first blame thrown is at the shield healer, even if they use 3 mits and a Deployment.

The only thing that would need to be "changed" is for the Support based Healers to have more Support functionality and the Dedicated ones to have tools for sustained healing. Right now you can go into Ex3 and probably have one healer solo heal it with the other as just an emergency backup. People were solo healing ZodEx in 6.0. In 6.0, "selfish" WHM Glarespam was considered a liability to their party if they were doing actual healing, so (in an odd twist on this paradigm), their co-healer was basically solo-healing P1-4S with the WHM just doing support and suplemental healing with their oGCDs. The high damage bleeds are far more easily handled by having your WHM or AST use HoTs on the afflicted party members with additional support from your SCH/SGE's oGCD supporting heals.

Laughs in Panhaima, but yeh, the main reason people bring 2 healers for a lot of EX farms is not actually for the healing, or the 'safety' or whatever. It's because mechanics target certain players. People did 1 tank 1 heal runs of EX2 not just because it's faster, but because it was consistent who the stack marks for Water would go on. If that went random because of missing a healer, it'd have stayed as a 2heal fight. It'd be hella funny to see a curveball raid that required 3 tanks or something, though people would probably just do it with 2 tanks and have a DPS as the third, like a RPR or something

Sure, but roulette doesn't work by letting you pick your party members from a pool. You get stuck with what you get, just like now. Again, this is no worse than the game is right now...

Yeh, we get our party members from a random pick. Set aside the Savage for now, lets use Normal mode raids. If we want to have the roles really stand out, I'd estimate Dedicated healers would have to be 2x as strong on HPS output as Support Healers. Any less and you'd probably just run 2x Support and be fine. So, if the game throws you, idk, a new level 93 trial, which is designed with the new paradigm in mind, It gives you 1D/1S, and it's working how it should, cool. But what if it gives you 2 Supports? The equivalent of 2 SCH now, HPS checks have to be built to factor that in and be clearable by that comp. So the healing is 'tight but they can do it'. On the flip side, 2 Dedicated healers is going to be like WHM/AST paired up against a HPS check now. You just don't need that much HPS, most of it is wasted, CDs are left unused, Gauges are left capping. So the change only really affects High End, which, again, doesn't help solve the issue that veteran healers have of 'this EX roulette is pain'. Heck I did one earlier as SGE, and I decided 'you know what, once the barrier goes down, I'll keep track of which buttons I never press', and this is the result:



And I get the feeling that, as a Dedicated Healer class, this would be the average EX roulette too. Stuff just doesn't hit hard enough to justify it. It can't, while SE is on their 'oooh we have to protect the healers from stress' thing. Oh, and also while it's on my mind, we had this idea with the MT/OT split. That never went through, and I think the same logic applies here.

I played through some dungeons and trials as a healer recently and, regrettably, I realized that so long as there is a plethora of tanks who single pull and/or don't cycle cooldowns in level 90 content or teammates who consistently mess up mechanics, Yoshi will continue to perceive healers as fine because their role of cleaning up after people is being fulfilled. He genuinely believes peak healer gameplay is when teammates are constantly making mistakes.

Give us big unrestricted pulls, I wanna see some Algethar Academy tree-boss roomwide pull in this game, at least that'd force us to GCD heal (probably)