The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ForsakenRoe]

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

Triage healing works in other places because the game engine can actually keep up with the quick-reaction demand that 'triage' is at it's core. If you see the tank get clapped by a TB down to 20%, and a melee DPS happened to get clonked by it, and both are bleeding out to the attached DOT, FFXIV wouldn't allow for the quick decision making of 'I'll let the DPS suffer for the one GCD of cast time I'll use to keep the tank up, then Tetra them' or 'I'll Tetra the DPS now, and then cast time Cure2 the tank, and hope the tank has enough sustain/mit left to keep themselves up till my cast finishes', because every action in this game's crusty engine doesn't actually register on time, 'Bene lag' is the prime example. It'd be cool to have actual 'triage' situations, but the reason it works better in, say, WOW, is that AOE healing is not plentiful. It's either kinda weak but spammable, or has some internal CD like WildGrowth, Circle of Healing, Dream Breath, Spiritbloom, PowerWord:Radiance, etc. In order to have a similar environment here, Medica and it's equivalents would need to have a 10s CD at minimum.

Maybe they could do it with a hacky workaround though, some kind of debuff that means 'only single target healing affects this player for X seconds', then have it applied to, idk, 2 DPS while they get clapped by adds. At the same time, have both of the tanks be getting slapped around by hard autos from the boss. Now each healer has to handle one tank and one DPS, with single target healing. How long can they leave the tank alone to selfsustain? Is their 120s like Vengeance up soon to help mitigate? Is the DPS actually going to bother using Bloodbath? etc. All of this is kinda pie in the sky thinking though, as a key part of triage is that you can't save everyone, every time. Sometimes you have to choose to let the DPS die, to keep the tank, and therefore the pull, going for a little longer. And I feel like 'the healer purposely let X die', regardless of reason, is just gonna generate animosity, especially in a game that's used to healers being HPS demigods who can, in some cases, keep party alive without even intending to, because of incidental healing like Assize or EarthlyStar going off

As for HPS pump requirement phases, personally I think the 'more HPS requirement' of this tier was fun in a way. Keyword, WAS. For starters, it was mainly 'you need more mit on raidwides' which was a little bit /shrug, especially if you're the Pure Healer, not much changes. I've said in the past, imagine if P7S had the front/back fist slams do proximity damage, but the bleed is removed from Spark of Life. Less damage on Sparks, but way more frequent raidwides. Enough that the OGCD kit might not actually cover every single one. Also thanks to the passage of time, I'm BIS, everyone's BIS, we're back to outgearing the fights. The tale as old as time. And no matter how many times the tale is told, the ending is always the same. Can we take a leaf from the Minstrel's book, and try a DSR-esque timeline change, to a future where we didn't lose our damage skills in the jump to SHB. A future where WHM has Glare 4, Dia 3, Dia 2, Banish, Misery and the fixed lilies, Assize, maybe a way to proc an empowered Holy that does 300% damage, so it's a gain to Holy in single target, etc. Or SCH has like 7 DOTs like that one time in ARR. Or SGE is the Disc Priest equivalent a fair number of people had hoped it'd be.

A future, where the job design team sat down and never had to say 'hang on, we give tanks new DPS skills every expansion, we should do that for healers too', because it was understood to be a given, a 'blatantly obvious', that the two non-DPS roles should have equal amounts of DPS skills added with each expansion. That it was an inherently understood tenet of design, that if tanks get Primal Rend, or Inner Chaos, or Confiteor, or Blade of Blade, or Double Down, or Shadowbringer, despite being 'not a DPS', then it only makes sense that WHM would get Purgation, or SCH would get Meltdown, or AST would get Comet, or SGE would get... whatever they'd get (idk greek medical terms). A future, that, if it were possible to experience, as we do the alternate events of DSR, I think a great majority of players, from all skill levels, would say 'actually this slaps can we have this instead'.

Maybe they should do a PTR with some changes to try out, for people to give feedback on. Changes are hard to give feedback on without having it in your hands to mess around with, certain things like 'is this fluid' or 'is this clunky' can't really be interpreted from patch notes. So if they had a PTR of sorts, with a change like, idk, Taurus's AST changes, for people to try, and give feedback on, I wonder how many people who originally insisted 'I don't want healers to change at all from current' would think 'actually this isn't half bad, I quite like the gameplay for this class being super buff-heavy, I really feel like I'm empowering my team!'

If you seek a good faith argument, come back. Until then, if you seek to be willfully obtuse and act in bad faith, that's on you.

Bye, hf with the 24man and stuff

[Renathras]

Bye, hf with the 24man and stuff

O...kay?

That was to Ty not you (my reply to you was far more cordial as while I do think you're blindered to arguments, I don't think you're arguing in bad faith), though. So not quite sure why you replied to that quote and not my actual response to you, but whatever I suppose...

Oh, triage healing works in FFXIV - has in the past - it just requires healer kits to not be bloated with powerful oGCDs and for encounter designs to have different damage profiles than they've come to have. More like ARR and HW, less like SB/ShB/EW.

And there will never be a case of healers having as many DPS abilities as tanks. Tank's MAIN role (maintaing threat) requires they to do at least token damage outside of having abilities like Flash, which no longer exists. Moreover, Tanks don't have to juggle party needs on top of their damage. If a party member screws up a mechanic, it either wipes the group or its the healer's job to fix it, not the Tank's, generally. Their utility also works differently. They're all oGCDs - which you could argue healers' could be as well - but they also aren't designed to be spamable as a backup. If a party member repeatedly screws up mechanics, tanks don't chain cast Heart of Corundum or Nascent on them. They don't work as GCDs in that way, other than PLD Clemency, which you get yelled at if you use.

Healers, on the other hand, are STILL designed with that paradigm, even if it's not used in practice in scripted encounters where everyone executes mechanics perfectly. You'd have to give healers some oGCDs like Tetra that have no CD and can be used over and over again without a hard lockout in place for you to even begin to talk about healers in the same design space as tanks, and as yet, I've seen none of you present such a system.

A WHM can chain cast Cure 2 on a screwing up party member quite a few times - just tested this on a striking dummy and the number is 11 with a tick making it 12 (more Piety would make it absolutely 12, but let's go with that) Cure 2s with no use of Lucid, Thin Air, or pausing to use the Lily that was generated in that time.

So we'd need to have Tetra with 12 charges before we could safely remove Cure 2 and give healers a tank-level damage rotation.

12. Charges.

And that recharge quickly (within a minute), so you'd be generating charges of Tetra every ~6 seconds or so.

...though that does sound oddly amusing now that I write it out. Heh, that might be an interesting thing to do. Give WHM basically Solace and Rapture as oGCDs that stack to 10 and recharge ever 6 seconds. It would make healing ridiculously trivial, but if we did that (and, of course, had party mitigation like Temperance and maybe a lesser mitigation on a 60 sec CD), then we could start thinking about having a rotation on par with WAR or MCH. That might be fair.

...I'd wager none of you are proposing THAT.

EDIT:

So your position is that the forums comprise too small a user base... so let's instead look to...

Large collections of the playerbase that are a more representative sample of the player base than here? That sounds pretty smart, actually.

What you don't realize is every "neutral" is someone not agreeing with you. The bulk of your initial searches were that. Reinforcing the position that the bulk do not agree with your position. As the saying goes "Those who enjoy the game aren't on internet forums complaining about it". Neutral means "Enjoy it/like it/have no major complaints with it." It DOESN'T mean they might not like something else even better - let's get that clear - but it DOES mean they disagree with you of it being people "starving" and the like.

Also, note I said the COMMENTS, not the CREATORS. Chair also said the same thing I have - to change three healers and leave one braindead. I think that may have been his exact wording, with "probably White Mage". So again, this seems like the logical and best solution.

Specifically here at this timestamp in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWubxOTUWU&t=376s

...I'm guessing that's the video you're talking about. And I'd also note I basically agree with him overall. A bit less dripping sarcasm and I don't find 1-2-3 NEARLY as exciting as he does, but overall I agree with him. And to this day, I don't see why nAST needed to be removed. Because...there's no reason it needed to be removed. It's not like having ShB d/nAST would break the current game in any way at all. And I say this as a person that really dislikes AST!

Also what he says at 11:48:

"If someone complains that they need to be rewarded with more DPS for their complicated Job, simply tell them that their reward is being able to HAVE FUN and not being BORED out of their ------- minds! Shut the ---- up about a whole 2% dps variance!"

Also rules to live by. Basically, I'm fine with everything he said in that video and agree with the overall position entirely. I'd say it's my own, but it's a bit different - with the return of nAST, that would be FOUR healers with you guys' preferred playstyle to 1 without.

[Shurrikhan]

Oh, triage healing works in FFXIV - has in the past - it just requires healer kits to not be bloated with powerful oGCDs and for encounter designs to have different damage profiles than they've come to have. More like ARR and HW, less like SB/ShB/EW.

And there will never be a case of healers having as many DPS abilities as tanks.

She didn't ask for them to have the same total count of DPS abilities. She asked for them to have the same addition to one's offensive abilities per expansion (which the prior paragraph had just exemplified as not needing to each be on a discrete button, so long as they're still interactive [not just a potency bump trait])-- i.e., if DRK's getting Shadowbringer, maybe WHM should get Afflatus Purgation, or some way for Misery to briefly buff Glare/Holy.

Now, I'm not necessarily sold on their needing to be one-to-one or the like, but for a guy calling foul so often, I would think you'd be more attentive to the difference between a single adder and its sum.

Large collections of the playerbase that are a more representative sample of the player base than here? That sounds pretty smart, actually.

Our couple dozen or less consistent XIV streamers/content creators alone are not a larger sample than the whole of these forums.