#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[CaptainLagbeard]

For starters, what I want to see two things.

1. Healers being absolutely necessary to beat end-game content... Trials and Raids... Normal, Alliance, Extreme, Savage. Healers shouldn't be replaceable.
2. Healers getting buffed to a point where their base damage output is at the same level as Tanks.

[sharknado]

if they don't want to improve nor play decently, it's a choice and their problem, it shouldn't be everyone's.

The game doesn't really want people to improve or feel the need to unless they want to clear two specific end-game content modes. On top of that public parsing or performance grading is a big no no in this game. So they would have to say they are changing the game audience, which is less subs, less money. No MMO will do that. They will try to please everyone and tell to go savage and ultimate if someones wants a challenge WoW also does this, has multiple difficulty levels and so on to try to please everyone.

a complex rotation which can be some or all of :
-multiple dots
-various buffs with decision making to do
-damage gcds filling a healing gauge (or vice versa)
And this rotation would be the theorical 100% efficiency of the job, but if you just do 121 you still get around 80% efficiency.
It is an amount that almost no healer in DF meets anyway, because, as said before, by designing healers for the most braindead players, SE effectively made the playerbase of heals mostly braindead & lazy people.

In end-game content you would have to manage all of this, raid frames and mechanics at once. Be careful what you wish for. And if healer DPS would get higher then it would be more punishing to heal more so the potency of all of this could be lowered to "balance"

[Alice_Rivers]

But we can do both, and we need to.

You do realize that in DF, the overwhelming majority of healers you'll encounter don't GCD uptime (we're talking less than 50% here) nor DoT uptime ? Don't align buffs, don't use ogcds correctly, and so on ?
Why cater to these players ? At this point why not implement changes like :
-every 10th glaroilosis cast applies a dot
-native autocasting damage gcd for healer jobs
Because otherwise maintining uptime is too hard and sooooo stressfull for the poor casuals :'(

if they don't want to improve nor play decently, it's a choice and their problem, it shouldn't be everyone's.

I agree in so far as there are some terrible healers out there with terrible dps uptime, often terrible healing too, worse is the game does a bad job of teaching healers how/to heal and makes almost no mention I can see of actually pushing dps as a healer. Rather that is player convention and that may or may not be accounted for in higher tiers of content. There should be a requirement for players to have a brain, the game really should teach healers how to play healer and with that to dps, I'm just saying that we should fix healing first and then build any added dps rotation around that scenario.

Is there a single issue with having what I suggested above ? , a complex rotation which can be some or all of :
-multiple dots
-various buffs with decision making to do
-damage gcds filling a healing gauge (or vice versa)
And this rotation would be the theorical 100% efficiency of the job, but if you just do 121 you still get around 80% efficiency.
It is an amount that almost no healer in DF meets anyway, because, as said before, by designing healers for the most braindead players, SE effectively made the playerbase of heals mostly braindead & lazy people.

And such changes ar in no way prohibiting changes to encounter design and reducing dps & tanks absurd amounts of self sustain (lmao at thing like earth's riddle or 3rd eye, and don't even start with the tanks).

I don't think there's anything too offensive here, at least to me, I would be concerned about the button count since my bars are kinda full as is but that's another matter. Ultimately pushing more dps is always going to be healer optimisation, for me it's more about getting things to being 60% or more healing uptime with dps filler rather than 90% dps uptime with healing filler. That would make our existing small handful of dps skills a lot more palatable.

[GartredZW]

I don't really see why we have to constantly tiptoe around those who enjoy current healers. If they don't like that I want more complexity to return to the healer role? That's too bad, because I hate what they enjoy right now.

We both pay the same sub, their preferences don't get to supercede mine.

I say keep White Mage exactly as it is now so everyone who actually likes healer as it is now can just go there.

[CaptainLagbeard]

They should introduce a new Healer class mid-expansion, one that uses the current Healer design as they fix all the other healers... It can even start at 100 with the requirement of any other Healer at 100 to unlock... See how many people would switch to it.

[Bobby66]

I don't really see why we have to constantly tiptoe around those who enjoy current healers. If they don't like that I want more complexity to return to the healer role? That's too bad, because I hate what they enjoy right now.

We both pay the same sub, their preferences don't get to supercede mine.

I mean this largely depends. While inherently their preference may not supersede yours however, if SE desire or goal for the job falls more so inline with those that enjoy current play style then yes one could say their enjoyment and preference does in fact supersede your own. It sucks, but sometimes that is just the way the cards fall.

I do sympathize with you case in point old SMN.

Edit: We are also talking about two sets of players here also. If we really want to fix healers tanks will always have to be adjusted, and if be are being honest most tank players probably do not want to see their role/job nerfed for whatever reason. SE also has a more of a track record listening to overall tank requests not looking at your DRK sorry about you.

[Sharawiwi]

The game doesn't really want people to improve or feel the need to unless they want to clear two specific end-game content modes. On top of that public parsing or performance grading is a big no no in this game. So they would have to say they are changing the game audience, which is less subs, less money. No MMO will do that. They will try to please everyone and tell to go savage and ultimate if someones wants a challenge WoW also does this, has multiple difficulty levels and so on to try to please everyone.


In end-game content you would have to manage all of this, raid frames and mechanics at once. Be careful what you wish for. And if healer DPS would get higher then it would be more punishing to heal more so the potency of all of this could be lowered to "balance"

Too much of a black & white reasoning, it is possible to keep such part of the playerbase in the 95% of the game where it's not a problem (MSQ, social, normal content, DoL & DoH, etc.) while having a meaningfull endgame. As it is right now, with 3 fights cleared week 1/2 without healers, it's not (and the tier is really easy compared to the past). It's possible to do both.

Moreover, look at every online game with a developped competitive side who choose to appeal to casuals and oversimplified their game. It's a short term gain but mid term and long term it's a massive loss.
The players keeping a game alive are not the casuals, it's the passionate ones who stay multiple years and spend money. Especially with the subscription system, most casual will play 2-3 months at best and unsub until the next big release.

Oh my god, having something to manage in content, please I'm begging to get back to the feeling of playing AST in savage and ultimate.
And if healing end game content became extremely hard, maybe it would force tanks and melee dps to respect their healers by not permanently greeding for uptime.

The state of the game is already the worst it has ever been (at least that's how I feel), I welcome any change in the right direction, even if not perfect.

[Kes13a]

Moreover, look at every online game with a developped competitive side who choose to appeal to casuals and oversimplified their game. It's a short term gain but mid term and long term it's a massive loss.
The players keeping a game alive are not the casuals, it's the passionate ones who stay multiple years and spend money. Especially with the subscription system, most casual will play 2-3 months at best and unsub until the next big release.

as much as I hate to disagree... but you are wrong.

you are trying to say, that the high end elite people who blast through content like their house is on fire, and stop playing for months until the next patch/expansion... ARE CASUALS?

thanks for the laugh. thats a good one. not sure what game you have played where that happened, but I would love to know. but I seriously think you have it VERY backwards.

[ForsakenRoe]

And for people who don't want to improve beyond 11112111111 + occasional ogcds heals, SE should just do the maths so 12& "rotation" is 80% efficiency, and the perfect rotation is 100%.
And before complaining, 121 rotation with 80% efficiency but 90% uptime is already better than the vast majority of modern healers, people should work on ABC instead of wanting the maximum job complexity to be leveled down to their personal "best".

I made a rotation for WHM like a year ago (and rewrote it more recently, but still pre-DT hence it uses EW values), that would allow a player who plays as they currently do (that is, refresh Dia when it falls off, press Glare otherwise) to achieve 98% of the damage potential of someone doing the 'full rotation' I had created. In fact, all of the healers I redid, if you ignored the 'new damage button', would lose like, a single filler spell cast (Broil/Malefic etc) or less, per MINUTE. Still got complaints from certain individuals (if you know you know) that 'casuals would be causing enrages because they can't do the full optimal rotation'. I think that for some players, the idea of change itself is more scary than the actual proposed changes, and I fully expect that, were we in a different MMO with a PTR, the changes I would propose (if I were at a pitch to SE) would be accepted pretty well (if anything, I'd expect some 'is that all???' from some players rather than 'this is too much')

Like, as an example, if I reduce 'what I would do to WHM' to the smallest possible changes with the largest possible impact, it'd be 'Reduce Dia to 12s duration, rescale potency. Add new action Water (later Banish) with 15s CD, dealing 40p more than Stone/Glare.' And that's literally it. The funny thing is, since we have so little already, we don't actually need much changes to have a big impact on the 'feeling' of playing the job. And with this, ignoring the Banish button entirely would lose the player 160p per minute, which is now less than half of a Glare. In fact, with the way I had set the potencies up, IIRC the only way that the proposed rotation would be 'more punishing to a casual' than the EW rotation (was current at the time) was if you played the exact EW rotation (that is, you use exactly two Dia casts per minute, no more no less)

But then, by doing tiny changes like that, we can then build off of that with 'phase 2' and phase 3' as optional additions (eg SE could agree that P2 sounds good, but P3 goes too far). So for WHM again, P2 would be to add a new gauge that goes from 0-100, called Nature's Vigilance. Casting spells would fill it (eg Stone is 1pt, Aero is 5 over its 12s duration, Water is 5, and the healing spells range from 5-20). IIRC, full dummy uptime would give about 55-60pts per minute. 50 Vigilance would then be spent on a new AOE healing action, Blessing of the Elementals. A 'healer Fell Cleave' of sorts. Using this action would then give you 3 Petals on the gauge corresponding to Earth, Wind and Water. These petals would then convert Stone/Glare, Aero/Dia and Water/Banish into their ultimate elemental spells of Quake, Tornado and Flood (to mirror how BLM gets Flare/Freeze). These 3 spells would make BOTE damage neutral, and would provide optimizers something more to optimize (trying to get them all, plus Misery, into raidbuffs). Also, by making Quake, Flood, Tornado AOE (with 50% damage falloff), we take our AOE rotation of 1 button (Holy) to (optionally) FIVE (Holy, BOTE, Quake, Flood, Tornado)

Phase 3 would be 'add a Lily spender that applies barriers to party'. I would bring back Stoneskin at 30, move the Lily system to be learned at 30, and bring back 'Graniteskin' as the AOE version. Then at 76ish (where we currently learn Rapture), upgrade them to 'Afflatus Bastion' and 'Afflatus Sanctuary'. By having a shielding Lily spender, we can change the stupid 'overheal to prep Misery' into 'apply a barrier to prep Misery, which has a 30s duration so you might be able to get some use out of it at some point in its duration'. And it opens up potential for healers to save GCDs, because the WHM's shields would be damage neutral (but weaker than SCH/SGE of course).

But maybe SE sees all this, and goes 'OK this all sounds cool, but we want WHM to be the 'pure healer' so we don't think it should have access to barriers like that'. OK, cool, sure, then we ignore Phase 3, and just implement Phase 1 and 2! There's still enough meat on the bone with those changes, I think, to bring some fun back to the job. Trying to set up your healing rotation such that your POM window is Misery, Quake, Flood, Tornado, 3xGlare4, would be enough to make the job interesting in all content I think.

Eukrasian Dyskrasia was the perfect opportunity to put all of this to the test. A 40p gain, over the course of 30 seconds, would be an incredibly small DPS gain, nobody would cause enrages because of ignoring it. But SE took it away, because I guess they think we're too irresponsible to 'ignore' it and would bully people for not using it with 100% efficiency? I guess??? IDK what their logic was but I don't expect it to track. If they don't want people to bully other people for suboptimal gameplay, we have the TOS protecting those who would be bullied

Rather than seeing more complex healers I'd rather start with content actually demanding healers heal, then I wouldn't mind having more complexity if it's called for. But I think it more important to address the main problem first and secondary things after.

Making healers heal is an idealistic goal, but one that will take a lot of time. Time that the dev team simply doesn't have to spare. I ask primarily for 'more complexity to DPS rotation' not just because I think it'd help address the issues, but because it's so much quicker to implement. The dev team needs to score a 'win' now, and make tangible steps towards showing 'we are working on it', whereas with 'more healing' it'd take a lot longer and all we'd get is a hazy Lodestone post saying 'Please look forward to it'. So if the devs actually improved the DPS rotation (and ideally, had some more interactions between damage and healing to optimize), they'd get some goodwill from the disgruntled veterans, and buy themselves some more time for a more indepth overhaul of the role. Additionally, the small changes to the damage rotation might be enough to convince some veterans that 'hey, I guess they are working on it finally, I'll give it a chance (to show their metrics that I think this is the correct direction)'

[Sharawiwi]

as much as I hate to disagree... but you are wrong.

you are trying to say, that the high end elite people who blast through content like their house is on fire, and stop playing for months until the next patch/expansion... ARE CASUALS?

thanks for the laugh. thats a good one. not sure what game you have played where that happened, but I would love to know. but I seriously think you have it VERY backwards.

Passionate =/= hardcore gamers, sorry if I wasn't clear enough.
I was talking about the more average person, not hardcore but not a total casual, someone who has played for a few expac, done some EXs, have a FC estate, maybe a personal one, etc.
They are getting bored too of the oversimplification.

Happy to make you laugh <3, it's good for the general health.