#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't understand why people want to add layer upon layer upon layer of mechanic to fix healing. It's not the first time iwonder why, but it's the first time i voice it.
i think all your idea aren't the solution at all.

You just want to add new code into a game know to have a spaghetti code for years.... It's asking for bug, lag, dev taking even more time to to things, risk of mistake making some fight too hard and being nerfed later, rendering thoses mechanic near meaningless on other fight, even more unbalance between jobs etc... etc...

Why wanting to take the risk to make things even worse when the answer, the solution, the fix is way more simple : Tank and DPS just need to have their mit, self-heal/heal and potency nerfed. it's the most simple and efficient way to fix healing.

SE just need to roll back on the powercreep they created.

I don't think it's a good idea to consider 'SE can't code without making a spaghetti mess' as a factor in whether an idea has merit or not. If we did, nothing would ever get added again, look at how jank most additions to the game have been. Glamour as a system was a hack job back in 2.3 and we're still paying the price for its implementation, for example, and since then rather than fixing it to work better, they've bandaid fixed the storage issue with Glamour Dressers. Nor do I think 'what if one job is better at solving the mechanic than another' is a factor, because A: To avoid 'one job is better than another' you'd have to have every job be entirely identical in their designs, and B: SE has made situations where one job is clearly better than another at solving a mechanic quite regularly, so long as every job can clear I don't think it matters so much if one job has a slight advantage at a mechanic. Look at AST in P3S vs WHM (which actually brought AST play rates up to WHM levels for that one fight), look at a great many fights that have 5 tankbusters, where WAR (and only WAR) can Holmgang 3 of them (this happened again with M3S, so it's not like that was just a Stormblood thing).

I hear a lot of people saying that 'the solution to make healers more engaging is to make us heal more'. The idea I posted would make people either heal more, or use Esuna more, both of which are 'what healers should be doing' according to some players. It being a separate system, I'd argue, would allow for more granularity on adjusting how much damage it does/how hard the fight is, not less. If SE were to just do a change like 'nerf healing power by 50%, nerf incoming damage by 25%' (such that we're effectively weaker at healing vs now), I think that runs at least the same risk of 'fight is too hard' (if not more), but also there's less dials to adjust to change the fight difficulty to a more satisfying level than current gameplay (but still clearable). Consider, as we get more gear currently, the healing challenge dissipates, because our heals get stronger AND the damage we take goes down (due to Defence/MagicDefence stats on gear). But an external mechanic like the suggested one, doesn't necessarily have to interact with the defensive stats. The mechanic that applies 50k of Aetherblight in Week 1 progression, could still apply 50k in full BIS, our healing power would go up, but the value to heal would not go down (unlike currently), making the content more resistant to 'being outgeared' in that regard

At this point, I don't even think complete removal of Tank/DPS party-mit/selfheal tools would solve the issue. Take WAR. Back in HW, they had Equilibrium (which they didn't want to use because in Deliverance it restored TP) and Inner Beast (which they didn't want to use because that's a Fell Cleave you're missing out on). If WAR were taken back to that point in terms of their party-mit/self healing capabilities, I don't think that really solves the Healer gameplay issues. Instead of using 5 of my SGE tools to get through a dungeon pull, maybe I use 7, or 8. But I have like 9 total tools, so my gameplay is still 'OGCD bullshit go' and then spam Dyskrasia. We can't just blame it all on BloodWhetting and the like, our own Healing kits are part of the problem too. I mean, look at DRK, back then in HW they had Dark Arts Abyssal Drain, which was functionally similar to what we now know as Bloodwhetting. But it wasn't really an issue back then, and it IS an issue now. What changed? How much extra stuff we have access to with an additional 40 levels of kit would be a factor I expect

So a team like the following is ok? : War, GNB, Monk, Picto, Dancer and RDM....

Sorry, but as a healer i feel just completly useless with a party like that.

That's a lot of healing and mitigation across that party, yes. Now imagine we remove all of the mits, and raidwide healing actions from that team. So, WAR loses SIO and Nascent Flash (they can only heal themselves with BW/Equil), GNB can only self-target Aurora and loses Heart of Light. Monk loses the Earth's Reply heal (it can keep Mantra since it's been there since ARR), PCT loses Star Prism's heal and Tempera Grassa (it can keep the self-shield), DNC loses Curing Waltz, Improvization and Shield Samba, and RDM loses Magick Barrier's 10% mit (it can keep the healing+ since it's basically another Mantra). Okay, with all of that stuff removed, how do I as a healer, tackle Worqor Lar Dor EX? TBH, basically the same, but I press a Medica3/Aspected Helios every now and then to keep up with the DOT.

So, after all of that, the net result of the changes listed is that our gameplay now includes an occasional Medica3 that wasn't there before. I don't think that'd really solve much. Plus, old content has been designed with those mits on non-Healers in mind, so removing them means having to go back and check old content to make sure it can be cleared with the changed job kits, and the added pressure on the healers to do all of the mitting/shielding, and that sounds to me like it might cause 'risk of mistake making some fight too hard and being nerfed later'

[ForsakenRoe]

sry for doublepost the other one is very long

Nerfing the tank and DPS party mitigation would get the job done too. Although ... we immediately get met with resistance and backlash if that is the only method we use ... >.> It was what ForsakenRoe mentioned, so she thought that buffing the encounter damage more would be accepted more or not noticed as much. It may seem like a roundabout way to fix the problem, but maybe it can add some more new mechs for us to have fun with if Square can pull it off.

1. Increase the frequency of tank busters

2. Increase the boss' auto attack damage

We've seen in this very thread, many Tank players have not taken kindly to the suggestion that their fun (read: healing for their whole HP bar each GCD with Bloodwhetting) has to be impacted, in order for the Healer role to have more fun added to it. An external system would stand a much stronger opportunity to be accepted as a way to rein in the power level of these non-Healer actions, without directly reining them in via numerical tuning or outright removal.

Here's an example: Think about Interruptible Actions. The first pack in Dohn Mheg, you can Interrupt one of the enemies to prevent it from empowering one of the plant thingys. Or Hermes in Ktisis Hyperborea. If the Tank does the Interrupt, the amount of healing we have to do as Healers is directly affected, they do less damage because the cast was Interrupted and they didn't get a damage+ buff. But we never say 'damn that Tank's taking all the fun out of my job by Interrupting that add' because it's an external mechanic that is dedicated to being 'Tank gameplay'. So, if such a thing existed for Healers, an external mechanic that any role can try to participate in and help out, but only a Healer can truly resolve (EG a Tank can apply a barrier to block the effect on themselves, but they cannot get all 8 players every time it's applied due to the CD), then I think that stands to be much more accepted by all sides of the playerbase, as Healers would feel they've got a mechanic dedicated to their role to solve, and NonHealers would feel that they can use their utilities to help out at times (without solving the mechanic completely on their own). But EG: in a situation where A BRD clears their own Aetherblight because they used Warden's Paean on themselves, I expect they'll think 'hell yeh I was able to use this utility for this mechanic that's cool', not 'damn this sucks why can't I use this action on everyone and do the healer's job for them'

As for 1: I've never understood why we have a CD of 25s on Provoke. If it were say, 10s, it'd allow us to have more fast paced tankswapping in certain encounters. Not that every fight has to have faster-paced tankswapping, but it'd be nice to have the design option available

As for 2: If an enemy were to apply 50% of their attack as actual damage, and 50% as the Aetherblight debuff, we could see a fight design where the tanks have to swap because of the building debuff, and once they swap, the tank who has aggro will be building up Aetherblight from taking autoattacks while the 'offtank' would be healing their own Aetherblight away with their selfhealing tools. And this would allow certain design elements, such as how WAR's Nascent Flash allows them to heal both their own Aetherblight, but also helps their co-tank's Aetherblight level stay lower (meaning they don't have to swap back as fast). Or Cover from an OT PLD could allow the MT to get some extra seconds to clear some of their Aetherblight (and not build more because the PLD's taking it), extending their time as the MT for a bit longer, etc.

[Lorika]

Now imagine we remove all of the mits, and raidwide healing actions from that team.

Where did i say remove?
I said nerf, it's completly different.

[Tigore]

Roe was brainstorming an extreme example and said such an example would probably just barely help increase the healing we need to do by itself. We might also need to advocate the removal of some of our own oGCD heals and cooldowns in addition to the extreme nerfs on the tanks and DPS if we only go down the path to only nerfing. As such, increasing the encounter damage looked like a better idea to focus on first so the nerfs do not have to be severe.

As for the 25s cooldown Provoke, the only reason I can think of would be because the Warcraft tanks once started ping ponging a boss on a big arena when the boss was entering their damage plus phase. They understood that it was hell on melee DPS, so they started to burn through their defensive cooldowns first. Once both tanks did so, they started playing piggy-in-the-middle and favored ranged DPS more to reduce the effect this would have on the DPS. Blizzard had to add in a taunt immunity after maybe 5 quick consecutive swaps over time to prevent the boss looking foolish running back and forth. It was either that or make the boss fiendishly fast with the running.

Other than that, I would like to see some actual tank swaps for our encounters with 2 tanks. The off tank is 90% of the time just another DPS since they are just there in case something screws up to kill the main tank. We do have tank busters hitting both of them, but it generally just happens on the "final trial boss". Even our 12th normal final boss from our last expansion 8 player raid didn't really do anything specifically important for the off tank. I was able to use things like Nascent Flash on the main tank, but that was it and it likely compounded the issue even more with healers almost not needing to heal the tanks. Shirk and turning off tank stance was used quite often since I was able to out pace the threat of other tanks half the time. I elected to use the healing utilities like Nascent Flash more so when someone was getting raised.

[Shurrikhan]

Where did i say remove?
I said nerf, it's completly different.

I think their point was that to have a meaningful effect on typical parties' GCD healing usage, you would essentially need to nerf the likes of Shake it Off, Clemency, Divine Veil, Passage of Arms, Curing Waltz, Reply if Earth, etc., across that comp to the point that their holders would rather not have them bloating their bars at all -- i.e. effectively removing them.

Which then means the nerf/gutting/removal would be likely be an incomplete solution anyways (as even with the nerfs we'd still spend the vast majority of our time spamming Malefic) despite stripping a form of engagement from said jobs and reducing the number of ways non-healers can differentiate their support/utility from one another.

So we'd end up degrading gameplay elsewhere just to have less of an effect than we'd have by just... increasing effective sustain requirements with the least possible side effect (e.g., through a greater number of damage events rather than the damage of each event).

[Lorika]

Then again, i said nerf, not nerfing to the ground
Since Shake it off was took an exemple, just revert back to the way it was at the start : without the group heal.
Remove the level 94 boost of Second wind, make some CD longer, remove some potency, remove some stack.

Make the skills still usefull, but less powerfull.

I mean, right now, eveyrthing is done for transforming FFXIV into GWXIV

[Supersnow845]

Then again, i said nerf, not nerfing to the ground
Since Shake it off was took an exemple, just revert back to the way it was at the start : without the group heal.
Remove the level 94 boost of Second wind, make some CD longer, remove some potency, remove some stack.

Make the skills still usefull, but less powerfull.

I mean, right now, eveyrthing is done for transforming FFXIV into GWXIV

Nerfing the regen off shake it off would do nothing to change the nature of the skill for example

That’s the problem here, damage is already so low that tanks and DPS having ANYTHING is going to immediately infringe on the healers

The only thing that would be “enough” to fix the healers with the current damage output is to delete everything off the non healers. Even with no regen (or even upfront heal) on SIO that’s one less GCD heal or mitigation the healer has to apply and with how little damage comes out that’s just less actions for the healer

[Shurrikhan]

Then again, i said nerf, not nerfing to the ground

Then you'd add maybe... 1 AoE heal per average minute, if that -- so, maybe up to 4% fewer casts spent just on Broil? Which is negligible.

1. Since Shake it off was took an exemple, just revert back to the way it was at the start : without the group heal.

The majority of its strength is still the initial mit.

2. Remove the level 94 boost of Second wind

Given Maim and Mend, this amounts to less than a Cure per fight.

3. make some CD longer

Then you run the risk of making it not an available tool at all against many sequences of attacks, which effectively removes its engagement. These matters quantize.

4. remove some potency

See #2.

5. remove some stack

I'm guessing you mean charges, as none have stacks. See #3.

You've noted that others have focused too much on messing with outlying opportunities instead of dealing with the simple, core issues, but you're doing the same thing here yourself. There's not enough sustain among the tools you aim to nerf, even if you were to remove them outright, to --in forcing that healing from healers instead-- reduce healers' portion of uptime spent on spammy or on-CD attacks to below some two-thirds in a typical fight.

So you will have have further homogenized and simplified gameplay among many non-healers... only to make a clearly insufficient difference, if any, among healers.

[Azurarok]

In terms of not using our healing GCDs I think the truckload of oGCD healing we've got is more the problem than anything else right now. I've tried healing Chaotic a few times, and some of the strats, the mixed item levels, and the amount of mistakes (towers) that can happen make it much easier to run out of oGCDs, and I've consistently had to resort to casted heals so my GCD usage has been quite a bit more mixed there. I'm sure I'm also overhealing quite a bit but I also don't trust a 24-player pug group enough to not do that.

It takes that much chaos to make the role engaging. Maybe if we learned another attack or two instead of yet another heal every 20 levels we'd have a better balance of skills.

[ForsakenRoe]

Then again, i said nerf, not nerfing to the ground
Since Shake it off was took an exemple, just revert back to the way it was at the start : without the group heal.
Remove the level 94 boost of Second wind, make some CD longer, remove some potency, remove some stack.

Make the skills still usefull, but less powerfull.

As others have pointed out, the point I was trying to illustrate is, if we can outright remove these non-healer actions like SIO, Second Wind etc, and it has very little/no tangible improvement to our healer gameplay, then nerfing the actions (less removal of power compared to removing the actions) would have even less effect on our healer gameplay. It's not just that Shake It Off now heals for a total of 800p that is causing our healer gameplay to stagnate, it's the addition of things like 'here's a free 10% boost to healing to anyone in Asylum' or 'here's 500p of regen if you stand in Soil/Kera', or 'here's 2000p of healing that you can use versus multi-stacks/DOTs (Lilybell)'. That last one is especially egregious, as what used to be 'ok it's time to use Cure3 a couple of times', and thereby involved the slightest amount of MP management (can I afford Cure3 here or should I use Medica as it costs less), now it's 'use funny plant'

It's all well and good saying 'nerfing/removing Tank/DPS utility actions would make us have to press healing GCDs more' and while it might be true in the literal definition of 'is this statement true or false', a solution that decreases my Broils per minute from 22 to 21 (or even, let's say 18) is not really a 'solution' IMO, as even at 18 per minute that's 75% of my GCDs being used on the same action per minute

As for your example of SIO, removing the healing and making it just the barrier effect again, the reason they added the healing (specifically the HOT part, few people seemed to complain about the initial healing when that was added) was because SIO sucked, pretty badly, against Bleed-raidwides in Abyssos. Removing it entirely wouldn't solve anything for healers, and would just make WAR 'not as good' vs Bleed-Raidwides or Multistacks, leading to outrage from WAR players for no gain to anyone else. I agree that it could be changed in its effect though, so as to retain its current power, but change how it interacts with our HP bar. I'd make it like Panhaima, so rather than the barrier, 300p of healing and 5 ticks of 100p regen, I'd have it as the initial barrier, then 300p of healing once that barrier is destroyed, and 5 stacks of 100p barrier Panhaima style after the initial barrier breaks. This makes the burst heal contingent on timing, makes it thematic as the heal triggers when you 'shake off the damage' you took that broke the barrier, and the Panhaima style barrier protects from DOTs/multistacks without encroaching on Healer responsibilities (because if a stack is not consumed by damage and expires, it doesn't heal the HP bar of the person it was on, unlike the current regen)

Same for the Equilibrium HOT, 5 stacks of a self-Haima for 300p per layer, instead of 1500p of Regen