Originally Posted by
Renathras
THIS is also bad faith and snippy. You want me to provide evidence for an opinion? That we don't agree what "sorry state" is?
Or do you want me to provide evidence many players think the current healing is in a fantastic state? (In which case maybe you should only quote that part)
I just want to point out something very interesting with this response. Earlier, I stated that most players are unbothered by the current healers and would either remain unbothered or respond positively to added damage buttons, and your response was, verbatim "Can you cite evidence proving or strongly supporting this?" I literally copied and pasted it from your earlier response to pose the same question when you said "many players think healers are in a fantastic state."
Both my statement about players being unbothered and yours about players finding healing fantastic are both equally definitive statements, so you essentially just called yourself out for giving a "bad faith and snippy" response. Which is ironic because neither my, nor your responses to those specific statements are bad faith or snippy. It's entirely reasonable and valid to ask for evidence for definitive statements like that. Which is why I followed up with examples of direct response to healers responding positively to the concept of added DPS buttons with the 6.1 trailer example where the healers I've spoken with in my FC who are currently unbothered by WHM specifically and play it regularly were expressing desire to see the PVP WHM limit break integrated into their PVE kits as well as more broadly how wide audiences of gamers respond to game quality or balance/design adjustments through the examples of Pokemon and Super Smash Bros.
Let me try another way of trying to make sense of current healer design...
Healer Structure:
As it stands, all 4 healers share the same structure in gameplay. We agree that this is a flawed idea, because the point of having different jobs is the ability to offer different playstyles for different people. Regardless, this gameplay is defined as:
- Responding to fight mechanics, which every player does (though tanks specifically have additional mechanics to manage that DPS don't and healers don't really. In some harder fights you might respond to certain tankbusters with a cooldown, but you don't deal with the positioning elements or aggro, and in easy fights tanks just do it all themselves without your help)
- Responding to instances of damage every 30-60 seconds or so per fight on average through the use of primarily healing/mitigation cooldowns woven between offensive spells (or if you're WHM, occasionally substituting those DPS spells with a lily heal). These moments will typically last around 1-2 GCDs worth of gameplay time. In Savage, some fights extend this for specific mechanics, but only by another GCD or two.
- If you are a level 90 SCH, you can also respond with Expedient to increase your party's margin for error during tight positional mechanics.
- If you are AST, you manage your card system, which is on paper a more in depth system of constant engagement; however, the general consensus on the card system is that it's mechanically unfun to play and ultimately unrewarding in its current iteration. We can support this claim with the job's abysmal play rate, regularly cited as such by those who have given feedback here and on other media sources.
- Between instances of healing requirements, you spend the remainder of that 30-60 second window attacking with a bare minimum DPS toolkit. The bulk of this gameplay is casting your filler spell. Previous, I made the statement "you use this more than all other actions combined." Well I did some number crunching on P8S part 2, a fight with a very dense amount of healing requirements comparatively to most other content in this game, even other savage fights. I searched out 20 healers in teams that parsed green, 20 that parsed blue, and 20 that parsed purple (and I really dug deep to not just pull in top performing numbers) and these are the average percentages of Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis compared to all other actions. This is not percentage of DPS actions used, only the filler spell.
Green Average: 38.39%
Blue Average: 42.77%
Purple Average: 43.38%
I didn't do grey, orange, and pink groups to focus on values that could be considered closer to average on the low and high ends. But as you can see, I was incorrect on stating you use filler spells more than all others in all forms of content. But I would argue that considering I used P8S part 2 to find these values, those numbers will only go up with nearly all other forms of content, and even these numbers are well over 1/3rd of your action usage not including other DPS actions. Some other notes is that, interestingly, the green parse group ASTs were generally the lowest percentages of Malefic usage in contrast to other healers, which makes sense given how much card actions they use, but they were often higher than SCH and SGE in the blue and purple groups, which I think translates to higher skill level ASTs being more comfortable relying on their co-healer's OGCD regens, but that's just a theory. WHM was unanimously the healer that used their filler the most, probably because they have the smallest action total.
Conclusion to Findings:
An important detail to note is that this is almost certainly not reflective of prog given how late into this raid tier we are. That said, something worth mentioning about prog is that DPS doesn't initially matter until your team has reached enrage, and by the time your party reaches enrages and starts needing to push numbers, the majority of the mechanics should feel much smoother, so cautious healing has likely been mitigated by the time you have to start worrying about DPS contribution; however, these numbers may still be smaller early in a raid tier with lower gear and possibly needing an extra heal here and there due to having lower Mind and Determination, but I would guestimate that the number wouldn't be drastically smaller since you'd really only need 1 additional heal at times, and not all the time either.
In other words, at its apex, healers will depend on their filler spell for roughly 40% of their gameplay, and because there's no attributes like combos or additional effects associated with the filler spells, we can describe this 40% of gameplay as largely inactive, or able to be performed with an "auto-pilot" esque approach. This is not to say that you play entirely on auto-pilot, but at times where other jobs must multitask responding to mechanics and maintaining their damage output, healers are except from 40% of this. Again, this is roughly, and based on one of the most healing-intense fights we have well after its initial release. Most content in the game will rise this number quite a bit.
I want to try and translate this value to other games as best I can (which, to be mindful, will not be 1:1 comparisons) and see if you feel that these are genuine improvements to the gameplay experiences of those examples. You may disagree that some of these examples are effectively comparable to FFXIV, which is why I want to give a few different takes to see if we can find one that feels like an adequate comparison.
The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time:
Zelda games can loosely be described as puzzle platformers with a light combat aspect. A major part of Zelda gameplay is collecting new items that allow you to solve puzzles, such as the slingshot, the heavy boots, and bombs. One such tool is the bow and arrow. Let's compile some of the focus you'd spend on choosing inventory items by removing the bow and arrow and its power ups. Instead, you'll gain passive power ups to your sword that cause it to fire a shockwave that homes in on targets that you'd currently use your bow and arrow on. This also replaces the slingshot and boomerang. Instead of augmenting different arrows with fire, ice, or light, all of these effects apply at once and will automatically trigger applicable reactions, such as lighting a torch or freezing water. We can also merge your heavy boots and light boots to just be passive effects to your shoes that allow you to automatically resolve mechanics that require you to change your footwear. So instead of equipping the heavy boots to walk against heavy wind, for example, Link will automatically do this when approaching heavy wind instead. In this example, we've compiled your inventory to resolve more mechanics automatically. It's hard to say if this is effectively translates to 40%, but do you feel that these would make Ocarina of Time a better game?
Persona 5 Royal:
Currently, you can effectively break down Persona 5's turn based combat into choices between offensive actions, healing actions, and support actions (attack/defense/agility buffs and debuffs largely). Rather than have independent actions like Masakukaja, which increases the party's agility, all of Morgana's (the primary healer) healing spells now always boost the target's agility passively. Ryuji who is a bruiser type of character can currently boost the party's attack with Matarukaja, instead all his attacks just also decrease the enemy's defense instead. Effectively, support becomes automatic rather than chosen specifically, and all actions are just about attacking or healing. Every persona can currently carry 8 actions, but we can lower that to 5 actions, and Joker who can hold multiple personas can hold a maximum of 7 instead of 12. Does this improve the general experience of the game?
Tekken:
Tekken is a fighting game where combos can effectively be broken down into a combination of the following actions: Move, Run, Left Punch, Right Punch, Left Kick, and Right Kick. In this example, we will merge both punches and both kicks, simplifying the game's combat into Move, Run, Punch, and Kick. We can also shave down the total move list for each character to reflect this. Additionally, attacks can hit high, mid, or low, where low attacks can be jumped over, but can hit opponents who are guarding while standing up. We'll remove low attacks entirely, taking away the need to focus on whether you need to stand or crouch. Grabs can still break through guard, and every character has at least 2, so there's no issue of guard stalling. It's a fairly simple and easy change to compare to. Does this make Tekken a more fun fighting game?
Fire Emblem:
Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG with a lot of components that go into each encounter: unit count, vision, terrain, weapon triangle, mounted united, doubling enemies... It's a pretty extensive list. In this example, let's remove terrain effects for combat, making it so the player doesn't have to worry about positioning as much. Forests, forts, roads, etc. are all simply cosmetic. Mounted units are more often superior to grounded units due to having higher movement, but specific weapons are designed to counter these units and hit them for extremely high damage. We'll remove the advantages of mounted units as well as weapon advantages against certain types of units so players don't need to focus on what types of units the enemy has other than range and the weapon triangle. These two changes alone would make a major impact on lessening the burden of knowledge on the player, as unit choice and map layout are no longer concerns outside of weapons. There's still the aspects of combat, leveling, stats, and weapons though. Would this improve Fire Emblem's gameplay.
I want to reiterate that we've used a fight with a considerably higher demand for healing than the majority of FFXIV to find this value of 40%. If we wanted to make a more fair comparison to these games for the general experience of FFXIV's content, such as dungeons, fates, the MSQ, alliance raids, etc. This number would shift upward quite noticeably, meaning we'd need to further truncate gameplay aspects of these examples to more accurately compare them to our example of healer gameplay. Let's also be mindful that these are only indirect comparisons and they are not meant to equate the same experience as playing a healer in this game. The point is to try and identify a through-line that can unravel this mysteriously hidden shining quality to that 40% break period.
Reply With Quote
