#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ty_taurus]

Over on JP, I found a post of a player Tonaka who wanted to convey something to foreigners but was not comfortable doing so with a translator, and I wanted to share their opinions. Tonaka, if you read this, I always like to see players come to interact with us even if through a translator, but there are a lot of people in North America who are really rude and disrespectful at times which isn't fair to foreigners trying their best to communicate with us. So I understand why you my be apprehensive to do so.

I'll include my understanding of their post and summarize it, and I'll add a link to their original post as well.

Their first question is do we want recovery from the tanks removed, or do we want to just reduce how often they can provide sustain?

Their second question is if we want DPS on healers to be more complicated, how complicated should it be? If we also want to heal with the GCD, how often should we be healing with the GCD? For example, would we want a healer with a DPS rotation like Warrior's where healing is added to the job? Or a DPS rotation like Summoner's where only healing is added to the job? Or would we want new healer job mechanics?

They also saw us referencing "5 years," so were we happy with healers in Stormblood? If so, what was good about healers in Stormblood?

Here is a link to the page with their response.

Please do not be rude or disrespectful to them! And please, if you want to answer them, do it in this thread. I don't want to take over their thread. I really am happy that we're communicating with each other, but it needs to be done delicately. Tonaka, I apologize if my summary does not accurately represent what you said in any way. Having to translate your post to English means it's possible I did not understand things correctly.

To answer your questions myself:

I like that tanks and DPS can have sustain and think it's an interesting way for them to help the team outside of doing damage. But I think because most FFXIV battles are gentle when it comes to damage, rather than helping the healers, it ends up invading their duties. I don't want to take these tools away from tanks or DPS either. But if using healing effects on tanks and DPS came with some cost, like how Paladin's Clemency is on the GCD and costs MP, that would help prevent them from being too powerful. Another idea is rather than tanks and healers providing direct healing, instead they make the healer's recovery stronger.

For DPS, I think each healer should approach DPS differently. We should have a healer that is still very approachable to new players and casual players. I think there's more DPS tools that healer could have without feeling like too much work, but still feels entertaining for when playing alone or in easier fights. But I also want a healer that feels sort of like "Red DPS that happens to heal" or "Green DPS" which I think Sage should be. You mention Warrior or Summoner, but I would rather do something like a "Mini Red Mage." Instead of your attacks being 1-1-1-1-1... Maybe it's more like: 1-2-1-3-1-4... or something like that, with a small burst at the end and maybe one or two OGCD attacks. Since Dawntrail is already designed, maybe that's something more for 8.0. For now, I'd like to see the attacks Sage already has made available more often. Phlegma is used every 20 seconds, for example.

A lot of healers were actually fans of Heavensward more than Stormblood. But I think there's a general consensus that Heavensward wasn't the best for more casual players. Stormblood is seen as more of a happy medium between the complicated Heavensward and the simple Shadowbringers. Though, White Mage is often regarded as an exception, as White Mage felt really bad in Stormblood. But for Scholar, for example, you still had Selene. You still had different poison spells with different durations. It wasn't just one poison on a 30 second duration. You were balancing several poisons. Also, I think how often you GCD healed should be around of often we would heal in Heavensward or Stormblood.

[MisterNublet]

Over on JP, I found a post of a player Tonaka who wanted to convey something to foreigners but was not comfortable doing so with a translator, and I wanted to share their opinions. Tonaka, if you read this, I always like to see players come to interact with us even if through a translator, but there are a lot of people in North America who are really rude and disrespectful at times which isn't fair to foreigners trying their best to communicate with us. So I understand why you my be apprehensive to do so.

I'll include my understanding of their post and summarize it, and I'll add a link to their original post as well.

Their first question is do we want recovery from the tanks removed, or do we want to just reduce how often they can provide sustain?

The effectiveness of Warrior's (and Paladin's) self-sustain needs to be reduced first and foremost. Bloodwhetting is a broken (overpowered) ability on AoE/Dungeon pulls. Both Paladin's Clemency and Dark Knight's The Blackest Night are good examples of how tank sustain should be done. Tank sustain should require a cost to use such as a resource (MP or Gauge), a gcd use, and/or a loss in DPS. Nascent Flash is an example of a bad skill design, same as Shake It Off which is bloated/power crept and doesn't need to have both shielding, and healing.

Their second question is if we want DPS on healers to be more complicated, how complicated should it be? If we also want to heal with the GCD, how often should we be healing with the GCD? For example, would we want a healer with a DPS rotation like Warrior's where healing is added to the job? Or a DPS rotation like Summoner's where only healing is added to the job? Or would we want new healer job mechanics?

It doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to have some kind of decision making to use. None of us want tank's damage rotation of pressing 1-2-3. Healers are still casters, and yet black mage, red mage, and summoner have interesting and different game play with their spells. Give Healers a new 2.5 second cast spell that makes weaving oGCDs impossible, so they have to alternate between their 1.5s spell and 2.5s spell based on needs. Give them another Dot (damage over time) with a 15 or 18 second duration so they now have two DoTs to juggle. Give each healer an instant cast ability similar to Sage's Phlegma on a cooldown that they have to keep track of during combat. Such simple additions that would add so much to healer's stagnant gameplay.

I'll take new healer job mechanics too, but such a change would likely have to wait until 8.0.

They also saw us referencing "5 years," so were we happy with healers in Stormblood? If so, what was good about healers in Stormblood?

AST's old card system. Not this travesty of a card system they're pushing onto us with DawnTrail.

[MisterNublet]

But I also don't want the healers to all feel the same either. As you say, Black Mage, Summoner, and Red Mage are different. The healers should be too.

I agree with that, but such a change would likely require tearing out the entire foundation and rebuilding each healer from the ground up. Building four new gameplay systems revolving around job mechanics/gauges will take time that I don't think will happen until at least 8.0 with this job design team. Adding a new 2.5s cast spell, a new 15-18 second dot, and a new instant ability with a cooldown could be done in a month or two which would take some of the sting off in DawnTrail from having to wait until then.

If I had to give new mechanics to each healer, I would have to say it would be something to the effect of.

WHM would have to alternate between Earth and Water, while building into light (black mage like).

Scholar would have a "Offensive command" rotation and a "Defensive command" rotation, using 3 abilities, depending on the order how they're cast. 1-2-3 would be offensive (damage increase for Sch), 3-2-1 defensive (self shielding and healing increase for sch).

Astrologian would have a combo system. Ast would accumulate "stars" by casting 1.5s Malefic and two stars for casting 2.5s Malefic which they can then spend these "stars" on different abilities. (5 stars to summon Meteor, hah.)

Sage would be an "offshoot" of Red Mage's gameplay. Healing through Kardia will build to and unlock their "melee" combo which will in turn help them build Addersting.

[Jeeqbit]

Their first question is do we want recovery from the tanks removed, or do we want to just reduce how often they can provide sustain?

Reducing the frequency would help because it used to be less frequent: 2 Clemencies on PLD (sacrificing damage/MP), 1 (Thrill)+Equilibrium per 60 seconds and at certain points a rare Bloodbath every 90s.

But the potency and amount of abilities and traits is also an issue. A regen on "Equilibrium". A regen on "Shake It Off". "Bloodwhetting" every 25, with a shield, multiple strong heals, and significant damage reduction. The heal being added to "Vengeance".

Their second question is if we want DPS on healers to be more complicated, how complicated should it be?

AST right now seems decent but not as smooth as it could be or has been in the past due to getting "Macrocosmos" and "Astrodyne" to try and press along with everything else, so trying to burst it all while dealing with mechanics can get a bit excessive. The 5.0 version was good in terms of abilities to press and very challenging because of the frequency of cards to play.

If we also want to heal with the GCD, how often should we be healing with the GCD?

Needing to do this during enemy packs is good. I want to provide the last pull of "Amaurot" as an example. This is a pull that made me use all my abilities as a SCH and even use my GCDs. At least it did in the previous expansion.

Many of the pulls in Dohn Mheg are good as well.

would we want a healer with a DPS rotation like Warrior's where healing is added to the job?

A melee healer has always been an interesting idea. It's effectively been implemented in the form of WAR and PLD, except they don't have the classification of a healer.

what was good about healers in Stormblood?

Healers, on average, had multiple DoTs to manage instead of just 1, while AST had cards. Tanks had less sustain and enemies dealt more damage, so almost all of the dungeons required a healer, including the max level ones. I remember large pulls in most of these dungeons that I could not survive as a tank without the healer.

[ForsakenRoe]

Their first question is do we want recovery from the tanks removed, or do we want to just reduce how often they can provide sustain?

Their second question is if we want DPS on healers to be more complicated, how complicated should it be? If we also want to heal with the GCD, how often should we be healing with the GCD? For example, would we want a healer with a DPS rotation like Warrior's where healing is added to the job? Or a DPS rotation like Summoner's where only healing is added to the job? Or would we want new healer job mechanics?

They also saw us referencing "5 years," so were we happy with healers in Stormblood? If so, what was good about healers in Stormblood?

First: I would not want to see the recovery 'removed', as now that players have experienced what gameplay is like 'with' the tool, removing it will just feel bad. I would rather see the tools be reduced in power using the concept of 'opportunity cost'. As others have mentioned, Clemency for PLD is a very strong healing tool, but its power is kept in check because it costs MP and is a Spell (on the GCD), whereas Nascent Flash is 'OP' not just because it can heal once-per-enemy-hit, but because it has no associated 'opportunity cost', it is an Ability (oGCD), just 25s CD, and doesn't cost any MP or Gauge. Additionally, back in Shadowbringers, Nascent Flash healed based on the damage dealt, not a flat amount per hit, and this meant that the incoming healing was very dependent on using good burst abilities while Nascent Flash was active. I would like to see Nascent Flash/Bloodwhetting go back to using this design again, so that pressing the simplest AOE skill (Overpower) doesn't result in many thousands of HP healed for free.

Second: I would like to see our rotations be slightly improved in variety, but nothing too crazy. I would look at the tanks such as WAR as a good example of how our rotations should look as a healer. WAR has 2 Abilities it can weave in quite often (Upheaval, Onslaught), a Gauge to build up and spend on powerful moves (FellCleave), buttons to instantly give Gauge and to make Gauge costs 0 for a time (Infuriate/Inner Release). A simple Builder/Spender gameplay loop on one of the healers would go a long way to alleviating the 'tedium' of pressing the same attack spell. Additionally, I would look at Stormblood healers for some inspiration. Stormblood was, in my opinion, a good middle ground between the complexity of Heavesnward and the over-simplification of Shadowbringers.

Third: As others have mentioned, Stormblood Healers were a sort of 'happy medium'. AST had many tools to interact with its cards, such as sacrificing one to empower the next, holding one until later, extending their durations with Celestial Opposition. Scholar had many Damage over Time effects to apply to the enemy, and a way to easily spread them in a dungeon (Bane), resulting in a very different gameplay feel. And White Mage was experimenting with the idea of Cooldown Reduction via its Lilies. While the system ended up being a failure, the concept had some potential, if the Cooldown Reduction effects had been guaranteed. Regardless, the Shadowbringers Lily rework for WHM was universally accepted to be a 'massive improvement', and we should keep the aspects of Shadowbringers/Endwalker design that work well, not just roll everything back to Stormblood exactly as it was.

[Lyth]

Their first question is do we want recovery from the tanks removed, or do we want to just reduce how often they can provide sustain?

Their second question is if we want DPS on healers to be more complicated, how complicated should it be? If we also want to heal with the GCD, how often should we be healing with the GCD? For example, would we want a healer with a DPS rotation like Warrior's where healing is added to the job? Or a DPS rotation like Summoner's where only healing is added to the job? Or would we want new healer job mechanics?

They also saw us referencing "5 years," so were we happy with healers in Stormblood? If so, what was good about healers in Stormblood?

1. I think that a tank's approach to self-sustain should be proactive. If you correctly anticipate the incoming damage pattern, you should have more survivability through a timed, context-dependent effect.
   
   What I mean by this is having an action like Clemency's heal potency scale inversely to your current health. Or perhaps having an action like Abyssal Drain's heal potency scale up in proportion to the amount of damage that you've received in the past 5 seconds.
   
   If you want to take more of a reactive approach, then it has to be tied to some form of resource management. The problem with tanks currently is that they have a lot of passive 'regens' either built in to the rotation or built into defensives that you would use anyways. On top of that, there are reactive burst heals that are available on demand, but have no real cost to use. It's like playing a healer where all your defensive actions are free and oGCD.
   
   The likely reason this was introduced was to make tanking less anxiety-provoking, by giving tanks a button they can press whenever their HP becomes uncomfortable. But the experience of tanking depends on the player having that discomfort and managing it.
   
   
2. This will always be controversial. Support jobs should still individually feel unique to play in terms of their damage rotations in addition to their defensive toolkits. You cannot achieve this with only one or two damage buttons. Tanks still have relatively simple rotations in comparison to DPS, but it's much more of an even split between damage dealing actions and defensive/healing actions.
   
   I don't believe that it's a question of GCD vs. oGCD. It's about having meaningful resource management. The resource cost of a GCD is time, but there are other types of resources that can limit access to defensive actions and force players to make tough decisions.
   
   As for unique healer mechanics, I want to see healers have more ways to enhance their teammates effectiveness. Effects like Expedient can be difficult to quantify the benefit, but can influence uptime and help with executing mechanics. Group/team based movement actions are not well explored. Can you create a portal between two points on the arena to help some teammates gain uptime? Could you give a teammate a single target buff that they can consume on demand to gain a temporary speed boost?
   
   
3. Stormblood was probably the point where FFXIV started to move away from a 'trinity' design with interdependent roles, towards more of a team 'solo player' experience. Support roles were hit hardest by this.

[Nanananami773]

I honestly wish I could read all the submissions, but I am afraid that my ability and time are severely limited.
My experience here has been very interesting and I would recommend it to other JP players, but with your enthusiasm, there are too many posts and it takes up other people's time...

I didn't expect to even experience Godwin's Law here lol.

[Galvuu]

I honestly wish I could read all the submissions, but I am afraid that my ability and time are severely limited.
My experience here has been very interesting and I would recommend it to other JP players, but with your enthusiasm, there are too many posts and it takes up other people's time...

I didn't expect to even experience Godwin's Law here lol.

If nothing else, this exchange with the JP playerbase has been very interesting and very informative for the EN side (I think that's a sentiment most share).
I am thankful for your efforts and glad you shared the opinion of some of the JP side.
Thank you for your efforts!

[ForsakenRoe]

Hello again.
I posted what I noticed from yesterday's communication in my own way on the Japanese forum, and received some responses.
The first thing they are thinking about is what kind of player base you guys are thinking about; there is a huge difference from very casual players to those playing high difficulty contents.

Many people seem to think that if you care about casual users, it is not a good idea to overburden them with healers.
Also, some players who play mainly using PT finder and CF have never thought it was boring; adding that they can understand your opinion because when PT members are good enough and there was no need for extra heals, it is monotonous to play just throwing stones (Before 4.x, WHM was called "stone throwing machine" by some).
Some Japanese players also came to recognize that there were problems not only in tank and DPS skills, but also in content design, and some expressed that they thought this way when told.

Simply hearing "HEALERSTRIKE" or "STOP 11111" will lead to miscommunication, as some misunderstood the opinions and some came to believe that the movement was too radical.
However, if we specifically explain the problems with the content and the healing ability of T,D, JP players may gradually understand the true meaning.

Some users were surprised that the discussion in the EN forum was more heated than they had imagined, while others said that they had "seen similar discussions before (around 5.x?)."
One thing I would like to mention is that many Japanese users think that the posts of people who come to JP forums using translation tools seem very belligerent.
Depending on which translation tool you use, the impression you get is totally different depending on whether you use polite expressions peculiar to Japanese or not.
I don't want EN and JP to become enemies because of this (and probably you don't either).
If you ever come to JP's message boards, please be careful to use gentle expressions.

Hello, and thank you for reaching out to EN side of forums!

I am a player who is, like most in this thread, not very satisfied with healer gameplay. I have taken Yoshi-P's advice of 'trying Ultimates' to find fun with Healer, but the problem is that it's only fun while 'learning', or doing 'progression', once the fight is learned completely it returns to the same gameplay that I dislike, pressing the main spell over and over. I understand that JP's stance on the matter is one of prioritizing 'smoothness of gameplay', that it's better this way to reduce chance of wipes in IDs, allowing everyone to get their daily tasks done much easier. And for the most part, I do agree that the 'smoothness' is important for those players. But, I feel that there can be a 'choice' in the job actions, so that I can choose to have a harder time doing an ID, and a player who wants the current 'smoothness' can still do so and perform almost identically as well.

When we discuss Healer jobs in EN, and the monotony of using the same one attack over and over, one big point that comes up again and again is the Tanks. Their role is to hold Emnity on the enemy and mitigate damage to themselves, mainly, yet they get to have a fun rotation for dealing damage. They get to have Ability-type actions to weave into their rotation quite frequently (for example Upheaval, or Blasting Zone). They get Gauges which allow for 'builder-spender' gameplay, building up to a big attack with their basic moves, like a WAR will use Storm's Path to build Gauge to get to the very fun 'Fell Cleave'. They get to, effectively, be a 'mini DPS' for their rotation when they don't need to do their primary job of 'taking and mitigating damage'. Healers, though, despite also being 'not a DPS' just like a Tank, are told to use the same attack button over and over, if we want to contribute damage. It does not seem very 'fair' or 'balanced' that, despite both roles being 'not the DPS', one gets to have a much more intricate rotation than the other. I understand the JP playerbase's desire to keep things stress-free for the Healer, to reduce the chance of a wipe in IDs, but I believe there is ways to increase Healer rotation depth to roughly equal to that of Tanks, while keeping the Healing portion of Healer very easy to access. Additionally, the Tanks have a difficulty scale, with many believing that WAR is easier and GNB is harder, for example. I would like to see the Healers damage rotation be made roughly equal in complexity to the WAR. This could be done in multiple ways.

I have personally written posts which ask for small adjustments to how we deal damage as a healer, intending to keep the 'smoothness' available, but adding optional complexity for those who want to push their gameplay a bit further. For example, if I were to redesign WHM, I would reduce the Damage over Time duration to 12 seconds, and add a new button called Banish, which has a 15s CD and is a tiny bit stronger than our current main spell, Glare. Because of the small damage difference, a player could just ignore Banish completely and be relatively unaffected. They would not cause an 'enrage timer' issue, because of not using the spell, because the damage difference is purposely made to be so small, it does not cause 'friction' between players if the healer opts not to use it. I made a video a long time ago, which demonstrates this idea's rotation. The same principles would be applied to SCH, AST and SGE, where they would have 'optional complexity' for the players to make use of, and the potencies tuned so that ignoring these extra buttons would not cause issues for players. Then, I would also add a new spell that costs a Lily, and applies a Barrier to the party. I do not think the 'Pure/Barrier split' has worked, and rather than try to force it to work, I would rather just remove it and let all four healers have a 'sliding scale' amount of Pure and Barrier capability. If a Healer is very good at Pure healing, it should be weaker at Barrier healing, but still capable of some Barrier healing. and the opposite for the other end of the spectrum. Finally, I would add a new Gauge which fills when casting Damage or Healing spells. And once you get 50 of this Gauge, you would be able to spend it on a very powerful healing spell. This spell would also grant 3 Elemental buffs, which would turn Glare, Dia, and the new Banish, into Quake, Tornado and Flood respectively. This would increase the potencies in such a way that would make the healing spell 'damage neutral'. By doing this and adding '50% damage reduced to secondary targets', adding just 2 buttons to the hotbar, the AOE rotation in IDs goes from 1 button (Holy) to 5 (Holy, Heal move, Quake, Flood, Tornado). And if we were to have Cure upgrade to Cure 2, and Medica to Medica 2, we can save 2 hotbar spaces.

Another example is SCH. I would like to add two Damage Over Time effects we had in previous expansions, Miasma and Shadowflare. By tuning the potencies of these Damage over Time effects, we can reduce the 'punishment' of a player who forgets to use them on time, or refreshes them early by accident. This would give the two healers (WHM and SCH) different gameplay, where WHM is more 'burst focused', and SCH is more 'sustained damage over time' focused. Then, we could make AST have a bigger focus on using its Cards more often, and SGE could be made to be very unique because of Kardia. For example, if some of the abilities were reworked to function like Soteria, wherein the effect of Kardia is buffed for a duration. But I would also like to see a fast paced gameplay for SGE, I look at Reaper and it's fast burst window and think SGE could have one too. Something like '1 - 2 - 1 - 2 - big finisher laser'. And of course this would synergise with the Kardia effects.

Effectively, I (and many others in EN I believe) would like to go back to Stormblood design for Healer jobs. Where we had 'smoothness' added like removing Cleric Stance, and making Healer Damage spells scale based on Mind stat instead of Intelligence, but we still had several ways to deal damage. WHM had Aero 3, Aero 2 and Stone. SCH had Bio 2, Miasma, Shadowflare, Miasma 2, Bane to help spread the Damage over Time effects, etc. AST had Cards with unique effects, and ways to manipulate them such as Royal Road to enhance the next card drawn, Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition to extend their durations, etc. Shadowbringers removed a lot of things in the pursuit of 'smoothness', and a lot of people in EN would say 'too much was removed'. It did some good things, like WHM Lilies were made much more functional in Shadowbringers, but for the most part, in my opinion Stormblood had the better design. I remember Yoshi-P saying in a PLL before Endwalker released that 'we will not go back to 3.0!' and I agree with that, but with so many being unsatisfied by 5.0 and 6.0 Healers, I think that we should look at 4.0 Healer and what made it work so well, and try to bring some of that back.

Thank you for reading