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

[ForsakenRoe]

"Don't Fix It"

I love my brain-dead Scholar compared to 2.0

Luckily, this design retains such gameplay, as all of the potencies/effects of actions when using the default 'stance', Strategy: Offensive, are identical (or in some cases, even stronger) to Dawntrail SCH

Actually, that's a slight lie, because I also redesigned Dissipation and Summon Seraph so that they don't have the obscure 'mutual exclusivity' rules that they currently have in the actual game, so if anything it could be argued that this design is 'more braindead' at its skill-floor, while also offering a higher skill ceiling. Not to mention how busted strong this design's version of Seraphism/Manifestation/Accession are (though that's partly due to having to adapt how busted strong they already are ingame, to fit with the design's functions)

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.

While this could be 'a solution', I'm not a massive fan of it as a design decision. Take two players who want to play healer. One really likes the vibe of SCH, the fairy, the tactician aspect, etc. But they don't want to have too much of a stressful time trying to optimize the game and deal perfect damage at all times. The other, really likes WHM's flower motifs and being 'the classic FF healer', but also enjoys doing Savage and the like. I don't think I'd be alone in saying that having WHM be 'the simple healer' and SCH 'the technical healer' is not a good idea, because it alienates both of these hypothetical players. Conversely, if the difficulties were swapped, and WHM was technical and SCH was easy, then there'd be other players that get alienated.

Instead, I think the best path (and what I've tried to make with these designs) is the middleground: all four healers are simple to get into, and easy to execute for less competitive things like EX roulette, MSQ, Maps etc, but offer a layer or two of additional optional complexity for those players who want to make use of it, be that for week 1 progression or trying to show they're the best of the best at the job. The so called 'low skill floor, high skill ceiling' approach.

Since the example was brought up above, take the SCH design. You could simply ignore Strategy swapping as a gameplay element entirely, staying in Strategy: Offensive 100% of the time, and the job would play identically (kind of, some healing/mitigation actions are actually stronger in this design) compared to the current DT SCH. But for people who want to optimize their healing rotations, maybe swapping to Strategy: Defensive before hitting an Indomitability means that you can apply a barrier and mitigate a raidwide at the cost of an Aetherflow (-100p) instead of needing to use a GCD (in current game, -310p). But because of the way SE balances DPS checks in content, these optimizations are truly 'optional', you would not need to make use of them to clear Savage/Ultimate content

[Jidka]

How to fix it ?

If I had to fix it, I'll try by adding more unavoidable damage.
- You did the mechanics correctly ? Good, still receive 50% damages to your pretty face.
- Constant DoT to everybody.
- Damage done reflected to players.
- Mini tank-buster to a random player (who maybe will need protection from the tank in hard content)
- More frequent heal-check

Here are the few options I'm thinking right now.

And reducing cost of healing spells so heals don't go OOM too fast. (you know, they'll use them far more often than now)

[BigCheez]

How to fix it ?

If I had to fix it, I'll try by adding more unavoidable damage.
- You did the mechanics correctly ? Good, still receive 50% damages to your pretty face.
- Constant DoT to everybody.
- Damage done reflected to players.
- Mini tank-buster to a random player (who maybe will need protection from the tank in hard content)
- More frequent heal-check

Here are the few options I'm thinking right now.

And reducing cost of healing spells so heals don't go OOM too fast. (you know, they'll use them far more often than now)

Yeah, pretty much just more damage.

The adds that deal raid damage in the lv. 100 dungeons were a nice idea but unfortunately most healers will just kind of inherently heal through it by accident while using their equivalent to asylum/assize for single target healing on the tank/damage. It would be nice if it actually required intentional AOE healing.

It's still casual content at the end of the day. I don't think it should be "hard". It just needs to have enough going on to require you to use at least half of your kit.

[ForsakenRoe]

Here are the few options I'm thinking right now.

And reducing cost of healing spells so heals don't go OOM too fast. (you know, they'll use them far more often than now)

The adds that deal raid damage in the lv. 100 dungeons were a nice idea but unfortunately most healers will just kind of inherently heal through it by accident while using their equivalent to asylum/assize for single target healing on the tank/damage. It would be nice if it actually required intentional AOE healing.

It's still casual content at the end of the day. I don't think it should be "hard". It just needs to have enough going on to require you to use at least half of your kit.

The issue, I think, with 'change healing requirements' as being the entire solution, is that A: it would take so much more work to rebalance, recheck, make sure everything still works correctly re: old content, and B: it only solves the problem with specific gear levels. Take the aforementioned EX roulette dungeon mobs, that spammed raidwide damage. When we first encountered them, in our new lv100 AF gear at i690, they hurt, quite a lot. Many took to the forums, reddit etc to say 'this is great, we have to actually heal again' because we had trouble keeping up without using GCDs. Fast forward... literally a week? To when we had i700, and suddenly we didn't need to GCD heal anymore. Then another couple of weeks later, we have i710 crafted/normal raid gear, and we're healing it like it's just another EW dungeon. The speed at which we outpace 'challenge via how much we have to heal' due to our gear upgrading, is simply too fast IMO to be a viable solution.

That's not to say that it (increasing healing requirements) can't be a part of the solution (hence why I included some extra healing options in the designs, because I'd assume SE would increase healing requirements a bit alongside such designs), but I don't think it can be the whole solution. Because once we figure out 'how much healing is needed', we go back to the current damage that so many are not happy with. I don't think it'd solve anything, to go from 100% of my GCDs in a dungeon on trash (as, say, SCH) being damage, to 70% (because I'm required to press Adlo/Succor occasionally), because those 70% are still just going to be Art of War. Rather, having a situation where the skilled player can reach 100% damage GCDs again, and those damage GCDs being more varied, but a less skilled player finding their 1-button damage gameplay being broken up by pressing Adlo/Succor instead, would be the better solution I think. It gives the learning player a goal to strive for (swap out Adlos for Art of Wars, and Succors for Shadowflares, etc), and a player that has learned, something as a reward structure of sorts for their knowledge (having a variety of actions to use for damage). The 'variety' in buttons pressed when they're damage buttons, is also 'gear agnostic', it would not matter if the player was i690 or i730 in the Tender Valley if there were more variety in damage buttons to press, as they'd be able to interact with that button variety regardless of gear level, whereas with 'heal more', that might be true at i690, but maybe they don't need to GCD heal at all (even with increased healing requirements) at i730, and so they'd be in the same situation as now, where their GCD gameplay is back to being a single button

I did some maths back in Endwalker's 6.5, when Aetherfont was still a current dungeon of EX roulette. And IIRC, to get the first boss (the axolotl (?) looking thing) to deal enough damage to put me, a BIS SCH, in a situation where I'd have to use even a single GCD heal, it'd have to have done a raidwide for 20k damage, every 15ish seconds, on top of what it already was doing. I could go do the same maths for DT dungeons (eg the new one), but thanks to stuff like Divine Aura (1000p of regen) it's even more difficult to burden the kits. The sheer amount of healing potency we can blast out is honestly obscene, and I'm not sure how much work it'd take to get us into a situation where the incoming damage justifies the kit's power. Even if it were possible, I'd expect it'd cause less skilled players to be unable to keep up, and cause player friction, and we know SE hates player friction.