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

[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).