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

[Kohashi]

Class concepts aside, I love seeing people's hotbar setups. Isn't your hand cramping up having to press CTRL+ 2 and CTRL 4? I would die..

And how do you move mid-fight? I still use asd movement xD.

[ForsakenRoe]

Ah, I have my mouse set up so that the buttons on the side are considered 'CTRL' and 'Shift', so me pressing CTRL-2 is actually me pressing 'side mouse button' with my right hand, and 2 with my left

I also have big hands, such that I could theoretically hit 6 on my keyboard (I wouldn't want to though). I use QWES for movement, rather than WASD

[GartredZW]

In any case, I don't think making 10 bars filled with spells to juggle and systems will get people to stay. Complexity doesn't have to be resumed to how many spells you have and how many different buttons you push. And sure, let's say they make every single class an incredibly high ceiling to master. For a while it will keep ppl "happy" and then, people will master it, and they will say it's not complex enough anymore.

Can we please just throw out the idea that making players think at all will scare them into quitting entirely? It's a stupid idea, and I'm tired of dancing around the issue.
Take a look at any competitive game at all, and you'll see mountains of people who put in the time and effort to master every little nuance of their game. Why do they do this? Because it's fun of course. And every person who is good at the game was once a lowly level 1 struggling to keep GCD uptime against world mobs. It didn't scare them away, and the fear that it might isn't a good reason to ruin the fun for the rest of us. Can we stop pretending that having the same exact damage rotation from level 4 to level 100 is a good idea for a difficulty curve? What are people even doing through leveling if not learning how to play their class properly?
Furthermore, so what if a few players go "oh, I can't wrap my head around this. it's not for me"? Nothing can be for everyone. Not even this critically acclaimed MMORPG with a free trial up to level 70. Maybe some people just don't resonate with healers as a concept. Maybe some people just don't like tab targeting hotkey based combat. Are we going to start getting worried about losing out on that demographic and change the game to a first person shooter instead? And What of the healer main who watched their favorite role getting lobotomized into the ground to appeal to people who don't even like healers in the first place? Aren't you glad that you put in the time and effort to develop your skills in healing only to have some floor-licker whine about it being too hard, only for Square to decide that this is the mindset we need to cater to in order to create a better game.

My point being, People can adapt to a lot of things. Having a bit of complexity, or even a decent amount of complexity isn't going to hurt anyone. On the contrary, it will foster a large amount of dedicated players who put in the effort to squeeze every last bit of optimization they can out of their chosen job. Meanwhile, the casual who doesn't care about playing properly will just continue mashing broil and physick because they like the animation and don't care to read tooltips. This player isn't planning to play Extremes, Savages, or especially not Ultimates, So what does it matter that he can't be the best?

Also, Even if this casual player gets scared and logs off because pressing more than two buttons puts him into an anaphylactic shock, Why can't he just go play a different class without a complex rotation?
Seriously, we've got Gunbreaker and Dark Knight, which are known as the busy tanks as opposed to the simple tanks of Paladin and Warrior. Why can't we have White Mage be the simple healer with a simple rotation, and if you want complexity you play Scholar, Sage, or Astrologian? Remember, the main damaging rotation on all four healers right now is exactly the same. The only difference is that they get an extra button to press around burst windows, and Sage gets Phlegma, which you press twice every 80 seconds. riveting.

[Valence]

10 bars makes no sense, and we used to have more intricate and demanding toolkits before, and people went through casual content just as fine. They just had to learn slightly different things than today, where today you spend 95% of your time learning about encounter mechanics in modern dungeons and whatnot, back then you spent time as a tank for example how to pull and position mobs (not behind you), as a caster how to manage your mp, etc.

[Nero-Voidstails]

I do agree with the design but the other problem healer are now facing is DPS and tank role mostly warrior paladin are sadly a problem in themself and I will keep saying it all healing should be removed from every job that isn't a healer

[NightHour]

What healer strike?

I see plenty of people playing healer, plenty of healers in PF.

[ForsakenRoe]

Can we please just throw out the idea that making players think at all will scare them into quitting entirely? It's a stupid idea, and I'm tired of dancing around the issue.

I don't necessarily agree that we should ignore 'how scary the change might be for players if they have to think' (whether they're level 1 or 100) entirely. I do think that we need to have some flexibility in how much we can expand the skill ceiling (compared to where it is now), but I'd rather address the concerns of 'what if I press the wrong button' from some players with safety nets in the design, rather than simply telling them 'LOL you don't do content where it matters anyway'. An example is in the WHM, the potency of Dia was changed from its current 75 (plus 75 per tick) to 150 (plus 70 per tick) to rebalance it in regard to its duration being shortened to 12s. This also helps players however, who need to move for a mechanic but don't have anything else they can use for that mobility (eg a spare Lily), as a current-game player who presses Dia to fill the GCD of movement will get 75p and refresh the DOT, whereas in this WHM they'd get 150p (literally 2x as much potency), plus refresh the DOT (which also deals less damage per tick, and lasts less time, therefore 'losing' less potency to early refreshes). Additionally, Water/Banish are only 40p stronger than their Stone/Glare counterparts and are instantcast, allowing a player to choose to delay casting them (instead of using them as soon as they're available) at an average cost of 6.6p per GCD of delay, but recouping that lost damage by using the spell in a GCD where the player has to move (and would normally lose the GCD entirely)

SE's decisions for the DOTs (very strong per tick, very long duration, very low upfront damage) all combine to make a very inflexible combat environment where the very player who it's meant to help, is the player that suffers the most from misplays

10 bars makes no sense, and we used to have more intricate and demanding toolkits before, and people went through casual content just as fine. They just had to learn slightly different things than today, where today you spend 95% of your time learning about encounter mechanics in modern dungeons and whatnot, back then you spent time as a tank for example how to pull and position mobs (not behind you), as a caster how to manage your mp, etc.

I recently found some old screenshots, and here's a pic of my old ARR SCH hotbars (from the days before I learned to rebind my hotbar keybinds):



Note how we had more attack spells (Bio/Bio2 separate, Miasma, Miasma2 instead of AOW, Shadowflare, Bane), and managed to have less hotbar bloat than we now do. Also, check out those MP costs, currently our 10k MP gets us 25 casts of Broil (before factoring in MP regen from any source). With these numbers? 82 casts of Ruin 1!

I do agree with the design but the other problem healer are now facing is DPS and tank role mostly warrior paladin are sadly a problem in themself and I will keep saying it all healing should be removed from every job that isn't a healer

Healing on tanks is fine. Healing on tanks, as SE has designed them, is not fine. For example, I didn't mind the idea that WAR can use Equilibrium to heal itself once per minute when it was introduced in HW. I didn't even mind it when they removed the 'you have to be in the stance that costs you damage' requirement from it. I do mind that it can fully restore its HP, three times, each 25s, because Bloodwhetting is 'per enemy hit' instead of the expected 'per weaponskill used'.

I think a lot of the issues with tanks and how they're 'doing all the healing' would be solved by converting the healing of these tank actions, into barriers. For example, rather than Equilibrium being 1200p, plus 1500p worth of Regen, changing it to 1200p, plus 5 layers of 300p Barriers (like Haima). This protects them equally as effectively (technically moreso, because they'd now have access to a 300p Barrier for a tankbuster), but if they don't fully consume the Barrier layers, then it simply falls off. Same for Shake it Off, 300p of upfront Barrier, plus 5 layers of 100p Barrier for allies, will protect allies just as well against DOTs as the current form does, but once the barriers fall off, then allies HP will not have moved.

Finally, we've got stuff like Holy Sheltron. Rather than 4 ticks of 250p (1000p healing, same as a Clemency but without the MP cost or loss of damage!), 4 layers of 250p of Barrier, means that the PLD (or their Intervention target) is more protected vs now, but doesn't remove the need for a healer to heal them after the barriers fall off.

Of course, none of this would happen because people would perceive it as a nerf (when it's actually ironically a buff)

[ForsakenRoe]

Rewrote SCH damage potencies, they should now be balanced against Dawntrail SCH (like how the WHM design is balanced against DT WHM). Biggest change is massively frontloading Miasma's damage, making Ruin 2 a part of the levelling path (between Ruin and Broil), and replacing Ruin 2's mobility aspect with Miasmalysis. Also, took the liberty of giving Art of War a slow scaling over expansions, to have it keep pace with other actions in the kit (such as Shadowflare, which has to keep pace with Broil). Even though Broil is massively increased in potency compared to Dawntrail (340 here, vs DT's 310), the meme lives on and 'Art of War is a gain on two'.

Also gave WHM's Holy/Holy 3 some gradual scaling and a higher potency at max level, to keep better pace with SCH's Art of War (while still keeping BOTE/Quake/Flood/Tornado as more total potency than Holy/Holy/Holy/Holy)

I'll get round to balancing AST/SGE damage potencies vs their DT selves at some point

[ReynTime]

I've always been a proponent that every role and sub role should have 1 "braindead" job and 1 "complex" job, so there is one job for every kind of player in a role. The playerbase wouldn't implode if they made jobs with higher skill ceiling if there was always 1 or 2 alternatives in a role for players who are intimidated.

Not every job needs to be accomodated to players who like really simple gameplay.

Funny enough I feel like magic DPS is the only role where that scaling complexity of job mastery is noticeable. SMN is clearly the bottom, followed by RDM, then PCT and BLM come next.

[Rithy255]

1. Add more dps buttons such as Procs, extra Dot's or anything to keep track of, shouldn't be intense but healers should feel different even with slight dps differences. Even high damaging attacks that cost a lot of MP, using too much will burn your MP.
2. Lower healing output on all jobs, I don't mind tanks or dps having some small cooldowns that have healing tied to it, but they need to be weaker, Healers cooldowns are also way too strong healing wise. (Get rid of per enemy healing effects on BW)
3. Get rid of some bloat skills & useless ones.

Just some things i can think of on the top of my head.