Paired Threads: What would it take to make Heaker kits "complex/interesting"?

[ty_taurus]

I'm being an adult. I'm being direct. You're reading too much into what I'm saying.

[Aravell]

What they did in Abyssos isn't the shining solution that some people think it is. So they added some DoTs to the raidwides, that means you have to replace about 10 casts of your filler nuke with your GCD heals (and this is mostly on low gear runs only). That does nothing much to reduce the massive amount of downtime that still exists. Simply look at P6S and P7S. The biggest complaint about those fights is the massive amount of nothing happening.

[AnotherPerson]

4x DPS - Any all DPS party that did not have a RDM likely could not clear the dungeon. Party was DRG, RPR, SMN, RDM - I was the RDM. (I started to go NIN but realized my gear was a bit dated; had I done so, we would not have been able to clear.)

For all the talk of Healers being unneeded, it seems that DPS are actually the role that's unneeded.

I think DPS is actually the role that's unneeded in normal content, not Healers. When people say "1 Tank + 3 DPS" what they're really saying is "The party requires something that isn't a DPS otherwise the run won't work". If it wasn't that I formed a PF group specifically to do the three runs in a row, a normal dungeon run would probably have disbanded after that many wipes.

It's great you can clear the fight with 4 DPS (albeit requiring RDM to vercure). That's a quite an accomplishment! ... but I think you missed what the point of the challenge means entirely lol. The original point of this challenge was to see if dungeon content has gotten easier with each expansion enough where you don't need a healer in a traditional party as you did require one in the past (aka the holy trinity further collapsing when DF requires 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS) and doing the standard wall to wall pull. Tanks traditionally have mitigation, but they could not self-sustain through everything in wall-to-wall pulls and in bosses, and will eventually die along with the rest of the team if there's no healer healing, causing you to fail the clear. Nowadays, that's no longer applicable. It might be hard to do higher level dungeons with a healer that isn't healing, but not impossible to clear without them. With the addition of a healer that originally wasn't needed in the first place, it is now as clear as day the dungeon's relative difficulty to a traditional party has gotten easier.

If you were to compare it with tanks being unneeded, it would be equivalent with a tank not turning on tank stance and not using mitigations/healing at all in a traditional party of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS doing wall-to-wall pulls. If the tank at any point ends up being main aggro again, it means tanks are still needed as the DPS failed their job at doing DPS/died and/or the healer died, resulting in tanks being the ones who can still soak damage or TB for the rest of the party (thereby re-engaging their main role) unless they also happen to drop their ILVL to have the same HP & defensive stats to become gimped DPS. That would honestly be an interesting test to see if every healer can do this with different party compositions to tell if it's just the holy trinity that's collapsing or the entirety of the dungeons becoming too lenient where requiring both in a party isn't needed.

On the other hand, if 4 DPS can clear what the original intent was for a traditional party is required (1 tank + 1 healer + 2 DPS) and still do wall-to-wall, then we have a bigger problem on our hands than just 1 tank or 1 healer not being needed. It means you can just throw the trinity right out the window at that point and a bigger class redesign is needed since the only metric that would really matter at that point is just DPS. RDM being gimped healer using vercure continuously implies the idea that you aren't being a DPS if you're constantly using vercure, so ultimately the clear still required 1 dedicated healer so to speak (so while the holy trinity is still cracking with only 2/3 roles, it's not gone yet). Unfortunately, that doesn't address the issue of how the trinity is so bad right now though where you can either replace 1 tank or 1 healer. The trinity, at the moment, is already on the verge of collapse, just purely because you can exclude one of the 3 roles in the party in level-synced content at higher levels.

[Renathras]

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I guess we'd have to get a time machine to do past dungeons with past skills. There have been some in the past that needed Tanks and Healers together (Ala Mhigo enemies hit like trucks, even single pulling), we'd need to do it in period gear AND with period abilities. Not all Tanks CAN sustain themselves in wall to wall pulls. I think people vastly overapply WAR's insanity to all the Tanks. PLD had no self-sustain outside of Requiescat before 6.3 unless they were spamming Clemency, for example, and GNB's self-sustain is limited to its single target combo's -2, a slow burn longish CD HoT that can't be stacked but has 2 charges, and a once every 25 sec decent heal that can't be stocked (doesn't hold charges).

It may be true that dungeon difficulty for a general party has gotten easier, but that doesn't mean Healers aren't needed. It means you must have either a Tank OR a Healer. This could be interpreted as "Tanks are unneeded" just as easily. And it seems that dungeons don't require DPS at all.

Keep in mind that, as I noted, the ONLY way to clear with 4x DPS was to have one that acted almost exclusively as a Healer, do single pulls, and use Crowd Control. Without RDM, it would have been impossible, and even with RDM it was impossible to wall to wall pull. Your last paragraph seems to have you reflecting this same point, so we seem to agree that it still requires a "Healer" in that situation.

I would argue you can drop any one of the three roles, but two are still REQUIRED, it's just a choice of one or the other - either Tanks or Healers are REQUIRED. You must have a Tank OR a Healer to clear the dungeon. RDM was kind of cheating since it was acting as a Healer, just a barely making it one, lol

The only role you seem to be able to safely (and easily, I might add) drop in Lapis, is the DPSers.

Which, given how often people use the 1 Tank + 3 DPS example, was a somewhat surprising result. I was honestly thinking we'd be able to melt enemies as DPS, but that wasn't at all the case. It turns out, it's the DPS role that's extraneous. Tanks and Healers are, in effect, two flavors of the same thing - Support - of which you need at least one in the party to succeed.

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Your question is tainted. And I answered it: More healing.

You can't say "I'm not going to allow your answer, NOW ANSWER THE QUESTION!!" I've given you an answer, you don't want/won't accept it. That isn't me not giving you an answer, nor is it me not answering/refusing to answer.

I've ALREADY answered the question. You just refuse the answer.

As far as Abyssos not being a dungeon, they're trying it there to see if it could be done elsewhere. The more endless complaining about it, the less likely they'll do it elsewhere. But while some people are doing this intentionally - thinking they'll give them more damage then - the likely result is that they'll give them nothing at all. Hell, they tried it in Criterion as well, just went stupid with the Criterion Actions making role irrelevant (sorta), as well as Ex4 being much more healing heavy (especially on release). So they're clearly trying to do higher damage in content besides just Savage.

[ASkellington]

Your question is tainted. And I answered it: More healing.

You can't say "I'm not going to allow your answer, NOW ANSWER THE QUESTION!!" I've given you an answer, you don't want/won't accept it. That isn't me not giving you an answer, nor is it me not answering/refusing to answer.

I've ALREADY answered the question. You just refuse the answer.

Yeah I can, because I asked the question that way on purpose: I won't accept it because the devs themselves refuse it. So unless YOU can fix that then yes, your answer is invalid.

They aren't trying to see if it can be done elsewhere. Abyssos isn't unique to this "more healing/mitigation" BS. We had this in Shb. And guess what? They reverted all extra healing in the next tier afterwards and the start of this expansion. I don't doubt they'll do the same thing here. SE has a track record of this and unless the devs come and outright say that yes they're going to improve healing across all levels of content, MSQ included and actually have the gall to do so in 7.0, which has been proven for 2 expansions that they don't, your examples mean nothing.

Further, more healing isn't even a good fix. Good healers are ALWAYS going to have down time. Do answer why my down time has to be boring?

Also that is false that more damage buttons "isn't casual friendly". Casuals are people who don't want to do harder content. I would argue that more healing required is more casual unfriendly. The extra dps buttons are for the more expirienced healers who need something to do when they've met the healing requirements. This is why I keep asking you to answer the question, because you aren't giving an alternative fix to us having down time that we are guarenteed to have.

There is no way you are going to give enough healing in all forms of content to remove down time for a mid and especially hard core player. So again, what is your perposed fix?

[ForsakenRoe]

I reckon a 4x DPS run is possible if you use the right DPSs, the reason the 'trinity breakdown' has happened is because the tanks now have so much access to healing, so if you did 4x SMN for a similar level of selfsustain, and offset who had phoenix out so the regen had more uptime I bet it's easily doable

also lmao at the idea that you're forced to GCD heal your way through ARR dungeons cos 'you dont have as many OGCDs', if you play SGE or SCH you don't need GCDs OR OGCDs, the incidental heal of Embrace/Kardia is more than enough to keep up. Real fun being a SCH, getting anything below Stone Vigil, and being able to literally /follow on the tank and afk every trash pull. Or maybe that's 'peak healer gameplay' for some people? After all, if the healing is entirely automated, it's not the healer player's 'fault' if a wipe occurs, so they don't need to worry about that crushing weight of 'responsibility'

And Abyssos was good and bad. Good in that it made healing a bit more interesting, bad in that it A: scared the 'less skilled healers' away, B: wasn't actually 'more healing' but 'more mit', and that meant we were reliant on hoping that the melee, who had so little reason to use feint in previous raids that some did not have it on their bars, would use feint or we all die (and then the healer is asked 'where shield idot'), and C: it only lasted as long as we didn't have gear, as soon as ILVL rolled in, the healing became a lot easier to deal with because it's not solved the real issue. We don't need 'more healing' as in it hits harder, we need 'more healing' as in it hits more often, so that we actually do run out of OGCDs to use.

However, due to SE's not-great implementation of Abyssos healing paradigm, the idea of 'more healing' is likely now tainted in the playerbase's mind, as they have seen what SE's idea of 'more healing' actually is. Everyone keeps asking for 'more damage' because it is the most obvious, most casual friendly (don't have time to do these extra buttons? then dont, and focus on healing), most old-content-friendly (doesn't require changing old content at all, whereas a new healing paradigm might require changing eg old ultimate healing patterns), and tbh, most devtime friendly as half of the stuff we're asking for is literally just 'can we have back 'old tool X' like we had in 'previous expansion'', so the code's already still in the game

[Renathras]

I reckon a 4x DPS run is possible if you use the right DPSs, the reason the 'trinity breakdown' has happened is because the tanks now have so much access to healing

Arguably agreed.

The issue isn't "Healers aren't needed".

The issue is "everyone's a Healer".

Tanks are Healers (for themselves, and often have some ability to be so for the party). This is the biggest offender.

SOME DPSers are Healers (RDM with Vercure, SMN with Phoenix, DNC with Curing Waltz, Melee with Bloodbath and Second Wind, and quite a few Jobs with some version of self-mitigation shielding like Third Eye or Radiant Aegis).

Provided you have enough of these, and the right mix of them, any 4 man group is capable of clearing dungeons...to a point. There are some that have healing, but the healing may be insufficient ALONE to do the job. Normally, only Healers have the ability to do the job alone, but of late, Tanks are not only able to heal themselves, but the party outright. This not only means they don't need healing from a designated Healer, but that they can replace the Healer to the rest of the party. Conversely, if you drop the Tank from the party, the enemies do low enough damage that most DPSers can survive the hits and be healed for the damage by any of the four Healer Jobs due to their greater Healing potency. And, of course, a party without either needs a stand in Healer substitute.

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It seems that the general response from the Healer community actually IS that they want more Abyssos.

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More damage isn't more casual friendly. It seems truely casual people don't agree that it's to their benefit. It's also almost exclusively proposed and supported by higher end players, suggesting it's more what they want, something hardcore friendly, not something casual friendly. More damage is going to be more difficult for casual Healers than is Cure/Medica spamming. And "old content friendly" is completely irrelevant, since SE......we've had this exact conversation before, so I'm not going to retread the ground.

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Anyway, I agree with the "Trinity Breakdown" issue. It's less that it's outright breaking and more that when you give the abilities of one branch of the Trinity to both the others, it defeats the purpose and function of the Trinity.

[ForsakenRoe]

More damage isn't more casual friendly. It seems truely casual people don't agree that it's to their benefit. It's also almost exclusively proposed and supported by higher end players, suggesting it's more what they want, something hardcore friendly, not something casual friendly. More damage is going to be more difficult for casual Healers than is Cure/Medica spamming. And "old content friendly" is completely irrelevant, since SE......we've had this exact conversation before, so I'm not going to retread the ground.

Imagine a situation where a casual player is struggling to keep up with the incoming damage of the fight. Now imagine we have two universes, and in each one, one of the two suggestions was put in place. In the 'healers now have more tools to do damage with' universe, the casual player feels no difference between the 'Source universe' as it were, that we have now, and their hypothetical universe, because they're busy fighting for their lives to GCD heal through the pain. In the other hypothetical universe, the healing requirements were increased, and as such the casual who was already struggling to stay afloat versus the oncoming damage, now is unable to keep up and the party wipes. When I say 'casual friendly', I mean that 'in an emergency, this change can be ignored for the sake of keeping the party alive'. You can't ignore an extra 20% (or however much) HPS requirement, or people drop dead.

And if we were to change the healers so that they have less OGCDs, but their GCDs cost less mana and have half as much of a GCD (so, say a 1s GCD), that'd definitely have an effect on how old ultimates and savages would work re: healing patterns. Just the fact that you would have to stand still to hardcast things would be a massive change, the difference between WHM and AST mobility in UCOB frankly feels like I'm griefing if I go WHM. They can solve that by moving Rapture to 70 and PI to 76 though

oh, and if you had asked people 'which would you rather SE design fights like more, regular design where things hit like wet noodle, Abyssos with harder hitting raidwides and bleeds after to emphasize mitigation, or Barbariccia where it's not the damage that's the challenge, but the frequency it comes out at', I'd put real money on most people saying Barb, because, again, there's no difference to me if we have a raidwide every 2mins, or every 1 min, I can pretty much kitchen sink it with whatever combo of Physis, Kera, Holos, a shield, Panhaima, Pneuma after, bla bla. If the raidwides hit less hard, but came out every 20 seconds, we'd have to ration stuff out more. You can look at P6S and P7S for great examples of 'the boss hits you hard, once, then you can AFK for like a whole minute', its the same for tanks too, I'm pretty sure the first two tankbusters in P7S are EXACTLY one minute apart but I've not been in there in yonks.

[Renathras]

Imagine a situation where a casual player is struggling to keep up with the incoming damage of the fight. Now imagine we have two universes, and in each one, one of the two suggestions was put in place. In the 'healers now have more tools to do damage with' universe, the casual player feels no difference between the 'Source universe' as it were, that we have now, and their hypothetical universe, because they're busy fighting for their lives to GCD heal through the pain. In the other hypothetical universe, the healing requirements were increased, and as such the casual who was already struggling to stay afloat versus the oncoming damage, now is unable to keep up and the party wipes. When I say 'casual friendly', I mean that 'in an emergency, this change can be ignored for the sake of keeping the party alive'. You can't ignore an extra 20% (or however much) HPS requirement, or people drop dead.

There are two problems with this scenario:

1) In the more DPS scenario, now the party wipes because they didn't meet the enrage check when the casual player dropped their DoTs and DPS rotation.

2) In the "more healing" universe, the casual player shifts to spamming more GCD heals while the hardcore player would be using their oGCD toolkit more fully and sprinkling a some GCD heals into the mix. The whole reason we have the GCD heals right now (in theory) is as backups in case you run out of oGCD resources. Take P5S, for example. You can deal with the bleeds by using Regen (a GCD) and some oGCD. If you burned all your oGCDs and Lilies, you can fall back on Cure 2. This system works because the hardcore player can be efficient while the casual player isn't outright punished, they just are quicker to fall back on the "easy to use" tools. MP is so free that it's not an actual limiting factor.

The only way the more DPS buttons isn't unfriendly to casuals is if the amount of increased damage is negligible. "Yeah, you have a second DoT! It does...10 more potency than Glare! Woo!" Where it's so negligible dropping it isn't going to make or break any clears.

As for old Ultimates: That's already true. WHM doesn't get its first semi-spamable on the move heal until Afflatus Solace. While Ultimates require more care than "use on CD", Assize and Asylum are still not up all the time, and Tetra is single target. Moreover, many of those GCD heals have 1.5 sec cast times, allowing for ample slidecasting, a skill Ultimate raiders can't get by with not having. But if that was REALLY an issue, we could just make it where casting heals does not break on movement and the problem's solved. Or conversely, make all GCD heals instant cast like Lilies. I'm sure you'll reject all of those, but those would settle the issue.

And as you note, this is ALREADY a problem with old Ultimates, and hasn't been this huge issue garnering national attention or Dev changes. So it seems unreasonable to suggest that a change would force it to when it already is a problem that is already unaddressed.

oh, and if you had asked people 'which would you rather SE design fights like more, regular design where things hit like wet noodle, Abyssos with harder hitting raidwides and bleeds after to emphasize mitigation, or Barbariccia where it's not the damage that's the challenge, but the frequency it comes out at',

Probably Abyssos. I haven't seen anyone in the replies mention Barbaricca. I know a lot of hardcore players like Barbaricca, but it was murder in PF after week 1. Though part of that might have been the pretty punishing body check with the stack + 2 meteors bit.

Are you at all familiar with the concept of the "day crowd" and "night crowd" relating to the Jesus story? Not a religious thing, but the concept? The idea is that Jesus seemed to be beloved by the people, then all the sudden, they were demanding his execution. The theory goes "well, they were two different groups of people". Basically, the normal people out in the daytime loved him, but the aristocrats and elites out at night and their hangers-on hated him.

I think there's a similar concept here where the hardcore and high end raiding community likes certain things but the playerbase as a whole isn't in agreement.

But we all play the same game. So the way to handle the problem is to make the differences in the kinds of content we clear (something not shared) not in the Jobs (something shared). That is, if they add a DPS rotation to WHM, that DOES affect everyone. Remember Cleric stance? Remember casual Healers getting witched at for not using it (and hardcores getting witched at FOR using it)?

On the other hand, if the change is to CONTENT, that's far less of a problem. For example, if P9S is made like Barbaricca and Ex6 is made like Ex2 (granted, Hyd was a bit harder than the normal launch Ex) and normal/MSQ is made like it always is, then everyone wins, since the content doesn't bleed over. Savage isn't MSQ pushover easy and midcore Extremes aren't Savage hard, and people aren't witching at each other for using or not using their full DPS toolkit.

We are (I think...?) in agreement that damage should be more consistent and not 10 second of huge spike then 60 seconds of downtime.

[Sebazy]

1) In the more DPS scenario, now the party wipes because they didn't meet the enrage check when the casual player dropped their DoTs and DPS rotation.

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The only way the more DPS buttons isn't unfriendly to casuals is if the amount of increased damage is negligible. "Yeah, you have a second DoT! It does...10 more potency than Glare! Woo!" Where it's so negligible dropping it isn't going to make or break any clears.

I'm not really sure how you can actually put that down as a valid point TBH. Name one piece of casual player friendly content in recent years where an otherwise entirely average but competent group wouldn't be able to clear if they had a healer that wasn't DPSing at all. The only one I can think of is E8S, and that's most certainly not casual player content even if it wasn't exactly the most difficult Savage turn either. If someone can do Lights Rampant in PF, I suspect they can maintain dots too.

To further expand on this point - Having more of a healer's DPS come from dots vs nukes actually makes things more forging and less impactful. Reapplying your dot a GCD late is much less impactful than missing a Glare GCD. I did a fairly in depth breakdown on this in another thread some time ago. Let me see if I can find it.

I'm not sure if BarbEx was as well received by the general playerbase as it was by the hardcore playerbase.

BarbEX is actually a more interesting case study than many seem to realise.

The big kicker is that if you look at the numbers, RubiEX is actually a bigger heal check on the 2 occasions where it genuinely requires healing. It also spaces the group out around the arena at this point making it difficult to reach people. If SE just cut out the portal puzzles it would actually be a pretty respectable healer check IMO, but as is, it just allows you to dump all your big cooldowns and lolstomp the aoe output without really thinking about it.

Meanwhile, BarbEX gets the thumbs up from me not because it hits especially hard because frankly it doesn't. Where it wins out however is the pace of the fight. It feels hectic, it doesn't have huge long sections of downtime with big nothing burger animations and sequences. Instead it's just relentlessly chipping away at you and it feels great for it.

It's the same secret sauce that makes fights like TitanEX so beloved IMO.