Cure and it's Equivalents need to be axed

[Aravell]

I'm not arguing with you at all. I think oGCD heals should be stripped from the game entirely, or be given very long cooldowns similar to benediction. But that is a different issue. The pressing issue are GCD heals themselves and how they are frowned upon because you sacrifice damage to use them. There is no choosing between damage and healing. This is an illusion. If you need to heal, you heal. If you don't you do damage. That is the way of it. Stripping the game of oGCD heals or making them less potent doesn't change this. Any free resource towards healing will always be used to extend DPS duration windows.

I have to ask, why should the game be designed around what the community is frowning upon? Why does the game have to be designed around "the meta"? That's exactly what got us the much criticised 2 minute burst meta.

I think the devs should actually just ignore "the meta" and "absolute balance", they followed their own design without caring much about the player-created meta back in HW and SB, the jobs back then were unique and fun. They need to stop chasing absolute balance and make a fun game first without caring about the meta-chasers, as long as every job can clear every content, then balance is fine.

[ty_taurus]

I'm not arguing with you at all. I think oGCD heals should be stripped from the game entirely, or be given very long cooldowns similar to benediction. But that is a different issue. The pressing issue are GCD heals themselves and how they are frowned upon because you sacrifice damage to use them. There is no choosing between damage and healing. This is an illusion. If you need to heal, you heal. If you don't you do damage. That is the way of it. Stripping the game of oGCD heals or making them less potent doesn't change this. Any free resource towards healing will always be used to extend DPS duration windows.

I am no friend to the meta, but I understand all to well that if anything other than an offensive skill spins the GCD, it is heavily frowned upon. This includes GCD heals. Even then, the offensive skill you choose to use has to be most optimal in the lineup. You understand the value of GCD heals, the problem is this only has merit after you have exhausted your healing abilities (oGCDs). That is the pressing issue at hand.

Something that I think is worth mentioning is that every single tool that every healer has ever gained since Heavensward to now has only ever worked toward making it easier to use GCD healing less and less, and GCD DPS more and more. There has never been a healing action added after level 50 that is directly a DPS loss. Even situations like Emergency Tactics and Neutral Sect are not inandof themselves DPS losses, and augment your GCD such that you theoretically need less of them. And while Solace/Rapture were originally a DPS loss, they were only partially so--less of a loss than standard GCD healing.

You see, each time we've increased the level cap, naturally bosses would need to grow in stats and HP pool as well, but because every job would see an increase in the potency per minute they can deliver, if bosses only scaled linearly to their level, fights would last less and less time as everyone would be able to do more percent of a bosses' HP in damage than they used to. As a result, boss HP has to scale with that in mind. And this is fine, because there is a massively high limit to how much HP a boss can have, but the same cannot be said for boss damage to scale with healing potency per minute because party HP is far smaller. As a result, ever new addition shoves GCD healing out of rotation more and more until the point where we're at now where a skilled healer can avoid them entirely.

With that in mind, even if we rework healing actions to be more appropriately balanced to the frequency of damage taken, what exactly do we give to healers in terms of new actions or action upgrades? More healing will just go back to tipping the balance away from healing, ironically. Crowd control is virtually non-existent and doesn't hold enough importance to warrant use over standard DPS while support would need to be extremely high in order to justify its use unless the buffs last a long time, and both crowd control and support threaten to bloat the buff/debuff limit. What else besides new attacks can we add that doesn't disrupt the ratio of healing needed to damage dealt?

[ty_taurus]

What’s the obsession with making GCD heals damage neutral, the whole problem with healers is they have too much healing, misery doesn’t involve any sort of “choice” it just involves dumping healing whether you need it or not because misery is always a DPS gain, and that’s pretty much exactly how all DPS neutral heals would end up being

1) if it stores like misery then it’s always a DPS gain and you are punished for not using it
2) if it’s a single hit like pnuema or macrocosmos it’s functionally just your nuke with an inbuilt oGCD heal

Choice on healers should come from having to sacrifice damage to perform GCD heals and using an extremely limited suite of oGCD’s to attempt to minimise the use of GCD heals (while not being strong enough to eliminate them)

Encouraging DPS neutral GCD healing just leads to crappy modern WHM where you are vomitting out raptures for DPS gain

I don't think neutral healing is inherently a bad concept, but the problem is you have too little control over the ability to utilize it, and it's too frequent for how free it is. Lilies, for example, are available for free every 20 seconds (of which you can stack up to 3) with no MP cost, no cast time, and while "Neutral" in numbers, is technically a gain when used in buff windows.

If instead, lilies were always available, but had a steep MP cost while regular Cure spells were very cheap if not free, then there'd be a lot more agency with how you utilized Solace and Rapture, but you'd also want to contrast that with another high MP cost reward to work with, like if instead of a standard spammable AOE attack, Holy were also a high damage attack with some sort of cooldown or limit to its use, then you want to make sure you have the MP for Holy casts while engaging with lilies as you feel is appropriate. This was the premise behind old Energy Drain back when it actually was a strong and important part of your gameplay.

[Colt47]

FFXIV in general has issues with the actions available at the different levels, they just tend to have it manifest in different problems and sometimes people try to paint the problem as a benefit or making it unique. Generally they start out too simple and then due to the shift in direction with the job in how it is supposed to play, they end up with too many skills because the developers can't axe the old ones. WHM is one of those examples.

[Supersnow845]

That’s pretty much the same concept by a different name (not that I disagree), there needs to be a cost or a decision to be made on the healing

In my example the choice is between a damage spell or a healing spell, in yours it’s a choice between a healing spell or a damage neutral healing spell that costs a lot of MP, either way it’s an active choice you have to make that punishes you if you make the wrong choice, both are solutions I can see working

The problem with current DPS neutral healing is there is no choice, pnuema and macrocosmos are just functional oGCD’s and lilys are a DPS gain that are also a heal, a movement tool and free weave space

Energy drain combined with quickened aetherflow and hen energy drain restored MP is like you said another good example of this, energy drain wasn’t so much valued for its damage as it was the fact it was an MP recovery tool at the expense of raw healing, again it was a choice that provided benefit if used right but punished you if used wrong, now energy drain is basically just “if we don’t die by not using sacred soil then energy drain is always the correct choice”

[Supersnow845]

^there is choice when you are playing around a limited range of oGCD’s, a more complex damage rotation and GCD’s

It’s not “I press succor for this raidwide and we don’t die or I press broil and we die” it’s more along the lines of “hmmm I can move whispering dawn one GCD up so that I don’t misalign my DOT refresh but it heals less after the actual raidwide goes off, can I do this and still avoid pressing succor after whispering dawn expires” or “if I press medica 2 here it’s going to cost me a lot of mana but I might be able to save that asylum for later which frees up a glare in the burst window in 60 seconds”

The best current example is dissipation, there is a choice, a risk and a reward, optimising a limited suite of oGCD’s is a choice to limit to GCD healing, the GCD healing is the punishment so to speak, not the choice, as you say if the choice is “press succor or die” there is no choice

[Fyrebrand]

100% agree. Cure should just get replaced by Cure II when you unlock it. Once you get Cure II, there is literally no reason to cast Cure ever again except for if you get put in a super low-level dungeon where you don't have Cure II yet. The "Freecure" trait sounds good on paper, and perhaps it had its use back in the old days when MP was more of a concern and the game played very differently across the board, but in the current state of things it is a beginner's trap that is just promoting bad habits. I can't even blame newbies for being fooled by this -- and being told by some stranger on the internet "Only cast Cure II" rather than take advantage of Freecure sounds like pure idiocy if you don't already know.

The devs say they want to combat button bloat. THIS IS THE BUTTON TO CUT, if ever there was one.

If they really want to keep both Cure and Cure II, they should alter what they do so that they actually make sense to cast depending on the situation. Like, give Cure a minor "chain heal" effect where after it heals your main target, it jumps to the next most damaged party member and heals them for a little bit too. Cure II can do something else, like apply a short-term regen effect, or refreshes the timer on an active Regen spell on the target, or automatically heals the same target a second time after a delay. I dunno, something that might justify having both spells, and makes healing at low levels more interesting. I know they won't do anything like that, though, so deleting regular Cure and its equivalents is really the only realistic solution.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Some MINE Coils enjoyer in this forum like half a year ago(?) mentioned that Freecure was needed in those encounters specifically.

[Fyrebrand]

Some MINE Coils enjoyer in this forum like half a year ago(?) mentioned that Freecure was needed in those encounters specifically.

I mean, The Binding Coils of Bahamut is also a weird ancient relic from bygone days that arguably also doesn't belong in its current state. It's literally excluded from raid roulettes, and understandably so.

[Supersnow845]

Square enix

-we have heard your feedback regarding freecure and we have decided………to return overcure to the game in its original form

Please look forward to it