The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ForsakenRoe]

But is that really an advantage, to let the job essentially "play itself" when things are going good?

That kind of seems like a worst of both worlds, especially given that a healer that cannot choose to purely heal or purely damage, but instead will always have their burst healing held back by the strength of their combined overall damage+healing output, will be far harder pressed whenever things don't go perfectly right?

Output, at least, I could see as being a feature, but being semi-automatic? Moreover, to even be that way, it'd need to have very little control over the timing of its damage, either, which would make it even worse off (and more akin to a DPS with the likes of a permanent Vampiric Embrace than akin to a Healer).

So, like Resto Druid or Disc Priest, the reason it'd be 'an advantage' is the gameplay feel. Setting up your HOTs on Resto for the big raidwide damage HPS check thing, then hitting that Flourish to double their output and watching the HPS bars just shoot up (especially with how HOTs tick way more often in WOW anyway) is satisfying to see. Likewise, other people might find the instant jump from 10% to 70% because of a well timed Power Word: Life on Holy Priest. The reason I think 'do damage causes heal' would be 'an advantage' is because, atm, we have a very large disconnect between our healing and our damage, when it comes to GCDs. It's jarring to swap from our damage kit to our 'pump HPS for JWaves' kit. With a proper 'do damage, causes healing' kit, the two would be much more intertwined, and feel a lot more fluid.

Vampiric Embrace is interesting-ish, but not quite what I'm thinking of. Like, I was playing Guardian Druid in DF, and we now have a talent called 'After the Wildfire'. Every time I spend 200 Rage, I explode a burst of healing (about 60k in my gear) to all around me. Which is nice, but that is what I'd call semi-autonomous. I can't control when it goes off, it's happening at times pretty much out of my control, and I'd have to purposely play bad to get it to be timed right (not using Ironfur just to get it timed right). No, maybe I worded it wrong and that's MB. When I said 'semi-autonomously' re: SGE, I meant more like 'when you're playing correctly, it's happening alongside the damage'. You're still having to do Disc/Resto style 'set up' windows before the damage comes in. There's still 'choice' about what to use, and when. But when you are 'optimized', it's something you're not thinking about per se, as you're doing it instinctively. And since the effects I went for in my suggestion last only 4 hits (but can be used as much as you want, as long as you have the MP to fund it), VE's not exactly the most accurate comparison. It's more akin to setting up Atonements on Disc, I guess. But instead of lasting X seconds, I made them last X attacks.

And yeh, I guess theoretically, the SGE doing their healing via damage isn't covering everything in the raid, just as they don't now. They'd still have to rely on the cohealer for some things. As an example, let's take a raidwide, idk Hemitheos' Dark IV in P6S. Big damage, no bleed. As it stands, one Ixochole and one PI Rapture, and it's sorted. So, what if instead, we had the SGE able to PanKardia/Krasis/Soteria to cause some healing when they do damage? This way, we instead can go Ixochole, 'maybe' a Rapture (the SGE damage-heal might cover it if there's enough augments used) and therefore the WHM can keep their PI for something else. Or we could go Asylum/SGE damage-healing, and the Kardia heals are all buffed by the Asylum, meaning the burst healing of Ixochole and PI Rapture are still available for something else (in prog, very handy). The 'reward' is that your combat flow isn't going to get interrupted by having to press Eukrasian Prognosis, if you're skilled enough to cover it via the 'damage causes healing, which causes shielding' augment (I forgot which one I assigned that to, maybe it's Zoe)

[Renathras]

I don't feel like the present failings in how (un)equally attractive different jobs are for raiding are even because of that Pure/Barrier distinction, though. It's more a matter of their just not being enough (especially, GCD) healing to do for something like WHM to present any advantage outside of its single arbitrary bonus -- Afflatus Misery for multi-target burst.

Well, what it is is that Barrier healers HEAL TOO MUCH. For the Pure/Barrier distinction to have any meaning, the way it should work is that Barriers are required to minilevel fights, but that they are balanced as regards the Pure healers to do far less healing. Pure healers should do more healing than Barrier healer's heals + shields + mitigation multiplier, with the trade-off that they can't survive one-hit-KO/full health bar level attacks and/or their heals and MP economy should be better. When Barrier healers have to go all out on healing, their DPS should tank and they should be hard limited by MP while the Pure healers should have the opposite issue that they can't smooth damage and so HAVE to shift away from damage to healing more frequently but have the ability to deal with those greater spikes of damage and can continuously cast GCD healing tools for extended periods without going OOM.

That is, Pure healers should have raw power and sustainability at a moderate cost to damage (until the party overgears content and they need only token healing output) while Barrier healers should have mitigation smoothed damage spikes and better damage (when things are going well but the content hasn't been overgeared) with the tradeoff of losing more damage when they are forced to heal and not being able to sustain it as long.

This would actually make bringing one of each sensible and actually make the dichotomy make sense.

A simple example:

Suppose a Barrier healer had one 10% damage reduction ability, a 100 potency (let's say worth 100 HP) shield, and a 200 potency heal. This means that in terms of effective HPS, if they have a party member with 100 HP and a tank doing an attack of 100 HP, their party member will survive with the mitigation (taking only 90 HP worth of damage) and their 100 shield placed can also protect the party member (eating all the damage), and if they use both, the party member will be at 100% health with a further 10 HP shield. On average over a given fight using these abilities, the Barrier healer here will effectively provide a total of 300 potency worth of healing between the heal and the shield (assuming shields are 100% used up), and by mitigating damage by 10%, this makes an effective x1.1 to their healing (or something akin to that, might be 1.09, but same ballpark). This means they are, on average, providing 330 healing, and party members will not die to a hit of anything less than 190 HP since they can shield and mitigate it, and then 200 heal immediately after it with their direct healing spell. Note this also works if you flip the heal/shield portion to be a 100 heal with 200 shield.

Now, suppose a Pure healer has no damage reduction ability and just a 300 potency (let's say worth 300 HP) heal. Their party members must always have more HP than the attack in order to survive it. Their HP pools must be bigger than any unavoidable raidwide (not always true in minilevel gear). Assuming they are, boss hits must consistently strike for 300 for this healer to not be overhealing, and even if they did, the Barrier healer described above does 330 effective healing anyway. So this healer is only useful when there is consistent high damage, and its heal must be tuned to be 330 or greater (say 400) before it actually is appreciably more useful in that role than the Barrier healer. And that's ignoring things like Pepsis exist.

Granted, our healing kits are far more complex, but the example shows that mitigation makes up for raw healing in terms of effective HP [eHP] and that enemies need to reliably out damage that WITHOUT one-shoting party members AND the Pure healer needs to have a greater combined total healing potency than the Barrier healer's (heal + shields) x mitigation multiplier.

In live, a SGE can output NEARLY the healing numbers of a WHM absent Cure 3 spam. At its worst, Ixochole is as powerful a heal as Assize and up more often, Kerachole is approximately equal to Asylum and up more often (shorter duration but can be reapplied 3x per every one Asylum), augmenting that with Physis creates ROUGHLY as much healing over time as a WHM maintaining Medica 2 consistent uptime, Eukrasia Diagnosis (when it doesn't crit) is 300 potency of heal + 540 potency of shield = 840 vs Cure 2's 800 potency and Pepsis can not only turn that shield into a 450 potency cure but can do so every 30 seconds AND can do so even 1 potency/1 HP point of the shield is remaining, meaning this could be as much as a 1,239 potency heal. Holos matches Temperance pretty well with yet another barrier, Panhaima matches Lilybell with a shorter CD, standard Prognosis (300) is 3/4ths of a Medica (400) at 8/9ths (800 MP vs 900 MP) the cost, with the Eukrasia version is a 100 cure + 320 shield, for 1.05x a Medica (420 vs 400) at the same 900 MP cost, and can be Pepsi converted into a further 350 potency heal, making it up to 769 potency AOE, which is nearly twice a Medica's power. Medica CAN be buffed by Plenary, but only once per minute (instead of Pepsi twice) and only gains 200 Cure potency per Medica, making it 600 vs up to 769.

Solace and Rapture are Cure 2 and Medica that are instant and MP free, but gated by only once per 20 seconds. They ARE damage neutral, but SGE is also getting 170 potency of healing every damage spell cast, meaning every 3 Dosis (510) is effectively casting Cure 1 (500) on a target with no DPS loss; every 5 is 850 potency, or greater than a Cure 2 (note Cure 2 costs 1,000 MP to cast). And this is all free healing with Kardia being swappable every 5 seconds.

And I'm not 100% on the math, but I think SCH makes this even more absurd.

Point is, the Barrier healers have as much, comparable, or more healing than the Pure healers do. Further, their mitigation not only makes this healing more useful (eHP multiplier), but also allows parties to survive what would kill them. For the Pure/Barrier split to even make sense, Pure healers would need to not only outheal the Barrier healers, but do so by a fair margin. That is, for every 100 HP a SGE can heal, due to the eHP multiplier, a WHM needs to heal 110 HP just to be even with it.

ALTERNATIVELY, the Pure healers could be more efficient. Sure, Medica 1 and Eukrasia Prognosis may be comparable in healing, but if Medica 1 cost 500 MP, then WHM would clearly have the upper hand in MP management and sustain/spam healing...but it doesn't. With the Thin Air nerf in particular removing the Cure 3 spam option, which is what WHM had over SCH and AST in ShB. Not only that, but SGE has better MP and even gets refunded MP by using its oGCD heals, encouraging their use. For this version of the paradigm to work, it would need to be WHM and AST that have the MP efficient heals and better MP management, and SCH/SGE oGCD mitigation tools and shields would all need to have MP costs and be MP expensive so that their use had to be carefully monitored.

As it is right now, SGE can cast 2 Kerachole's per minute offering 10% mitigation to the party, 500 potency worth of 100 potency per 3 sec HoT ticks, and it even refunds the SGE 7% of its MP. This is 1,100 eHP potency and 14% MP regen. Conversely, WHM casting Medica 2 2x a minute is 500 potency of cure and 150 x 10 potency of HoT, or 1,300 total potency (but lacking the "damage mitigation saves lives from being one-shot), and COSTS 2,000 MP or 20% of the WHM's MP pool. While it's true the WHM can do this 4 times, doubling these numbers, it also doubles the cost. 40% of the WHM's MP would be comsumed doing this, as well as 4 GCDs, while SGE is generating + 1,400 MP and able to do 1,350 potency of Dosis damage and generate 680 potency (basically a Tetra's) worth of healing on their Kardia target in the process.

And this comparison holds looking across most of SGE vs WHM's toolkit (note I'm not bringing up SCH because it has more or less the same toolkit as SGE with a few extras AND a party damage boost from Chain Strat; but basically the comparison with SGE is "Same thing, but even more.") Barrier healers have comparable healing to Pure healers but also bring additional mitigation and HP buffer shielding to the table. And because of how more useful percent mitigation is alone (ignoring shields) Pure healers have to be able to do a lot more outright healing, and it needs to be more efficient, to make up for this.

AST KIND of escapes from this because it has a 400 Potency shield every 30 seconds from Celestial Intersection while matching WHM's one party mitigation with Collective Unconscious which is available twice as often as Temperance is, and still has Exaltation to match Aquaveil.

The game has two Barrier healers, one Semi-Barrier healer (which also has the best MP economy in the game), and one Pure healer that has heals that aren't really stronger than anyone's, far less mitigation, and it doesn't even have the MP budget to routinely access those powerful heals without going OOM anyway.

In effect, WHM's heals should all have their MP cost slashed in half and made damage neutral OR SCH/SGE barriers and mitigation oGCDs should have an MP cost on them. And I'm not saying this by way of suggestion (I don't know that it's a good idea at all to do it), I'm saying this by way of "for it to be balanced". Alternatively, WHM should get a second mitigation/half CD on Temperance and a party Barrier effect of some kind, possibly from Plenary. Plenary's 200 potency on every AOE GCD heal for 10 seconds creating barriers that stacked instead (or even that didn't) would be kind of interesting, and basically just an inefficient Panhaima with more steps, and math out to ~800 potency party wide barrier every 60 seconds. But it would at least be something and wouldn't be homogenizing too much since it would still be pretty distinct.

If either one brings something wholly unnecessary, they start to seem redundant, but, perhaps worse, if both are required then you have a very high chance of "Death by composition check," which would ruin any matchmade content unless it badly worsened an already bottlenecking queue by truly splitting it into those sub-roles.

I think that's the reason they made Barrier healers so strong in healing, so that for anything less than Extremes (matchmaking doesn't do Extremes, Savages, or Ultimate unless you specific que, and most people use PF since coordination is needed anyway), it's irrelevant. That's why 24 mans routinely will make the parties something like WHM/AST, SCH/SGE, SGE/SGE instead of taking the WHM or AST from Party A and swapping them with one of the SGEs from Party C. It's just so irrelevant it doesn't matter.

Personally, I feel like the distinction, if it's to be drawn up roughly as it already is now, should simply come down to different particulars of ease. Pure Healers should be better able to salvage stepping in fire when you step in the fire. Barrier healers should be better able to keep you from dying (to unavoidable damage) because of having stepped in the fire almost a minute ago (via vuln stacks) and occasionally sacrifice their own would-be damage for others' uptime.

This is a possibility, but I think it goes to the above. WHM GCD heals are too MP inefficient to make that work, and they're sacrificing a lot of DPS to do them. Making WHM GCD heals damage neutral via Misery and half MP cost would actually make what you say above a reality.

WHM should either have the most efficient heals in the game OR the largest (or both). It really doesn't. All its non-Lily GCD heals are comparable at best to the other healers while costing as much or more MP. You can point to Lilies, but Lilies aren't up all the time and are just MP free versions of Cure 2 and Medica, which other healers match with their oGCD suite. A 600 potency Durchole (or Lustrate) can be weaved after a Dosis (or Broil), both of which also have an average of 1 generated per 20 seconds (and SGE can bet +1 every 90 seconds or +2 per 3 mins with Rhizo and SCH able to get +3 per 3 mins with Dissipation), both SCH and SGE's generating MP, and SGE also gets 170 heal potency more from their Kardia, making their version better than a Tetra weave and ALMOST as good as a Cure 2 (DPS loss) or Solace GCD. And there's a similar argument with them having an answer for Rapture with Indom + Sacred Soil (also 3 uses per min, +3 every 3 mins) or Ixo + Kerachole (also 3 uses per min, +2 every 3 mins via +1 every 90 secs). So even its "efficient" heals that refund the GCD are exceeded by the two Barrier healers healing. And not, this is raw potency only, I'm not counting Sacred and Kera's 10% damage reduction here, which makes things even more lopsided.

WHM's heals are not bigger, and not more sustainable, and outside of Lilies, cost it damage to use, while also not offering the superior advantages of mitigation. The ONLY exception is Cure 3 if you need to spam it, but that is ONLY raw healing and not sustainable between the MP cost and loss of old Thin Air, and is a DPS loss to boot.

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We don't have a Pure/Barrier split. We only have one Pure healer. AST is effectively a Barrier healer, too (which also has buffs). And when that one Pure healer's heals are no bigger than the others while also lacking in mitigation and having no advantage in MP economy or sustained healing, and the fights don't work that way anyway, the system entirely breaks down, imo.

[Shurrikhan]

So, like Resto Druid or Disc Priest, the reason it'd be 'an advantage' is the gameplay feel. Setting up your HOTs on Resto for the big raidwide damage HPS check thing, then hitting that Flourish to double their output and watching the HPS bars just shoot up (especially with how HOTs tick way more often in WOW anyway) is satisfying to see.

Right, but again -- just very simply, unless playing with a static group of friends, parties don't take class/job/spec/profession X just because something about X especially appeals to its player, since each of the alternatives likewise comes with another player to whom the job is probably about equally attractive (assuming balance / no notoriously unfun-but-overpowered choice, etc.). Barriers and pure healers were never sold as a difference in gameplay (since a pure healer can feel as different from another pure healer as from a barrier healer) but rather in what they uniquely provide to the party.

As such, I feel like design has to accommodate both parts if we're looking for true job diversity, let alone in terms of alignments that would replace the Barrier/Pure dichotomy. I'd agree that the difference in means is ultimately more important, but if the means aren't allowed to differ enough to create unique features, too, that's a pretty tight constraint, which then holds back that mission; but if those features form and differentiate themselves only in unchecked/haphazard manner, we're very likely to simply end up with some being outright better than others, so we probably ought to in some cases jump ahead to a particular featural goal that the means seems to lend themselves towards and make sure that organic design still adds up to parity. That bridge between means and features shouldn't feel reductive, but the end result relevant to compositional choice (rather than just whom one most wants to main generally) needs attention, too.

I realize that may sound a little bit opposite to what I said to Renathras earlier, so let me point out the threshold I think is key. Organic design is good -- really good. Whatever the theme seems to want, it should expand into. But theme is also contextual, and composition is based out around features, not how it feels to arrive at them. That means we do need to make sure the end-results of those jobs will feel roughly balanced to those working alongside those jobs, as well, which may take some focusing a little bit more on certain branches of those themes and a little less on others with an aim at those end-goals. That does not mean we should template, or fixate on certain end-goals while still in the earlyish design process of maximizing the fun of a given theme gameplay-wise, but we do have to look at how these choices fit in among others.

If we want to make the relationship between pure healer and barrier healer more distinct and meaningful, a hurdle you have to deal with is ensuring both feel good during 4-man content, especially if Criterion is going to be a thing.

Are there really any novel challenges to pure/barrier balance likely to arise from 4-manning, though? I would think the only issue 4-manning has would be the undervaluing of AoE heals if AoEs were actually balanced for 8-mans (but, instead they're already balanced for 4-man and therefore just so overpowered in 8-mans as to essentially wipe out most spot-healing).

The idea of having pure healers have the ability to burst heal while barrier healers can't, and barrier healers have the ability to mitigate but pure healers can't, and the two are meant to cover one another could work in theory.

Which... sounds(?) fine, if only the situations actually allowed for it... and if it wouldn't have such an adverse effect on queues in the case that these things were actually needed (demanding sub-role matchmaking), rather than simply capable of smoothing things out. (Granted, come to think of it, multi-job queuing --or the ability to swap jobs out of combat even in instances if in certain conditions-- would fix that issue, among others, too.)

When I say opportunity cost, it should be a cost of DPS uptime. In other words, in order for SCH or SGE to burst heal, they have no choice but to stop attacking, and spend the next couple GCDs using their clutch burst button. The same is true inversely with pure healers and mitigation/barrier tools.

Sounds fine, even if a bit... lackluster, I guess? Granted, any argument against that would depend on a context in which the game isn't 99.9% centered on just total damage doable over {fight length}.