What would prevent 0/1 Healer clears of content?

[Renathras]

There are a lot of proposed solutions to the current "Healer problem", but the fires of rage are burning now due to the solo TOP clear. There are many solutions that have been proposed for a while, but the important thing about solutions is that they address the problem they are being proposed to address.

What would prevent 0/1 Healer clears of on patch content?

1) More DPS buttons for Healers? Well...no. While this might address boredom, if people are clearing content without Healers, it's not (mechanically) due to Healers being bored.

2) More support/buff/debuff buttons for Healers? Probably not. Same reasoning; people are already clearing content without Healers, so more buffs/debuffs wouldn't likely change that unless they were explicitly made requirements.

3) More damage from encounters? Well...yes, but not in a vacuum. Specifically, the damage has to be something that Tanks can't cheese and Tank + DPS healing and mitigation can't heal through and that they need more powerful and/or more spamable heals (and thus Healers) to get through.

4) Less Tank/DPS mitigation? Same as (3), this is only a partial solution. Mitigation checks aren't healing checks. Simply removing the mitigation wouldn't work since encounter design would need to change to have SMALLER spikes (ones that can't 100% party members if unmitigated) otherwise they're automatic wipes. That or give the mitigation to the Healers...which could work, though it would shift more stress onto Healers. But that isn't inherently a problem.

5) Less Tank/DPS healing? Same as (3), this depends on the encounter design. The issue comes down to if Tanks/DPS can get through consistent damage over an encounter on their own healing or if they require the dedicated Healer tools.

6) Healer kits being changed? Same as (3), but also factoring in (4) and (5). The Healer kits as they are now are not why TOP was 0 Healer cleared (though AST's kit in specific is why the recent solo heal was possible...) Healer kit changes, like DPS and support options, are more a thing that has to be done after (or rather, factoring in) encounter design changes to work with the new paradigm produced is. Healer kit changes, alone, won't fix the problem, since again, TOP was cleared without any Healers at all.

The overall solution is probably a holistic one, but proposed solutions need to address the actual problem.

If the problem is (and it has been stated to be or include, owing to them being used as "evidence" in support of it) that 0/1 Healer clears of content are possible, then the solutions need to address that first and foremost. Further changes can be considered for other issues once that is resolved, but if that is the (near) universally agreed upon problem, then the solution(s) to it need to address that.

[NobleWinter]

I'm not sure why you listed a ton of healer "fixes" that no one is suggesting to make healers mandatory in content. That oddity aside, groups have been clearing content regularly without healers since ARR. It's just gotten worse over time as it went from entry level dungeon clears, to level cap dungeons, to normal trials, to extremes, to savage raids, and finely ultimates where we find ourselves now. This is a design direction the development team is leaning ever further into and has refused to address as a "problem" for quite some time. As players it is completely useless to offer "solutions" when the development team refuses to acknowledge anything is actually wrong. Until the devs decide that healers should be important again the role will continue to slide into oblivion with stale gameplay and teams will avoid bringing them whenever possible.

[UkcsAlias]

3) More damage from encounters? Well...yes, but not in a vacuum. Specifically, the damage has to be something that Tanks can't cheese and Tank + DPS healing and mitigation can't heal through and that they need more powerful and/or more spamable heals (and thus Healers) to get through.

The ivalice raids show a mechanic that demands strong healing, but is sadly very staged: you get dropped to 1hp, and within a certain time you need to be healed to full health. As no dps job can effectively do this, it will require healing. But even then usualy just 1 healer (unless the time is realy short, which i think is not going to be a good mechanic at that point).

Some dungeons do also use this mechanic on random player, where although it doesnt drop to 1, it requires the healing. But this is almost the same as just randomly marking a target which then needs an esuna (a 1 healer job).

But the other problem is gear. Ultimates are the true test for your gear, so upgrading is a thing that matters. But there is a point where too much upgrades are there, making certain tresholds easier. If mechanics due to this gear no longer deal enough damage, it automaticly causes healers to become less important. The only way to get around it is if all damage is percentage based anyway, removing any aspect of health and healing potencies (which is dull). Its however the most reliable.

Otherwise you are always going to need mechanics that only healers can resolve. And even then, just 1 is often going to be enough. Unless the mechanic is capable of locking 1 healer out of acting: 1 healer gets frozen, and the only way to release is healing enough. Again, a dull mechanic very quickly.

Or you can just be very lame as devs, and demand a certain party layout. Want 6 dps's, too bad, 2 healers mandatory. Which i actualy think isnt a bad idea to do, as this is still a restriction in dps output for a team. Even if the healers dont have to do as much healing, their existance reduces damage output vs a dps that could have otherwise been there.

[ForsakenRoe]

You just have to have enough pure healing required, in a small enough window of time, that tanks/DPS healing tools are not enough to deal with it in time. Alternatively, throw more Esuna-debuffs in there. Nobody's zerohealing TEA any time soon, because Throttle will take out 5 of your team (the only thing you can do with zero-heal runs there would be to bring 6 bards as your DPS, and then you don't have eg SMN phoenix heal or DNC curing waltz)

When things do 'big damage' but there's nothing beyond that, like a doom timer or whatever, then mitigation can stand in for flat healing. And with how much mitigation we have across every role nowadays, that leads to what we saw here. It's also part of the reason why SCH SGE is a viable comp, and is in fact 'the meta' in DSR. Because the amount of mit required vastly exceeds the amount of flat healing required.

As an aside, changing healing to be more Barb EX in nature (raidwides are far more common, but hit less hard), would vastly incentivize pure healers over bringing two barrier healers, while also allowing 2x barrier to be valid too. Picture the scene, you're a healer, you have 70k HP. You have 80k damage coming in from a raidwide. You either mitigate it enough to make it hit 'less than 70k' or you die. Now picture the same, but the boss does a Knuckle Drum style rapid fire of hits, where each hit is 10k damage, and takes 5-6 seconds to do the full 80k damage. If you throw out a heal at any point while the move goes out as a pure healer, you survive the mechanic. Barrier healers mitigate the 80k total down below 70k and live that way, same as now, but Pure healers are able to deal with the damage halfway through the move with their stronger flat HPS output. Proactive healing and Reactive healing in a sense. It baffles me that SE hasn't considered this yet, and I can only hope that come 7.0, they consider it after seeing the Barb EX reception

[WaxSw]

You just have to have enough pure healing required, in a small enough window of time, that tanks/DPS healing tools are not enough to deal with it in time. Alternatively, throw more Esuna-debuffs in there. Nobody's zerohealing TEA any time soon, because Throttle will take out 5 of your team (the only thing you can do with zero-heal runs there would be to bring 6 bards as your DPS, and then you don't have eg SMN phoenix heal or DNC curing waltz)

When things do 'big damage' but there's nothing beyond that, like a doom timer or whatever, then mitigation can stand in for flat healing. And with how much mitigation we have across every role nowadays, that leads to what we saw here. It's also part of the reason why SCH SGE is a viable comp, and is in fact 'the meta' in DSR. Because the amount of mit required vastly exceeds the amount of flat healing required.

As an aside, changing healing to be more Barb EX in nature (raidwides are far more common, but hit less hard), would vastly incentivize pure healers over bringing two barrier healers, while also allowing 2x barrier to be valid too. Picture the scene, you're a healer, you have 70k HP. You have 80k damage coming in from a raidwide. You either mitigate it enough to make it hit 'less than 70k' or you die. Now picture the same, but the boss does a Knuckle Drum style rapid fire of hits, where each hit is 10k damage, and takes 5-6 seconds to do the full 80k damage. If you throw out a heal at any point while the move goes out as a pure healer, you survive the mechanic. Barrier healers mitigate the 80k total down below 70k and live that way, same as now, but Pure healers are able to deal with the damage halfway through the move with their stronger flat HPS output. Proactive healing and Reactive healing in a sense. It baffles me that SE hasn't considered this yet, and I can only hope that come 7.0, they consider it after seeing the Barb EX reception

I would also add to all of this, making the dps of healers and tanks comparable so in more casual content like EXs and below, where those HPS needs may not be that high and the healer exclusive mechanics are few, the 2nd healer doesn't get replaced instantly with a tank as there would be barely any efficiency gain.
This could go in hand with an expansion of the DPS tools that the role needs, to rewards healers for good healing in all the content while making sure that the "dps comparable to tank's" is not achieved with minimal effort, keeping healers from becoming the SMN of the support roles.

[ForsakenRoe]

I would also add to all of this, making the dps of healers and tanks comparable so in more casual content like EXs and below

If you mean comparable between healers and tanks (and neither are comparable to DPS), we're pretty much there already

Abyssos all bosses, 95th%

I'd much rather it be like this (tanks and healers fairly equal to each other) than something like the state of WOW:

Looking at Vault of the Incarnates (last tier), 95% Heroic (it's more comparable to our Savage). Using last tier because the current tier has only been out for like 2 weeks so the data set is way smaller

Is it any wonder people were dropping healers at the end of the season, when the healing kits of Prot Paladins (and selfhealing/mit of the other classes) were so out of control they could 1T4Dps through M+22 keys? If the healer's healing isn't needed, then the players will look to the comparison of 'what do we gain by bringing the healer anyway, and what do we lose'. And in WOW, the 'loss' was that the healer does only 20%ish of the damage of the potential 4th DPS they could bring instead. So of course they'd take the 4th DPS, especially in a gamemode where they're on a timer, more damage is always useful, and at those high key levels, you're more likely going to die to a oneshot rather than 'I wasn't healed for 10 seconds and died to bleeding out'

At least here in FFXIV, when we don't 'need' the healing, the amount of damage a healer can provide, in comparison to the DPS that would theoretically replace them, is high enough to give people cause to reconsider. Even then, you see healers getting dropped at times, like Hyd EX solo tank solo heal runs. It mostly happens when people work out the underlying logic of mechanics. For example, if the Water LP stacks in Hyd EX were 'goes on healers, then chooses at random if there's not a second healer to choose', it'd have been 2 healers every time. But it wasn't, it was 'goes on healers, and if a second healer isn't present, goes on a random tank', meaning that in a 1 tank, 1 healer, 6 DPS run, you could be certain that one goes on the tank every time and one goes on the healer every time. Making healers 'required' by forcing mechanics onto them is like, pretty lame as a way to make people take healers to things though. 'I'm only here because if I wasn't, Venom Surge would go random and oneshot half the party' isn't exactly a great feeling.

[Somnolence]

You just have to have enough pure healing required, in a small enough window of time, that tanks/DPS healing tools are not enough to deal with it in time. Alternatively, throw more Esuna-debuffs in there. Nobody's zerohealing TEA any time soon, because Throttle will take out 5 of your team (the only thing you can do with zero-heal runs there would be to bring 6 bards as your DPS, and then you don't have eg SMN phoenix heal or DNC curing waltz)

TEA Throttle is not good example since it can be skipped with enough dps. Ofc TEA itself requires enough healing that its not possible to get away with no healers; solo healer runs were done many times tho.

[WaxSw]

Damage

I mean even that we're still 500 rdps below tanks, its not like the WOW difference you mentioned of course but is still significant, the difference between healers and tanks is in net value similar to the difference between Mch and Blm and that's without counting how the true measure of a tank value comes from its adps (which is why DRK is so busted) where the difference increases to almost 1k dps when comparing the strongest adps healer to the weakest tank, that in today's standards is a huge leap, and its partially the reason why tank's can replace the 2nd healer so often, because on top of higher sustain from their stats, they are guaranteed to deal more damage, making the run more efficient:


(current tier in adps rankings)

I think the sweetspot should be closer to a more balanced version of what we had in Shb:


(last tier of Shb)

Here the tanks were above healers in adps but healers were above tanks in rdps, more balance should be required ofc, I don't think healers should be that far ahead in rdps but having both roles doing similar damage and not one being consistently 500-1k below the other would mean that replacing one for the other does not come at an efficiency cost.

Of course both are always going to be replaced by a dps when their sustain/mit is not needed but that's something that I think can't be solved for the majority of content as the healing/damage required to justify the existence of a 2nd healer or 2nd tank is not something that can be easily put in more casual content like Exs or below.

[Aravell]

Nobody's zerohealing TEA any time soon, because Throttle will take out 5 of your team (the only thing you can do with zero-heal runs there would be to bring 6 bards as your DPS, and then you don't have eg SMN phoenix heal or DNC curing waltz)

People can skip throttle by doing an early kill, however, it's very likely that a 0 healer run of TEA will be ended by J-waves. That's definitely too much damage to heal through with only tank and DPS tools, I'm also not sure if it's even possible to kill Brute Justice first and then kill Cruise Chaser before it enrages, even with 6 dps.

[AmiableApkallu]

If the problem is (and it has been stated to be or include, owing to them being used as "evidence" in support of it) that 0/1 Healer clears of content are possible, then the solutions need to address that first and foremost. Further changes can be considered for other issues once that is resolved, but if that is the (near) universally agreed upon problem, then the solution(s) to it need to address that.

I think this approach focuses on a particular tree and misses the forest. All of (1) - (6) are about healers wanting to feel relevant and wanting to have fun. The zero healer clear of TOP is, my two cents, a gut punch that highlights how not relevant a healer can be in content across the board. As I myself put it:

There's a simple reason why MSQ content and similar being clearable without a healer is a problem:

When you are that (sprout) healer, and you die, and everyone carries on without you well and fine… it just feels bad being shown exactly how unneeded your skills and presence are.

And in that framing, it's not actually necessary to guarantee a wipe if the party tries to go on without a healer. It's enough that the party simply not leave the healer for dead. Which, given that this is MSQ-level content I'm talking about, I bet it'd be enough to implement some sort of in-combat Phoenix Down, because I bet most parties, if they had the choice, would rather have the healer alive than dead.