#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[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.

[Ritsugamesh]

For anyone keeping track we've hit over 1,000,000 views now for this thread. Like holy moly.

I really hope we get something, anything, in terms of recognition out of this from SE. Even if it doesn't come until the next expansion. Something's gotta give.

[Ramiee]

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 yeah fair enough.
If CBU3 actually cared though they would compromise by making 2 healers brain dead and 2 healers fun for old players.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]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"

I'm not sure why having to manage all of that in 'end-game contents' is even a bad idea. Players are supposed to have SOME degree of competency in that level - that's to be expected. If they can't meet that expectation, then they should go back and try again after improving.

Furthermore, varied damage options would definitely lower the output of some healers who're used to 1 2 1 1 1. That's to be expected. But that's also SE job to decide how far low: will they do 70% out of full potential for keeping 1 button spam? Or will be 50%? 30%? 85%? Personally to me, I'll take any. Even reducing Dia DoT to 18s like old Aero II would've been a boon for such a 'simple change'. (just one from many low bar examples)

[Supersnow845]

Why are people so obsessed with wanting to baby roles in savage of all things

“Oh nyooo we can’t have the autos actually do more than the tanks inbuilt healing”
“Oh nyooo we can’t expect healers to actually heal”
“Oh nyooo we can’t expect healers to have an actual rotation”

Like what’s the point of savage if you are aren’t actually testing people. And let’s not pretend like the current design is inflating PF numbers which is a good thing, even JP can’t recruit healers at the moment despite them apparently liking healers being the designated fall asleep role

The current system isn’t working and the massive healer shortage on an easier than average to heal tier is proof of that, people simply do not want to play healers

[ForsakenRoe]

I mean yeah fair enough.
If CBU3 actually cared though they would compromise by making 2 healers brain dead and 2 healers fun for old players.

If CBU3 cared (and had the design chops) they would compromise by making all four healers fun for old players, while also balancing the potencies in such a way that you can also play all four of them 'braindead' style

AKA, the same way we can play DPS or Tanks currently (eg you could clear a EX roulette by just spamming Overpower as WAR, but that doesn't stop the players who want to Fell Cleave and Inner Chaos from doing so)

The current system isn’t working and the massive healer shortage on an easier than average to heal tier is proof of that, people simply do not want to play healers

GNB was designed to be 'a tank that plays like a melee DPS' and it was quite successful. I don't really get why SE didn't make SGE be 'a healer that plays like a DPS' (albeit a simpler one) if they wanted to appeal to DPS players

[PercibelTheren]

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.

Agreed. My experience with PvP games being balanced for the top players has been nothing short of horrible. In games where roles exist, the vast majority of them are DPS mains and that leads to every other role being nerfed to the ground, which in turns alienates large parts of the playerbase.

[Jojoya]

For anyone keeping track we've hit over 1,000,000 views now for this thread. Like holy moly.

I really hope we get something, anything, in terms of recognition out of this from SE. Even if it doesn't come until the next expansion. Something's gotta give.

Nothings going to give until enough players quit the game.

Sorry, but that's just the way business works. People pay, business is good. People stop paying, business make changes so they're willing to pay again.

At this point, no one is quitting. They're switching to other jobs at most.

Tired of healer design? Play tank. A tank not using their stance is a very sturdy DPS with healing and mitigation utility. If the amount of DPS a group of tanks can put out is sufficient to beat DPS checks, there is no reason to play anything else.