#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Shurrikhan]

If there were to be a Spirit Link Totem equivalent, I would have thought an empowered Bole the obvious choice, tbh.

[Tigore]

I was thinking if WHM could cover the AoE Esunaga, but I also noticed the posts about SGE struggling too. The DPS to heal niche is kind of too weak now from what I am hearing about them. Just a glorified SCH fairy limited to one target as others have said for the strength. Soteria and Philosophia definitely needs to grant either a stronger effect or better heals to be more worth it from what others are saying. I won't say no if the majority decides the WHM fits best for Esunaga. I am just thinking of what would be fair for SGE too. If we can come up with other things for them, it may still be okay to let WHM have it.

As for the Spirit Link Totem effect, I was thinking of SGE fitting the doctor feel the best out of the 4 healers. It's may be a bit flimsy on the lore effect, but the best I can think of would be those IV Blood transfusions. Except in this case, it would be borrowing someone's life aether or something and donating it to another who needs it most. If we do place it on Philosophia, Soteria could be the SGE to Kardia link for sharing HP too. We'd probably have to include an effect that breaks the link when the "donors" reach 10 - 30% HP just to be safe. Although SGE should be more than capable of exploiting this effect with Ixochole, Kerachole, Physis, Pneuma and Holos. Consecutive Tank Buster hits definitely become a lot more smoother to heal with the whole raid potentially sharing their HP for the damage done. It could perhaps be another strong niche.

As for the Piety remark, I also avoid that stat too with my current casual play. For obvious reasons of course with very few of the Savage Mechs we are talking about. The "1HP White Hole" I only remember from a certain spoiler story Trial at the end of Endwalker. If the stat also did some other things like improve the healing done and boost the shield amounts in addition to MP regen, it might be a bit better. Although just a bit now since we are already talking about the extra healing not being needed yet. We'll have to increase encounter damage first before that extra suggestion starts to look more valuable. We may not need to nerf the tank and DPS self heals or party mitigation very much if the encounters actually damage the party consistently. The dance mechs have their place, but it's become apparent that the devs are relying on them too much. It mostly amounts to occasional cheap shots on first timers or lagging players with the healers mostly needing a raise or 1 oGCD heal to fix it. There are times everyone gets hit, but that is quite rare and players tend to notice and share where to go after a wipe. If a solution cannot be seen immediately, there would usually be enough veteran players who did the encounter already present to follow on where to go. It also keeps the easy stuff easy (solo hunts and FATEs) if we don't have to nerf the self sustains much.

[ForsakenRoe]

We'll have to increase encounter damage first before that extra suggestion starts to look more valuable. We may not need to nerf the tank and DPS self heals or party mitigation very much if the encounters actually damage the party consistently.

This is why Aetherblight, or a system like it, has so much potential IMO. As the example I gave shows, you could quite easily make encounters that are a doddle for a Healer to handle (due to how much HPS we can put out with so little effort, or our unlimited access to Esuna effects), yet it's still too much for DPS and Tanks to handle alone, due to their healing moves having such CDs as they do. A simple mechanic like 'Every 12.5s, a tower to soak appears in the centre of the arena. It puts Aetherblight on the player who soaks it, equal to their Max HP. If the player tries to soak a tower while they have Aetherblight, they die instantly', while it sounds very hard to handle, it's really not, because you can simply cast Esuna once per 12.5s on whoever soaks it and remove the Aetherblight instantly. A joke to handle as a Healer (such that people would likely criticize it for being so bland a solution for 'making healing more interesting'), and yet it's still far too much for a 1T 3DPS team to handle, because only BRD can cleanse DOTs, and they have a 45s CD on their tool

As such, implementation of such a system means that all these non-Healer jobs can keep their utility actions, and even at the power they are currently at. Nobody needs to lose anything, nobody needs to be 'nerfed', because their numbers aren't getting changed

[Alice_Rivers]

My primary concern is that it will be made the same as damage is - Your entire HP bar or so little a crit heal will cover it plus any accompanying damage.

[Shurrikhan]

This is why Aetherblight, or a system like it, has so much potential IMO.

I've been trying to imagine this every which way and I still can't really find any significant appeal to building so much around Aetherblight, specifically, when I imagine it out relative to other options that would likely be mostly mutually exclusive with it.

Ultimately, Aetherblight just adds Esuna-able sustain requirements. Which is essentially a way to further take the myriad of healing choices by which to deal with that given portion/source of damage and suborn them instead behind something that ignores the magnitude of that damage to heal it all at once. That in itself seems... a downgrade. The only redeeming points to me are that at least this then-spammable-healing-nuke, Esuna, is (A) normally just single-target and (B) only affects that portion of damage and therefore might be less obligatory... when the given healing absorption is insignificant anyways.

More importantly, aside from propping up Esuna (and increasing the relative power of barriers not generated based on healing done while gutting the relative power of barriers generated based on healing done), I have to wonder what, if any, impact Aetherblight would have relative to just... making HP bars less zingy by nerfing both burst incoming damage and outgoing healing. Both slow how long it takes to heal someone to full and increase the relative value of --again, Esuna aside-- healers with greater optional (e.g., uptime-spending / at-cost) HPS.

And as for its impact on Esuna, it seems to devalue a more meaningful decision pathway (e.g., reduce the total damage that'd need to be healed by removing the DoT now vs. just ensuring the target has HP enough to survive the next hit between ticks, purging a bind or snare so that the target can dodge the otherwise unavoidable AoE vs. just shielding them enough to survive it regardless, etc.) with one for which the "decision" comes down to a simple strength computation a la reducing overheal (Would my heal have covered all the Aetherblight and then some anyways? Would I still progress further against the party's Aetherblight afflictions in total by spamming AoEs).

It feels like it just tries to solve too many issues at once through an unnecessary convolution and in doing so makes both the healing and Esuna a bit less interesting, especially when considering the net effect going in that direction would have relative to (at least partly) mutually exclusive options.

More concretely/analytically:

• Healing absorption typically rewards only knowledgeable greeding, which we already have a glut of rewards for by nature of the usual rhythm and tuning of damage intake in XIV encounters. I'd therefore prefer it be used sparingly and with deliberate (anti-)synergies with other mechanics in the fights in which it is used.
  
  
• Even when well situated, the considerations by which to weigh cleansing vs. healing through healing absorption effects are typically lesser than the kinds of considerations (in action choice and timings) offered already by virtually any other kind of debuff in their fitting contexts (slows, snares, vulnerability, damage down, etc.). It's essentially an especially lackluster cleansible.
  
  
• When you allow Esuna to remove a mechanic that would otherwise interact with your whole healing kit, allowing for any competing options requires the amount to be cleansed to be almost negligible as to allow the occasional nuke heal to surpass Esuna or for AOE heals to remain so overpowered as to have them, at least, be a competing option. Else, you replace an entire healing kit with one spammable OP button each time its opportunity for use appears.
  
  
• The upside would appear to be the accumulation of damage absorption across multiple contributing attacks allowing the priority to shift somewhat granularly from healing through to Esuna, with a healer being able to play chicken with the accumulated effect to Esuna once before nuke healing, but that effectively just limits the occurrence of actual heals even further, encourages far more risk of death for party members, and makes Esuna feel more like a Cleric Stance toggle than an action in its own right (e.g., one of situational more so than just scaled sustain value). I.e., it'd still be a downgrade in terms of QoL, action bloat, lost nuance, kit interactivity (especially in evenness of weighting across actions), etc. relative to just... not having that and instead increasing sustain action (or non-attack healer GCD action) requirements by any other means.

_______________

General Opinion:

We don't need healing absorption effects, let alone as a broad undermechanic, to make healers more necessary or engaging. We just need (A) opportunity/use-case for a greater number of sustain actions(' casts) as to outscale what can be provided by non-healers and/or --similarly but more about gameplay than mere role balance-- (B) more meaningful real use cases for non-offensive actions among healers (and perhaps a few more non-healing actions against which they could broadly compete to add further nuance to timing/greeding decisions and fight knowledge rewards among those increasingly needed heals).

(To be clear, we can have healing absorption effects, absolutely, though I'd argue that may be something better specifically not cleansible by Esuna, while if we feel Esuna ought to see more use, it should do so through more situationally sustain-costing debuffs or through actual DoTs. But healing absorption ought to just be a singular mechanic among many, not a specific answer to broad issues in the relative balance of healing outputs vs. damage intake.)

Ideally, you leverage that even further by giving healers some non-healing outputs to actually look forward to and to occasionally make decisions that might have lesser efficiency in terms of MP or total healing output in order to maximize their rDPS contribution through buffs, debuffs, etc., when the healing in that moment would not add greater rDPS potential down the line (from healer GCDs saved, target uptime saved, lives saved, etc.).

And if giving more to heal would overwhelm healers because of how quickly that would mean health bars depleting, then you just nerf both burst damage intake and healing output so that there's less common waste to overhealing among healer GCD actions and more of an ongoing fight between curative and non-curative priority conflicts.

[ForsakenRoe]

I've been trying to imagine this every which way and I still can't really find any significant appeal to building so much around Aetherblight, specifically, when I imagine it out relative to other options that would likely be mostly mutually exclusive with it.

The main issue with trying to increase healing requirements, is that we have an upper cap on how much damage an attack against us can do: our Max HP level. Aetherblight application doesn't do 'actual damage', and so it removes the constraint the devs have, of 'this attack can only do damage up to, but not exceeding, the player's Max HP (or a bit more, once you factor in mitigation)'. You could have an attack do 5x your entire HP bar (yes this is an extreme example), and as long as that 'damage' is Aetherblight rather than real HP damage, it can work because Esuna clears it all instantly. Or perhaps you can apply a barrier and negate its application, making the OGCD ST barriers (Benison, Intersection) a lot more useful for Tankbusters

Part of the idea of 'it can be removed with Esuna' is, as you surmise, to make Esuna a more relevant aspect of our gameplay. But it also offers ways for those players who panic, or who haven't got the resources to handle the healing required, to still resolve the mechanic. I acknowledge that '5x your HP bar' is a hyperbolic amount for the purpose of explaining 'decoupling maximum damage possible vs max HP of player', but imagine a lower amount, like say, 40k out of our 160k HP pool. Say that amount applies to all 8 players in a raid, it's probably not worth it to Esuna all 8 individually, so you'd heal through it. Conversely, if you have only two players affected for a larger amount like 100k (say, a tankbuster), maybe one cast of Esuna from each healer is better to use. But if you DO have tools available to you (eg you're a WHM and have Benediction ready), maybe what originally looked like 'I'll have to Esuna this', isn't quite as set in stone as first thought.

It has to be remembered though, that our goal is to reduce how many GCDs we spend on not-damage, to be as close to zero as possible. Casting Esuna constantly like that is going to result in a lot of 'wasted GCDs', and I'd expect that getting a feel for 'when to heal through the effect' vs 'when to Esuna it' would become an aspect of the 'mastery of the role'. Like how we learn a fight, and learn 'I can swap this Succor out for another Broil, and make the mit check by using XYZ CDs here in place of the Succor', this would be 'I can heal through this one with XYZ CDs, so I don't have to Esuna these 3 people'

It even opens design space for certain abilities to interact with Aetherblight in special ways. Benediction is an obvious one to have 'instantly removes all Aetherblight', but you could have things like AST's Essential Dignity say something like 'If the target is afflicted with Aetherblight, they are considered to be below 30% HP regardless of their current HP value', so that ED's scaling is always set to maximum effect to tackle the debuff faster. Maybe SGE's Kardia healing is twice as strong against Aetherblight, because of their medical knowledge. Maybe Emergency Tactics on SCH makes healing spells be a guaranteed Crit when they're used against Aetherblight, or Excogitation instantly detonates on someone if/when they receive Aetherblight. Maybe Macrocosmos could consider the application of Aetherblight to be 'damage', such that being afflicted with 200k of it (hyperbolic example again) means Macrocosmos would remove 100k instantly, etc. Hell, you could even have 'negative interactions' for abilities, like maybe DRK has some skills that self-apply Aetherblight, but they can prevent the application via TBN. Or maybe PLD's Cover applies all the damage (and I guess Aetherblight) that you Cover, as Aetherblight instead of real damage (so instead of taking a 150k TB twice for 300k and dying, you'd be able to take it and get 150k damage, 150k Aetherblight and live), increasing Cover's versatility, and being able to take someone else's Aetherblight onto yourself as a PLD (with the selfhealing of Confiteor combo/HolySpirit/Holy Sheltron) could open up interesting strategies for some groups.

Basically, I think it could result in a lot of potential design space being opened up for the devs to explore, as they seem to be struggling to find things to add to the healers that aren't just 'another HPS dump action' or 'another mitigation tool on a long CD'. I don't think AB is the only solution per se, but I don't think that reducing incoming damage and outgoing healing at the same time would be a good alternative, especially as it'd require taking a hammer to things like Shake it Off, or Nascent Flash's offhealing capabilities for such a change to have enough of an effect. I expect it'd just be perceived as a nerf. Rather than reducing how much sheer HPS we can throw out via something like Medica 3 (1175 total potency now) Seraphism (with ET, Accession heals for 672p per GCD, so more than a Cure3 for 60% the MP cost), or the Overheal Plant (2000p, if all 5 stacks are consumed via damage instances), I think it'd be better to play into it, and have systems that make use of that incredibly high HPS, and interactions within the kit, so that we feel powerful in what we do, but also that power is challenged by the content, rather than reducing our power, and the challenge the content presents, in order to avoid having to make a new system

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh, and to add to the whole 'The Vault gives a lore explanation already' thing for the idea, I just thought: Level 60 SCH Job Quest has us trying to prevent the plague that turned the Nymians into Tonberries, from turning some NPCs into Tonberries. We know that if someone's Aether gets corrupted (or 'blighted', perhaps) by something like tempering, it can cause physical disfigurement, Sin Eaters, Voidsent etc are examples. And we prevent the plague from turning NPCs into Tonberries, by casting Esuna on them. A little funny to me, in hindsight

[Shurrikhan]

The main issue with trying to increase healing requirements, is that we have an upper cap on how much damage an attack against us can do: our Max HP level.

This is irrelevant unless that limit degrades (or, denies beneficial opportunities to) our gameplay, but here the only effect is on the number of heals we can fit into an HP bar before overhealing -- i.e., on the tuning of (GCD) heals relative to player max HP. Such does not require in any way universalizing a healing absorb mechanic. It would require only a higher ratio of heals doable to player max HP.

Part of the idea of 'it can be removed with Esuna' is, as you surmise, to make Esuna a more relevant aspect of our gameplay. But it also offers ways for those players who panic, or who haven't got the resources to handle the healing required, to still resolve the mechanic.

No, it wouldn't. It would simply be optimal at X healing-absorption afflicted, competitive near that, and non-optimal in certain other situations. In the same way that a spammable Arm's Length would not simply give healers without the spacial awareness a way to still resolve a knockback nor a spammable Communio would give another way for Reapers to meet DPS checks, neither would Esuna be simply an extra "way... to resolve the mechanic." It would be THE way.

you could have things like AST's Essential Dignity say something like 'If the target is afflicted with Aetherblight, they are considered to be below 30% HP regardless of their current HP value', so that ED's scaling is always set to maximum effect to tackle the debuff faster. Maybe SGE's Kardia healing is twice as strong against Aetherblight, because of their medical knowledge. Maybe Emergency Tactics on SCH makes healing spells be a guaranteed Crit when they're used against Aetherblight, or Excogitation instantly detonates on someone if/when they receive Aetherblight.

But... why? Why would you not simply follow a single intuitive rule instead of adding the equivalent of X healer heals more against damage taken from this (kind of) attack and that healer against that attack, etc.?

There's already an established norm, btw, which is to simply consider healing absorption (and, in many games, normalized pending DoT damage) as missing HP for the purposes of any %missing HP calculation. Such retains the relative power of each tool, rather than relatively weakening the likes of ED or Benediction. I'd argue you probably don't even want that, though, if you want Aetherblight to feel at all meaningful. (Just as it probably should not be cleansible if you want it to feel impactful, especially if it's going to absorb 100% of healing up to its cap instead of some lower variable percent.)

Even that, though, is just a job balance decision to make the best of an otherwise added imbalancing mechanic (healing absorption) by making some jobs weaker and/or some stronger against that particular debuff. And, given Esuna, I doubt it's going to be particularly relevant regardless.

Or maybe PLD's Cover applies all the damage (and I guess Aetherblight) that you Cover, as Aetherblight instead of real damage (so instead of taking a 150k TB twice for 300k and dying, you'd be able to take it and get 150k damage, 150k Aetherblight and live), increasing Cover's versatility, and being able to take someone else's Aetherblight onto yourself as a PLD (with the selfhealing of Confiteor combo/HolySpirit/Holy Sheltron) could open up interesting strategies for some groups.

Again, there's already a very relevant norm here, especially for among Tanks, that would be both more intuitive and more gameplay-affecting: delaying damage taken to be instead taken over time (usually with the portion of health to be consumed by one's DoTs suffered shown --you guessed it-- as a second color or shade of health bar).

Yes, you can of course healing absorption to allow tanks to suffer sustain costs beyond their max HP, a la Purgatory on a Death Knight. Again, I think the game could benefit from involving healing absorption sparingly and deliberately.

But why revolve so much around a singular debuff? And why give it a Get Out of Jail Free Card in the form of Esuna?

To Wrap Things Up:

• I'd be happy to see healing absorption added to the game, but only as one extra undermechanic among several (e.g., Stagger, Break, flat rating buffs, etc.). To be clear, those should each be situated such that their effects are easily conveyable and understood in/for both their function and implications. (There therefore shouldn't be too many, but enough to meet our needs while generally shrinking the tooltip sizes and apparent memorization required to introduce more diverse kits engagingly in the contexts of the game's fights.)
  
  
• That said, I don't think a healing absorption debuff should typically interact with Esuna, since the whole point of the healing absorption is generally to require... more healing actions. I therefore dislike what making Aetherblight cleansible would do both to Esuna and to healing actions when competing against it.
  

  Allowing that interaction would replace the need to give Esuna a niche through far more contextually interesting debuffs (which are virtually any that are not healing absorption, be that a snare before an incoming AoE, vulnerability, particular DoTs, timing and mitigating explosions, purging a debuff at a particular time to optimize a compensatory buff, etc., etc.) with something that newly competes with and therefore overshadows or would be overshadowed by the rest of the healing kit all to center itself around a debuff that is probably the least typically interesting of any type.

• The present tuning of healing actions as portions of player HP can never be an issue in itself; it can only be an issue in terms of...

1. the relative reaction time available to healers,
2. the throughput available to healers as a portion of their uptime relative to incoming sustain needs,
3. the degree to which overhealing would be a concern, and
4. the relative tuning, given the matters above, of certain actions against each other --and per their mid- and longer-term costs-- as to allow for situationality / context-minded decision-making among healer actions.

Consequently...

1. If, at present, we somehow were to be lacking in available time to react to damage intake, we'd need only either nerf the frequency of attacks or both nerf the damage per attack and our heals.
   
   
2. If, at present, we are not spending enough time on GCD healing actions (uptime costs are too low), then you need only increase the relative healing required through a greater number of attacks (spaced away from burst) and/or weaker heals (for everyone, generally).
   
   
3. If, at present, the issue were solely that we far too easily overheal, again, one need only nerf damage intake slightly and proportionately nerf our heals (therefore giving a longer period over which that healing can be done
   
   
4. If, at present, our best options are too consistent and obvious, such as by having no real opportunity cost, and therefore leave no room for situationality, then adjust their tuning relative to each other. Such would in turn allow for shorter available reaction times to be salvagable even among higher uptime needs.

Conclusions:

• You would therefore, imo, be better off leaving Aetherblight as just another debuff instead of trying to make it, specifically, the way out of various healer woes. Simply target those problems in simple, straightforward manners not beholden to any particular debuff:

1. If there's not enough to heal, bring in more damage in ways that least disproportionately affect necessary reaction time, scheduling of limited actions, or necessary cognitive load in general. (E.g., add between-bursts hits, rather than just amping all incoming damage or nerfing heals outright.)
   
   
2. If there's not enough cognitive load engaged, increase the decision-making space available to healers by allowing for meaningful soft-branching opportunities in practice such as through the tuning of stronger vs. weaker actions, ramping undermechanics, meaningful healer damage opportunities and some small but impactful increases to healer non-healing kit, etc. This part may be intwined with the first, as it can also provide ways to reduce necessary reaction time and the sense of living or dying by a scheduled CD. Note, however, how it is not beholden to any singular debuff or undermechanic, only to healer kits actually being more cohesive and engaging in themselves.
   
   
3. Thereafter, if healers were to still struggle with being able to give out two heals without overhealing and to lack optimization opportunities for trimming those overheals, reduce both the incoming damage and all healing outputs proportionately so that the likely excess healing portion is decreased in bringing people up to required eHPs.

[Tigore]

There are definitely more avenues we can explore to increase the damage to parties with reduced risk of one-shotting the party. Although the Aetherblight system Forsaken Roe is suggesting is definitely interesting. She said we could also tie a non-lethal DoT in as a possibility so the healers are discouraged from greeding against the Esuna casts too much. Just a light DoT that slowly ticks based on a percent of max HP so it needs attention but could probably be done in around 5 - 10 seconds safely with everyone at full health still. The healers can also throw a shield up before it happens to potentially negate the mechanic from setting in the first place. That probably took inspiration from the Ifrit Trial knockback mech being negated if the player takes zero damage.

Some other avenues to consider could be something like this. They could very well be paired together with Aetherblight, so the solution to increasing party damage is not unilaterally on one thing.

1. Increase the Max HP of all classes

It's one of the simplest ways to allow encounters to increase the damage it deals reasonably on us. The HPS of the healer cooldowns are so strong now that the higher amount of HP to heal probably wouldn't be noticed much. The mana costs of the barrier spells were slightly reduced too, so first timer healers should reasonably be able to handle it with Succor and Eukrasian Prognosis.

2. Consider making some more of the major damaging mechs multi hit

I believe a tank buster for our current Savage fights already do this. We could also count the perma DoT on a recent Trial fight for this type of mech too. If there is enough sign for the healers that the total damage will be well over the full health of the party, it will definitely start to put the cooldowns like Asylum, Seraphism, Macrocosmos and Panhaima to work. This might also make the regens have a better place for working as a solution rather than it always being a mitigation check. The mitigation cooldowns should still work as another way.

3. Put in more gravity based mechs

This is similar to the White Hole that sets all HP to 1. It has the property of keeping the damage taken more relevant to players if it is percentage based on their current HP. It may not kill the players by itself, but it can ignore Defense and Magic Defense. If we had more mech combos that alternated a gravity hit with a regular hit, this could potentially make the regular hits more deadly if the healers have not prepped up shields, regens or spike heal cooldowns.

4. Use more debuffs that muddle the character stats and / or movement

Even if the boss has no enrage timer, reducing a character's ability to deal damage to the boss will obviously equate to a longer fight and more healing that would need to be done. At this point, it may also need to target the oGCD damage, buff and healing constants somehow to actually hurt more. It's still just a test for the healer or BRD to notice it and use Esuna / Warden's Paean to take care of it. If we do actually consider the AoE Esunaga getting in for a healer like WHM, it might need a cooldown of at least 1 minute or 90 seconds to be fair to the others.

[Shurrikhan]

@Tigore

Agreed. And again, I don't mean to say Aetherial Blight or any other mechanic can't be useful; I just don't think solutions paths ought to be conflated or that a solution ought to seek out a problem to justify it instead of us first building solutions straightforwardly from and to as directly as possible address what problems we can agree exist.

In other MMOs, for example, there is usually a clear distinction made between kit or between-abilities balance, inter-build balance, spec/mastery balance, class balance, and role balance, and one does not therefore adjust the proportion of power of a kit already balanced among itself to bring up the power of the class against others (instead simply buffing the class's outputs as a whole by the proportion they tend to fall short in real personal contribution).

Now, there are bundles to consider, of course: if, for instance, our main concern is healer engagement (and I'd argue always that gameplay should be the foremost concern, even if other solutions may mitigate issues in the interim), there would necessarily have to be room kept in mind also for the impacts of increased healing requirements and ways to meaningfully leverage healer kits for engagement in that context alongside any non-healing means of engagement added (ideally, synergetic with those healing considerations).

But I don't want to limit all those possibilities around, say, a single buff, debuff, gauge system, or under mechanic. Making any singular element that disproportionately necessary for the rest to work just invites future issues. If some portion of output or cognitive load can be reshaped/reshaded later through some new element to a net benefit, great, but that should be more in the realm of augmenting a then-working system than a focus for the way out in the first place.