Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[Katish]

I’m with Roe in that I think the pure/barrier split can work if done correctly, but it requires SE to understand the difference between then, make content designed to pressure both pure and barrier healing mechanics (even 4 man content) and design each side to heavily favor their side’s advantages.

What I mean by this is, if a barrier healers advantages are barriers and mitigation, then their bread and butter mechanics should be barriers and mitigation, not regens and mitigation. And in order to keep the barrier healers capable of responding to burst/regen needs, they can still have burst and regen healing, but their burst/regen heals should have steep opportunity costs—loss of DPS, high Mp cost. And this would be true in reverse for the pure healers.

This would create an environment where you want one of each because then you have a healer that can very easily respond to two types of needs in a more effective manner. The scholar could stop attacking to spend 1600 MP to burst heal the party, but the White Mage can do that for no MP cost and no loss of DPS. Something like that.

I'm not sure even that can work, given barriers would still always be preferred as the safer option. Then there's the question of why? Why even have barriers or pure healing, if nothing checks them...or you can just rely on one instead of the other, this being a system issue (why do they exist [outside aesthetics]). I would prefer the healers be able to answer anything at very similar levels in terms of healing/shielding ( doesn't matter on how they do it or what additional effect comes with [this is where the diversity can happen] ) because then healing floors and mitigation floors could potentially be brought up to justify the existence of either or (healing or shielding) as any pair of healers would work given they would have the tools to answer the same problem. You can force something to work, but it doesn't make it any less glaring that you're just doing the same thing in a different way (which is my main issue with healer button bloat)

Though "barrier" healers are still healers at the end of the day and not a new role.. meaning they are comparable to pure healers and compete for the same slot. Since both are the same role, both should share the same tools (at least where "healing" or mitigation is concerned) or else it beckons the question as to why shield when you can heal...or why heal when you can shield.

[ForsakenRoe]

I'm not sure even that can work, given barriers would still always be preferred as the safer option. Then there's the question of why? Why even have barriers or pure healing, if nothing checks them...or you can just rely on one instead of the other, this being a system issue (why do they exist [outside aesthetics]). I would prefer the healers be able to answer anything at very similar levels in terms of healing/shielding ( doesn't matter on how they do it or what additional effect comes with [this is where the diversity can happen] ) because then healing floors and mitigation floors could potentially be brought up to justify the existence of either or (healing or shielding) as any pair of healers would work given they would have the tools to answer the same problem. You can force something to work, but it doesn't make it any less glaring that you're just doing the same thing in a different way (which is my main issue with healer button bloat)

Though "barrier" healers are still healers at the end of the day and not a new role.. meaning they are comparable to pure healers and compete for the same slot. Since both are the same role, both should share the same tools (at least where "healing" or mitigation is concerned) or else it beckons the question as to why shield when you can heal...or why heal when you can shield.

So, the way I'd handle this is to look at SCH currently. It (and SGE) can 'burst heal', and have regens, but they have opportunity costs. Aetherflow/Addersgall costs, CDs, Pneuma's strong but it's a 2min CD. So, WHM should be the mirror to SCH, where it has some mit effects, but with an opportunity cost: Lilies. Just add Stoneskin (and an AOE version) as Lily spenders. This sounds like the dreaded 'homogenization' sure, but consider what we get from doing this: SCH can put mits and shields with it's OGCDs, and instead of having to top up with a wasteful GCD of Adlo/Succor, they can now rely on the coheal WHM to throw out a 'damage neutral' Stoneskin2. WHM now has a way to get value from what is normally 'overhealing to prep Misery', by using a shield instead of a wasteful heal.

Additionally, and this is the big one, assuming all four healers have access to shields, we can have 'shield checks'. Consider the HP-to-1 of the new trial, or Seat of Sacrifice. All four healers have enough tools to 'solve' that check, and so it's possible to put that check in as a mechanic. However, not every healer has access to shields, so we can't have a 'shield check'. In UWU, when it first released, not everyone had Arm's Length. The tanks had PLD at 3min, WAR at 'you have to use Holmgang for it', and DRK at 'use Plunge to override the KB, and it also has Benediction levels of input delay'. BRD and MCH had nothing. So, Vulcan Burst (the small Ifrit AOE blast) was not just a funny meme where you press Arms and ignore it. It was a 'shield check', making sure you have a Succor/NoctAST one applied. So, imagine this: a new kind of bar, like the flashing red one for 'interrupt this', perhaps green with a shield icon over it. This indicates that there is an aspect of the move, that can be reduced or neutralized by having enough shielding to make it deal 0 damage.

An easy example: A raidwide with a bleed, and Infirmity (healing down debuff) for the same duration. The raidwide does two instances of damage, one frame after the other. First an exactly 2000 damage raidwide of Unique-type damage, and then the actual raidwide of however much. The 2000 goes off first, and applies Infirmity if it goes through your shield (or you don't have one), the actual raidwide then does it's effect. So you can choose to either shield through it to prevent the Infirmity debuff, or later on you can make the executive decision that 'okay we can ignore this bleed until after the Infirmity wears off, then deal with the damage via OGCDs' or such. We also had Photon in A11S, which set your HP to 1, and you were ticking from a constant DOT because the floor is on fire, so you needed a shield or you'd die to the next DOT tick. The issue is, it's now so easy to get an OGCD shield from a WAR, PLD, DNC, wherever, that it's hard to say if this would actually change anything, or if it would just be another 'ok we use Shake here problem solved'

I see others bring up the AST vs WHM comparison and that brings me to the point: it's once again WHM that got saddled with the dev's twisted idea of 'lets have a healer that focuses on being 'the pure healer'', we had it in SB and it was a colossal failure, we have it now and it's, admittedly less of a failure, but still a failure. It's getting tiring watching them step on the rakes over and over like Sideshow Bob. But at least Bob stepped on a different rake each time, this 'pure healer' fixation is the same rake again

edit:

I feel like devs have this bizarre vision of Scholar already being a ‘support/buffer’

* I’d like to say Haste/Fey Wind too but that’s too problematic lol, can’t upset the Black Mages or Monks.

When they first announced the split, my thinking was that SCH would have everything like Feint, Addle, Disable, Eye4Eye, etc, and be an absolute machine of buffing and debuffing for it's mitigation. Like, 'mitigate this 120% raidwide to a manageable level' would be 90% the SCH/SGE's job. Instead we have them able to outHPS the 'pure healers' because mitigation is just 'better' in like, almost every situation (and mit is considered as HPS by logs now)

Haste would be fine for a BLM, and I've heard Monk can play some bizarro SKS build, as long as you understand Optimal Drift and can keep Demolish lined up with ROF correctly using it

[Katish]

...

I like the ideas for what their worth, I just wish the devs could be inspired with redesigning healing with similar aspects especially the knockback portion of shields...but as you brought up other nonhealer classes, would require a redesign of not only healers but maybe removal of shields from other nonhealer classes. It's not the quantity of skills that matter but quality with answering new mechanics or adding something that the kit didn't already offer (definitely need heal skills pruned and reimagined).

As for whm, yeah,,,I am not sure why it is in the state it is...SGE can outheal where it matters and do more dps(?) I am trying to figure what makes whm the pure healer when comparing the two and what it actually brings to the table. Alas, this is what homogenizing does (because the healers are too similar that they can all be compared 1 to 1).

[Aravell]

So, the way I'd handle this is

While the idea itself seems interesting, it would also require Bob (SE) to stop stepping on the same rake (pure healer design) over and over again. The current design they have is unsustainable though, they have to either redesign the healers to play better within the subroles or remove the subroles entirely at this point, because there's a lot of overlap from every healer except WHM.

Side note: Ifrit's Vulcan Burst in UWU was never a shield/kb immunity check, you can survive it simply by being inside his hitbox. I've had enough shield healers forget to shield to know that.

[Aravell]

What I mean by this is, if a barrier healers advantages are barriers and mitigation, then their bread and butter mechanics should be barriers and mitigation, not regens and mitigation. And in order to keep the barrier healers capable of responding to burst/regen needs, they can still have burst and regen healing, but their burst/regen heals should have steep opportunity costs—loss of DPS, high Mp cost. And this would be true in reverse for the pure healers.

If the pure and barrier split had healers rely on each other to cover their weaknesses, then I would agree. But with the current design, the split is never going to work. I wouldn't be opposed to such a paradigm that forces healers to work with their partner in order to heal effectively, but they'd have to redesign healers to fit neatly in their box at this point.

We have the issue of both shield healers double dipping in regens and shielding:
SGE alone has a regen, burst heals and shields, all damage neutral GCDs or an OGCD.
SCH has regens and shields. Funnily enough, SCH has barely any ability to apply shields for free.

Meanwhile, regen healers also have their problems to solve:
AST is double dipping into regens and shields at the same time while also bringing mitigation every 60 seconds.
WHM is really the only healer that kind of toes the line of their box.

If they can fix the issues, I wouldn't mind having it. But there's also the issue where burst heals are not as valuable as effective mitigation.

[ty_taurus]

I'm not sure even that can work, given barriers would still always be preferred as the safer option. Then there's the question of why? Why even have barriers or pure healing, if nothing checks them...or you can just rely on one instead of the other, this being a system issue (why do they exist [outside aesthetics]). I would prefer the healers be able to answer anything at very similar levels in terms of healing/shielding ( doesn't matter on how they do it or what additional effect comes with [this is where the diversity can happen] ) because then healing floors and mitigation floors could potentially be brought up to justify the existence of either or (healing or shielding) as any pair of healers would work given they would have the tools to answer the same problem. You can force something to work, but it doesn't make it any less glaring that you're just doing the same thing in a different way (which is my main issue with healer button bloat)

Though "barrier" healers are still healers at the end of the day and not a new role.. meaning they are comparable to pure healers and compete for the same slot. Since both are the same role, both should share the same tools (at least where "healing" or mitigation is concerned) or else it beckons the question as to why shield when you can heal...or why heal when you can shield.

That’s what I mean though. Fights would need to explore more frequent situations like reducing the party to 1 HP and inflicting Doom, or Infirmity. Think P3S with Reaper’s toll. pure healers would need to be designed to resolve those mechanics with relative ease while barrier healers, on there own, would have to dump a lot of resources into that or burn LB3 to resolve them. Or more examples of mechanics like High Concept or High Concept 2 where the party has to split far apart, and setting regens on the party in advance makes those very easy, while barriers don’t last long enough to cover the whole mechanic.

Bu lot like I said, it requires the design team understand these nuances intimately, but I don’t genuinely believe they do.

[Connor]

It’s funny that they tried to split pure/shield healers into two distinct subcategories and failed pretty spectacularly by giving the pure healers shields and the shield healers a ton of regens/pure heals lol.

Even funnier is the fact there’s very clearly a much more straightforward way to split healers - using a distinction that already exists. Between personal dps healers (White / Sage) and ‘rDPS’ healers (Scholar, Astrologian).

They tried to create a healer dichotomy, failed, then completely ignored the fact they’ve already created an entirely different dichotomy that people can actually make sense of (unless 7.0 gives WHM and Sage a bunch of raid buffs which I highly doubt lol)

[Supersnow845]

It’s funny that they tried to split pure/shield healers into two distinct subcategories and failed pretty spectacularly by giving the pure healers shields and the shield healers a ton of regens/pure heals lol.

Even funnier is the fact there’s very clearly a much more straightforward way to split healers - using a distinction that already exists. Between personal dps healers (White / Sage) and ‘rDPS’ healers (Scholar, Astrologian).

They tried to create a healer dichotomy, failed, then completely ignored the fact they’ve already created an entirely different dichotomy that people can actually make sense of (unless 7.0 gives WHM and Sage a bunch of raid buffs which I highly doubt lol)

If they tried to double down on that dichotomy I seriously hope they try to make SCH’s buff more interesting than a boring disconnected button they press once every 2 minutes they can’t even spread with deployment

AST plays like trash but at least it’s buffs actually feel meaningful, delegating chain would literally change nothing about SCH

[Connor]

If they tried to double down on that dichotomy I seriously hope they try to make SCH’s buff more interesting than a boring disconnected button they press once every 2 minutes they can’t even spread with deployment

AST plays like trash but at least it’s buffs actually feel meaningful, delegating chain would literally change nothing about SCH

Don’t get me wrong, I totally agree about Scholar lol.

I feel like devs have this bizarre vision of Scholar already being a ‘support/buffer’ even though the vast majority is just ‘disguised healing’ rather than actual party support / utility. Like, if asked why Scholar has so little ways to buff the party, they’d go ‘But what about Sacred Soil / Fey Illumination / Whispering Dawn / Protraction / Excogition. Which, I get they technically are buffs, but at the same time they’re also mostly just ‘healing but in buff form’ lol.

I think going forward Scholar could easily fill it’s niche as a ‘support healer’ by actually developing on the idea of it as a utility healer that can support the party. It could differentiate itself from Astrologian by having Deployment spread more buffs than just Adloquium. Plus, where Astrologian’s buffs are more direct (i.e damage up, damage taken down, etc), Scholar’s buffs could be more indirect. Like increasing crit rate (obviously problematic but just for talking’s sake lol), Expedient’s movement speed buff, increasing max HP. * Which again is largely just building on what we have now but without this weird obsession with everyone only being allowed ‘that one’ raid buff at 120s lol. I feel like a lot of classes also have party buffs where it doesn’t make much sense (why is DRG a support lol) but that’s veering on a tangent lol.


* I’d like to say Haste/Fey Wind too but that’s too problematic lol, can’t upset the Black Mages or Monks.

[Renathras]

The word "CAN'T"

No, but that's not relevant.

Okay, you...missed what I actually was asking you since I was actually curious about it - why WHM = PLD not WHM = WAR?

Having asked that (and hoping you address it - I also started a threat to discuss damage rotations):

Which people/encounters/content are we talking about?

Medica 2 spam can handle...a lot. I mean a lot a lot. So without actually requiring any higher skill, the Cyan bar goes a long way. And are we talking about MSQ content or Savage content? If Savages, then the Cyan bar is irrelevant since Savage healers should be in Magenta anyway AND adding more DPS buttons also pushes into Magenta since at that point you have to deal with Savage damage and mechanics (already a higher level) as well as Enrage, meaning engaging with the DPS kit isn't optional. So which content and which healers are we talking about?

Secondary:

Assuming for the sake of argument WAR is an acceptable "lower bound", what would WHM (or any healer, but WHM makes the most sense to me, personally) need to be equal to that lower bound? Again, me personally looking at it, Dia is harder to manage than Storm's Eye since you can track it on multiple things, it's harder to track than a self-buff, and and it can't be stacked (so even overwriting 6 seconds is suboptimal where doing so with Storm's Eye may not be). But Storm's Eye requires a BIT (5 seconds) of prep time with the 1-2. So this is more of a side-grade than anything. Outside of that, WAR has a 3 stack oGCD (Onslaught), and Fell Cleave/Primal Rend vs Solace/Rapture/Misery, which aren't exactly comparable, but are probably somewhat close considering giving WHM a GCD damage burst would require turning Solace/Rapture into oGCDs otherwise they'd have their healing strongly curtailed during their bust (that Cyan bar you mentioned), so the current Lily vs Beast Gauge comparison there is probably pretty comparable.

So turning Dia into a self-buff combo action and giving WHM a 1-2-3 combo...would that be sufficient to make WHM comparable to WAR and thus sufficient to meet the "lower bound" acceptable bar?

I would put White Mage at a 1, or maybe a 0.5 if we're allowed to use decimals. I genuinely do not understand how you would look at a 30 second DoT, a 40 second cooldown, and the ability to use Afflatus Misery during buff windows as a 5 or 6. How high does the scale go? Where would you put Ninja? a 27/10? Like, I'm not trying to rag on your abilities or anything, but I would probably consider Ninja to be the hardest job to master (maybe others can disagree with me on that), but there's no way Ninja could only be 4-5 points higher than White Mage on the complexity scale. Comparatively speaking, that is "stratospheric," at least in relation to the healers.

...hence my point: Scales are subjective.

We're probably also talking about different things.

For me, a 1 would be "autoattack, the class". The floor is a class where it plays itself (Vanilla WoW Hunter; literally you'd autoattack and...that's what you did for entire boss encounters). You can't really have a lower skill floor than "don't do anything after initiating combat". So that's the absolute bottom end (1 or 0, depending on how we set up the scale). And my scale includes everything about the Job, so for healers, it isn't just the damage side, it's also the healing side. Healing plans add complexity, skills with delayed effects or that involve tracking things add complexity, etc.

My scale's probably also semi-exponential (like the Richter scale), though not quite in that same way (since there's hypothetically not a cap on "most complex possible", so a scale needs to be "semi-infinite" sorta).

I'd rate NIN similar to AST, personally. Mainly due to the burst APM and all the stuff to juggle, though NIN...is hard to measure since the burst is really high up there but the maintenance rotation outside of burst is basically identical to WAR's (self-upkeep buff, gauge burn to prevent overcapping, it just has a Mudra use or two alongside that).

And it also comes down to how you measure difficulty. For example, I measure 1-2-3 (non-branching) as functionally equivalent to 1-1-1, and I consider a 30 sec DoT more complex than a 30 sec upkeep buff (can be on more than one target, harder to visually track on my screen), especially compared to a stackable (up to 60 sec) self-buff. Whereas, from your perspective, the 1-2-3 is more interative and more complex (maybe?), and you probably don't consider Dia to be more complex than Storm's Eye whereas I do.

Scales are subjective.

That was, you might recall...my point.

.

10 - BLM, MNK
9 - NIN, DRG, AST
8 - SAM, BRD, DRK
7 - GNB, MCH, RDM, SCH
6 - RPR, SGE
5 - DNC, PLD, WHM
4 - SMN, WAR
3 - N/A
2 - N/A
1 - N/A

Though...I suppose I need to really lay out in thought what makes each number what it is. Again, with 1 being "rightclick and leave the room", the absolute floor, what is above that and how much for each one... But, it's all subjective.

I suppose I should try formalizing the system. Hm. Maybe something like:

1: Absolute floor of "cannot fail, don't even have to play". Vanilla WoW Hunters in Molten Core auto-attack.
2: Have to actually press buttons, but there's no real failure state provided you are actually hitting things. "FCFS" ("first come, first served", or "use things as they come off CD") Ret Paladin from Wrath of the Lich King.
3: Has failure/suboptimal states, but the punishment is effectively nonexistent, no real choices. EW SMN if it didn't have Energy Drain or Ifrit.
4: Like above, but actually has some choices for optimization, even if they're very minor. Additionally, may "part time" track additional things (party buff utility, healing, threat): EW SMN, WAR, possibly WHM
5: Like above, but has either additional things to track or extra role responsibilities to track or a more complex rotation or situational/proc alterations to rotation or etc: DNC, PLD, probably WHM
6: Like above, but has more than one of those things, and/or a more rigid, less flexible rotation, more tight timings, or more indirect actions: RPR, SGE
7: Like above, but has additional complexity or speed, more esoteric/nuanced optimizations, and a tighter rotation/gameplay with a bit of jank/clunk that must be overcome: GNB, MCH, RDM, SCH
8: Like above, but likely has even more things to track, more clunk to overcome, and some niche and possibly counterintuitive optimizations to maximize performance: SAM, BRD, DRK
9: Much more technical, often with very high APM phases, easy to drift, very punishing on death, and penalty for failure is high: NIN, AST, DRG
10: Highly technical, optimizations are unintuitive or even counterintuitive, very punishing on death, have many openers, reopeners, and rotation possibilities to memorize and optimize around: BLM, MNK

I think that's pretty fair. There's a little room for wiggle here and there (like SMN is borderline a 3, and probably would be if it didn't have Ifrit or holding Energy Drains for 2 min burst windows; WHM is borderline 4 instead of 5 but I feel like the DoT pushes it over into a 5 - if it was a self-buff or didn't have that, it'd easily be a 4; MCH has a lot in common with the 9s, but it just feels overall easier to execute in practice, even if it otherwise shares a lot of their characteristics; etc etc)

I suppose if I added 0 and put the "Vanila WoW auto-attack Hunter in Molten Core there", it would slightly open up the middle, and have some things scoot down (the ones on the borders mentioned above, perhaps), but the list is subjective to begin with, even with a more formalized categorization schema.

Some are just always going to be subjective. Like I find GNB easier to play than DRK (and found it easier to play than pre-6.3 PLD), but others find it very difficult to play. So some things really are just the individual. (For my part, it was always easy for me to tell where I was in my rotation due to how rigid the rotation is, but to some people, that rigidity is what made it hard to play...)