What Healer kit (not encounter) change would make GCD heals NOT bad gameplay?

[Aravell]

That said, something I've been thinking about lately is a way the lily system could be different and not promote so much overhealing, and the idea goes like this: Instead of Solace and Rapture being flat heals, we have three lily actions. I'll use some blunt names for the sake of simplicity.

Afflatus Fast Cast - Makes your next spell instant cast. Costs 1 lily and nourishes the blood lily. Also grants 1 stack of Growth.
Afflatus MP - Causes your next spell to restore your MP by an amount equal to its MP Cost. Costs 1 lily and nourishes the blood . Also grants 1 stack of Growth.
Afflatus Healing - Increases the potency of your next healing spell by 30%. Costs 1 lily and nourishes the blood lily. Also grants 1 sack of Growth.
Growth effect: If your next spell cast is a healing spell, that spell also nourishes the blood lily.

In other words, it's a soft 1-2 heal combo where you augment a heal before activating it all while staying DPS neutral. How do you feel about something like that?

I'm a supporter of more interesting kit design and also of powerful abilities coming at a cost. Your suggestions would expand the lily system and make it more interesting, but I'd change just one thing about the Growth effect, I'd make it a stacking effect that's granted by the buffed GCD heal and at 2 stacks of Growth, you're refunded a lily. Yes, it would become a dps loss because you'd have to use 2 GCD heals under the buff effects to get 1 lily back, but I'd like to see powerful abilities actually cost something to use again. So it would be:

Afflatus Fast Cast - Makes your next spell instant cast. Costs 1 lily and nourishes the blood lily. Also causes your next spell to grant 1 stack of Growth.
Afflatus MP - Causes your next spell to restore your MP by an amount equal to its MP Cost. Costs 1 lily and nourishes the blood lily. Also causes your next spell to grant 1 stack of Growth.
Afflatus Healing - Increases the potency of your next healing spell by 30%. Costs 1 lily and nourishes the blood lily. Also causes your next spell to grant 1 stack of Growth.
Growth effect: At 2 stacks, grants 1 lily.

[Shurrikhan]

I wish "people" would be clear that healing GCDs cost personal damage. If you're playing "thoughtfully," you hit those healing GCDs because you think the party's total damage will be better off for it, or is more likely than not to be better off for it -- in practice, meaning you think the party will actually clear versus wipe.

And, if the party's total damage is actually better off because you hit that healing GCD instead of your personal nuke, why is it that the spreadsheet aggregator du jour fails to recognize that as a positive rDPS contribution?

Unless "people" decide that heals actually can have a positive rDPS contribution, the conversation is always going to be about damage neutrality and pushing everything into oGCDs (a la tank kits).

/end abbreviated rant

This. I cannot understand why people think a single purple parse, only among a party of otherwise all equal or better-performing players, is worth more than multiple mediocre clears, especially ones that managed to clear early on (pre ilvl-inflation) despite a low-performing party -- nor, more importantly, why any of it could be mistaken as relevant when for anything less than going into Ultimate.

I do not understand why the fixation on fflogs is so often far wider-spanning than it has any reason to be, and fflogs itself has far more it could do to provide more useful at-a-glance data, e.g.,

• using as the default damage metric the average of rDPS and aDPS together, so that jobs' varying ability to exploit buffs is also accounted for (call it pDPS or w/e, for DPS provided to one's party -- which rDPS pretends to be but misses half the picture of);
  
  
• including another metric for total effective pDPS + Sustain (call it TQC --Total Quantifiable Contribution-- or whatever); and
  
  
• contextualizing player parse history with their performance relative to their group (especially for that TQC metric).

[Supersnow845]

All trying to encourage healing on FFLOGS as a combined metric would is end up in the situation of “oh sorry you need some mitigation, sorry bro kerachole is on CD because I press it on CD because it ups my TQC and is the biggest TQC increase of my addersgall skills”

[Shurrikhan]

All trying to encourage healing on FFLOGS as a combined metric would is end up in the situation of “oh sorry you need some mitigation, sorry bro kerachole is on CD because I press it on CD because it ups my TQC and is the biggest TQC increase of my addersgall skills”

You have a 10% mitigation. Its only contribution to 'damage nullified'... is as much damage as it nullifies.

If you used it on CD regardless of how little incoming damage was coming and thereby nullified less damage overall, that'd literally show as a lower amount of 'damage nullified'.



There's only one metric that encourages using attack CDs on CD regardless of total contribution to the party, and it's the one we already judge everyone by: rDPS. You curently literally get more rDPS and higher "performance" relative to your party by ignoring raid buffs, since rDPS gives zero credit for timely exploitation of external buffs, despite both buff and exploitation being needed for the party's total contribution. Which is, again, why that metric ought to be replaced.

[Supersnow845]

You have a 10% mitigation. Its only contribution to 'damage nullified'... is as much damage as it nullifies.

If you used it on CD regardless of how little incoming damage was coming and thereby nullified less damage overall, that'd literally show as a lower amount of 'damage nullified'.

Except you would have to count pure healing or TQC would artificially inflate shield healers

If you decide to calculate TQC for shield healers and rDPS for pure healers you still run into the current problem you have now it’s just slightly less likely people will compare SCH to AST

[Semirhage]

I don't even necessarily hate the *idea* of oGCD healing world. I tend to like healing best when it's done in short, decisive triage loops as a second ball to juggle while doing more combat-positive things (and by that I mean, healing staves off loss, instead of pushing toward victory). Give me 2-3 carefully chosen spells when they're needed and keep the battle flowing. Healing in this game is just needed far too infrequently. The choices required in doing so are slim to nonexistent. The pop quiz dropped in front of you is multiple-choice and the grader will count 3 of the 4 choices as "correct", and rarely punish you for picking that fourth one anyway. The other ball you're juggling alongside this fail-free minigame is just spamming Magic Missile over and over again. These healer kits are as deep as a puddle. That's the issue that needs attention. Being free oGCD heavy exacerbates that issue, but we could easily delete all of the oGCDs, make GCDs free (or whatever) to compensate, and we've switched to a nearly-equally puddle deep GCD healing model.

[AnotherPerson]

I wish "people" would be clear that healing GCDs cost personal damage. If you're playing "thoughtfully," you hit those healing GCDs because you think the party's total damage will be better off for it, or is more likely than not to be better off for it -- in practice, meaning you think the party will actually clear versus wipe.

And, if the party's total damage is actually better off because you hit that healing GCD instead of your personal nuke, why is it that the spreadsheet aggregator du jour fails to recognize that as a positive rDPS contribution?

Because the reality is that most GCD heals don't do anything to a mechanic that outright kills you for failing it. Can't heal an attack that takes your entire HP bar away if there's nothing left to heal. When everything's reduced to a binary check of whether you do the mechanic correctly or die and the amount of unavoidable damage can be dealt with just free healing, then it's not surprising this is the result.

[Aravell]

I think 'healing GCDs that cost damage' are just a fact of life in this game. They see use in prog, and as we get more geared/learn fights, we start to remove them from our timeline. They cost us damage, yes, but not using that Succor and wiping to the raidwide costs us more time. I think certain elements of the playerbase need to reconsider what's important in doing raids, high number means nothing if you let a wipe occur when you could have saved it.

I think this mentality is unlikely to change if the healer role is continuing in this design direction. Ever since the ShB changes, I've seen a sharp increase in the amount of people willing to wipe the entire party for just one more filler cast. (If you join a weekly clear to pad your parse, you are a bad person.)

Let's take P11S for example, if a WHM intends to use Lilybell to cover Styx, Lilybell won't be up for the 2nd Styx, a good healer would know that and would adjust accordingly, a bad healer would just do absolutely nothing because their free tool isn't up. But the funny number website will view the healer that did absolutely nothing to heal Styx as the better healer, because they hit more fillers.

That's why I want to see a lot less damage neutrality. Using your turn(GCD) to heal in RPGs should cost you that turn(GCD), healing becoming a free action(OGCD) just breeds bad habits. I would expect that anyone who chooses to be a healer would be willing to drop damage when a heal is needed, but quite a few healers post-ShB really don't seem to care if a DPS is about to die, they just spam away.

[NobleWinter]

In order to make GCD heals feel good I had an idea for making Cleric Stance a Trait of WHM to change how we interact with them. For every five (this number could be anything really) offensive casts from spells like Stone, Aero, Glare, Dia, and Holy and maybe even Misery too it would grant one stack of Cleric Stance up to a maximum of four. These stacks of Cleric would only be useable on Healing Spells and cause them to become an oGCD. With one Stack of Cleric Stance you would be able to weave Medica 2 or Cure 3 behind a Glare cast. The healing skills would all proc like Cure 2 does from the Free Cure Trait currently while stacks of Cleric Stance were available but they would still retain their MP cost making them an inferior option to Assize but constantly available. In this way we could interact with them more freely and still respect the hefty MP cost. I would also make the WHM revive instant with 3 stacks of Cleric Stance available giving WHM an advantage on reviving people that isn't completely dependent on Presence of Mind or Swiftcast. Being able to run and gun a limited amount of GCD healing might also incentive Piety to really play into the burst healing capabilities. The lack of shielding on WHM might actually make sense with this kind of throughput available.

[Semirhage]

Because the reality is that most GCD heals don't do anything to a mechanic that outright kills you for failing it. Can't heal an attack that takes your entire HP bar away if there's nothing left to heal. When everything's reduced to a binary check of whether you do the mechanic correctly or die and the amount of unavoidable damage can be dealt with just free healing, then it's not surprising this is the result.

Yeah this too. Square's encounter design is increasingly moving toward making sure players can interact with it as little as possible. More predictable encounters, but the first role affected by it is the role that nominally is all about countering punishments for deviating from The Plan. It's not that I think encounter design isn't also a problem, but the kits suck too.