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

[klu]

Oh snap, the "i don't care if its a necro" dude removed his post!

I didn't notice that. So thats why you folks think I did this.

[CVXIV]

Oh snap, the "i don't care if its a necro" dude removed his post!

I didn't notice that. So thats why you folks think I did this.

I had seen that too which is strange
It was something like, "I don't care if it's a necro, you people need to see this"
No clue why it would've been removed if the intention was to bring this thread back to the top for people to read OP

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I had seen that too which is strange
It was something like, "I don't care if it's a necro, you people need to see this"
No clue why it would've been removed if the intention was to bring this thread back to the top for people to read OP

Supposedly if you remove a post yourself, there would be some sort of 'blank space' remains that you can choose to write your reasoning why you remove it, or not at all. Your name would still be there.

Iedarus' post being completely gone without any trace means their comment was deleted by a moderator.

EDIT: kinda strange now when I think about it - that other glamour thread is being constantly bumped (people literally don't add anything new and express their intent purely to bump it) but the mod just leave them alone. Meanwhile a healerstrike-related thread being bumped and it's insta-delete. Man, I love double standard lol.

[Iedarus]

Supposedly if you remove a post yourself, there would be some sort of 'blank space' remains that you can choose to write your reasoning why you remove it, or not at all. Your name would still be there.

Iedarus' post being completely gone without any trace means their comment was deleted by a moderator.

EDIT: kinda strange now when I think about it - that other glamour thread is being constantly bumped (people literally don't add anything new and express their intent purely to bump it) but the mod just leave them alone. Meanwhile a healerstrike-related thread being bumped and it's insta-delete. Man, I love double standard lol.

Yeah that's basically what happened. I'm honestly surprised it didn't result in me being totally banned from the forums (yet), but I just couldn't let such an elaborately crafted post simply die like that, especially when the healer strike thread is still going strong. Better to get the strongest threads in the forefront.

I'm ordinarily against necroing but this thread is legit hard evidence that there is a better way.

[ForsakenRoe]

If someone's post really did get removed by a moderator, that means a moderator saw the thread. Which means a non-zero% chance that its contents got passed along to SE. Mission accomplished (maybe)

Since the thread got bumped by someone else, it gives me an opportunity to opine on the design of the current healers, these redesigns, and how they'd interact with the new raid design direction. With the latest tier, some healers are really starting to feel like they're a relic of their time, and nothing puts this more on display than how wide a disparity there is in functionality during the M6S add phase.

So, after clearing the tier, I was thinking about these designs, and how the additions to each Job would fit with each of the fights. For example:

WHM:

- M5S is the intro to the tier so there's not a massive amount of impact any additions would have. You would simply have more healing options to use, and more moblilty for places like Funky Floor or Arcady Night Fever's cleave dodging. Plenary Indulgence's mitigative effect would be a free bonus to help mitigate any hard hits like A/B Side, or Celebrate Good Times

- M6S is the big one, as the WHM design would give WHM access to more incidental cleave attacks, with Quake, Flood and Tornado. The WHM would be able to much more easily damage the adds, even when chosen to be in the Jabberwock bind, helping close the gap with AST (due to the latter having Gravity to spam from any range). If GCD heals need to be used for whatever reason (eg, early prog, low gear strength etc), their increased contribution to the Vigilance Gauge would get the WHM back into their damage-neutral healing tools far faster (and would give them more uses of Quake/Flood/Tornado to dump into the add packs)

- M7S has a couple of places where mobility is asked of the player (eg the Gigaflares in P1) which this WHM would have a better time handling. The WHM would also be able to Quake/Tornado/Flood the first adds. It's not much but it's more than we have now! Plenary's added mitigative effect would also always be a boon over the current WHM's mitigative suite. In moments where no healing is needed but the WHM wants to prepare Misery for raidbuffs, they'd also be able to use Afflatus Sanctuary to apply a damage-neutral barrier, allowing them to get at least some healing use out of the Lily

- M8S expects the player to be much more mobile, and this WHM would be just that, as it would have more instantcasts than hardcasts in its DPS rotation. Additionally, Plenary's mitigative effect would see plenty of use throughout the fight on various hard hitting mechanics (Tracking Tremors, Stone/Windfangs at the start, during the Add phase, Beckon Moonlight perhaps, etc). Being able to use Blessing of the Elementals for healing (instead of running out of damage neutral tools and relying on Medica3) would also help to keep the player's DPS rolling

SCH:

- M5S, as above, doesn't really push the player's limits per se. Even so, having more options on how to mitigate hard hits like B-Side > Celebrate Good Times allows the player to be more versatile in how they accomplish their mitigative responsibilities.

- M6S, the Add phase experience would be vastly improved due to SCH regaining multiple DOTs and being able to spread them via Bane. Additionally, if chosen to go far away for the Jabberwock bind, the SCH could keep up their damage by spamming Shadowflare, getting the on-cast potency of the spell repeatedly. Additionally, more options for mitigation and pure healing (via Strategies) would allow a minmaxing SCH far more versatility in how they tackle the phase. Synchronization Tactics could also allow for interesting emergent gameplay, such as being able to put Concitations out, even on the Melee/Tank group, in the Lava phase because while you cannot reach them, the Faerie can

- M7S, any situation that calls for mobility, this SCH would have more tools to address, both for mitigation-while-moving and damage-while-moving. Additionally, Synchronization Tactics would allow for more freeform healing in certain phases where the party is split apart (eg Strange Seeds in P2).

- M8S' movement requirements would be much more smooth to handle, thanks to things like Defensive-Indomitability, Defensive-FeyBlessing, etc. Synchronization Tactics would, again, help a lot in the Add phase to mitigate both groups for the line AOE hits. In Phase 2, SCH could be incredibly well suited to the fight design (given that we're split across several platforms). Unfortunately, SE made the Faerie instantly teleport back to us whenever we use a teleporter, so this potential strength of SCH's kit was killed on the vine. Being able to do things like Recitation > Defensive-Excogitation > Deployment Tactics in a moment like Twofold, not only giving everyone a heal to top them up after their first hit, but also mitigating that first hit with the added Galvanize effect, would massively increase how many options the SCH player has to handle each mechanic

AST:

AST already feels pretty well suited to the fight design we now see, but for an example of 'potentially it's even cooler', being able to Synastry and spread mitigation/healing effects between the two Tanks during M6S Add phase would be very cool to see. Duplicating Essential Dignities, or Exaltation's mitigation effect, or Celestial Intersections, would make Synastry feel very powerful in that phase

SGE:

- M5S: As above, M5S is the introduction and as such, nothing will feel like a complete gamechanger. But, there are plenty of moments where the boss doesn't do much of anything while he sets up for his next attack (Eg, loading up A/B Side, or doing his X-Snap and Twist cleaves), and in these moments, this SGE would have opportunities to set up themselves, using the Kardia Augments to apply Zoe-based Barriers to the party ahead of the A/B Side hit

- M6S: Quite a big one, SGE would have even more options on how to deal damage to the Adds. With Neuralgia/Myasthenia and the Toxikon rework, a SCH could potentially stockpile 20 seconds of AOE attacks to use, even from the opposite side of the arena, by using their 2 charges of Myasthenia, then spending 2 Toxikon windows (which take 7.5s each to complete), not on alternating Neuralgia (the cone) with Myasthenia (the line AOE), but instead choosing to sacrifice the tiny bonus potency for alternating and simply pressing Myasthenia 4 times before finishing with Pneuma. If not chosen by the Jabberwock, they can instead incorporate Neuralgia as usual. The SGE would also be able to much more effectively keep up the offense against the adds while still keeping the Tanks alive, thanks to the new Kardia Augments. Even if the SGE were to fall back on using Eukrasian Diagnosis to save the Tanks, the barrier breaking would grant a free use of Phlegma, which could then be used to apply the DOT to the add pack for massive damage contribution. Also, in the Lava phase, Kardia Augments would make healing from range a lot more comfortable

- M7S: As with the other healers, more mobility options for when the player has to move (although SGE has a lot of mobility anyway). Kardia Augments allow more healing over long distances (Strange Seeds, Debris Deathmatch), and would also allow the SGE to much more easily heal through Brutal Impact raidwide sequences without dropping their damage.

- M8S: THE big one, as the boss draws inspiration from the same places that SGE's visual aesthetic does (with the fin funnels and all). SGE vs Howling Blade would presumably end up pretty fast-paced on both sides, with great SGE players being able to match his attack speed with a barrage of their own counterattacks. Extra mobility options as the fight requires, Phlegma proc from Barriers saving the player more damage compared to Toxikon's current refund (for Tracking Tremors and the like), being able to use Kardia Augments to heal from longer ranges at times like Add phase, or all of Phase 2. With how fast the mechanics come at us (especially at the end of P1), this would provide a LOT of situations where a Zoe-based Barrier gets broken, allowing the player to use Pepsis quite frequently to trigger the Second Opinion healing

Might not be as interesting to anyone else as it is to me, but it's quite... validating? To see that the ideas I had way back in Endwalker would be well-suited to this new design direction for the raids. It tells me that my thought processes, and the logic of 'why give this healer, this thing', was on the right track, and that the additions listed here would help to future-proof the Healer kits and give the Devs new design spaces to explore

[Shurrikhan]

Tangential, but... one idea, with a few possible iterations, that feels like it's never quite seen sufficient rebuttal yet could increase the desire for responsive healing and make incoming non-lethal is to have some further penalty from remaining at lowered health (which, while it might not feel the "nicest" to have your performance in your healers' hands even sooner than upon death, does make sense, as why would being at 100% health be the "Brink of Death" just for having died within the last 89 seconds and again within 89 seconds before that... while you're still swinging, moving, and being healed with full effectiveness while at 1% hp?).

Some possible (highly spitball) iterations:

EDIT: Added an old idea back into the list.

1. You now take an additional 10% of your missing health as damage per server tick while under 70% health, but the biggest sources of damage (individual or in chain) are reined in and squished down a bit.
   
   :: This (and all spitballs after) assumes a leniency period, whereby actually the better of the last two ticks is taken, but I've left the description as is for brevity.
   
   This effectively moves mitigation from mattering only in terms of healing not needed thereafter and/or keeping up the final single point of health (for a bimodal "dead" or "alive") to being able to actually threatening healing requirements thereafter, but in a way that pure healing now can also deal with, putting them on a more even footing (assuming greater overall sustain, at least in terms of raw throughput, for pure healing).
   
   
2. Your output (damage and healing / effective potency) is reduced by 10% below 75% health, 20% below 50%, and 30% below 25% health, with accordant re-coloring of the health bar per quarter. Or, your output is simply reduced by 1% for every 2% you are below 70% health (max of 35%), with gradual recoloring below 70%.
   
   This reduces healer knowledge-leveraging in terms of incoming fatal damage but allows for more frequent rewarding responses to damage and perhaps even synergy between stronger but slower CDs or greater timing leniency (per long-duration barriers) and more frequent/granular CDs or those with less timing leniency (e.g., direct healing only), though if and only the latter are given commensurate overall sustain advantage to make up for their lack of burst potential or new extension to max eHP.
   
   
3. Each second, your %hp missing below 80% also reduces inflicts Trauma equal to 5% that amount, reducing your maximum HP. You clear away 5% of remaining Trauma and regain 1% of your normal max HP per second as part of your natural health regeneration, but this threat does give reason to heal non-negligible damage immediately. Vulnerability Up debuffs now instead apply Trauma, providing an obvious visual representation of the eHP loss.
   
   This similarly gives reason to heal quickly but without penalizing output in a way that might oblige DPS "annoyingly" to hold CDs a brief time until healed. Yes, as a side-effect of pulling Vuln debuffs into the Trauma system, this also reduces the danger of spaced Vulnerability Up debuffs (e.g., of refreshing a debuff with only 1s remaining, thereby maxing out the time for which you are vulnerable) while allowing design to slightly increasing the danger of being hit in dense fashion (since each debuff's impact would decay over time anyways).
   
   In encounter design, the largest hits therefore ought to be nerfed a bit, with the threat of remaining at low health making them seem more serious even without the one-shot potential. If still attempting a design that balances heals and mitigation, then it would make sense for barriers in this case to also decay over their duration to reduce their timing leniency, or to ensure that pure heals pack an increase enough to total sustain (relative to heal + bonus max eHP + Trauma avoided by the barrier relative to an GCD-later follow-up by a pure-heal) or to frequency of low- or no-cost skills over mitigation to be competitive.
   
   
4. Both [2] and [3] together, with output reduced by half of %hp missing below 80% and maximum health by 10% of that portion per server tick. E.g., at 1% hp you'd have effectively 40% less potency and would take 8% of your max HP in Trauma per tick, though this could be slowly cleared over time once healed up. Vulnerability Up would still be replaced by Trauma, with every Vulnerability Up debuff ultimately also being a Damage Down debuff.
   
   With that, we'd want to keep people at 80+% health, making that --rather than 1+%-- the sort of go-to healing threshold. This gives us 80% spare margin that we CAN tap into but wouldn't constantly want to leverage for healing efficiency, which means we have plenty of room to deal with excess while feeling like we have more to do.

Granted, I'd still add to that either about a, idk... 40%(?) healing nerf across the board and nerf to back-to-back burst or White Hole style mechanics OR increase the frequency of outgoing damage spread apart from said mechanics (ideally, atop more random-hit damage and so forth). I might even recommend that we allow for cast-holding (pause a cast at 99.99% progress to hold for when the damage comes out, making timing more lenient if needed at commensurate cost to uptime).

[ForsakenRoe]

Trauma

We had to lose things like 'DRG gives a debuff to the enemy that makes Piercing damage 10% stronger', because any time you played BRD or MCH but didn't have a DRG in the party, it'd feel pretty bad knowing 'I could be doing 10% more, but I'm being artificially held back by the system'. Likewise, I expect this would end up in the same situation: DPS/Tank players feeling like their fun (doing big number) is being held hostage by whether the Healer wants to actually heal sooner rather than later. Additionally, there's occasionally times where in Savage, Tanks get domed for about 20% of their HP per autoattack, so would the Healer be forced to keep the Tank constantly topped up to keep them above 80%, lest their damage output start getting affected?

I think the suggestion shares some similarities in concept to the Aetherblight idea in the OP (which I added a lot later so it's understandable if you weren't aware of it), but this Trauma system would, if I understand it correctly, externalize the 'punishment' in such a way that it affects everyone. Whereas, I'd imagine the 'punishment' that you have to deal with for Aetherblight, is simply 'you, as the Healer, have to do more healing (compared to dealing with the Aetherblight quickly)', which internalizes both the resolution of the mechanic, and the punishment for not resolving it, to the Healer role.

If being below 50% meant having 20% reduced damage, heck, if it meant even 2% reduced damage, I expect GNBs would refuse to use Superbolide, as it'd require them to actively decide 'I will do less damage, so that I can be more surviveable' which was the exact issue and reason that the TankStance/DamageStance thing got removed (so that Tanks didn't have to 'feel' like they need to sacrifice Damage/Surviveability for the other). WAR and DRK would have it even worse too, as if they have a situation where they are constantly being brought back down to 1HP (eg Howling Eight), they're going to be told 'you need to deal 30% less damage, during this 2min window, as part of the strat' and it lasts a whole 10s, that's half the burst window!

As for reduced Max HP while suffering Trauma, I'm not a fan. I look back to how Weakness/Brink would reduce your Max HP, and lead to chain-death because after the first one, you simply don't have the Max HP to survive the subsequent raidwides. I also remember the whole 'Tanks using STR accessories and dying to Susano's TB' thing. I think it made sense to address those issues (whether the way they were addressed was 'the correct way' is a different topic). There's also a fair amount of times where we have multiple hits in a row, which drop us below 80% and would trigger the Max HP reduction mid-mechanic, which would have to be reworked/double checked to see that they still function. WHM would also be more punished than AST in this regard, as AST has CU and Neutral Sect shields over WHM's one-time Divine Caress shield, which means that in some cases, AST would be able to prevent multi-hit mechanics from taking the party into Trauma territory, while WHM would be forced to let them drop into the threshold to trigger the Max HP reduction (Tracking Tremors, some Brutal Impacts, etc.)

Let's imagine for example, a raidwide hit in a normal raid. It deals 50% of your Max HP in the Trauma version, and 25% of your Max HP, plus 25% of your Max HP as Aetherblight, in the other version. With the Trauma effect, if left alone (because the Healers want to just deal damage and not heal), the people who took the hit will deal less damage, through no fault of their own, due to Trauma. In the Aetherblight version, however, I would imagine that the more common punishments for leaving Aetherblight alone would be things like a Vuln Up (which does nothing on its own until the next hit hits), a DOT (which increases how much HP needs to be healed before the next mechanic, so, 'punishes the Healer' for leaving it alone), or a pseudo-DOT which converts more and more HP into Aetherblight over time (increasing how much HPS you have to push to get out of Aetherblight and stop the conversion, again punishing only the Healer for leaving it alone)

[Shurrikhan]

I was already aware of Aetherblight. I just consider them fairly different, and those three explicitly example spitballs to be far from the limit. You may recall my suggesting a simple Grievous mechanic before, whereby missing %hp DoTs you (past a threshold of lenience) based on that wound's severity. The more wounded you are, the less someone can be left there, even without further incoming damage, essentially leaving big hits threatening even without necessarily one-shotting people (making us less bimodally dependent on mitigation / max eHP increases). While such would give mitigation even more places where it feels significant, the extent would therefore be reduced, and unlike healing absorption

As I mentioned back around the time Aetherblight first popped up, I find healing reduction / absorb / necrotic mechanics to be kind of the worst of all worlds (relative to DoTs, more direct relative vulnerability, or even damage loss), but, tbh... I don't see anything wrong with, yes, needing to not literally be at the brink of death to be able to deal one's full damage -- "externalizing" or not (which probably wasn't the reason the likes of Piercing Resistance Down were removed, judging by developer admission or as would seem logical from what else was removed or what those removals were allegedly responding to ["playing a comp, not a job”]). If anything, I'd rather the game be more contextual and interdependent, even if not so categorically as through Slashing/Piercing/Blunt Resistance Down debuffs. Doubly so when the opposite makes no sense (still capable of superhuman feats just as when at the peak of health... until dead a pinprick later) or leave potential fixes preemptively abandoned just to keep the game as degeneratively streamlined as possible.

Consider also, though: Is our performance not already externalized if a healer fails to keep us up (alive), or to rez is in timely fashion? To say we can't have anything that would incentivize keeping us healed because a healer might not want to heal us feels like yet another "healers can't have X, because... <outlier bad player example Y>", though now also from an altogether different context. (Why would players still always play as they do now, where there is reward only for maintaining the final 0.01% of health in a context, even once there is reward for, say, a whopping 80% of health?)

Healers exist to increase the raid's total DPS by having those other, greater sources of DPS not go down as far as they otherwise would (if/when the investment in that capacity would be more efficient for said effective DPS over a whole fight --deaths included-- than taking another DPS or Tank). Whether that factor is purely bimodal (dead or alive / 0% or anything greater than 0%) or more granular doesn't change that. If anything, it's more likely to habituate more responsive healing even relative to risking minor damage loss then than risking your least geared member's death now, simply because old habits of healing only when CDs permit the healer not to lose any personal damage (a trifle by comparison anyways) wouldn't be viable in that new context.

Inb4:
(Why the dislike of healing absorbs? Because they either truly or ostensibly don't matter until the next damage event, therefore at best acting as more damage per event but without the necessary scrutiny of eHP thresholds unless chained, rather than creating actual new damage or damage-risk events. I want more to interact with, ideally; more timings that would matter, rather than only to, in effect, nerf healing and extend all players' max HP while creating a new arbitrarily buffed --that is, relative to not including that mechanic-- class of utility spell.)

* To be clear, this does not apply to in PvP or ramps of debuffs resettable through deliberate, non-plain action (e.g., kiting during old Necrotic affix healing taken reductions in M+), only as a general mechanic in place of a less delayed means of threat (DoT, damage reduction, longer lasting max HP reduction, etc.).

P.S.
As for WHM, there's no point designing a broad system specifically for/around a job as is where said job is already unnecessarily hamstring; the spitball ideas above, like being significantly injured inherently carrying a DoT with it before, assumes the obvious -- that WHM might be allowed to have some way to shine beyond the rare perfectly timed (but already devalued by now) Misery cleave.

[Valence]

I wouldn't mind some battle mechanics like fatigue and hp/mp decay through it but the mechanic would have to be clearly identified visually for healers or supports to help alleviate it and manage it but the whole system would really need to be reworked entirely into a different type of content to bring actual resource scarcity and forays into dungeons or hostile territory, rather than dance fights. Just adding a debuff that grows over time or forces healers to overheal else the dps are going to go mad at them for losing damage, on top of the current system, feels frankly kinda like a punishment.

[Shurrikhan]

I wouldn't mind some battle mechanics like fatigue and hp/mp decay through it but the mechanic would have to be clearly identified visually for healers or supports to help alleviate it and manage it but the whole system would really need to be reworked entirely into a different type of content to bring actual resource scarcity and forays into dungeons or hostile territory, rather than dance fights. Just adding a debuff that grows over time or forces healers to overheal else the dps are going to go mad at them for losing damage, on top of the current system, feels frankly kinda like a punishment.

I think each idea shared here has definitely had that easy visual identifiability, no?

• Aetherblight shows what portion of missing HP would take more to heal back via coloration right on the health bar.
  
  
• HP thresholds explicitly came with visual indicators for each range.
  
  
• Reduced Max HP, unlike Vulnerability Up debuffs, can likewise easily show the max HP lost right on our HP bars (blacked/greyed out or shaded area).
  
  
• Same for the "Trauma" undermechanic posited in my last post.
  
  
• And as long as all wounds would create a DoT based on missing HP, pulling the badly wounded increasingly towards death, there'd be nothing at all visually ambiguous about that, and we could even have the expected net damage or healing to be taken over the next server tick to show right on health bars.