The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

I really can't say how Yoshida actually feels about the topic as he obviously as to respond in a very PR friendly way, but I can't help but feel like he really wants to say something like "will you just stop worrying about that?" And I say that because there's always this really heavy dejected sigh whenever questions about healers come up.

I could be wrong, but I feel it's very likely he thinks of healers like old school MMO player would. Remember Yoshida was playing MMOs when they were just starting out. As well as single player RPGs, where in most of those, the healer was fairly limited on offensive options. In much of the Final Fantasy series original run (discounting the remakes made since Y2K), WHM often had only the offensive spell of Holy or a low damage offensive spell on-par with Fire/Ice/Bolt 1 in damage. Even in FFX-2, the WHM dressphere didn't even have the "Attack" command, instead having Pray. And in Everquest, Clerics (the main healers) never cast offensive spells in most major content, they would literally sit /meditate in battle to regain mana for more heals to cast, and there would be things like Cleric chains where they took turns in a set order sustaining the main tank while others rested to regenerate mana.

I'm not saying Yoshi P wants that, but he's just a bit older than I am and both of us experienced the evolution of healers in videogames in a similar way, so it may be how he kind of thinks of healers as primarily for healing. That would explain his HW era "We balance around healers doing no damage" and even "If you want to be challenged, play Ultimate" and the most recent (not exact quote) "Honestly, what do you guys want? We've tried making changes, but we don't get what it is you want..." statement. He likely thinks that the healing role appeals to players who want to actively heal, seems confused that people who want to DPS would play the role much, but also is worried he can't make healing too stressful or there won't be enough healers.

Part of the problem is like I said in my original post here - that there are a lot of different mentalities of healers asking for conflicting things (some are asking for more damage, some are asking for more healing, some are asking things be left the same, some want a change but aren't exactly sure what) - and so he's getting a lot of conflicting inputs that aren't compatible with each other (outside of a more complex version of my own idea, something like - leave one healer alone, make one do more damage, make one do more healing...and then make bosses sometimes need more healing but the more healing healer be able to handle it so the others don't have to, I guess?) It's a complicated problem to appeal to everyone.

In the simple days of ARR, this is kind of how it worked. WHM was mainly casting heals while SCH was more onto the DPS side of things in Cleric. WHM could use Cleric, but until late ARR and into HW, many didn't. WHM handled the heavy lifting for the healing while SCH supported.

And because of this, both types of healers were happy.

SCH's were able to work in support heals and buffs (Selene, Soil, etc) while mainly being focused on their damage output, shifting to healing dynamically if the needs of the fight demanded it. WHM's mostly stayed out of Cleric and focused on things like keeping HoTs rolling on those needing it and GCD healing the tank and party as necessary. Everyone was happy, because we had a healer that appealed to each of the two types of healer players, and they were both needed for the content so everyone had a spot and a role to play in the group dynamic. Most ARR era SCH's had a blast playing the Job. Likewise, most ARR era WHM's had a blast being healing powerhouses that could heal their team to success. A modern incarnation of that is what I think the game needs.

Post Gordias, as the shift was more towards healers should damage, it started to alienate the healers that liked healing. Over time, enough left that it caused issues with the healing requirements frightening off the more damage/support focused healers who didn't like having to deal with it, leading to the simplification of healing needs to de-stress the role. At the same time, they de-focused on damage. So basically they made everyone angry.

ARR was basically like if instead of a Pure/Barrier split, healers had a Heal/Support split. And honestly, I think that might be _A_ solution. Though I'm not sure these Devs have the knack for making it work in a compelling way.

I don't know for sure, of course, but that's my guess.

I'm not generally opposed to healing leading to DPS. I am generally opposed to DPS leading to healing.

Note that I say "generally". If a specific Job was designed that way, I'm okay with it. But it shouldn't be the role. For example, as I've said before, SGE having a rotation like SMN or even RDM minus the melee component would not be a negative in my mind. As long as the Job can still meet fundamental healing requirements even if they mess it up. For example, suppose (for simplicity, I'll use RDM names) SGE had Fire/Stone, Aero/Thunder, Holy/Flare, and Scorch. Just that. 4 Hotbar spaces (Scorch would replace Fire/Stone, Holy and Flare Aero and Thunder, respectively). If they all did the same Kardia 170 healing, this means if you flub your rotation, you're still generating the same healing, thus meeting "the requirement". On the other hand, suppose Fire/Stone generated 100, Aero/Thunder generated 150, Holy/Flare generated 200, and Scorch generated 300. Now if you mess up your rotation, you might not be meeting the minimum healing requirements.

The reason I think this is important is twofold. The first is that whole "scaring off healers" thing that I think we've both acknowledged is a Dev concern. The second is that the pro-DPS healer player should be accommodated (keep in mind I've held to this position, just not for ALL healers) with a Job that isn't punishing them for doing what they want to do. If it was the increasing model and you flubbed your rotation, you'd have to break out the Diagnosis spam or whatever, which would disrupt the SGE player from what they actually enjoy, the damage dealing. Granted, you might have to do this some otherwise, but generally you'd supplement your Kardia healing with oGCDs instead and only fall back on your GCD heals in cases of emergencies. And by that I mean "24 man opening day" not "I messed up my rotation".

...then again, I'm not a DPS minded player and maybe those who are WANT to be punished with their tank dying if they flub their rotation or them being forced into chain hardcast heals if they flub their rotation? But I would think not. I would think they'd want the tank to stay alive so they can try to reset and get their DPS rotation back on track without having to expend a bunch of GCDs on heals.

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Alphinaud vs Red Mage: Let's be fair, anything compared to RDM is going to look less stylish. And I'm not sure comparing a character cinematic to a Job Actions trailer is a good apples-to-apples. For example, contrast the GNB Job actions trailer to Thancred using the Job. RDM is particularly stylish because of backflipping and some flashy cast animations mixed with melee. It's probably one of the most dynamic feeling Jobs in the game to watch played. Alesaie doing RDM just before him doesn't look nearly as dynamic as the RDM Job actions trailer, either.

That said: A lot of this is personal taste, I'd wager. To me, SGE's normal attack is fun to watch. I love the animation and the lasers make me think of the Ghostbusters Proton Packs because of the way there's that little plasma swirl around the axis of the lasers. They're laser pointers for Dosis 1, sure, but Dosis 3 looks amazing to me. The big red X from Toxicon makes me think of Double Down. I think Plegma's the only one I'm not super amazed by, but it's also the one ability in SGE's roster I'd really change (make it 15 or 25y, 6y just feels too short). Holos has a lovely animation, as do Eukrasian Diagnosis and Hamia.

I dunno, I guess we disagree, but I love SGE's animations.

On WHM...not really? Of WHM, SCH, and SGE (the three I play), WHM's main cast is probably the least "umph-y" of the three. SGE's is super cool lasers that have thickness and feel like they have some heft to them. SCH's makes me think of the red plasma turrets from Halo, and the sound effect feels like some "impact" when it hits. WHM's feels a little more like...you know in Dragonball Z how sometimes a fighter will fire off a slew of weak attacks and they always do nothing? Lampshaded in DBZ Abridged when Vegita does it to Perfect Cell who replies "Oh, Prince...when has that EVER worked?" WHM's feels more like that. But it also is the only one that kinda floats in the air as it charges the cast (also Holy), which just looks cool to me. So it evens out. I don't really get tired of any of them, no. It's the same to me as the 1-2-3 rotations on Melee/Tanks/MCH. It's the filler thing you do and it looks cool enough for what it is - your basic attack.

I guess that's my take on it, anyway.

I've never really cared for WHM as a CNJ/Druid. I get it's lore accurate, but it's kind of meh to me. So Quake/Tornado/Flood probably wouldn't inherently have me like them better. Besides which, I feel like those are more AOE spells than single target ones. I'm not saying I would hate it, but I'm more saying I'd probably not like it any better, per se. I'd feel pretty neutral towards it. I think WHM spells should be more Light focused. As we learned in ShB, Umbral is kind of like the "higher order" form of those spells. So Earth, Ice (not Wind), and Stone upgrading to Light makes sense in the same way Fire, Thunder, and Aero (not Blizzard) upgrading to Darkness would make sense. It would honestly feel a bit weird if WHM were to go back to more "base" elemental magics after touching the higher magic Umbral spells. Though if it WERE to do so, the high order ones (Quake, Tornado, Flood) would make more sense than just more Stone/Aero.

I'm not entirely sure I understand your proposals, but having Cure 2 and Medica just become instant cast once every 20 seconds (Lilies - I don't think the Devs want to move that back to 30 because that means 90 sec for 3 instead of 60 sec for 3, which breaks the written by thee hand of God on tablets of stone 2 min burst window system... <_< ) Just ignore Solace and Rapture, unless we're just doing that for the animations, I guess. If it's the same button, it's not like it matters to me either way. But in practice...this would be the same as WHM today, just with a little better button economy, I suppose. In theory, it would be a nerf (someone thinking they'll need to use two Cure 2s might have time to cast one but need the second to be instant for a movement mechanic and this system would nerf that...but I think that's a super edge case we don't really need to worry about.)

I was trying to think of more frequently cast buttons, though, to break up the Glarespam - since I think we've identified the unbroken spam as the thing that people most dislike. This proposed change wouldn't alter that, as you'd just be casting Solace and Rapture as you do now, and Misery at the same frequency. You'd be freeing up two buttons, but...

I get you're thinking use Water/Banish to get it back to 60 seconds, but that still seems to go against the Dev intention. I'm not sure of any other Job that has its burst only line up only by doing something specific like that (that is, their burst BUFFs), though rotation gets into some gray area, I suppose. The problem, though, you note - having to save an oGCD to use if you need to heal then. I think the Devs' intention with healers is that they never have to do that. That is, that your DPS spells don't push healing. It's why they didn't give healers a combo before (when spells were all hard-coded to break combos) because they didn't want someone getting "locked in" and not healing because of it. For example, how if I'm on RDM and you die during my melee combo...you're just gonna have to wait until my melee combo's done before you get a raise outside of some extremely extraordinary situation (e.g. 6 people are dead but me and the tank but healer LB3 is ready).

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Though I am a bit curious how "heals generate Misery would be hard for casuals because they'd need to (needlessly?) cast heals to fit more Misery into burst windows) would be too difficult, but stack and charge mechanics on spells wouldn't be?

In a strict sense, it would be little different than today (casuals not saving Misery for buff windows), it would just be less punishing to use GCD heals, which may break up the monotony of casting nukespam. Not to mention some other animations are nice to see. I outright love Eukrasian Diagnosis' animation. Would love to cast it more and it not be so detrimental to optimal play. Honestly, they should probably just remove Solace and Rapture in this scenario to encourage Cure 2 and Medica use, but at the end of the day, the result would be the same. Well, except you could use Misery more often, I suppose. I suppose you could flip the script and make Misery like Toxicon where it only needs one stack and only needs to do 2x Glare's worth of damage since that wouldn't put as much pressure on getting it into a buff window, but honestly, no idea.

I think that'd actually be all the more harmful to, especially, the 70+%, as it'd be taking something at least somewhat intuitive (don't GCD heal if you don't need to) and replacing it with optimally wasting heals in cycles to be readied for Cards and, to their caps in preparation for sync with 2-minute damage buffs.

Would it?

Consider you'd still be getting 1 Misery per 60 sec natively from Lilies, and that's literally how Lilies are used now. I'm not sure this would really change anything in that sense. If anything, it would make it more casual friendly since the people using more hardcast heals would refund that damage with Miseries. Super-casuals aren't thinking in terms of optimal, so they wouldn't be thinking "I should heal now when it's not needed so I can Misery in the buff window". So it wouldn't change their gameplay at all. This is actually a change that would MARGINALLY allow for a SLIGHTLY increased skill ceiling under very specific situations (a non-casual doing high end content where Misery drifted getting it back on-track) while not harming casuals and being such a niche case for optimization that the mid-core wouldn't be disadvantaged. I think it's one of those "more dps buttons/rotation" changes that doesn't cause a problem.

That is, optimizing players wouldn't cast Cure2/Medica when not needed for Misery during burst windows, since you can't stack Misery. If you have a full bloom on the Blood Lily right now and cast Solace/Rapture, it's wasted (as far as generating Misery goes). And if you're in the buff window, casting Misery (that you've built up before the window) then Cure 2 3x then Misery would be identical in DPS to casting Misery + Glare x4. So there'd be no optimization there other than if you need to heal during the buff window, you could do so and (if you did so 3x) have enough time in the buff window to refund that damage as opposed to now if you had to do it, you'd be missing out on one Glare's worth of damage.

But, again, this is something only very high end players would even play around with, and it would be damage neutral vs just playing exactly as you play today. It just would allow you more flexibility with healing. So I think it would be a good change as it doesn't hurt the casuals or mid-core, and it gives the high end something to REALLY wring out just that little bit more optimization if they genuinely want to, but that is damage neutral vs the more midcore player.

Honestly, it'd work better with WHM since it's designed more for GCD healing. SGE with Toxicon would be nice (not sure broken or not...), but you guys are correct in that it has oGCD healing and WHM is kind of just mimicking that with Lilies + Misery.

I think the problem is the Devs, as we all seem to agree, don't see "lost damage GCD" in the way the playerbase does. They don't see GCDs as a resource/meta-resource. Misery just turned out to be a happy accident, it seems. Does explain why it took them so long to make it damage neutral. They didn't get that was the calculation players were actively making.

They STILL seem not to, exactly.

What makes WHM simple is it doesn't need to pay attention to what the enemy is doing as much as the other healers.

We're mostly discussing their damage rotations. I think there's at least implicit acknowledgement that their healing kits are at least marginally different (other than maybe SCH/SGE). The questions are more specifically about the damage kits and trying to nail down what exactly makes "fun" and what can be done there without major impacts on the downstream playerbase that may disagree.

Why are the devs so laser focused on any tiny issue the community might have with Tanks and DPS but completely ignore the healer side unless we're too loud to ignore?

I honestly and genuinely think it's because they don't know what to do for sure with healers. Everything they do pisses people off, so they're trying to ride the line of "What seems to minorly piss everyone off but majorly piss off as few people as possible". More damage upsets people. More healing requirements upsets people. Fewer buttons upsets people. More buttons upsets people.

They know that making healing too stressful crashes the number of healers. They know that making healers to damage focused crashes the number of healers. But they know that not making them damage enough also crashes the number of healers. So they're trying to ride that line and thread the needle between. And as much as people say they aren't doing a good job...they kind of are for what they're working with. The question is if they should continue to try and maintain this paradigm or not. It's the entire reason for my suggestion, since if they favor one or the other camp, the number of healers will crash (again). So for any major change, it would need to favor both at the same time, I think. We either have the current "split the difference" model or we can genuinely split into two types of healers.

And, honestly, if we had "healing focused" and "support damage focused" healers, that would probably actually MAKE SENSE in the game where the Pure/Barrier split did not...

Indeed, as I described above, this is largely the way ARR played, in both casual and more hardcore settings, but especially 8/24 man settings where the WHM's often did the bulk of healing while the SCH's were support and damage focused, able to dynamically swap to healing when the WHM's needed more help and then back to damage as the situation allowed.

Tanks and DPS the only real (global, not Job specific) issues are that people don't really like the 2 min window, but it has some proponents and is more an expansion level rework anyway. Though even there, they don't make everyone happy. SMN's rework, Kaiten's removal, MCH going 3 major patches without any really needed changes, and the PLD rework are all examples. But they seem to have a clearer vision there. With healers, it's like they want the "healers are for healing" model, but the encounter design and Job design doesn't really make sense for that. So it's this awkward place with "Do you want us to do what you say or what us to do what your tools and encounters implicitly say we should?"

[Shurrikhan]

The odd thing to me about that, though, is I feel if they were really worried about that, they'd make all GCD heals generate a damage neutral resource.

Consider you'd still be getting 1 Misery per 60 sec natively from Lilies, and that's literally how Lilies are used now. I'm not sure this would really change anything in that sense. If anything, it would make it more casual friendly since the people using more hardcast heals would refund that damage with Miseries. Super-casuals aren't thinking in terms of optimal, so they wouldn't be thinking "I should heal now when it's not needed so I can Misery in the buff window". So it wouldn't change their gameplay at all. This is actually a change that would MARGINALLY allow for a SLIGHTLY increased skill ceiling under very specific situations (a non-casual doing high end content where Misery drifted getting it back on-track) while not harming casuals and being such a niche case for optimization that the mid-core wouldn't be disadvantaged. I think it's one of those "more dps buttons/rotation" changes that doesn't cause a problem.

Honestly, it'd work better with WHM since it's designed more for GCD healing. SGE with Toxicon would be nice (not sure broken or not...), but you are correct in that it has oGCD healing.[/hb][/hb]

Sure, they might not know why more veteran players are yeeting heals into the overhealth abyss, and might not therefore copy that well/sensibly/directly, but it's still going to be confusing for them if every GCD heal is DPS-neutral but through bankable refunds that then get spent during damage amp windows and therefore creates this really twisted up optimal play that they'd have to figure out at some point to progress deeper into mastery.

And in the meantime, precisely because wasteful healing to prep damage is unintuitive as all heck (especially when it's not simply an exact analog of any other source of [already bloated] free healing), it's only widening the gap (and suspension of otherwise more reasonable instincts) between new and veteran players.

I don't think true DPS-neutral heals outside of CDs are a good thing.

Some refunding? Sure. But not outright lossless casts.

:: And ideally (to me), incoming non-burst damage would be higher and oGCDs and Lilly spells (unless we wanted specifically to give WHM an MP advantage for "prog champ" status) both would have MP cost enough that there wouldn't be any wholly "free" healing anyways that WHM would need to match up again skill-per-skill.

I think the problem is the Devs, as we all seem to agree, don't see "lost damage GCD" in the way the playerbase does. They don't see GCDs as a resource/meta-resource. Misery just turned out to be a happy accident, it seems. Does explain why it took them so long to make it damage neutral. They didn't get that was the calculation players were actively making.

They STILL seem not to, exactly.

I could have sworn they (Yoshida and Starfox, in one of the first LLs) noted exactly that factor in explaining why we were seeing double-SCH so often even in T1-4 (rather than only as a fix to Infirmity in T5, since Lustrate at the time healed for 25% HP regardless of anti-healing debuffs). Since SCH had effectively auto-regen and a much less wasteful 3/4s of a Bene every minute, instead of 1 per 5 minutes... yeah, SCH was kicking WHM's butt overall simply because WHM had to drop significant damage (and mana) to do any healing while SCH didn't -- i.e., a gap in oGCD output. It wasn't particularly unknown or undiscussed even back then. It was ostensibly part of their reasoning behind adding Tetra and Asylum (or simply, a greater increase in oGCD throughput to WHM than to SCH).

And, because nontraditional compositions were also more common back then, it seemed like, if anything, people were more aware of this idea that the point of healers, and even healing itself, was ultimately clear speed (via cheese, permissible uptime, etc.) instead of solely reliability.

[Renathras]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

I get there are a lot of "That's impossible..." what-ifs. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend. As I noted above, on at least some level, this was how healing in ARR worked, and players were (at the time) largely satisfied with this, with many loving both healers despite their individual focuses. Set aside the "impossible" and "ARR wasn't REALLY like that by 2.4 and on..." and so on, just a thought experiment.

[ty_taurus]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

I get there are a lot of "That's impossible..." what-ifs. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend. As I noted above, on at least some level, this was how healing in ARR worked, and players were (at the time) largely satisfied with this, with many loving both healers despite their individual focuses. Set aside the "impossible" and "ARR wasn't REALLY like that by 2.4 and on..." and so on, just a thought experiment.

We technically have this dynamic now with DNC who's identity revolves around buffs and can also provide very mild sustain. I do play DNC now and enjoy it, but I would rather be playing SGE with the fantasy that it is entirely capable of delivering upon. So in short, I don't think anything would change. You'd get some players who'd accept the DNC identity, but you'd still have a lot of vocal backlash against the healer role for feeling stale in easier content. It would still probably be looked at as inherently flawed by many dedicated healing players. The game would also need to output damage constantly in order to justify the healer role and not have the meta kill it for a 2x support scenario you mentioned, and who knows how that would impact MSQ instance content. You'd probably just have a different game entirely at that point. Perhaps if the frequency of damage was high enough to actually justify healing rotations, it might not be as frowned upon, but it's too difficult to say because the environment would have to be entirely alien to the one we have now.

The reality is, that idea of healer is one that is dying because it was historically very unpopular in older MMOs where healers were HP batteries and little more. Most people don't want to just be a battery or a cheerleader. They want to engage with the gameplay, just from an angle of someone who prioritizes support and needs to make decisions based on the situation their in of when to attack, when to heal, when to support, etc.

Now I know the point of this was for the sake of argument, but I do want to point out that while many of the suggestions several of us have made over the years about the healer role may be a lot for the tepid constitutions the devs seem to have around healer design, that these are suggestions would work within the structure that this game provides. It doesn't require a ground-up rework of the game because we discuss changes that work based on how encounters are designed currently. We need to accept that DPS is a major party of healer gameplay in this game as it has been designed, whether intentional or no, but I also believe that this acceptance can also lead to creating a healer that is meant to appeal to the healer that doesn't like offense--a healer who disguises their DPS contributions through support.

[Renathras]

We technically have this dynamic now with DNC...

True, but that's kind of my point - it's not a Healer Role split. It's a DPS Role split, and it's kind of haphazard. 3/4 Jobs sort of have it and sort of not:

PLD - A Tank with a lot of party healing and mitigation. All the tanks, honestly, have some capacity for party healing and mitigation (WAR does as well), but PLD has the most on-demand between Clemency, an extra raid mitigation, and the rare uses of Cover. No Raise for a "second healer". Its healing is a DPS loss, to the point it's rarely used without condemnation.
DNC - More a buff focus than a healing focus, but with some healing abilities. But its healing abilities weaved within its damage formula but also gated by long CDs preventing any kind of sustained support healing. No Raise for a "second healer".
RDM - Potential for sustained party healing, but the healing is more or less as weak as it can be and not be completely trivial. Best Raising potential in the game. Its healing/Raising is a complete DPS loss, however.
SMN - The only other non-healer with a Raise, but its healing outside of Phoenix once every 2 minutes is less than trivial. Phoenix healing is enough to be significant, but is time gated and cannot be held for situations needed, making it often useless overhealing.

We don't have a Healer system with this basis. Although here we could note that other than PLD (for rotational issues), the other three are widely loved classes, and of the people who do love PLD, one of the reasons is because of that support capability. SMN is the most played Caster (and possibly the most played DPS Job), RDM is still very popular, and DNC is the most played Ranged.

I'm not saying it's what would be used for SGE, but SCH and AST having a kind of hybrid support profile would probably be very popular. In effect, isn't this what most of you are asking for already? ARR SCH? Healer Jobs that maintain a DPS rotation and uptime with some damage ability interactions/CDs and such where most healing is done through oGCDs or ability interactions?

This would make the "Support Healers" more fun (rather than stale) in easier content for the players who are bored now, since you'd actually be playing something like DNC or RDM when no healing was needed, shifting more heavily into your healing tools only when the situation demanded it. I don't know DNC that well, but I know RDM decently.

[EDIT to clarify - I mean "A healer/new healer/SGE/SCH, whatever that played like this"]

I would envision something like imagine if RDM had its present day rotation with a few tweaks. Acceleration has a shortish CD (30 sec, maybe) and can be used on heals. Using it on heals generates more Black/White Mana of some set amount (less than if you were using your DPS rotation, but enough to partly refund GCD healing with damage) than their standard non-acceleration amount (which would be as much as Jolt 2) and make them instant cast. Maybe it guarantees procing Stone or Fire Ready (whichever Mana you have less of), the details aren't overly important here. It gains the abilities Vermedica (a simple AOE heal) and Vercure 2 (a larger single target heal). It would also have an AOE oGCD heal with a CD around 60 seconds (Vermedica 2, perhaps), a single target heal like Lustrate/Durchole with a 60 sec CD (Vergrammaton), a second heal that's basically the same thing, but consumes 10/10 or something White/Black Mana (Ver...lustrate?) (so like SCH with non-Energy Drain healing abilities, optimization would be to avoid using it, but it's there if you need spikes of single target emergency healing; RDM also already has something like this in live as a DPS with Enchanted Reprisal as a movement tool but one you generally want to avoid using unless you have to), and probably some kind of oGCD single target barrier, like VerStoneskin as either a Benison or Aquaveil equivalent (every healer has some kind of Aquaveil at this point other than MAYBE SCH depending on how you want to look at Protraction). Finally, healing GCDs don't break the melee/burst combo. If we wanted to, we could make more oGCDs use Mana or add an AOE oGCD that does or something, but this is just a framework.

So your oGCD kit consists of something akin to Physis, Tetra, Lustrate (spamable with Mana), and Divine Benison, along with, of course, Magick Barrier, which is outright (a weaker version of) Temperance right now, backed up by a strong single target spamable GCD backup heal (Vercure 2) and a AOE spamable GCD backup heal (Vermedica). And, of course, Verraise.

The gameplay would consist of performing the rotation just like today, and when your Pure Healer teammate needed more support, you could use your oGCD healing tools for spot or emergency healing, and in crisis situations, you could support with Dualcast 2x Medica or Cure 2 spam.

This would be a lot like ARR SCH with a main focus on DPS upkeep with oGCD healing support, having GCD backup heals for moments of crisis. The GCD heals could also be used with Acceleration to generate Mana, or could be used as Dualcasts at a minor DPS loss. Using it as the lead cast of a 2 spell pair would refund some of the damage lost by generating a Jolt 2's (spell you want to avoid/"consolation prize" rotation ability when you don't have Fire/Stone anyway) worth of mana. Still a damage loss vs Jolt 2 (what with not doing damage), but wouldn't interrupt your rotational flow if you're able to heal in this way - remember that being one of my considerations for the DPS minded healer, that their rotation flow be as little disrupted as necessary by healing needs in a general sense outside of emergencies.

Surely that wouldn't feel stale, especially since you were just mentioning how stylish and fun RDM looks?

It would still probably be looked at as inherently flawed by many dedicated healing players.

That's the point - dedicated healing players would, instead, play the other Healer subrole, let's call it Dedicated Healing (DH vs SH) to avoid confusion with the current "Pure" or "Barrier" names.

Again, just like in ARR where dedicated healing players didn't enjoy SCH and so played WHM, under this model, they wouldn't play the Support Healer unless they wanted that playstyle. In ARR, if a dedicated healer picked up SCH, they either adapted to or it swapped back to WHM when they realized Adlo wasn't Cure 2 and Succor wasn't Medica.

...I also find it a bit confusing you're arguing against this. Isn't this what you were asking all healers to become? o.O

The game would also need to output damage constantly in order to justify the healer role and not have the meta kill it for a 2x support scenario you mentioned,

P5-P8S say hai. Not trying to be snarky, just a smidge of humor. We just saw this, so it's clearly not a "change" here, it's what we have right now. It's also what we had in ARR and HW. I think you said before you'd been playing since then as well. Do you remember back when boss autos were actually dangerous AND could occasionally crit? That makes P5S's bleed look tame since at least it's anticipated and controlled.

and who knows how that would impact MSQ instance content.

It wouldn't. As you guys are fond of saying in your idea to change all the healers, MSQ would remain unchanged for the casual player so Healers not into that could play as they do today. No reason to change that.

Likewise, in casual 2 healer content, 2x Supports would work entirely fine. For example, in 24 mans now, you don't need a Pure and Barrier healer. You arguably could probably solo heal all those fights if your party members are avoiding avoidable damage. So for the purposes of ques - 24 mans, leveling dungeons, and so on - there would be no healer shortage even if the Sustain Healers were unpopular (they wouldn't be, btw), since the game could just grab Support Healers to slot in and have no problems.

You'd probably just have a different game entirely at that point.

P5-8S are in this game right here. And again, ARR and HW. I'm not sure it would be "different game entirely" nor "entirely alien" since it's both been this game in the past and is arguably this game this tier.

The reality is, that idea of healer is one that is dying because it was historically very unpopular in older MMOs

Not really. While it's true that some less players want to play them (hence splitting the role so you only need half as many), healers were traditionally more played than Tanks, and still are in a lot of games. Even in FFXIV, Tanks and Healers are roughly equivalent in number of players, and this is with the healing model being unsatisfying for many. So it's never been historically very unpopular, and has often been more popular than Tank. Still arguably is except in games that allow for a Support role. Note also that Support is something a lot of players enjoy, despite games not having it as a fleshed out role.

Non-scientific, but in polls of the Pantheon community, the split is roughly 18% Tanks, 22% healers, 30% Support, and 30% Damage players. Not exact, but Healers are a bit more than Tanks, and the DPS players split. In many games (no Support role), those players are forced into one of the other three roles, and tend to play either Healer or something like DNC/RDM and find themselves dissatisfied because it's not QUITE what they like best, instead preferring something like a Mesmer/Enchanter/Bard (Everquest type, not FFXIV type). Which is to say, there are a lot of players that genuinely want that playstyle and are kind of just left in the cold.

It turns out a significant amount of people kind of DO want to be a party cheerleader, just a lot of them want to be a different type of cheerleader.

Moreover, I don't think Dedicated Healers are nearly the vanishing base of players you do. I know players who ONLY play healers in games, and they don't DPS. You guys talk all the time about how many 0 DPS Sylphies you run into in all your dungeon and Party Finder Raids, right? Someone earlier said she ran into a healer that ran away from the enemies so they didn't damage any with Assize. Clearly there are a lot of these players (by your collective anecdotes) rather than it being a dying or vanishing playeerbase. If it was vanishing as you say, then you guys wouldn't have all those stories of the 0 DPS healers, right?

They want to engage with the gameplay, just from an angle of someone who prioritizes support and needs to make decisions based on the situation their in of when to attack, when to heal, when to support, etc.

At the risk of taking us to the unproductive place we were a few pages ago - I think here you're stating your own opinion as if it is shared by everyone. You say "They want to engage with the gameplay". Two issues with this are (1) Dedicated Healers ARE engaging with the gameplay, they just aren't engaging with a DPS rotation and (b) why is "They"? I get that "They" includes you, but are you of the mind that you can speak for the entire healing playerbase across all of gaming? Is that not a bold claim?

that these are suggestions would work within the structure that this game provides.

Ahem...

...many are not. For example, your two concepts (particularly the first one) above would not work with the current game encounter design and party structure as we have it today.

Moreover, what I proposed actually would work just fine. For non-Savage content, it would be irrelevant. For Savage content, you could probably brute force it just like people were able to get a single healer Ultimate clear. Dedicated players could probably 2x Support Healer it if the party as a whole made some modifications (DPS with more healing/mitigation utility) and played well (no taking avoidable damage at all), while the majority would opt for taking one of each healer. It would be no different than P5S if you had one Healer focused on healing all the bleeds while the other Healer focused on DPS, shifting to support healing during the heavy damage phases.

The game is already working like this in the current tier, and did in 6.1 (selfish WHM's forcing their co-healer to do 80+% of the healing is a perversion of this idea, and it literally worked - people hated it because it wasn't intended and designed for)

So I'm confused why you're saying this idea would require a "ground-up rework of the game" considering both of the previous raid tiers (both in the EW expansion) have had examples of this in the live game (clearly it hasn't required a total rework!), and the game also has this as the roots of what we have today, being the way healing worked in ARR and arguably HW...

I'm a bit confused how you're thinking it requires entire reworks when it's already what we have in live?

.

We don't "need to accept that DPS is a major part(y) of healer gameplay". Again, at the risk of before, that's what you need me to accept for your position to be the default and have precedence. (In other words, for your position to win "by default".) But there's no actual reason or necessity to do so. Current encounter design and healer gameplay shows we do not, in fact, need to accept that.

But besides that, this WAS a thought experiment. A "what if" and "how would it work if we did it"?

You will never appeal to Healers that don't like offense if you're presenting them with a choice of do more offense or be a worse player. Forcing them into casting non-healing support is only a marginal solution, as it will only appeal to a few, and will mostly appeal to Support players (from the Tank/Heal/Support/Damage paradigm), not to Heal players. In other words, it will appeal to players like you more than to players like me.

Imagine in reverse if we had a system where all your damage spells were treated by the community as a Paladin casting Clemency - you being bad. That you're only to use them in very niche cases. Surely you can realize you would find Healing very un-appealing in a game design where you were told to not cast DPS spells in group play and that they were just for doing solo instances. I'm not sure how you think the reverse is going to appeal to people who are your mirror. Can you explain this?

That is, I think you don't understand people that disagree with you like me. You seem to think my mindset is "I don't want to damage the enemy personally", or think that I/we want to play as a pacifist. Like I think it was Sem who said the Healer ran away from the enemy pack to not accidentally hit them with Assize. While I won't say NO ONE plays that way, I'll say that's not the majority of us on the other side. As I've expressed before, what I don't like are damage rotations and upkeep buttons/CDs. Like take RDM. I don't mind Jolt/Stone/Fire/Aero/Thunder/Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution, per se. I don't like being stuck in a rigid damage rotation while trying to heal. I also don't like abilities I need to use on CD or line up. It's why I hate DoTs and having to upkeep them, and on SCH often forget Chain Strat. My mind just isn't in that space.

Conversely, it's why I don't mind dealing damage (one-button Glarespam/Dosispam/etc) because I have no aversion to hurting the enemy. I have an aversion to something distracting me from party healthbars. It's also why I'm okay with charge CD direct damage abilities (like Phlegma) because I can use them in a wide span without a performance loss. I have a 40 second window to use Plegma in as opposed to Dia where I have a single GCD I must use it on or suffer a performance loss. It's the lack of flexibility that I had issue with in both your WHM change proposals, especially the first because of the length and rigidity in the burst window.

In short: It's not harming the enemy I/we have an aversion to, it's being locked in a rigid damage rotation or damage rotation that steals mental focus away from the fight and healing needs of the party.

Replacing "damage" with "support/buffs" tends to lead to the same result. It's why I don't find AST appealing (well, also the aesthetic, but the playstyle), and would only find it slightly more appealing if the Cards were GCDs, but not much more.

I'm just curious about how you're so certain of what other people think or how they'd react to changes... I agree that many players have the same focus and interest that you do. If I didn't think so, I would never have proposed changing any of the healers at all. I'm just confused why you are so resistant to see that the opposite is also true. Dedicated Healers (players) are no more dying than Support Healers are, for example. I'm just confused about how you're so certain of these things, as I've seen no data to really support it anywhere, and anecdotally, I'm hardly alone in how I think. Hell, as I noted, I purple/blue in 24 mans. That means around 3/4ths of Healers in FFXIV in general content (not high end raiders) dps less than I do.

.

But anyway, the point of the thought experiment was to see if you would like a Support/Damage-Hybrid Healer as a playstyle or not.

.

EDIT: And it's a bit ironic to me you guys are against that kind of Healer since...imo, I'd find a RDM Healer Job that played more or less as I described RDM above and slotted into the second Healer slot as...dare I say I would find it fun to play?

[ty_taurus]

We don't "need to accept that DPS is a major part(y) of healer gameplay". Again, at the risk of before, that's what you need me to accept for your position to be the default and have precedence. (In other words, for your position to win "by default".) But there's no actual reason or necessity to do so. Current encounter design and healer gameplay shows we do not, in fact, need to accept that.

Accepting that DPS is a part of healing in this game doesn't necessarily translate to DPS rotations like what gets discussed. It just means accepting that DPS will always be the metric that is used to determine what actions a healer takes. What action either directly or indirectly yields the most damage? Even when you heal, you're making this decision either intentionally or unintentionally. Reviving a DPS? That's more damage than hitting Glare. Esuna-ing the Slow off the BLM? That damage the BLM is losing is probably worth more than your Glares. Using Medica II? Ideally, it's because the regen gained will result in less Glares lost than perhaps Cure III. This is even true of old Final Fantasies. There's not a prize for topping off the party. You're trying to not lose people so you can continue the battle and win the fight. Many players actually try not to heal in battle and instead heal after battle in older turn based RPGs, because all healing in battle does is slow everything down unless it's preventing KOs. An example of where this is accepted was in the buff to Afflatus Misery. It means accepting that players would not use lily healing for any other reason than being forced to as the reward of misery was not a reward, but a consolation prize.

[Renathras]

Accepting that DPS is a part of healing in this game doesn't necessarily translate to DPS rotations like what gets discussed. It just means accepting that DPS will always be the metric that is used to determine what actions a healer takes. What action either directly or indirectly yields the most damage? Even when you heal, you're making this decision either intentionally or unintentionally. Reviving a DPS? That's more damage than hitting Glare. Esuna-ing the Slow off the BLM? That damage the BLM is losing is probably worth more than your Glares. Using Medica II? Ideally, it's because the regen gained will result in less Glares lost than perhaps Cure III. This is even true of old Final Fantasies. There's not a prize for topping off the party. You're trying to not lose people so you can continue the battle and win the fight. Many players actually try not to heal in battle and instead heal after battle in older turn based RPGs, because all healing in battle does is slow everything down unless it's preventing KOs. An example of where this is accepted was in the buff to Afflatus Misery. It means accepting that players would not use lily healing for any other reason than being forced to as the reward of misery was not a reward, but a consolation prize.

I don't disagree that many people play this way. However, many do not.

Ask Jonny Casual if he's thinking about the difference between a lost Glare or a dead DPS doing more damage than him when he casts Cure 2 or Raise and he will look at you in utter confusion. "When someone's dead, I Raise them. That's what healers do. When someone's damaged, I heal them so their health bar isn't as empty and they aren't as likely to die. That's what healers do."

A midcore player (who isn't REALLY trying to optimize or parse) will probably mention the DPS difference, but it's more an aside than anything. They aren't actively thinking, when choosing to Raise or not "Would my Glare potency be more or less than this dead player's?" It's not a part of their active decision making process. (It probably isn't for most hardcore players, either, they've just internalized the decision.)

The buff to Misery wasn't "players would not use lily healing for any other reason". It was "high end raiders trying to maximize their parse or clear tight Enrages would not use lily healing for any other reason". And it wasn't even true of all high end raiders. People were using Lilies before the change. Some where just complaining about it. A lot.

I think part of the problem with the language barrier here is you are accurately describing a portion of the player base and gamers in a more general sense. The problem isn't that you aren't accurately describing that part (Double negative, but the point is, the part you're describing you are describing correctly). The problem is you aren't accurately describing them/us all as a whole. You're describing a part and then extrapolating that part's view onto the whole, leading to confusion and a difficulty to understand and reconcile the disconnect when you run into someone that is from the part you aren't accurately describing. It also seems to cause you to believe the part you're describing is either the whole or at least such an overwhelming majority as to be functionally equivalent (in terms of how the game should be designed), when we don't actually have evidence to support that and, at the very least (again, the Lucky Bancho numbers: https://i.imgur.com/t6eJLaj.png ) have evidence showing a significant portion of the player base (at the very least a large minority) doesn't fit into that.

[Shurrikhan]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

I get there are a lot of "That's impossible..." what-ifs. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend. As I noted above, on at least some level, this was how healing in ARR worked, and players were (at the time) largely satisfied with this, with many loving both healers despite their individual focuses. Set aside the "impossible" and "ARR wasn't REALLY like that by 2.4 and on..." and so on, just a thought experiment.

Just my $0.02:

To me... probably not, but it depends (on whether there were already established thematic grounds players were attached to and would have aspects trimmed from to suit those categories, and/or whether there'd be cohesive designs possible likewise blocked off by that adherence to sub-roles).

I feel like we get far more bang for the buck, up to a pretty high threshold, from competing choices in gameplay rather than just competing choices in menu-play alone (just picking job A or job B, or build A or B, etc., before entering the given activity). While I like class/job/build to have their own unique advantages and features (atop their unique playflows and aesthetics), I don't feel like there's ever been a whole delineation in who's been allowed to do what that ever increased the total depth available to players; instead, those delineations just more quickly let devs be content with less on each choice they provide. In that case, good mechanics are, for the worse, purposely held hostage to/by certain builds, rather than each build competing to make the most interesting/attractive/fun cohesion and synergies they can out of whatever they like / find fitting.

Or, to put it another way, take any thematic kit you can imagine: Time-Space, Druidism, Elemental, Alchemical, Life-Death, Onmyou, Blood, Incarnation, etc. There's almost always some element of that kit, whatever it may be, would want to be allowed access into more "advanced" (deep, interestingly set up, etc.) healing or into "support" options. Some may, in the course of grabbing what seems to fit best around their iconic tools, end up with especially high value or intricacy or button counts of aspects A, B, C, or D, etc., but there's no point in dividing those jobs into any sort of halves or taxonomies just to say what can or can't be given to a particular theme/aesthetic.

I wouldn't mind a slightly more deeply heal-focused healer, but it shouldn't be "heal-focused" just because it lacks anything else (see, traditionally and still largely today, XIV WHM). And no theme or job concept ought to be constrained just to fit an arbitrary sub-role.


Full related disclosure: I dislike any sort of template-based design. I prefer a job happening to end up with some unique arrangement of various capacities as might suit a pentagonal strengths graph rather than being designed around any hard constraints other than "Make this theme as fun as possible."

[Venur]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

It is not possible to achieve this without going in the 2x support meta for single group content.

Otherwise, you either make one of those 2 healing group useless. If the support/heals can't main heal your group why would you pick them but if they can main heal why would you want a pure healer that would simplie makes your run slow and more prone to failing a group mechanic ?


Vanguard was probably the most notorious one for the heal+off heals for meta. Support healer where basicaly second tier DPS with good secondary healing.

Two pure healer was too much heals for slow killing and one wouldn't be enough or cause lots of whipe. So a pure healers and a support healers (tier 2 DPS and tier 2 heals) would make things easier while not slowing the group down too much.

As content got older it could be single healed but off-healers could just stop healign completly and focus on damage dealing.

But such game are more for a niche group of players IMO.

[Renathras]

Well, first, on a light note...

That's so weird. The only games I can think of (other than that one) where there was a Soul Drain type ability, it typically would either be Black Mage (Drain/Osmose) or some incarnations of Dark Knight, I think?

I respect the deep number crunching; however, one thing that I think is very important to keep in mind when we talk about theorycrafted ideas is that none of us have access to a prototyping build for the game.

This is true. But I guess my point here is that these changes would be identified and have to be changed. More saying I don't think it works out quite as you intend. Your intent seems to be to have an ability that normalize another to 3 uses per minute, but the problem is, this second ability is only used 2 times per minute. So there will naturally be some weird sync/desync/drifting.

One solution might to toss the Budding idea and just have Lilies naturally generate at a rate of 1/30 sec and have Banish exist to knock off 10 sec from that (like BRD/MCH can take off 15 sec from their oGCDs during that one BRD song/MCH's Hypercharge), but Banish would need a 20 sec CD for that to work. But this basically makes Budding a slightly more annoying GCD version of Presence of Mind - something you need to press like a metronome on CD.

...it is funny; it occurs to me that you guys hate a metronome 1 button spam (dipping bird with a 2.5 sec period could play the game for you outside of healing and Dia refreshing), but people like me hate a CD metronome (right now, I could set a dipping bird with a 60 sec period over my PoM button or 2 min over my Chain Strat button)

We both hate metronomes because we see them as annoying and uninteresting busywork where a dipping bird could play the game for us, but we hate different kinds of metronomic play.

...I feel like maybe there's a point of agreement/compromise there somewhere, but I'm not quite sure HOW since we each prefer the other form of metronome. XD

A handful of the issues...

Fair (for Second Concept). I assumed "after Tempest" meant "immediately following" rather than "sometime in the next 4 GCDs". That could work better (though I again think Budding does not). The First Concept still has the Banish/Budding/Dia/Misery problem due to CD drift, however. Like Dia isn't restricted by combo action, it's restricted by trying not to drift it.

Ultimately, what I care about most is the idea, because if the concept is sound...

100% understand. The first question to ask is "Is something like this feasible? If so, we can hammer out the details. If not...then there's no reason pushing the idea further."

From my take, your First Concept is not feasible without largely changing how the game, encounter design, and healing for WHM makes. Something like it would be feasible for SCH or particularly SGE, however, as I noted, because SCH can continue to heal even during those rigid points and SGE would be healing due to working through those rigid points via Kardia.

In other words, is the concept of building toward Tempest, Soul Drain, and Holy feel like a good idea...

I don't know how it would work with the option to engage with it or not (having Tempest be a separate button would create optimization where you would delay it for burst windows, so that would become "mandatory" and not optional). The more basic concept of several spells building to a bigger spell is fine. I think we've more or less seen this in different forms across Jobs. RDM uses it with Dualcast - Jolt/Stone/Fire into Thunder/Aero; AOE Aero/Thunder into Impact is basically this on a very small scale - and on a larger scale, with the Black/White Mana leading to the melee/finisher burst combo. PLD does this with its 1-2-3 leading to Atonement and now to Holy Spirit. WAR does this with Beast Gauge and Fell Cleave. MCH does this with Heat Gauge and Hypercharge.

...note the distinction between "builder/spender" and "cooldown". PLD 1-2-3 gives you a powerful attack (...sorta...) to use, which is distinct from FoF/Req/Conf, which is "use on CD/every 60/120 seconds. The latter is controlled by CDs, time gating, and the player having to remember to use a button around a certain time or set a stopwatch when they start the fight or have a raid leader in voice chat (who probably does that) tell everyone when the window is coming up. Conversely, the builder/spender gameplay is lower mental budget and part of actions the player is taking, thus making it more under the player control. Granted, this is much less than in the past when the player had options, such as PLD/WAR you really only have your 1-2-3 combo so it's just a "hidden CD" (were in the past you had several different combos and the Threat combo you could use, so there was more player choice in the rate these resources would be generated), but I think that's the distinction. Player agency/control vs the player being a slave to a CD clock.

But anyway, WHM even has a version of this with Misery, it's just not part of its standard rotation since Glare doesn't contribute.

Hence why I proposed myself every couple Glare/Dia casts (say 3 casts of either) leading to High Glare. It's basically the same concept, so I find that agreeable. (Dia included so you wouldn't have weird High Glare drifting and it's simply every X7.5 sec through the fight where you cast it, downtime aside). My issue is more the comboing and the drifting, and in the case of making the optional control scheme, optimizing distinction.

But the core concept of "every X casts, you get to cast something else that is bigger and feels a smidge more satisfying" I find agreeable in vacuum.

Now, to talk about Afflatus Budding for a moment...

Right, I understand. But I think the solution here is just to make Regen/Medica1/2/Cure1/2/3 generate a Blood Lily 1/3rd when used. The reason is because your proposal is trying to do this same thing, but on a CD, meaning they are only buttons you don't want to stay away from once every 20 seconds. So that doesn't really fix the problem, since you already can use Cure 2/Medica once every 20 seconds without a DPS loss anyway (Solace/Rapture). It's just the same rotation as today with extra steps and a SLIGHT change in that you'd use Medica 2 instead of Medica 1 (Rapture is Medica 1 but Medica 2 is better in every way at only a slight MP different) and could use Regen without a damage loss (but it's already an instant cast, so that doesn't change anyway)

And it's only once every 20 seconds, so it doesn't introduce any additional flexibility in that sense.

And as I said, it rings too close to me to SB WHM Lily interactions with oGCD CDs. And I've made no secret about how I feel that was the single worst iteration of WHM in the entire history of FFXIV. It was the one expansion I DID NOT main WHM, that's how bad it was.

I just feel like "reduce CD on..." abilities are not good design for heals. They only seem to work well, imo, to DPS oGCDs, and only when the rotation is really strongly tuned for that, like MCH is.

Another adjustment I mentioned in the past that I kind of just default to in my mind for WHM is that you should be able to generate 2 blood lilies,

See, this I disagree with for the argument Shurrikhan was making - it highly prioritizes unintuitive "heal when no healing is needed" gameplay to stock Miseries for burst windows. It actually is the opposite of what I'd do. Sure, you could have the CD on it for 20 sec, but (a) some buff windows are longer (Searing Light is 30 seconds) and (b) now there's no point in being able to stock them in the first place other than it gives a TINY bit more flexibility to Lily heal use, but that's already an 80 second window, so more flexibility (to prevent overcapping) there isn't really useful or needed.

...because you can now more comfortably hold onto your blood lily for an upcoming buff window and not feel like you can't heal until after.

Yes, but another solution is to just have Misery be DPS neutral and all heal GCDs generate 1/3rd a Misery charge. This way, you feel like you can heal whenever you want/need to, and you just cast a Misery after any 3 heals. The only niche optimization is if you have a multi-hit attack (SoSEx, ZodEx, etc) and you Medica 2 the first strike, Cure 3 the second strike, Medica the third strike, and Cure 3 the fourth strike, then let your HoT from Medica 2 heal up the party after the fifth strike, you'd overcap a Misery there. But this is a pretty edge case that I don't think is really a problem in the grand scheme because of (a) how unusual these mechanics are and (b) how the focus is more on just getting through them anyway, so sitting on a Misery wouldn't feel TOO terrible, not to mention if you were about to have a Misery when it started, you could just cast the Medica 2 early and then dump the Misery. Not to mention in the live game right now, when you do have to do that, it's an absolute DPS loss anyway. At least this way you'd get some refund of that.

I dunno, I just don't feel like it's a big enough problem overall to require a Misery change to stacks, and then we'd be having to do things like band-aid the 20 sec CD and stuff to prevent misuse. Just seems like a solution to a niche problem that generates more problems. Like giving someone a medicine for a minor issue they aren't even complaining about and that's not a threat to them that then requires another medicine to deal with the side effects.

If someone's not keeping up with their DPS, they're spending less MP.

I...think it's the opposite. All heals cost as much MP (or more, as much as 3x more) than our DPS buttons. You go into a MP deficit when you cast heals. All the healers are designed right now, with nominal levels of Piety, to be approximately MP neutral for long periods if they're only casting their DPS spells while using Lucid and Assize/Aetherflow/Draw/Astrodyne/Addersgall abilities on or near CD.

Honestly, I hate Lucid (now that it's not useful for threat reduction like Shroud of Saints). My personal opinion is that it's yet another "dipping bird" ability. I'd rather Piety just be boosted so we have the same overall MP regen over a fight. It's only REALLY useful if you use it just after being Raised. But if you're using it somewhat on CD, it's likely to be on CD when you get Raised anyway, meaning it loses that supposed flexibility.

Super short, though:

I don't have any problem with a sort of 1-1-1-boosted setup. And I already made a suggestion for Water as a low level Assize. And I still think GCD heals generating 1/3rd Misery is a good idea. So within there we have agreement on...uh...Water being added as a low level oGCD that upgrades to Assize, which itself has a "release" secondary effect once used to better make use of the heal.

...hey, it's not EVERYTHING, but some agreement is still agreement. Progress! \o/

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One more quick aside to the spell effects:

Honestly, call me easily amused, but I just love the casting animations in this game. The character model and visual effects. I have spent literal minutes just casting Holy before in my inn room just because I like the visual effect of it and the float cast animation. When I'm bored, I'll sometimes start/cancel cast that spell over and over just because I like the way my dude spins and hovers. I've said since ShB gave Glare the same animation I wish there was a HEALING SPELL that used the float cast, like Cure 3/4 would be a good candidate, if not Medica 2. All the WHM healing spells are much more grounded. I still love them, but I'd like to change it up a bit.

And from the moment I started the game as a CNJ 9 years ago, I fell in love with the little Cure 1 cast kind of gathering power in the staff before raising it to heal someone. I took part in the "Cure Initiative" back in the day. I also LOVE Physic's cast and am genuinely sad we don't get to see it more. One hand across the other arm as you charge power in your book. That's just so cool to me. Also Adlo/Succor's book slam. There's something of a "I SAID you aren't hurting my ally; last word!" finality of it. Like putting my foot down or something. Even the sound of the book slamming shut is well done. And I love Eu Diagnosis with the Nouliths spinning around to deploy the shield, but honestly, have you ever sat and just cast Prognisis? The non-Eukrasia one? Arms out to the side, gathering power in the Nouliths, then deploying it. Another cast I almost never get to see except when spamming it for Hunt trains so the boss doesn't die TOO quickly and my party still gets full credit (based on agro generated, so AOE overhealing works a treat)

So you talk about being bored with spell animations...I'm not sure that's even possible with me.

Just my $0.02:

Worthwhile points.

Tot he thematic kit argument, though - keep in mind this is always true. Priests in WoW can heal or DPS, but they can't tank. Maybe you love Priests, but if you want a Priest-tank, you have to play a Protection Paladin and just kind of headcanon it. Other than a TINY point in Cata/Mist/Warlords (I forget which, but that one Demonology Glyph), you can't tank (or heal) on a Warlock. There's a point where thematic kits are limited.

The issue here is more FFXIV's engine/battle system is...very rigid. You can't really lean into different directions. You're either playing right or you're playing wrong. RDM's can't play as pure casters, they HAVE to use their melee combo. They also can't play as pure melee just getting the Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution finisher periodically. I mean, in theory they could KIND of do that (using Manafication with their 1-2-3 and Fleche/Contre on CD as their filler), but it's clearly playing wrong and will tank their performance. The only real exception to this is BLU.

Would it be cool if RDM was tuned where you could EITHER use the Jolt/Stone/Fire/Aero/Thunder gameplay today to build into an Enchnated Melee combo OR you could somehow use 1-2-3 and play as a melee to do so (e.g. every time you complete the Combo, it reduces the CD of Manification, and the non-enchanted 1-2-3 is tuned to where both playstyles do the same DPS; and likewise have a CD you could use in place of Enchanted 1-2-3 that does roughly the same damage and grants access to Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution so if someone wanted to play RDM as a pure Caster with no melee they could)? Oh absolutely! I would love it if you could flex and do any of those three you wanted to.

...but the game's battle engine is way too rigid and doesn't allow that.

I would love it if FFXIV was more flexible, but it sadly isn't. There's one right and wrong way to play a given Job, and if you're not playing the "right" way, you're wrong. So there's not really a way to make flexible playstyles within a given Job. There IS a way to make different playstyles within a given Role, however.

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Hm...just an aside:

Did you play SCH in ARR?

If so: Did you like it?

It is not possible to achieve this without going in the 2x support meta for single group content.

Why?

Otherwise, you either make one of those 2 healing group useless.

Howso?

If the support/heals can't main heal your group why would you pick them but if they can main heal why would you want a pure healer that would simplie makes your run slow and more prone to failing a group mechanic ?

Well, they'd do similar levels of damage, though the AST/SCH situation would still exist...but that exists today. So at worst, we'd be no worse than we are today.

As for the "Why would you pick them?", until you overgear the content, the Pure healer can't solo heal. But you don't need 2x Pure unless you want a big safety buffer, but you could use SOME suplemental healing. This is why you would bring the Support early in the tier. As the tier got longer on and people got more gear, your Support needs to do less and less damage until you get to the point your Pure can more or less solo heal it. At that point, you have two options, you can either swap out the Support and solo Pure heal it with an extra DPS Job (for faster clears) OR you can swap out the Pure for Support/Support for them to share the healing load while buffing the party's output enough to also speed up clears. OR you could just keep your same party you've been clearing all this time with no issues; your Pure healer is healing and your Support healer is doing damage and throwing buffs and is still there for spare healing if people make mistakes or your Pure healer dies/Pokeball DCs at a bad time.

Now, people could do Pure/Pure early in the tier if they wanted, just like people can do SMN/RDM double caster now if they want super wipe prevention. But in practice, few parties do this, and if that's an option for the extreme risk averse parties...why are options bad? Conversely, very high end players might push Support/Support early. But again, why would it be bad for a few people to do a thing they have a choice in the matter of? And how is this different than parties running AST/SCH today?

People still didn't generally SCH/SCH in ARR, or WHM/WHM in ARR, even though they could have, because they did have trouble with the healing requirements. In SB (and some later in ShB), one of the few bright spots for WHM was that it was useful in late-tier solo-healer runs. During the tier, the general flow was Pure/Barrier, then you could branch into either Support/Support or Pure solo for late tier (once content was overgeared) parties. So you'd start the tier with WHM or dAST + nAST/SCH, and later in the tier, you'd have dAST/SCH or WHM/extra_DPS_Job. But, both were functional, so if a friend group only had two WHMs or two SCHs, they could still clear content, they'd just have to have their party adjust.

This is, of course, a niche optimization thing - only very high end players would even be considering this, so it wouldn't affect 99% of the game. But your trade-off late tier or in Ultimates would be 2x Support OR solo Pure if you're pushing for speedruns. But for casual or midcore groups, or even some hardcore groups that are chill and not pushing speedruns, this wouldn't be an issue at all. So even in that situation, it wouldn't turn into a Support/Support meta OR a meta that excludes Support.

And if we were REALLY worried about Support/Support becoming meta, we could just make it where their buffs don't stack (Bloodlust/Heroism in WoW with the "Sated" debuff) to hard-code prevent that. But I don't think that would be necessary at all.

Finally, consider the proposed changes (making all healers play a Support Healer playstyle instead of a Pure/Dedicated Healer one) as the alternative simply REMOVE the Dedicated Healer playstyle entirely, meaning if we're worried about Pure Healers being out in the cold of the Support/Support meta, if ALL Healer Jobs are turned into Support, then the entire game would all be Support/Support anyway!

Again, it's important to note that this is no worse than the situation we already have today. So at its worst, this idea produces an end result no different than what we already have now. What this allows is more party/player choice and options, which is a good thing.