Healer Suggestions Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

What I was thinking is that basically, DHIT sucks cos it's 'crit but smaller' yes, but it's at least interesting as compared to determination, which is a flat 'everything' boost. So we'd have 4 stats per role:

Right, but that "flat 'everything' boost" is at least a decent enough option, especially in a context where Crit only affects chance and jobs each have crit procs, as it opts for power over frequency of bonus events.

Having DHit convert into a Crit Bonus stat wouldn't be too awful, either, but would force mirrored investment each in Crit Chance and Crit Bonus for what jobs would actually want it, still constraining it as an option so that it's less desirable (or, has a lesser expanse of use cases), ultimately, than just straight Det.

For my part, I'd rather just see 3 general stats, each with job-specific scaling modifiers to allow for more or less oGCD-based jobs to still be allowed access to (something other than) Haste...

General: Haste (only GCD rate), Precision (Critical Hit Chance), Determination (Flat)

...such that we actually have enough of each of those now-just-three stats for them to actually make a significant difference...

...and 3 tertiary stats not naturally found on gear that are taken basically only for cheese / QoL / easy-mode-ing fights without a particularly tight enrage.

Tertiary: Tenacity (slightly increases maximum HP, Defense, and Magic Defense each), Swiftness (bonus movement speed and reduced Sprint CD), and Piety (increases all MP gains, including from external sources such as elixirs or being resurrected; maybe also reducing the duration of Weakness).

Granted....

...my own radical pipedream would be to have no secondary stats at all and instead just have Strength, Dexterity, Focus, and Spirit serve different functions that are useful, at least to a point, for every job and could make far more radical differences (a more Freya-like clothie DRG focused around frequent Geirskoguls and Mirage Dives, rather than powerful DFDs and Stardivers).

(Technically) complete freedom of gearing, with item sets being manipulable between different armor classes -- each tier has just 1 or 2 base items atop which armor is added, cloth lengthened, etc., as to increase Focus or (Magic) Defense at the cost of added Weight (which comes at an effective cost to, indirectly, the value of one's Strength and Dexterity) and adjust its balance of bonus stats (based primarily around the piece's 'vibe' I guess, since we apparently need wearing a nicer jacket be capable of making one hit 5x as hard).

In that setup, though, there wouldn't really be a single set role per job, and omni-levelers would as often just "main" Spirit, Focus, Strength, or Dexterity play, because a Spirit-heavy Monk would play a role more similar to a Spirit-heavy White Mage than a Focus-heavy Scholar would.

To be clear, even then, Warrior would not be able to competitively support much Focus or Spirit, though such could be useful for a highly flexible DPS build, while casters other than RDM would not be able to support much Strength or Dexterity (outside of perhaps Summoner Avatar meme builds, taking on physical qualities from its summons).

[Zolvolt]

If sqenix seriously cared about healers they would make drastic changes for us. They'd remove piety or make it desired. They'd make healing fun again by adjusting damage output, and mitigation tools and increase tank auto-attack damage. But we're in a never-ending cycle of boredom and bad stubborn choices.

[ForsakenRoe]

Interestingly, I was checking the reddit for WOW earlier, and spotted a thread where a healer main was venting about the healer design over there. Seems to be that, after the end of last patch where 'healers are not needed even in a M+22 key' and the subsequent 'buff player HP and enemy damage, but not ally-targeted healing' (which results in tank selfheal being adjusted, but 'tank using selfheal tool on ally' or actual healer healing to be less potent) adjustment of this patch, the healing requirements have fallen into one of two situations: still not threatening enough and they feel like a scuffed DPS with zero damage output (WOW healers are like 20% of a DPS's output rather than our 50%), or 'so fast and so hectic that it's mentally exhausting'. Very little in-between.

And IDK about everyone else, but if EVERY piece of content is 'mentally exhausting' that's probably not going to be good for the casual players. And again, remember, the problem here is that 'the lower level content doesn't feel fun to someone who is a competent healer'. We can't go saying 'oh so Savages are 'mentally exhausting' levels of hard, but the EX roulette will be casual friendly still', because that's not solving the problem, that the EX is still boring for the veteran healer. We need a solution that makes every content difficulty level fun, regardless of the player's skill level. A solution that makes EX roulette more fun, Savage more fun, Ultimate more fun, those new Variant thingys more fun, and all without over-burdening the more casual side of the playerbase with massively increased potential to wipe, which 'raise healing requirements' would very likely cause.

Personally, I'd consider this a premonition of sorts, of what would happen if we were to raise the damage incoming, or lower the healing potencies, or whatever combination of 'our heals are less effective vs the damage that is coming our way'. But some may not be convinced their 'just make it so we need to heal more' plans are not actually healthy for the playerbase until they're put in the game and the damage is done, it's whatever either way really

[Shurrikhan]

Interestingly, I was checking the reddit for WOW earlier, and spotted a thread where a healer main was venting about the healer design over there. Seems to be that, after the end of last patch where 'healers are not needed even in a M+22 key'

Tbf, that was due simply to a single tank outlier, Protection Paladin. Imagine oGCD Clemency on steroids and with frequent free-cast procs and augmenting effects.

[ForsakenRoe]

Tbf, that was due simply to a single tank outlier, Protection Paladin. Imagine oGCD Clemency on steroids and with frequent free-cast procs and augmenting effects.

If it was an outlier, why did they not just nerf the outlier, rather than 'nerf the outlier, and everything else too'? And by 25% no less, one patch after they effectively nerfed all healing with the same method by 40% for the launch? There's more to it than just 'oops one tank was too good' I'm pretty sure, and it looked to me like it was a case of 'we have to either fix it by doing this (make heals effectively 'worse' by making friendly HP bars bigger AND monster damage bigger), or we have to just increase damage without adjusting ally HP, which leads to the spiky '80%-to-0% in a single global' gameplay that nobody likes', because that just turns everything into mit checks

oh wait

[Shurrikhan]

If it was an outlier, why did they not just nerf the outlier, rather than 'nerf the outlier, and everything else too'? And by 25% no less, one patch after they effectively nerfed all healing with the same method by 40% for the launch?

Apparently, they had wanted to make damage less spikey (or, healing more gradual/attrition-like) by that amount from the start.

But, yes, there was only one tank capable of so keeping the whole team up. Anything else relied on taking a ton of hybrids... all for typically less efficient effect than just taking a more standard comp (granted, Ret and Enhance buffs would have made it less punishing now).

And they did nerf that tank's external healing. Greatly. I just wish they stopped at that.

[ForsakenRoe]

Well, in either case, we're back to the original point: they increased how many healing GCDs you have to do in some way, now players are feeling like it's very mentally draining to be a healer. And so regardless of the reason that the no-healer runs were happening over there, I maintain the position that 'increase the number of healing GCDs required to keep up with damage' is not the solution to go for here, as it will either A: destroy the casual playerbase, or B: not actually address the issue of 'easier content is boring to people who are good at healers'

[Shurrikhan]

Well, in either case, we're back to the original point: they increased how many healing GCDs you have to do in some way, now players are feeling like it's very mentally draining to be a healer. And so regardless of the reason that the no-healer runs were happening over there, I maintain the position that 'increase the number of healing GCDs required to keep up with damage' is not the solution to go for here, as it will either A: destroy the casual playerbase, or B: not actually address the issue of 'easier content is boring to people who are good at healers'

Sure... for WoW... given how much more healing as portion of uptime or even CPM was already required over there (several to some dozen times as much). Here in XIV, though we're so, so far from that point that I see little issue with making content require a little more healing.

Heck, without that, it's not as if we can have actual 'heal checks' (rather than mere mitigation checks) in this game.

I do think we should first prune back the amount of free healing given to WAR and PLD, to be fair (not just because it throws things out of whack, but also because the way they --especially PLD-- provide that sustain is just so damned boring / basically non-optimizable), but even after that I certainly wouldn't mind giving healers a bit more to heal, in no small part because it then makes the DPS portions of the kit (say, back when SCH could juggle up to 5 DoTs in ARR) that much more interesting for/from that added pressure opposite DPS optimization, further rewarding fight knowledge.

[SargeTheSeagull]

If you boil it down to its essence, there is one problem with healers: They spend most of their time pressing one button. There are so many ways to fix this it's incredible and honestly really simple. To make a quick list: Do what WoW did in 10.1 (increase enemy damage and player health by a lot so healers can't top people off as easily), give healers rudimentary damage rotations, make healing spells more in depth so you can't just spam medica/succor, make regenerating MP more complex instead of just hitting lucid dreaming, make raid damage way more frequent like in Barb, put most heals on the GCD so using GCD heals doesn't feel terrible (this is probably a terrible idea but an idea nonetheless), the list goes on and on and on. At this point I borderline don't care what they do so long as they do something to make them more engaging.

[ForsakenRoe]

If you boil it down to its essence, there is one problem with healers: They spend most of their time pressing one button. There are so many ways to fix this it's incredible and honestly really simple. To make a quick list: Do what WoW did in 10.1 (increase enemy damage and player health by a lot so healers can't top people off as easily), give healers rudimentary damage rotations, make healing spells more in depth so you can't just spam medica/succor, make regenerating MP more complex instead of just hitting lucid dreaming, make raid damage way more frequent like in Barb, put most heals on the GCD so using GCD heals doesn't feel terrible (this is probably a terrible idea but an idea nonetheless), the list goes on and on and on. At this point I borderline don't care what they do so long as they do something to make them more engaging.

Problem is, no healer in WOW has a Medica, or a Helios. Every AOE heal is either gated by a CD (Wild Growth, Circle of Mending, Spiritbloom) or is dogwater bad without some sort of talent to change it's gameplay (Holy Nova with Rhapsody talent, for example). I've estimated previously that in order to get to where WOW is in terms of 'Healing GCDs used vs Damage GCDs used', we'd have to delete every OGCD and halve the potency of every AOE GCD heal, something that casual players will likely not be able to keep up with. Now, some people might find it fun to throw out Regen on everyone individually to keep everyone healed, but that doesn't sound great to me. We can swap 'press Glare 100 times' to 'press Cure 100 times' and the gameplay has not changed, we are still pressing one button, we've just added 'constantly change targets' to the APM count, and AST's already have enough issues doing that only at the 2min marks.

If they want to increase healing requirements to match Barb EX, at this point I'm kinda just apathetic to fighting the idea. Just do it, watch the casuals be unable to keep up and quit, and I'll stand among the burning rubble of the game and say 'I told you so'. and nobody will be around to hear it, because they quit too. Or they can do it to just the hard content, leave EX roulette etc untouched and then what do you know, the problem isn't actually fixed at all, lower content is still boring as hell for veterans. But that does sound like an SE solution, to misinterpret what is needed, do the wrong 'solution', receive feedback about how it's not worked and go 'well we tried, see you in next expansion maybe we'll fix it then' cough kaiten