Healer role design change?

[Sebazy]

I miss when I had to toss a Regen on the main tank during Trines in O8S or they die to autos. I don't think I've needed to press Regen once in most modern fights. Also the part about them designing fights to be log-friendly, that would explain why they stopped doing mechanics that give people a damage down for doing it correctly (Digititis) or mechanics that lock down a specific person in the fight (Hand phase in A3S and Titan gaols in E4S).

I still remember the the first time we hit an intermission on O8S Clownka, we're all oohing and aaahing as the statue shifts FFVI style. Meanwhile Kefka proceeds to quietly kick the tanks into the floor whilst no-ones looking. Loved it =(

[ForsakenRoe]

The 'I'm out, but not really' any% speedrun

[SenahPanipahr]

SE don't really need to go back to ARR style encounter designs, but rather they need to look at what made those otherwise really rather basic bosses such good fun when the modern day equivalents like Alte Roite are almost universally derived.

Ramping up the damage on tanks, allowing bosses to keep auto attacking through casts, allowing those auto attacks to crit, bringing back non telegraphed mini tank busters and additional aoe procs with normalised RNG chances to really keep the healers on their toes. Make us sweat, make us have to keep an eye on the tanks, make us have to keep an eye on the melee. Stop allowing us to let someone sit at 100hp safe in the knowledge that the next AoE is clearly indicated on our spreadsheet and Assize/Asylum/Eos will get them topped long before anything else comes along.

Basically, more incoming damage coupled with less predictability. The sooner SE drop the weird esports mentality and stop trying to design both fights and jobs to be 'logs friendly' the better. I genuinely think it's sterilised the enjoyment out of Savage at this point.

Hah, this is really elucidating and depressing at the same time. Most of the the higher level stuff I've done has been ARR content on MINE. Didn't realise it was such an intentional pivot from after that since I've experienced far less of the harder raids and trials after that.

Really sucks to learn/confirm, but thanks for the incidental explanation. The things you highlighted are a huge part of why I loved healing Coils and Titan Ex, but I don't have the firsthand experience to summarise them so well myself.

Is the esports mentality really such a thing? I'm not really clued in with with most of their devlog stuff around newer raids, because spoiler avoidance I guess; but it'd explain a lot. I don't really understand why they'd be designing around parsers given they're so negative around all that. (Though my best guess would be that they're afraid that adding more RNG to the mix will leave FFXIV players turning to the same thing that killed the fun in WoW -- i.e. DeadlyBossMods and co.)

@Renathras, I'm not going to pretend I understand the extent of any bad blood between other posters and you, so I'm going to keep myself out of those particular side discussions beyond what I already said about not getting bogged down on minutiae. Being clear and concise is probably our only shot at someone from SE seeing these repeated complaints and doing something with them (though I already accept there's a good chance we're just screaming at the void and each other).

[ty_taurus]

I think "Content" is a more accurate way that I feel the player base has with healing as it currently exists. Most players aren't necessarily trying to break down the state of job design or anything, but I think most people, even if they aren't dissatisfied with the state of healing, feel that there's improvement that could be had. Spending too much time DPSing, too much time on mainly 1 DPS action, not getting to use most of your healing actions most of the time, are all things that I've seen normal people acknowledge. It's not as big a deal for them, but they would certainly enjoy certain changes be made, (and which changes may depend on who you ask). From the surveys we did before, and even from Ren's Reddit Q&A, most people who have appeared on either feel that healers could use a few more damage tools at least, or wouldn't be bothered by it at least, and that checks out with conversations I've had with players in game. Healers in my FC that were excited to see PVP Afflatus Purgation and wanted to see that in PVE. My static healer who thought the idea of ARR SCH's potentially 6-7 DoTs (7 if AoE) was too much, but feels like healers do need more damage tools anyway just to make things less spammy.

I think most players, if asked what healers could improve on, would say that they want to see more healing needed first, but a fair amount of those players would also say having more DPS gameplay instead if more healing can't happen, or a little of both is also fine.

[SenahPanipahr]

I think SE also designs regular content in such a way that any regular Medica spammer can clear it, this is not that great as there is no difficulty curve

"Medica spammer-friendly" is unfortunately an apt way to summarise a lot of duties. It's really painful to see them be so stubborn about this when, as you pointed out, everyone is telling them "this needs to change". While I don't expect gamedevs to adhere strictly to suggestions from players, I do expect them to treat identified problem areas seriously. Personally I'd love for healing itself to become the focus, for Healer to 'live up to its name', but I'd accept them receiving an actual DPS rotation if only because I don't have confidence that they'd also go back to tweak older content such that healing wouldn't still be irrelevant for 90% of the game. (Some rotation improvements would also be good regardless if they're insistent on continuing in the direction of FFXIV being a single-player JRPG with a ton of online elements more than a straight-up MMO; I can't imagine how painful going through the MSQ as AST would be, at least WHM can spam Holy.)

Though to be honest if they'd only just reduce the absurdly high ilevel sync on older duties it'd go a long way in starting to address the issue, it's super dumb how many old raids aren't even remotely challenging -- looking at you Crystal Tower, who at SE thought it was a good idea for a roulette to be 90% the same three raids -- Healers shouldn't be praying for disasters just for their role to be remotely interesting because the item level is too high for most mechanics to even matter.

Most of the Healers I run into are tired veterans that stick with the role for whatever reason, or newer players who are either mechanically weak, or just unduly anxious about underperforming in a party context. (As we all know, healing adequately is far easier than non-Healers seem to think.) I can't help but wondering if SE's stubbornness around this is due to some corporate focus-testing/survey nonsense, where they think they've identified a "type" of player that chooses Healer, rather than realising how they've shaped the current demographic by making it unappealing outside progression to anyone other than noobs.

It's just so sad and silly for them to base entire role designs around a temporal issue (in this case, an influx of new players) rather than trying to improve the experience of learning new jobs/roles as a whole. Utterly self-defeating in the long term, unless they really just want healing to be an awkward support role for people less interested in the game so much as hanging out with their friends and going to social events. (Nothing innately wrong with wanting to do that, but they shouldn't sacrifice what should be one of the most interesting aspects of the game for it.)

[Shurrikhan]

Or we could give tanks back the ability to trade between sustain and pure offense, such that otherwise excessive defense would at least mean further offensive resource available, if indirectly. In that way, damage wouldn't be the only role particularly worth gearing first.

Additionally, if we just slightly nerfed AoEs but made them into smart-heals, tanks' natural mitigation and others' personal mitigation CDs would actually have the potential for some rDPS impact, rather than merely feeling redundant respective to those AoE heals.

[Aravell]

One problem with simply returning to the damage profile of the old raids is that even they won't be able to stress out the overbloated healer kits that we have right now. Take Blazing Scourge from A12S for example, you had to time a heal in between the 2nd and 3rd hits or the target will die, if we have out current kits for something like that, we can just set an Aquaveil and a Benison and just ignore all 3 hits completely then Tetra/Solace. To make those types of mechanics relevant again, they'd probably have to ramp up the damage to about 200% of our max HP or cut out a ton of bloat in our healer kits.

I personally advocate for quick streams of moderate damage to exhaust our extensive healing kits and force us to dip into GCDs because there's no way we can cover everything with OGCDs. Having occasional damage that totals to higher than our max HP is how they got to the point where mitigation is king.

[vetch]

Well, I said it would be better at it, not that it would be perfect.

I personally advocate for quick streams of moderate damage to exhaust our extensive healing kits and force us to dip into GCDs because there's no way we can cover everything with OGCDs. Having occasional damage that totals to higher than our max HP is how they got to the point where mitigation is king.

Coils excels at this, because between its big raidwides it intersperses more aggressive damage windows with crit-enabled-autos and miniature tankbusters, extending longer than the duration of a single short mitigation, so you either need more than one or to suck it up and use the long mit. (It's also a lot more fun to tank because of all the judgement calls you have to make, like deciding to mit where you ordinarily wouldn't because a healer died and has low MP.)

[ForsakenRoe]

Coils excels at this, because between its big raidwides it intersperses more aggressive damage windows with crit-enabled-autos and miniature tankbusters,

I didn't do Coils in ARR, but did do some synced during HW. For comparison's sake, is Barb EX remotely like what you're looking for, in terms of a more recent addition? Cos if so, I'd agree that Barb EX felt pretty good to heal (the extra ilvl from this tier of raid probably kills that a bit, but that's the nature of vertical progression)

[Silver-Strider]

I didn't do Coils in ARR, but did do some synced during HW. For comparison's sake, is Barb EX remotely like what you're looking for, in terms of a more recent addition? Cos if so, I'd agree that Barb EX felt pretty good to heal (the extra ilvl from this tier of raid probably kills that a bit, but that's the nature of vertical progression)

The main difference between Coils and Barb was how much damage the MT was taking in comparison to the rest of the party.
Taking T9 as an example, Nael can use Ravensbeak (Tank Buster) while a Stardust meteor is falling that deals raid wide damage and is STILL auto attacking the MT.
That means the tank is eating a Tank buster, getting hit by Stardust AND is taking Auto attack damage all at the same time.
Compare that to Barb that will either attack the Tank with a Tank Buster or is using an AoE attack. Auto attacks stop entirely so it's typically just 1 form of damage that is hitting the tank at any given time. Massive difference.
Then, we also have to take into account factors that once existed in ARR/HW that aren't present anymore. Things like Crit from Bosses and Darkness Damage, Tank Stances themselves providing mitigation at the cost of reduced DPS which made Stance Dancing a thing to increase a Tank's damage at the risk of taking more damage themselves, etc.

No modern fight will ever be equivalent to the damage Coils used to do without a major overhaul to combat design.