The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ty_taurus]

But, we've had more triage-based healing. Not for a long while now and not terribly often, but... there wasn't anything exclusive between having more of a rush and sense of gamble from the healing itself AND having far more damage skills. We did have both. The devs gave up caring about it in the face of "just give them more skills(' bloat) as an expansion selling point" before they'd come anywhere close to leveraging it terribly well, but it was there.


Okay, but, who all actually thinks the near-entirety of our healing coming from fixed-timer oGCDs or mechanics devolving into "See A, slap button A," is... an improvement over what we had prior?

On the rest, mostly agreed, but... wanting more of our dopamine to come from the healing itself, wanting to feel like we're making more vital decisions in our healing, etc., isn't a preference that leads to "Well just go play WoW" anymore than just "Well, just go play (older) FFXIV." It's not so much that XIV isn't for that sort of player as... not for that sort of player anymore.

And given that I'm pretty sure those wanting more from healers, or even just the kind of "more" that we already had, outnumber those happy with their current state, that should mark a problem, not just a difference in preferences.

There are two examples I can think of where heavy healing mechanics were required:

1. Turn 2 cheese strat: The coils were wonky, and in Coil 2, you were pitted against a small labyrinth of rooms with minibosses. You'd have to make your way through at least 3, but there were more, and which ones you took down would disable certain effects from the final boss, but that final boss had a nasty mechanic known as Allagan Rot where you'd basically be playing hot potato with your team for the whole fight and holding it too long or giving it back to someone who had it recently would explode and kill everyone. The strat? Wait until there were I think it was 10 minutes remaining on the raid timer, where the boss would "enrage" by just spamming high damage AoEs. You'd completely bypass all of the boss's mechanics and just burn it down while the healers spammed Medica/Medica II/Succor. This was not the intended strat.

2. Mini-burn phases like in Brute Justice: At the end of the fight with Brute Justice in A8N and A8S, he spins around and just does constant raidwide damage for the last small chunk of his HP, with the raidwides growing in intensity. These mechanics are exceedingly rare--rarer than Esuna mechanics--and only make up a small fraction of the total fight.

Beyond this, sure sometimes there are small windows where burst healing is needed, but these are few and far between, and once that phase ends, you've got another 30-60 seconds where no one is taking damage but the tank, and generally the tank has no issues managing that themselves.

Those burst moments can be fun and feel great, but the gaping holes inbetween those phases should be fun too, especially since that gaping hole is sometimes the size of the entire fight in most of this game's content. This contrasts against some other MMO examples where raidwide damage occurs every few seconds. FFXIV has never designed a fight to function this way. The closest you get are examples of damage spam mechanics as with Brute Justice.

[Shurrikhan]

There are two examples I can think of where heavy healing mechanics were required:

I didn't say anything about "heavy" healing. Nor did you previously do so. You said "triage."

In triage, healing revolves around an element of leveraged bets, so to speak. You're guessing that there will soon be incoming damage enough to kill X, but not Y, and so you heal X first, or you're guessing, without certainty, you'll have time enough to perform a riskier but more efficient action. In triage healing elsewhere, some degree of emergency cooldowns usually needs to be saved, rather than simply used on cooldown, because spam heals won't be enough to salvage a mis-guess (no prior sustain buff, nor sufficiently topping off the upcoming victim --probably because they were chosen at random-- by which to make spam heals enough to keep them alive). That requires a degree of combat tuning and slightly more hectic encounter design.

We had already approached that a couple times in this game, only to then let it be swamped out by just having so damn much free healing and little worth saving it for that isn't so painfully obvious as to devolve into nearly pre-synced "un-mechanic" buttons. The scheduled rigid dance overtook it, but not necessarily for the better.

Those burst moments can be fun and feel great, but the gaping holes inbetween those phases should be fun too, especially since that gaping hole is sometimes the size of the entire fight in most of this game's content.

Again, you can have both. Having a satisfying set of downtime skills do not require the healing itself to be dry as dust. Yes, the downtime should be our first target because it's so much more easily improved, but it's not as if we have to choose between the one or the other. The contextual value downtime skills add depend also on the state of the healing kit relative to encounter design, so that area should come up eventually, too.

[ty_taurus]

I didn't say anything about "heavy" healing. Nor did you previously do so. You said "triage."

In triage, healing revolves around an element of leveraged bets, so to speak. You're guessing that there will soon be incoming damage enough to kill X, but not Y, and so you heal X first, or you're guessing, without certainty, you'll have time enough to perform a riskier but more efficient action. In triage healing elsewhere, some degree of emergency cooldowns usually needs to be saved, rather than simply used on cooldown, because spam heals won't be enough to salvage a mis-guess (no prior sustain buff, nor sufficiently topping off the upcoming victim --probably because they were chosen at random-- by which to make spam heals enough to keep them alive). That requires a degree of combat tuning and slightly more hectic encounter design.

We had already approached that a couple times in this game, only to then let it be swamped out by just having so damn much free healing and little worth saving it for that isn't so painfully obvious as to devolve into nearly pre-synced "un-mechanic" buttons. The scheduled rigid dance overtook it, but not necessarily for the better.


Again, you can have both. Having a satisfying set of downtime skills do not require the healing itself to be dry as dust. Yes, the downtime should be our first target because it's so much more easily improved, but it's not as if we have to choose between the one or the other. The contextual value downtime skills add depend also on the state of the healing kit relative to encounter design, so that area should come up eventually, too.

I was trying to think of a simplified way of describing "spam healing buttons because damage goes out every few seconds" but perhaps that was the wrong word choice, lol.

And yeah, I want the healing side of things to feel fun and thoughtful too.

[Shurrikhan]

I was trying to think of a simplified way of describing "spam healing buttons because damage goes out every few seconds" but perhaps that was the wrong word choice, lol.

Oh, shoot, we had totally different definitions of the word then. Does what I described sound more attractive, at least?