FFXIV Healer Strike and the 'How would you fix it?' line

[ForsakenRoe]

Greetings to the General Discussion section of the forums. As some may be aware, there's a thread up in this section, about a 'Healer Strike' (680 pages and counting!),. Essentially, us Healers have given feedback in the Healer section of the forums, and been ignored, for some five years now. When laying out what issues the healer role faces, be that 'our damage 'rotation' is overwhelmingly comprised of a single button', 'there simply isn't enough damage to heal to warrant our bloated healing kits' or something else, a common reprise from some who don't see the point in the strike, or 'why are the healers complaining', etc. is:

'Well how would you fix it?'

It's getting tiring, watching new faces enter that thread, say the line, and then I/others have to repost what we've already said about how we'd fix it, again and again, because it's simply not reasonable to ask someone to go back through 600+ pages of back and forth (a lot of it completely unrelated to the topic at hand). So, I figure I'll just make a thread here in General, which answers the question: How would I fix it?

A couple months ago now, I posted (in the Healer section, since it's Healer related) a thread for each of the Healer Jobs, which detailed a design that would (in my opinion) improve the gameplay of each of the jobs. These designs may well not be the 'silver bullet' that fixes the job's woes overnight, but at the very least, I believe they would 'buy time' by generating goodwill from the playerbase, allowing the dev team to spend time further down the line to implement a more robust 'solution' to the problems the Healer role faces (eg, increasing how much healing we have to output, across the range of content the game has to offer).

Rather than link to the threads (which requires opening four separate tabs), I figure it'd be easier to just copypaste the thread OPs here, into one mega-thread, for ease of access to all four (rather than opening each in an individual browser tab). All of the OPs being in this one thread also makes it easier for SE to find, should someone from SE see this thread. Please note, these were written some 2 months before Dawntrail's Media Tour, and as such, listed potencies use Endwalker values as a baseline (and Dawntrail actions are not listed) have been sort-of updated with Dawntrail-related information, with some actions being reworked in function/balance to better fit the below designs (cough Philosophia). As per the game's terminology, actions are denoted as being either 'Spells' (on the GCD, affected by 'healing magic potency increases', etc), or 'Abilities' (OGCDs, affected only by 'healing action potency increases', etc).

I have tried to write the designs in a 'chronological' way, such that the tooltip for an action reads as it would when you are at that level, as I feel that it makes understanding 'how the job evolves with each level' more understandable. For example, Glare 3's tooltip at level 82 says it is 310 potency, despite being 330 at Dawntrail's endgame due to a trait at level 94. Square Enix's way of doing tooltips on the Job Action Guides, is to show the tooltips as they would appear at level 100, which leaves the player without some information about their ability's functionality at previous levels. For example, I can't see what the potency of Glare 3 is on the WHM Guide when I first learn it, as the tooltip for it says it is 330p, and the 94 trait mentions only that it is 'increased to 330p', but not what it is increased from. It only mentions the 310 potency in the 'Recent Updates' widget, but that doesn't inform the player if the 'update' was because of a buff to the action or because of the trait modifying the action.


Edit: The concept of Aetherblight (an idea to make the HPS of healing more important, without necessarily changing the healer kits)

Since there's not really a good spot anywhere else on the first page, I'll have to put it here in the first post: I have previously posted a few posts (in the actual Healer Strike thread, so they're kind of lost to the sands of time now) musing on the idea of something I would call 'Aetherblight'. In other games (like WOW), it's called a 'heal absorb', and is functionally the inverse of our SCH/SGE Barriers. Where an Adlo protects our 'real HP' from 'enemy damage', a Heal Absorb protects our 'missing HP' from our 'ally healing', so the way to deal with it is to just... heal harder. Since one of the largest divisions on 'how to fix the healer role' (besides 'does it need fixing at all') is the topic of 'should Healers get more damage actions, vs more healing required', I think this idea has merit, as it provides a way for SE to increase healing requirements in a sense, without necessarily having damage 'hit harder', or 'hit more often'. A post on the topic (as an example of what I'm trying to describe) can be found here:

For illustration, what I mean for Heal Absorbs (as it relates to a debuff on allies for a healer to deal with) is, quick paint diagram:



In this example, John Finalfantasy has a Heal Absorb for about 20k on himself, and various Barrier effects (Adlo, Divine Veil etc) for like 25-30k as well.

A heal used on John will first remove the purple section of the bar (the Heal Absorb), turning it back to grey (missing HP). Once the purple is fully removed, the healing starts affecting the grey 'missing HP' section of the bar again.
An enemy attack that hits John, as we know from current gameplay, would first take away from the orange (the barriers), and then start hitting the blue section (the real HP). The attack would ignore the purple section

Additionally, Heal Absorbs being a debuff allows for some of them to be designed as 'this can be removed instantly via Esuna'. As such, players would get a choice in how to resolve the mechanic: Is it more efficient to use healing to heal through it (eg if you have a DOT at the same time, WHM's LilyBell would be very good at clearing it), or is it better to Esuna the affected players? Target count also falls into this 'choice' factor, if there's 3 players out of 8 in a raid that got the debuff, is it worth AOE healing to solve it, is it worth just Esuna all 3, or is there a way to single-target heal them that makes THAT method more efficient (eg 3 Essential Dignities = one for each player, Benediction on one and Tetra on 2/3, etc)

Edit: You know how if you get a Barrier big enough to be 'more than your whole HP bar' it shows it as a small diamond? Well:



Same can apply here. John here has FOUR HP bars worth of Heal Absorb for you to get through before you can heal his actual HP bar!
(this is a hyperbolic example to illustrate how we can potentially have more Heal Absorb than our current Max HP. I would not expect the developers to make us heal 4 whole HP bars worth of Heal Absorb for one mechanic, we don't have the MP for it)

So, with such a mechanic added, healers would potentially get to have their own, role specific 'mechanic' to interact with, in the same way that Tanks get Interruptible Actions as something that they're meant to handle (theoretically, when SE remembers to use the mechanic). However, the design space opened up by adding such a mechanic is vast, and would allow much greater creativity with raid design. For example, soaking a tower could debuff the player(s) within, with Aetherblight rather than actual damage. There could be debuffs that interact with Aetherblight, such as DOTs that are active while you have Aetherblight and removed once the Aetherblight is cleansed.

Furthermore, Job actions could have specific interactions with Aetherblight. Going beyond the obvious 'You can remove Aetherblight with Esuna' (which gives struggling players a 'solve this instantly' panic button at the cost of a GCD), you could have things like 'AST's Essential Dignity considers the player to be at 1 HP for its scaling effect, if the player is afflicted with Aetherblight'. Or for SGE, perhaps something as simple as 'Kardia heals for double potency, if the Kardia target is afflicted with Aetherblight'. SCH could see some kind of guaranteed Critical Hit effect, such as 'Healing spells under the effect of Emergency Tactics are guaranteed to critically heal, if the target is afflicted with Aetherblight'. And of course, WHM would be incredibly well positioned to handle such a debuff, as Benediction would clear it instantly AND set the HP of the target to Max, perfect for any tankbusters that happen to apply high levels of Aetherblight.

Lastly, Aetherblight is, ironically, pre-explained in the current lore, so nothing needs to be changed in the story to justify it: Zephirin's spear could be said to have applied such a high amount of Aetherblight (and a DOT, cos of the hole in his chest) to Haurchefant, that Alphinaud, who was not very skilled as a healer at the time, could not heal through the Aetherblight fast enough to save Haurchefant (and he didn't think to use Esuna)