Why Are Healers Not Allowed A Gameplay Loop, Anyway?

[Tweets]

So, remember back in the day when Aggro was something Tanks had to put some degree of thought into? Questions like "How much can I afford to sit in Deliverance?" and "Should I use Rage of Halone here?" were things you had to consider. This has, of course, been sanded off. Aggro is now all but automatic; do your simplified DPS rotation and you'll be fine, assuming everyone is equally geared and equally skilled.

So now Tanks' gameplay consists of doing a simplified DPS rotation and using defensive skills to ensure they or their party members don't die. That's a gameplay loop.

DPS are even simpler to boil down: do a more complex DPS rotation.

So why are Healers the way they are? Tanks and Healers are two sides of the same coin; both are defensively-oriented support classes, it's just that one is always melée and specialises in preventing damage, and the other is always a mage and specialises in recovering from damage.

Why are Healers unique in being given the absolute bare minimum of a DoT, a single spell they spam, and their 'new and exciting' skill that does a single chunk of damage every 2 minutes? Why, when the rest of the classes in the game have been unified under the acknowledgement that we're all just DPS with different upsides and downsides, are Healers still not properly integrated?

In my opinion, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Healers should have a simplified DPS rotation equivalent in complexity to Tanks' which outputs a reasonable amount of healing (either directly, such as triggering a Regen regularly, or indirectly, such as generating stacks of a resource that can be spent on healing).

This would then be supplemented by their cooldowns, which in low-difficulty content would provide a buffer to compensate for mistakes (the same way Tanks rarely need mitigation for dungeon bosses or minimum-size pulls, but can use them to survive full pulls or bosses in which they have collected a lot of Vulnerability debuffs), and in high-difficulty content would be required to succeed.

[Tunda]

As Mr. Yoshida once said:

play ultimate.. which is <0.1% of the game in that place you will enjoy

[Vladmiere]

aah so instead of talking about healer issues its the encounter is the where the hard part of the gameplay needs to be. We need to learn to dance the Ultimate steps and do our two 60 and 2 minute AOE heals and buster tank heal then go back to the dance spam one button damage spell? No thanks. I rather have a balance of class skill/mastery+raid composition and as Mr. Yoshida forgets to say "real life be drag no time for ultimate static".

[KisaiTenshi]

In my opinion, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Healers should have a simplified DPS rotation equivalent in complexity to Tanks' which outputs a reasonable amount of healing (either directly, such as triggering a Regen regularly, or indirectly, such as generating stacks of a resource that can be spent on healing).

The healer should have no "DPS" rotation what-so-ever, because that means they won't have their attention on healing. And a "healing rotation" is pretty pointless if the DPS can avoid taking all telegraphed damage, which means that at worst, you only have to press cure-2 once every minute.

Now, imagine a situation where they make the regular content have a constant bleed. Nothing in the healer kit permits you to both move around the AOE telegraphs and heal every 2 seconds.

The healer is the only role that has to look at the party/alliance HP bars. Their focus should not be on doing damage, but keeping their party at full health, and that tends to be easier the older the content gets, because Medica-2 type party regen is a thing. If they took all regen and healing AOE's out of the game, and you had to click every party member to heal manually, it would be impossibly difficult to recover from party damage. Notice we have multiple "party heals" but not "party esuna". Whenever the party gets hit by a pile of cleanable debuffs, you have to spend like 16 seconds trying to remove them all, but most debuffs don't last long enough to worry about, so few people even do this.

Like I would like to see the game actually drop 2-minute long cleanable debuffs that reduce the player damage to 1 (Eg mini/frog/kappa/chicken or something) that the healer has to remove to make DPS happen again. Not these "drops off in 10-15 seconds" ones. Like some of the better instances of this was the "bomb" debuff in the Amon fight in Syrcus, and the doom debuffs in a few fights (The Wanderer's Palace (Hard)) which we did see a fair amount of in the Endwalker raids.

This is how I would design an encounter to have a "fair balance" for all jobs:

Stage 1) until 90%, telegraphed AOE's
Stage 2) until 60%, cleansable debuffs that hit only the DPS (eg mini, slow/heavy) + telegraphed AOE's
Stage 3) until 30%, debuffs that hit the DPS and Tank (doom) + floor-wide AOE's
Stage 4) until 10%, stacking bleed debuffs (eg poison) on all players that require the healer to party heal every 2 seconds if not cleansed
Stage 5) until defeat, enrage wall debuff to prevent tanks from being able to finish the boss (tank only does 1 damage) and if not finished in 60 seconds, 9999999 damage.

So one third of the fight you need to use Esuna, and two thirds you have to actively heal bleeds.

If certain tanks weren't practically unkillable without the healer, that means the entire fight has to have more things the tank and dps can not self-heal out of. Which to me speaks of poor job design if they're not willing to remove the self-heals from the other jobs. If everyone can heal, then the healer needs to basically be tasked with cleaning debuffs, or over-powering bleeds.

[flowerkatie]

And a "healing rotation" is pretty pointless if the DPS can avoid taking all telegraphed damage

This argument only works if you're against changing encounters, but based on the fact your solution includes changing encounters; the argument doesn't work.

If changing encounters is on the table then a healer rotation is not pointless and is quite the opposite, because there can be an increase in unavoidable damage to force healing and therefor make the possibility of a rotation. There are comparable examples of other games that use a variety of proc's and synergy between spells to force healers into maintaining a rotation so their core heals are effective. I'm not saying this is a solution, I'm just pointing out that the blanket statement you made is subjective, and in my opinion, wrong.

[ty_taurus]

The healer should have no "DPS" rotation what-so-ever, because that means they won't have their attention on healing.

No.

/10char

[Tweets]

...

I think you're coming at this from the wrong direction.

"Healers can't have a fun gameplay loop because they need to pay attention to healing" is predicated on the assumption that they are and should be required to be paying close attention to healing output. Not only is this patently not the case in the game's current design ethos, I reject the notion that it should be the case either.

"Healers have to look at the party's HP because they need to focus on keeping everyone at full HP" is similarly predicated on a falsity; in difficult content you are instead planning out your HP restoration based on the knowledge you have gathered about how much a given attack requires, not hawkishly watching the party's HP for sudden, unexpected drops. And don't even get me started on the idea that everyone should be at full HP all the time. Playing Whack-A-Mole like that is a surefire way to sabotage yourself by burning all of your resources, when as long as everyone has at least 1 HP they're still firing on all cylinders. The only possible reason to keep people at full HP is if you believe they will be messing up mechanics, and that's just not a realistic option in difficult content, and in casual content you're better off just rezzing them when the mechanic's over than sabotaging yourself by spending resources repeatedly trying to rescue them.

In essence, Healers and Tanks are essentially playing the same game: Learn the timing and relative danger of the fight's damage, and prepare countermeasures; Tanks' countermeasures tend toward reducing the damage taken, while Healers' tend toward undoing the damage after the fact, but in essence they are the same: Rationing out cooldowns to negate the damage the boss is doing to the party.

This is why I posit the notion that what works for Tanks will work for Healers. The current state of Tanks can serve as a proof-of-concept for designing Healers, because at a basic level they function very similarly; the differences are really only on the scale of the differences between Melée DPS and Casters.

[ty_taurus]

You know, driving a car requires you pay attention to more things than healers do. You have what’s in front of you, what’s in your rear view, what’s in both side view, and what’s in your periphery. I bet proponents of the current healer design probably complain about that too.

[Zolvolt]

Theres room in this game for some healers to have dps rotation and some healres to not have dps rotations. not sure why we even have to argue about one way is right and one way is wrong when we can just have our cake and eat it too.

[Zaytex]

Healers used to have a gameplay loop for their DPS, but this resulted in there being a very obvious gap between good to bad healers. The developers commented on this, not wanting their to be such a disparity between the best and worst healers, since bad healers would just gatekeep their entire team from clearing content.

So here we are, where healers gameplay loop is so bare-bones, non-nuanced, devoid of almost any complexity, that any half-awake lobotomy patient could do it almost flawlessly and without friction.