Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I suppose it depends on how you view it.

On one hand, low lv healing feels 'easier' because you don't have much healing buttons to press. Especially WHM. It's either Cure I, Freecure (lol), Cure II, or Regen. Depending how low you're synced to, you might not even have access to any of them except the first one.

On the other hand, low lv healing also feels 'harder' because the lack of tools means you can't afford to fall behind. In higher dungeon, you can bail with one from your many instants. Tetra, Bene, Benison, Lily, thingamajig. This applies to all healers.

To put it simply, it feels like the damage taken ratio may vary across the lv range with one commonality that is "leveling dungeon bites harder, capstone dungeon is a snoozefest", but our HPS has always been consistently tad on the higher side, and is only ever increasing as we learn more tools while we level up. Damage taken ratio never quite been raised to match that. The fact that you can still comfily heal every dungeon and some msq trials as a CNJ says a lot.

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A little bit off tangent: I wish we get more dungeon pulls like Amaurot (hello again tethering mobs!) or at least make the trash pack do something interesting at all instead of just being a striking dummy that autos whatever they're aggroing.

[Connor]

It’s on me for using ‘literally’ the way a 2018 Starbucks white girl does when they’re like, “just literally so over it right now” - and not the actual definition lol.

Yes, obviously Sastasha is not objectively hard to heal or difficult in any way. But at the same time even just from the sheer fact that you don’t have a slew of oGCDs to answer any situation, you’re more engaged with it through minor things like ‘oh no I’m running around but now I can’t cast Cure’ or ‘the DPS got hit but the tank is getting hit butt kicked who do I heal first’. Like, yes they aren’t any more actually difficult than what we have now, but once someone hits level 90 suddenly they don’t even really have to engage with those basic decisions, since they can just pop one of many, many free and/or dps neutral oGCDs.

Lastly as Sebazy said my experience of levelling a healer fully was in ARR (I already had WHM at 50 from 1.0 so I used Scholar / Summoner lol). Which - granted - was a very different kettle of fish from what we have now. I can’t say I’m running it regularly enough to know what it’s like to heal now lol. But from what I remember of being a low level healer, it was at least more ‘involved’ than what we have now. Even if you’re just considering hitting manual Embrace whilst using Physick/Ruin/etc lol, and that’s not considering switching Cleric Stance.

Basically overall while Sastasha probably wasn’t the best example (it’s just the go-to example of newbie dungeon for me lol), the overall healer levelling experience does see difficulty start off low, spikes at random times then drops off completely once you hit level 90. Surely a steady rise in difficulty as one progresses makes more sense than having it rise and fall so unevenly

[Teno]

We have a decent amount of okay healers and very rare good/amazing healers. Sorry I want healers to be better too but if most can’t even handle healing with the large amount of healing skills we have now I hate to see how it will be if they cut skills and gave an equal amount of healing and dps skills again.

Nah I’m good. Keep things the way they are. Bad enough trying to get healers to heal with just one dps skill spam. I can’t imagine the disaster it would be if they gave us more dps skills again.

Trimming dps skills down was probably the best thing the devs did for healers. I’ll get hate for this post but idc. I been around since 1.0 so I know everything healers went through up until now. I main healer too. So yeah.

Yeah you'll get a lot of well deserved beef indeed. What game are you playing exactly that all your healers can't press an oGCD every 5-10-20s ? Or there's something you're not telling us. Because even bad healers will carry you through most content except ultimates.
Your post makes me seriously doubt that you main healer or have been around during ARR/HW.

[Renathras]

If you guys would actually bother to read yourselves you'd see that I said I personally think with tank over the top self sustain gone at high levels you get to do more healing things at higher level, you don't affect low level at all because it already is the case there and noone has any problems there clearing prae or longstop and the likes, I'm agreeing that personally it would be more interesting to change up higher level healing but the devs have a different view of everything, so thanks to all for proving my point in the end I guess?

But I saw everything I need to know when people keep upvoting this right here: " Like, I’m pretty sure you literally have to think about healing more in Sastasha than you do in expert roulette lol"

If you truly think a 2 button dungeon like sastasha is harder than expert roulette to heal (which isn't hard to heal neither for me because like I said, max lvl tank sustain outside of drk is out of control but it has far more complex mechanics than the 0 mechanics of sastasha), you clearly know nothing about healing across all lvl's and barely play healer at all except maybe at max level.

The healer subforum here is kind of an echo chamber slash madhouse.

I'm not sure why I stick around other than I like conversing about the topic with people, but you won't find many people willing to actually listen to you or treat you respectuflly here if you don't agree that healing in this game is braindead and that the solution is adding more dps buttons that will somehow not at all affect anyone who doesn't like to use them while also making playing healers more challenging and harder content require you use them...something that can't both be true at the same time, and that healing itself cannot be increased in frequency (even though a simple Medica 2 could solve it) because THAT, not a slate of DPS abilities, will scare off new healers - people that want to fill health bars will be more scared by filling health bars than by being pressured to be a dpser while also juggling health bars. Somehow.

The logic defies, yet here it's prevalent. Take it for what you will, but you won't get many people listening to you fairly here. /shrug

(Watch the attacks pour in, but it kinda just proves the point.)
[Watch the attacks insist that it does not prove the point, too.]

[Icecylee]

Hasn't Roe taken the time, several times even, to show you mathematically it WAS possible, though? Unless you were really getting that hung up over doing 2% less possible maximum DPS on your parse, I guess. Other people have tried to engage you on the subject as well with various different pitches and theorycrafts, but you like to disregard them outright or just ignore them, too (myself included).

[ForsakenRoe]

Hasn't Roe taken the time, several times even, to show you mathematically it WAS possible, though? Unless you were really getting that hung up over doing 2% less possible maximum DPS on your parse, I guess. Other people have tried to engage you on the subject as well with various different pitches and theorycrafts, but you like to disregard them outright or just ignore them, too (myself included).

It's pretty funny to me, and a bit sad, that said post is a year old now, and despite me seeing in advance that there could be these issues raised (what if casual does wrong rotation and bad damage, and causes enrage), and taking steps to counteract that (I listed Banish as being only a 40p gain over Glare for a reason, if you can believe that), we still end up with the song and dance.

Essentially, I 'foolproofed' my theorycraft as much as I could, and I'm getting told 'yeh but what if 'a fool so foolish you didn't even know it was possible to be that foolish' played your version of the job and absolutely botched it' well, yeh but then I'd expect that the difference in potency between Glare and Banish would be playing second fiddle compared to larger issues like 'the player is not actually casting anything at all', or 'the player is dead because they picked their nose in the 5s long cast-time orange AOE marker', and solving those kinds of problems is a little outside the design scope for the theorycraft

Plus, some quick maths, assuming Glare is 310p still:

Pressing Glare instead of Banish in my theorycraft would lose you 40p, only if that loses you a cast of Banish from the fight. This averages out over the 6 GCDs of a Banish recharge to be about 6.67 potency per GCD.
Pressing Dia instead of Glare (overwriting Dia) would lose the player 160p per cast. The ticks are not considered, because you aren't 'losing' any.
Pressing Glare instead of Dia (losing ticks) would lose the player 70p per tick lost.

Pressing Dia instead of Glare currently loses the player 245 potency.
Pressing Glare instead of Dia (losing ticks) currently loses the player 65p per tick missed.

and that healing itself cannot be increased in frequency (even though a simple Medica 2 could solve it)

Let's imagine that, in order to pressure the healer playerbase into using their GCDs a bit more (and by proxy, breaking up the Glarespam with a new button), you need to maintain Medica2 with say... 50% uptime to keep up with a DOT that is constantly burning your feet (like A11). Let's ignore things like overheal and whatever, just a simple binary pass/fail of if you have more than 50% uptime on Medica2's HOT or not. You just need to press it twice a minute, at least. You can throw Dia right after it if you want, and get both refreshes done at the same time, kinda like IJ/Song swap timing on BRD?

So with that in mind... how much thought have you given to the fact that you're now horrendously MP negative, and what's the solution to the MP issue you've now wrought upon the job?

[AnotherPerson]

So with that in mind... how much thought have you given to the fact that you're now horrendously MP negative, and what's the solution to the MP issue you've now wrought upon the job?

At this point, the simplest way to move forward is to:

1. Make Basic heals - Cure II, Medica I, Medica II, Physick, Succor, Adloquium, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Eukrasian Diagnosis, Eukrasian Prognosis, Benefic II, Aspected Helios, Helios -- all 0 MP cost. Even on death, you can still heal. This change alone will simplify a lot of issues of simply keeping the party alive without an issue in running MP negative. Also, consolidate Cure I into Cure II and Benefic I into Benefic II already for crying out loud. It's a waste of hotbar slots that could be used elsewhere.
2. Condense and remove a larger portion of the current amount of healing tools available to less buttons but with more utility or cost MP for their additional benefit. This change will incentivize the Basic heals as a skill you can readily depend on rather than look down as 'bad/inferior' because you no longer have so many other free-healing skills that can do what the basic healing skills already do.
3. Increase healer DPS to make up the fact that they have to use basic heals more often and can't be using their nuke as much as before. This helps balance and reduce any tedious gameplay and stay in-line with increasing HP of enemies on DPS jobs in solo & group content.


After those 3 changes, healers have more room and design space for more unique healing skills, support skills, or even dps skills in general since the basic ability to heal without worry has been covered. Especially in the early levels of healer gameplay, because basic heals no longer cost MP, you have much more room and freedom to add unique skills. SE can also freely add more damage since healers will always be able to rely on the basic healing skills to make ends meet in a frequent moderate to high-damage environment as they no longer have as many fail states to worry about. If anything, the only fail state would then be Enrage, which mostly means the healer has met the basic requirements on doing their healing job properly and now the party needs to optimize DPSing better.

[ty_taurus]

3. Increase healer DPS to make up the fact that they have to use basic heals more often and can't be using their nuke as much as before. This helps balance and reduce any tedious gameplay and stay in-line with increasing HP of enemies on DPS jobs in solo & group content.

Let's say we increased full uptime healer DPS to that of tanks, but built the expectation that required healing requirements will cut into about 15% of that in group content. That would actually help the solo healer experience feel less slow without changing the current balance surrounding group content. It would, however, make normal content even faster, so that could also exacerbate the situation of making a lot of older story fights too fast and easy, even skipping mechanics even more than we already do.

[AnotherPerson]

Let's say we increased full uptime healer DPS to that of tanks, but built the expectation that required healing requirements will cut into about 15% of that in group content. That would actually help the solo healer experience feel less slow without changing the current balance surrounding group content. It would, however, make normal content even faster, so that could also exacerbate the situation of making a lot of older story fights too fast and easy, even skipping mechanics even more than we already do.

That's a simple solution - lower the max ILVL sync to account for this change. There is no need for the ilvl sync to be so vast as in the case with ShB and Endwalker. It has already been done for The Final Day, and now the ilvl is much better than previously. The thing with making basic heals cost 0 MP also allows for more frequency of damage without worrying the healer runs out of MP and is unable to heal. Not everyone has perfect DoT uptime on healers, so a more tightly bound ilvl will encourage more healers to play safer. Doubly so if damage is much more frequent and higher as they have less room to maneuver around in case someone messes up.

However, there's only so much you can do to content like P1N, when damage boils down to an unavoidable raidwide every 30+ seconds or so if people don't mess up at all and nonexistent/one-shot lethal otherwise. It should be painfully obvious to anyone that content designed in such a manner has already failed healer encounter design since lowering ILVL doesn't cause healers to heal any more or less than they do currently. It's just more overheal, and unless the fights were reworked, there's not much you can do for old story fights where unavoidable damage has been increasingly being moved to avoidable mechanics and one-shot attacks. (Heck, I done 1 tank + 7 DPS runs in PF during moogle tomestone event because that's how pitiful the amount of healing is required there, not much you can do at that point).

[Shurrikhan]

At this point, the simplest way to move forward is to:

1. Make Basic heals - Cure II, Medica I, Medica II, Physick, Succor, Adloquium, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Eukrasian Diagnosis, Eukrasian Prognosis, Benefic II, Aspected Helios, Helios -- all 0 MP cost. Even on death, you can still heal. This change alone will simplify a lot of issues of simply keeping the party alive without an issue in running MP negative. Also, consolidate Cure I into Cure II and Benefic I into Benefic II already for crying out loud. It's a waste of hotbar slots that could be used elsewhere.

This seems the right direction, but perhaps an overcorrection. If you make them free while attacks have MP costs, you're going to send a particular message to newer players. You also remove recovery value from downtime and remove any limitations on the likes of already powerful tools like our nuke ST heals and our basic AoE tools. Finally, it leaves oGCDs so superior in efficiency over burst GCD tools (your Cure III, Medica II-equivalents)... and has an obvious imbalance from what jobs don't even have a Medica II equivalent anyways.

If the main issue with such things is that one returns to death effectively MP-starved because Lucid is on cooldown, then there are more immediate and precise solutions: (A) you can have players respawn with slightly higher (%HP and) %MP, and/or (B) you can remove the bloat that is Lucid Dreaming, which is far more likely to leave one feeling MP starved in the moments after returning from death than it is to (as, unless one is purposely saccing oneself, it is virtually always hit on CD, meaning that your average MP/min is virtually always back-loaded).

For my part, I would reduce the MP costs by a lesser amount (say, Cure II to 600, especially if Cure/Physic/Benefic are to be removed) and remove MP generation from abilities (they just reduce the actual nuance available to those actions by making them even more use-on-CD) and ax Lucid Dreaming, instead increasing our passive MP generation in compensation, including by allowing Attack Speed (GCD speed, and therefore Spell Speed) to benefit MP rate. That would already put enough into each tick to forgo most worries of starvation. While those healing abilities may have otherwise held a bit of burst MP recovery that builds up over death as they recharge, it's a bit too chance dependent, punishes gauge-dependent jobs, and leaves more down to (un)luck. Having the base tick rate take over their MP/min contribution would just leave things far more consistent. And, again, feel free to slightly up the on-rez %MP (and %HP, for mirroring).

Fully agreed on the other two points. Condensing the glut of oGCD heals, especially as forces us to make more inventive and makeshift use of more versatile (less precisely form-fit) but still specific tools (not all should be a Durochole/Exaltation, but neither should we likely have clear-cut counters-spam-AoE-damage tools like Liturgy). And having being compensated for the greater portion of GCD healing to be done would also go a decent way towards improving our solo play and sense of dynamism/agency (especially in the --unlikely-- case that we get back more numerous and more significant short-term DPS checks).

Also agreed regarding max ilvl. Honestly, I'm not sure why any piece of content needs to allow for a maximum ilvl more than (say, 5 over) the item level that it, itself, grants as rewards (or 10-15 over its minimum, in the case of content without rewards).