Needed Frontline Changes for 7.x: Active vs Passive Healing Abilities

[Solain]

As someone who has pvp'd since it's induction into FFXIV, and as a part of the larger conversation on asking for more meaningful healer participation in content, SE needs to reconsider how it approaches Dawntrail changes to healer jobs - especially in Frontlines. Currently, healer jobs in Frontlines are limited to massive passive healing abilities that are tied to damage abilities (to sometimes force people to heal, albeit passively), and their active healing abilities or even potency are extremely limited. Outside of Cure III, which was also nerfed from affecting cross-alliance teammates, many healer abilities struggle to keep up with well-timed Sky Shatter + any other AoEs that follow...just as an example.

Currently, the reliance on passive healing is a problem. It does not let players make decisions easily, learn how to change those decisions with changing environments and needs, and it acts as a stopgap that enables a DPS-centric game mode - which we are of course seeing throughout FFXIV. But the larger issue specific to Frontlines is that healers are now primarily damage dealers and subsequently healers...depending on players' abilities and even drive to heal.

SCH, for example, is widely played as a DPS job that can deal upwards of six million damage in a match...compared to an unaverage DRG doing two-three million damage, but that damage is not the problem. Many of these SCHs heal around three-five hundred thousand HP, not counting the mitigation and healing from mostly their Limit Break. Another example, SGE, does about one-two million healing on good days, but most of that healing is out of the hands of the player or barely consequential (Frontlines Kardia heals essentially do nothing).

Now, AST and WHM are slight exceptions to the active healing problem. AST's Macrocosmos can be toggled at will, and WHM's Cure III and II can truly save the day for retreating or pushing. But once you use those abilities, your kit is empty, which forces you to rely on Limit Break regens for WHM or juggling individual players with Aspected Benefic - a hit or miss on Frontlines.

I could go on, but as such, I would like to ask SE to consider giving healer jobs more active healing/mitigation tools to 1) provide a more enjoyable, and well-rounded healer experience, 2) allow skilled players the opportunity to change their parties' fates, and 3) raise the skill level of healers in FFXIV overall.

Welcome others' thoughts!

[Post]

I didn't think Cure 3 has ever healed cross alliance, or even outside of your party.

I think it makes some sense for AoE heals of this nature to be party bound, given how little healing there is to be done in PvE between two healers already (especially in alliance raids), and that in PvP such jobs as SGE with limit break would be too powerful, but many actions are arbitrarily bound to party members that should not be such as Aquaveil, or Icarus. This should apply to non healers as well; it's dumb that a BLM or MNK can't dash to players they meet even in the overworld, imo.

Cure 3 could probably be allowed to as well at least uniquely heal your target and THEIR party (provided it's a different party than yours). If you attempt this it just heals yourself as if you had no friendly target.

But that's another topic, really.

To what you're talking about, I feel like the healing healers provide in Frontlines is meant to be closer to what they provide everywhere in PvP since the redesign: covering short assaults and retreats on allies being focused, with some able to contribute more crowd control, shielding, or burst healing to provide this.

Largely, the role of healing (or more actually, surviving) is up to the player themself to fall back of they're out of defenses and MP and that's the intention. If we allowed AST's Macrocosmos to affect ALL allies, it'd just be stupid since 4 ASTs can already burst an entire enemy team instantly with just a little coordination and battle high, let alone how much healing the whole raid would get on top of that. WHM's laser Regen too, even if passive, could mean that 4 of them could be healing the raid for 12000 every 3 seconds for 15 seconds every minute (more often with kills, and more effective time since engagements aren't constant minute long battles). That's the equivalent of casting 5 cure 2s in a row on every player in the whole raid at a huge 30 yalm radius (greater than all normal attack ranges). Even more when you factor in the healing bonus.

I just think healers could very easily be made too powerful, and they're already quite strong in the hands of players and allies that know when to push and when to fall back and support.

[Mawlzy]

As we know, recuperate exists so that healing from healers is largely unnecessary. The reason is presumably because in the absence of restrictions on role composition over the party/alliance, this can leave an alliance healerless, thus SE decided there was no choice.

I am reluctant to suggest any upward modification to rewards, since it invariably comes with downsides. However, one possibility would be to swing the balance of the amount of available healing back to healers and away from recuperate, then add a "class in need" bonus once players enter the instance, with an XP boost for those switching jobs into a needed role. This would potentially have the broader appeal of allowing greater skillset diversity based on role. If the current meta remains, it might even lead to more balanced matches with players switching to DRK when there's a tank deficit.

Can't see any of this happening, of course.

[Mistress_Irika]

I'm not surprised this was brought up. All healers are heal capped making their life saving plays nearly nonexistent without their limit break, especially in frontlines where dealing with more than 4 players equate to an instant death. Personally, this is the harshest nerf I have seen against them. You have no heals to save anyone, you have no limit break, and you're ultimately forced to run away praying that no one decides to chase you while you cower in a corner praying for your team to hurry up and revive.

The reason why healers are at this point now is because of how majority, if not everyone, was extremely reliable on the healers to keep them alive despite the potency nerfs they've been receiving last expansion and despite everyone having access to potions. To further put emphasis on the past problems, in your small competitive mode a bad healer on your team was a team loss majority of the time. As for frontlines someone has mentioned the absence of healers being an auto loss. There were also those that complained that it took more than 5 dps in order to kill a single healer, and then you had your infamous healer stacking in your alliance making killing overall that much difficult. This is the current solution to the problem that was being asked to be solved. Now there's less reliance on the healers overall. While everyone is now responsible for healing themselves at least half of the community will still target healers first for the simple fact that they're a threat as long as they can offer heals. This especially holds true for crystal conflict where there's some sort of advantage when you have 2 healers in one party.

As much as some would like for healers to go back to having some sort of outcome with being useful with keeping people alive there are many that are satisfied with how things are, and there are others that wants killing to be even easier by nerfing Recuperate or outright removing it altogether with the tradeoff that everyone has increased HP to compensate for the removal of the ability. Regardless, most would rather keep the heals to be capped so that everyone feels like they're actually taking down alliances or whoever's in front of them with ease. Say that Recuperate was removed entirely while the healers are still capped. Sure, healers get back control. However, would they really matter at that point if they can easily run out of heals in the first place? To me, I think it'll only matter in crystal conflict. Defensive wise, they're screwed in frontlines.

[KageTokage]

I would prefer bigger base HP pools and little to no self-sustain healing vs. what we have now.

So much of the time you just get melted before you can even start using Recuperate, which makes the effective HP it can grant you useless.

[Valence]

If you give more healing tools to healers, they're gonna be absolutely broken in CC (AST double healing is already insufferable to face under the hands of solid players) unless their damage contribution is reduced, which will bring imbalances where you get games going absolutely nowhere because too much healing and not enough damage (in the case of multi healers random teams).

As for FLs, I understand the will to have more in terms of healing, but you already have potent tools to help melees that need to get out of trouble, you can save a lot of people with it, especially with WhM/AST, as for SCH and SGE, their LBs are also actually extremely powerful there too (on top of the crowd control nullifying on SCH's). I have also had the misfortune to play in past expansions where every game was decided by who fielded the most amount of healers or the best healers, where you actually ended up seeing at the start of the game people asking who wanted to devote to the -shitty- job of healing, and you optimally needed at least 2 people to bite the bullet. I'd like not to get back to that, it was just miserable.

If you get melted down in FLs, it's a good indication that you screwed up and were out of position. It's something you learn to avoid, and good players don't generally get melted. If anything, melee jobs are too strong compared to the ranged squishies, especially DRG and NIN that are just ranged in disguise. BH also needs to stop applying to recuperate.

[NorthernLadMSP]

Melee and tanks are way too strong and their damage reduction needs to be nerfed.

As for healing, I agree something needs to be done as well. While I don't necessarily think we need to go back to being heal bots that only heal the entire match, a few extra heals for all four healers would be appreciated.

Someone commented that good healers used to make or break matches, and now it's good Dark Knights (or a lot of DRKs) that make or break matches - also something that needs to be dealt with.

[Solain]

If you give more healing tools to healers, they’re gonna be absolutely broken in CC (AST double healing is already insufferable to face under the hands of solid players) unless their damage contribution is reduced, which will bring imbalances where you get games going absolutely nowhere because too much healing and not enough damage (in the case of multi healers random teams).

As for FLs, I understand the will to have more in terms of healing, but you already have potent tools to help melees that need to get out of trouble, you can save a lot of people with it, especially with WhM/AST, as for SCH and SGE, their LBs are also actually extremely powerful there too (on top of the crowd control nullifying on SCH's). I have also had the misfortune to play in past expansions where every game was decided by who fielded the most amount of healers or the best healers, where you actually ended up seeing at the start of the game people asking who wanted to devote to the -shitty- job of healing, and you optimally needed at least 2 people to bite the bullet. I\\'d like not to get back to that, it was just miserable.

If you get melted down in FLs, it's a good indication that you screwed up and were out of position. It's something you learn to avoid, and good players don’t generally get melted. If anything, melee jobs are too strong compared to the ranged squishies, especially DRG and NIN that are just ranged in disguise. BH also needs to stop applying to recuperate.

On CC, I believe there needs to be some disaggregation from FL. SE is well within their capabilities to make FL specific actions or zone buffs (e.g., Echo) that do not and should not affect CC.

On healing, there’s always a careful balance of individual and team survival, which ultimately depends on play styles of the individuals, light parties, and the larger alliances. Currently, healer mains have good combination plays but really have no comparative agency to the other roles, without taking significant risks; I’m talking mostly about healing, here, which should be their core function (in theory). For example, Cure III is an excellent counter to DRK pull and whatever DRG is likely following up. But once you’ve used that, you have to rely on others’ abilities to heal themselves out of trouble…and the normal rouletter or even mid-tier PvP’r is not skilled/quick enough to process/input the order of operations to survive ultimately leading to mass party wipes. And let me be clear, these party wipes are TOO easy. Give me an MP-based Medica or Med II, and I’d be happier

[Valence]

Let's not kid ourselves, if healers don't have much agency beyond healing, it's because they're ranged, and ranged jobs are near useless fodder in FLs. Some like SCH/BRD can bring good buffs, some like MCH/BLM/SMN can bring some cc which isn't that much needed since every melee and their moms have some anyway, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to melees. Healers are in the same bag as far as I'm concerned, but they do have the upside of having actually great LBs to play there: Purgation is great on DRK sinkholes, Celestial River is actually meta (AST is meta unlike all other ranged), Seraph actually pumps heals like you're asking healers to heal and also grants 1 cc immunity, Mesotes is a direct counter to DRK meta... Honestly, healers are far from the worst in FLs right now. And you can't just ask to be able to heal everyone on your own, else 1) your job is overpowered and 2) what happens when you stack many healers together? You can't kill anyone anymore?

I don't disagree that some dissociation will probably need to happen at some point between FLs and CC though, this is not sustainable.

[KageTokage]

Another reason why the current recuperate spam gameplay sucks is that it severely benefits coordinated teams who can focus fire/CC efficiently (Sometimes through less then legitimate means...) to keep people from extending their lifespans.

You'd still be rewarded for coordination if everyone had higher base HP but it would be a lot less lop-sided then things are at present if you can actually react to burst/CC by not melting instantly.