#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kacho_Nacho]

This may not be a relevant snippet anymore (due to your later post) but I want to focus on this for a sec. We used to have, for example, SCH with Bio, Bio 2, Miasma and Shadowflare as its DOT repertoire (in HW). In SB, they merged Bio and Bio 2, such that the former upgraded to the latter, and Shadowflare changed from a 100% uptime GCD, to a 'press this once per minute' OGCD. These two changes vastly decreased the amount of 'timer juggling' that a player had to do, but apparently it still wasn't enough. If some players are to be believed, even the single 30s DOT we have now is still too much and that should be removed too.

But SE seems to take a hammer to every issue (especially for healer design), even when a screwdriver would work just fine. For example, back in HW, SCH's potencies were (according to consolegameswiki, via waybackmachine):

Broil: 170
Bio (18s): 240
Miasma (24s): 300
Bio2 (30s): 350
Shadowflare (30s): 250

Rather than removing DOTs entirely, the DOT potencies could have been reduced, and that potency redistributed into Broil. Here's some exceptionally fast and dirty maths. As it stands, we do 4 Biolysis per 2min, and the rest of our GCDs (44) are Broils. Biolysis is 700p total, and Broil 4 is 310p. So, we have a total possible potency-per-2min of 16,440 (via GCDs, and ignoring Chain/Baneful). So in a hypothetical rebalancing to make a more HW or SB style kit work with current DPS checks, that's the number I'd be trying to aim for. To prevent confusion between Bio1 and Bio2, let's create a more SB-style kit as an example to aim for with this hypothetical balance experiment, so we'd have just 3 DOTs: Biolysis, Miasmalysis, and Shadowflare. So, in each 2min window how about, and bear with me on the potencies, there is reasoning to them:

Broil 4: 340p
Biolysis: 370p (as 35p per tick, plus 20p on cast)
Miasmalysis: 360p (as 10p per tick for 24s, plus 280p on cast)
Shadowflare: 350p (as 50p per tick for 15s, plus 100p on cast)

(This assumes Art of War remains at 180p. If AOW were made stronger, more of the damage of Shadowflare could be moved out of the DOT portion and into the 'initial cast' portion)

These DOT values would, assuming 'optimal play' (which would mean 8 Shadowflares, 5 Miasmalysis and 4 Biolysis per 2min), have a total-per-2min potency of 16,620, almost within 1% (it's 98.9%) of the current design's per-2min output from GCDs (again, ignoring Chain/Baneful as critrate complicates maths too much for 'quick dirty example'). But at the same time, due to the small difference in potency-per-GCD of each of the DOTs, ignoring them entirely in favour of simply using another Broil, means that using 48 Broils in 2min (instead of 31 Broils, plus 4B/5M/8SF) is a total per-2min potency of 16,320. This means that, a player who decides to just use Broil for their rotation and forgo the DOTs entirely, would function at 99.2% of the Dawntrail design's potential output (IE using the DOT perfectly on time and not losing a single tick), and at 98.1% of the 'use all the DOTs perfectly optimally' output of these values. And we see differences in DPS output of around 5-8% between SMN/RDM, versus BLM PCT due to 'the res tax', so a mere 2% on a healer is not going to make or break any enrages.

Also, you may notice the seemingly bizarre potencies of Miasmalysis in the example. By frontloading the DOT potency so hard, it allows the DOT's total 'per GCD' potency to still be 360, thereby making it more 'worth it' to use in the rotation than a Broil (if you're looking to optimize), but the exceptionally low potency per tick means that it's great for movement (as you'd lose less potency to an early refresh), which allows us to replace Ruin 2 as a button (which has not seen an animation update since ARR, and probably ought to be replaced). Additionally, Shadowflare's low base cast potency means it functions in the opposite way, it can be used for SingleTarget and AOE combat situations (being more damage per GCD than a Broil), but refreshing it early is not good. This means that, in AOE situations like a dungeon pull, you would want to use it and maintain the DOT effect, but NOT to outright replace Art of War with it as the 'spam action' (as that doesn't solve the 'one button' issue for AOE, just moves it to a different button).

Lastly, by having a simple trait that upgrades Energy Drain to Bane at, say, Level 42-46ish (and returning Aetherflow/Energy Drain to Level 6 where they belong, SE please and thank you), ED would find actual use in AOE situations, by spreading Bio/Miasma like the 'good old days'. This would take the potential AOE button count from 1 (AOW) to 5 (AOW, Bio, Miasma, Shadowflare, Bane). I'd argue that it'd actually be a good design choice to leave off the additional effect Bane had in SB, where 'the durations of Bio and Miasma are reset when spread'. By making the durations carry over as they are (eg: you have 10s left and spread the DOTs, the spread copies have 10s left), we can replace the 'reset' effect with a much better/cooler one: 'Chain Stratagem can be spread with Bane'. By doing this, we can turn Chain Stratagem into an AOE raid buff, which then synergizes with Baneful Impaction also being an AOE action


So I hope I've been able to demonstrate that SE's approach to balance, of 'remove X gameplay element entirely' (in SCH's case, the DOT management), is not the only solution

You have, quite well, Forsaken Roe. I am happy you took the time to dive into this.

Honestly, I wish the job devs would take a step back and take a look at the state of all the jobs from the perspective of players instead of designers. Square Enix has said many things about these changes being made to make the jobs less stressful; but, they're just making these changes to make the jobs easier to balance for their job designers.

There were different things the devs could have done instead (as you have demonstrated many times) to have maintain balance and keep jobs interesting. They just chose to remove things instead. It's frustrating.

[Aravell]

While there's nothing wrong with playing difficult content as intended, it's been made clear multiple times that a majority of the playerbase will not attempt things beyond their skill level and *will* leave said content to gather dust, and thus comes the deluge of Square-Enix's design decisions to bring said content down to an "approachable" level and sure enough, jobs get caught in the rain too. I do not know how one can make dynamically shifting difficulty though to make sure players can partake in all content, and instead we end up with patch cycles that specifically cater to "casual" or "hardcore" content with the obvious flaw that it always leaves someone out (like how this last patch was very much geared toward the raiding scene and everyone else got scraps if anything).

And this is precisely the fatal flaw of segregating each subsect of playerbase into their own level of content.

Let's say I'm a savage raider, I like doing savage. Now let's say they make savage easier next patch, where do I go now? Extremes are still a step below and ultimates might be too high, so where does one in that position go when their content is taken from them?

Now let's say they implemented a nice mix of difficulty distributed across job and content. Let's say I'm a casual player in this scenario, I play SMN, I enjoy flashy skills and breezing through MSQ stuff. Now next patch, they increased the optional ceiling of the SMN job, so I, as the casual who enjoys SMN, still get to fire flashy spells and breeze through MSQ content, nothing changes for me.

Jobs in particular would be even harder to keep dynamically able to move from pick-up play to complex, because players can and will ignore jobs and even entire roles they don't like because they're either too hard or too easy, and nobody wants "their" job to end up in a basket that doesn't appeal to them, with healers right now being a perfect example when toning down gets taken too far.

I don't see why they can't implement a spectrum of difficulty, just look at the caster role before EW, it was designed really well. RDM was the introductory caster that was simple to pick up but also has some intricacies to master. SMN was the middle ground, a bit harder to get into but rewarding when played well. Then we have BLM, very hard to play well but had tons of little tweaks you can do to your rotation which you'll benefit from if you're smart about it.

In this sliding scale scenario, we can also change jobs to better suit the content. Perhaps I can only do up to extremes on BLM but if I reduce my mental load by swapping to RDM, perhaps I can go up one difficulty tier to savage content.

[Iedarus]

I do thank this game for making me appreciate my main game, Gw2 more for being significantly more innovative if still janky and frustrating at times. Even if all the classes can basically be any role, now (which I don't mind since we can't swap classes), they are infinitely more exciting to play due to the fast paced combat. Even healer builds give me that long craved dopamine hit after coming back to it. Don't even get me started on the leagues better race design, fashion and revolutionary mount system.

[AmiableApkallu]

The problem I imagine is that the "optional ceiling" ceases to be optional when encounter design necessitates that you can't get away with just being flashy and breezy. Dawntrail for example upped the ante on what the typical normal-content-only player had to do in order to advance and it wasn't met well by some of them.

The "optional ceiling" here has little to nothing to do with Dawntrail's perceived increase in difficulty. There aren't any DPS checks. There aren't any healing checks. I'm 100% certain I dropped multiple GCDs in a row, interrupted multiple casts, etc., etc., the first (and second, and third...) time I cleared Dawntrail's dungeons and trials.

Dawntrail's MSQ didn't ask you (the generic "you") to play your job better. It asked you to become more observant with respect to the tells for incoming attacks and to dodge them.

[AmiableApkallu]

Why exactly encounters became the "hard part" while jobs didn't, I can only assume it's because they didn't want anybody's favorite job to feel like it couldn't participate in certain content, so every job had to be made viable even if that resulted in homogenization or over-simplification. "No jobstone left behind" and such.

Hot take: Encounters became the "hard part" in a way that ignores the existence of roles and jobs. Spread. Stack. In. Out. Go left. Go right. Do the hokey pokey. None of that cares whether you're a tank, healer, melee DPS, or ranged DPS. Every job becomes viable when all that an encounter requires is that whatever warm bodies exist not stand in the bad.

Add in a DPS check, and maybe we start to care that everyone can maintain uptime. Add in a tank buster with a Damage Up debuff, and maybe we start to care that there's a second tank. Add in a "hard hitting" raid wide, and maybe we start to care that there's a healer around somewhere.

Rather than design encounters so that the jobs in the roles and sub-roles each have their part to play -- which would be a meaningful form of participation -- it would seem that SE has decided to see how far they can go with turning jobs into generic warm bodies.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Hot take: Encounters became the "hard part" in a way that ignores the existence of roles and jobs. Spread. Stack. In. Out. Go left. Go right. Do the hokey pokey. None of that cares whether you're a tank, healer, melee DPS, or ranged DPS. Every job becomes viable when all that an encounter requires is that whatever warm bodies exist not stand in the bad.

Add in a DPS check, and maybe we start to care that everyone can maintain uptime. Add in a tank buster with a Damage Up debuff, and maybe we start to care that there's a second tank. Add in a "hard hitting" raid wide, and maybe we start to care that there's a healer around somewhere.

Rather than design encounters so that the jobs in the roles and sub-roles each have their part to play -- which would be a meaningful form of participation -- it would seem that SE has decided to see how far they can go with turning jobs into generic warm bodies.

That's it. You hit the nail on the head.

[Azurarok]

Wasn't that a little bit what Hydaelyn EX's add phase was? DPS needing to breaking crystals while tanks kite adds and healers keep the tanks alive.

Guess they could've put in some raidwides during that but iirc the adds hit pretty hard as it was. Then ILs went up and we eventually got solo tank/healer runs going

[Shurrikhan]

Hot take: Encounters became the "hard part" in a way that ignores the existence of roles and jobs. Spread. Stack. In. Out. Go left. Go right. Do the hokey pokey. None of that cares whether you're a tank, healer, melee DPS, or ranged DPS. Every job becomes viable when all that an encounter requires is that whatever warm bodies exist not stand in the bad.

Add in a DPS check, and maybe we start to care that everyone can maintain uptime. Add in a tank buster with a Damage Up debuff, and maybe we start to care that there's a second tank. Add in a "hard hitting" raid wide, and maybe we start to care that there's a healer around somewhere.

Rather than design encounters so that the jobs in the roles and sub-roles each have their part to play -- which would be a meaningful form of participation -- it would seem that SE has decided to see how far they can go with turning jobs into generic warm bodies.

And the sad thing is that you can absolutely have healing, tanking, and damage-dealing matter in less immediately obvious / all-or-nothing ways in encounters, even just through the combination of positional tendencies and differing outputs, if only you had some undermechanics to allow for interception and more granular short-term checks (such as through something dealing as much damage as it has health remaining, debuffs ignored so long as they don't drop you below X% HP, DoTs that tick until raised above X% HP, etc).

[Rolder50]

Gettin pretty close to 1000 pages innit. And healers only get worse.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Gettin pretty close to 1000 pages innit. And healers only get worse.

986 pages and 9857 posts. At this point, it is clear Creative Studio III is going out of its way to ignore us. There is no way the forum moderators would not mentioned this thread to someone.