Let us use phoenix downs in combat, give healers more damage buttons, and a bit else

[Rebeccubus]

I wanted to share this idea based on what I've seen from the devs, players, and my own personal feelings. Please hear me out, I know it might sound like stealing even more of healer's identity at first, but I promise it isn't that.

As the devs were simplifying healers again and again, I remember them mentioning one specific thing a lot as to why. They kept saying they were getting feedback that healing was too stressful. The devs took this to mean that the problem was juggling healing and damage dealing at the same time. Personally, I think they completely missed the mark.

IMO, what is actually more stressful for a lower skill healer is when you die and the entire group wipes because of it, or even worse disbands because of you. The punishment for underperforming on a healer is WAY higher than any other role. A dps or tank can be carried through content by a healer. They get to make mistakes and continue playing. A healer can only be carried by another healer, a caster with a raise, or an OP tank (last one especially sucks cause the healer and often the DPS too dont get to play anymore as they wait for the tank to SLOWLY finish the fight or die).

SKIP HERE IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE IDEA FIRST
The fix I propose is this. Let us use phoenix downs in combat. HOWEVER, they need to be really suboptimal to use relative to a healer's res. They should take as long as a hardcast raise on top of having at least a 30s to 1 minute cooldown and possibly a short range. I think healer's would also possibly need a small buff to their raising ability to make it more clear that they are THE ressers. Whether its cheaper resses, shorter cast time, a special raise-swiftcast, etc. Phoenix Downs should be an emergency item that is typically saved to use ON HEALERS, and practically never elsewhere. This lets lower skilled healers have more room for mistakes, and it lets other players not feel so hard-stuck with a healer that cant clear a fight because they can do something about it.

To make this work however would require removing a lot of the healing that non-healing classes have (please hear me out on this again but I'm doing the follow up in the next comment cause I'm out of space)

IMO this frees up the balance of the game to do many really good things. Caster's with res wouldn't need to be balanced around having resses as much as they are. Non-res classes would be able to save runs of casual content and possibly even occasionally hardcore prog by ressing a healer. You can take a lot of the self-sustain off of non-healers because they wouldn't need to be as self-reliant and encourages more team-play. And one of the biggest things, you can easily internally justify giving healers engaging damage rotations again because the stress of needing to perform perfectly on a healer will be reduced.

[Rebeccubus]

I couldn't fit all I wanted to say in one post so I'm following up here.

If anyone is worried about how this will feel in game, we actually already HAVE it. Variant and Criterion dungeons allow you to take resses. In variant dungeons, anyone can res but the non-healer version has a 30s cooldown and without swift you're also stuck with an 8s cast time. Criterion dungeons give everyone ONE fast res per pull (but healer resses dont work) and it honestly feels good, but I wouldnt want that version implemented elsewhere.

To follow up on the bit about self-healing on non-healers, there needs to be incentive to get a healer up in the first place, and right now we can often just do without them entirely because everyone has too much healing. They deserve to have their role and fantasy. Shields and mit on other classes are fine because they are unable to heal us back to full HP when the boss isnt doing damage. I don't think we should just strip away everyone's agency (especially tanks), it just needs to be shifted from self-agency to team-agency. And for example, a tank having the ability to pop massive shields/mit on themselves or others to give time to start getting a healer up, I feel is comparable if not better-feeling agency. It allows more people to participate in saving a run because it becomes a TEAM effort, rather than just watching a tank solo a fight for 10-20 minutes, and it solidifies healer's role as the healer. Having no healer alive should be a ticking countdown to a wipe that everyone needs to work together to stop.

I like phoenix downs over stuff like healer's having some self res because I feel we need MORE team-play, not less. It also doesn't solve the issue of making lower-skill healers feel less alone in their struggles.

Sometimes you would still wipe or a fight would be unclearable, but thats fine to happen. It is also okay if healing is generally a more punishing role. This change would still feel much better on average because there'd be more you can DO. The solo tank could start getting people up to play the game again. They also just fit thematically cause like... its an FF game, phoenix downs are a staple.

It is also a lot less work for the devs to implement than other solutions as PDs are already IN THE GAME, we just can't use them in combat. If they wanted to put a bit more work in, hardcore content could have a longer CD on the res as well, or even be single use per pull for balance. It also helps a little with gil inflation!

Also to be clear, I still think healer's should get better damage rotations even without this change, but I feel this helps the devs JUSTIFY it for themselves by balancing the level of stress on a single role at a casual level.

[Valence]

The reason they're removing friction and blocking points is precisely because people complain about relying or depending on other players. Tank dying because not healed properly? Tanks complain that they rely on healers -> SE makes tanks invulnerable and self healing. Running dry of MP? Players complain that rotations are MP negative and that you need a rphys to refresh on longer fights -> SE deletes the whole system and makes rotations MP positive and individual.

And so on.

[Rebeccubus]

The reason they're removing friction and blocking points is precisely because people complain about relying or depending on other players. Tank dying because not healed properly? Tanks complain that they rely on healers -> SE makes tanks invulnerable and self healing. Running dry of MP? Players complain that rotations are MP negative and that you need a rphys to refresh on longer fights -> SE deletes the whole system and makes rotations MP positive and individual.

And so on.

In my opinion that's both the player's misunderstanding their frustrations (players are often good at finding problems but horrible at solutions), and the devs making poor choices of solution.

At certain times classes DID need more self agency. Relying on other's for your main basic resource was, to me, a bad thing (its different when someone can boost your ability, like when casters could give other MP which was nice after someone was raised). It also does suck when someone's performance is weak enough to halt progression. However, I feel the way they reacted to those complaints was wrong.

This idea would both make players a BIT more reliant on others, but also make them able to DO MORE to help others. People are generally frustrated when they feel like there's nothing they can do, not just when other's screw up. The frustrating part of a healer dying is that you have to slowly wait for death when the boss is at 70% and there's a raidwide and stack coming up in a minute and you know you can't beat the boss before wiping. The devs can make team-play satisfying and not feel like being team-RELIANT to a degree that is unfun.

That said, we should also push back on people that want to play the game SOLO because that's going too far. As long as we have the class trinity, we rely on each other at a core level and that's okay. Non-tanks should rely on tanks to take the big hits. Non-healers should rely on healers to keep everyone healthy. Non-dps should rely on DPS to make the fight end before half an hour (or enrage in hardcore of course). These are good things, but it is also okay when the lines are crossed a BIT. In my opinion the devs have done a good thing by trying to make people feel like they have more agency, but they did it in the wrong way.

[Jeeqbit]

They kept saying they were getting feedback that healing was too stressful. The devs took this to mean that the problem was juggling healing and damage dealing at the same time. Personally, I think they completely missed the mark.

I actually don't. Probably the most busy healers were with damage was in Stormblood. Although I could manage it just fine and it kept me busy, it was a lot to manage and keep track of, since SCH and WHM had a whole bunch of different DoTs to apply and track. And plenty of players are definitely not like me... and would not manage that.

Still, making them spam 1 button wasn't necessarily the answer. I do feel like Sage gets pretty good with its damage kit, especially if you rig it before a boss fight by doing a tank shield and a party shield to get a full sweep of Addersting at the start of a fight due to the standard raid AoE+buster. Gives you a good variety to press.

WHM feels pretty good to me overall, despite the main button being on a 2 minute CD, because many fights have a lot going on that I need to pay attention to players for between that.

AST is alright, has lots of damage and buff buttons, and the card game always gave it something, although its card system used to feel more fun with a Royal Road or Lord/Lady RNG system.

SCH is really what got shafted the most in terms of damage. It has a lot of damage buttons in the sense of... Energy Drain x6 or more. But it feels like the other healers just have more variety, and the crit button doesn't feel as good as what the other healers have to me. But this is how SCH has always been beside the DoTs it had, and it's my main healer, so am fine whatever they do with it really.

IMO, what is actually more stressful for a lower skill healer is when you die and the entire group wipes because of it

Well yes, and tanks fear the same actually, but the reality is many players can clear a dungeon regardless if that happens (did it earlier today, defeated two bosses as a MNK despite that the healer died, and it was a tight sync dungeon too so I had to use my self-heals). Moreover, when they die, players usually don't care and just pull again and beat it. Hopefully new players will learn these truths about FFXIV eventually.

The punishment for underperforming on a healer is WAY higher than any other role.

Now do you see why everything has become crazy easy, to the point you can finish a dungeon without a healer easily? Healers are optional in most dungeons/fights if everyone else plays well. It's the same reason they gave heal potions to everyone in PvP - to reduce reliance on the healer.

Let us use phoenix downs in combat.

I would like if we could use all forms of potions on others... like in traditional FF games. It disappointed me this was not possible, and yet there's not really a good reason why. Would it really hurt to be able to use a Hi-Potion on a party member?

[Supersnow845]

snip

The problem with changing the healer design because not everyone could handle the SB/HW healers is that it has arguably raised the healer skill floor rather than lowered it because what you do is way more visible now and people expect more

In HW when you had cleric stance if you ran a dungeon and the healer spent 99% of their time in healing stance and maybe refreshed a DOT here or there everyone was fine and understanding; but you had room to show off your skills if you knew what you were doing.

Now the modern healers expect 99% DPS uptime because healers have nothing else to do with their wealth of oGCD’s, so “safety play” is more noticed and ridiculed

So the modern healers arguably made mistakes on both sides, their floors are higher because others expect them to do DPS as a baseline, not their ceilings are barely above the floor because there is nothing to optimise besides uptime

[Rebeccubus]

I actually don't. Probably the most busy healers were with damage was in Stormblood. Although I could manage it just fine and it kept me busy, it was a lot to manage and keep track of, since SCH and WHM had a whole bunch of different DoTs to apply and track. And plenty of players are definitely not like me... and would not manage that.

I do want to ask one thing of this. At least in casual content, isnt it okay to NOT track all your damage stuff? Having optimization beyond what casual players are comfortable doing is okay, they shouldnt feel pressured to do what isnt comfortable (within reason, which of course everyone has a different take on where that is). Taking away tools for hardcore players to play with feels like only a loss for them and not much of one for casual players who couldve just ignored them anyway. I personally wish that was the mentality people took. Everyone in 14 is meant to do damage, but it should be okay for healers to pause focusing on their DPS in order to keep everyone alive.

Still, making them spam 1 button wasn't necessarily the answer.

Agreed, they chose the wrong solution again. I'd argue there was a path to "simplify" (smooth out via QoL) healer's damage rotation's by making it more in depth and interesting with a better flow/cohesion without removing basically everything they had.

Well yes, and tanks fear the same actually, but the reality is many players can clear a dungeon regardless if that happens

True, however it is definitely less so, and a tank in a dungeon can be ressed where a healer usually cant. Meaning they get to keep playing the game and can participate in the team again.

Moreover, when they die, players usually don't care and just pull again and beat it.

This is good, yes. I like people being resilient to difficulty and I do not want the solution to be making everything easy to clear. I simply thing that the balance of responsibility needs a LITTLE adjustment, not a complete overhaul.

Now do you see why everything has become crazy easy, to the point you can finish a dungeon without a healer easily? Healers are optional in most dungeons/fights if everyone else plays well. It's the same reason they gave heal potions to everyone in PvP - to reduce reliance on the healer.

And ironically we see the opposite issue in a lot of savage fights of the last expansion where a SINGLE death meant a wipe because mechanics were designed to obliterate you if you didnt have everyone up. Damage also got really really bursty with like raidwide damage back to back to make sure you couldnt survive without a healer. Once again they chose a bad solution to a problem. I do think the PvP change was good due to them also giving healers a lot of crazy cool offensive abilities. THERE everyone being very solo-capable makes sense.

[Valence]

I do mostly agree with the OP, to make it clear. I also feel that the reason we've been getting more and more bodychecks especially since SHB and EW is precisely because there is not much left to challenge groups beyond playing DDR and standing at the right spot or not for every mechanic. There is actually two main hurdle mechanics in savage currently:

- Individual deaths from failing a mechanic, which essentially means that too many and you risk hitting enrage. It is also one of the only ways to truly tax on healer MP just to keep raising people when they fail. This also puts the onus on healers not to die themselves, and one of the reasons those days in most statics i've been into, healers die the least and often do callouts, is because they have nothing else to do beyond babysitting the party and watching out for mechanics.
- Soft or hard body checks, where either someone failing a mechanic will snowball into a wipe (most notably with party stacks, partners, etc that are everywhere now), or just with someone failing a mechanic that will instantly wipe the raid. Those do not rely on healers and are precisely there to relieve some of the pressure off their shoulders. But at what cost? As you say, it's one of their wrong answers to a problem, and one of the worst one yet they had to make because bodychecks just swapped the pressure off the healer ("why is that healer constantly failing to raise/heal us we're stuck because of them") into the group individually ("why is this player constantly failing that mechanic, it's wiping the raid and I can't solve it for them").

What we have almost completely lost as a result of a combination of many things they axed out of the game:
- Scarcity based gameplay, resource management at the individual AND party level, groups slowly snowballing to wipes not because of failing mechanics individually, but because of mechanical strain providing too much pressure until the group collapses.

[Rebeccubus]

- As you say, it's one of their wrong answers to a problem, and one of the worst one yet they had to make because bodychecks just swapped the pressure off the healer ("why is that healer constantly failing to raise/heal us we're stuck because of them") into the group individually ("why is this player constantly failing that mechanic, it's wiping the raid and I can't solve it for them").

I honestly don't hate these existing (which probably isnt even what youre saying) but they started doing them WAY too often.

What we have almost completely lost as a result of a combination of many things they axed out of the game:
- Scarcity based gameplay, resource management at the individual AND party level, groups slowly snowballing to wipes not because of failing mechanics individually, but because of mechanical strain providing too much pressure until the group collapses.

Yknow when you put this into words, I realize that some of the most fun I have with hardcore raiding is that panic of trying to figure out what we need to do to recover for upcoming mechanics or if its too late. I get to feel some of it as a red mage where its like "Who do we need up and when can we get them? Do the healers need to worry about upcoming damage? Do they even have MP to spare for a raise? What mit did we lose for the upcoming damage and do I need to spend mine NOW instead of saving it for later? Can a tank invuln to cheese something so we can keep going (especially during prog)?". Honestly the idea I have for phoenix downs plays right into a resource management/scarcity gameplay. "Who can take the time to res and where? Can the healers cover the raise or are they too busy? Whose damage is least important to lose for the raise? Is there even time to get it out? How many do we need up for the mechanic?"

Another take of mine that wasn't relevant here is that I really wish we'd bring back unique and interesting utility on classes. Stuff like when casters could give MP to others so like if you raised a healer they could give them a boost to their MP. However Ether's also cover this issue of course like that other poster likes, but SIMILAR UTILITY would be nice. I think the only main balance issues being "does this class do personal damage or buff the party, do they have a raise, what heals or shields/mit do they provide" is very boring. Id rather all DPS do similar dps output (whether personally or buffs) and then you get a lot of unique utility to pick and choose. Resses are the one thing I think are powerful enough that I want them reworked a bit as I've mentioned.

[Jeeqbit]

I do want to ask one thing of this. At least in casual content, isnt it okay to NOT track all your damage stuff? Having optimization beyond what casual players are comfortable doing is okay, they shouldnt feel pressured to do what isnt comfortable (within reason, which of course everyone has a different take on where that is). Taking away tools for hardcore players to play with feels like only a loss for them and not much of one for casual players who couldve just ignored them anyway.

Yes, the developers could have just left it and said "it's fine if some players don't engage with the damage buttons", since that's really the approach now anyway with them being taught to spam Cure > Cure II or Adlo.

The reason I think that they changed it from Stormblood was actually because I don't think it was intentional for healers to have all these attacks. Let me explain...

• White Mage had an older Aero DoT, intended for use below level 50.
• White Mage had a separate DoT they got, clearly intended for higher levels. But you could actually apply both!
• White Mage had an AoE Aero, clearly intended... for AoE. But this meant you could apply three Aeros.
• It was pretty clear they had different intended use cases, one of them really needed to be an upgrade, and the many Stone attacks technically had different use cases (applying different status effects for example) but in reality it was ideal to have a priority macro to use the highest level Stone available.
• So SE fixed all this by creating the trait upgrade system we have now.
• SCH had a bit of a different problem. It inherited all of Arcanist's actions, which were intended for Summoner and SE didn't really intend for Scholars to care about. Which is why they will never make a class split into multiple jobs again. This wasn't intended and it was their mistake all these actions were available to Scholar, and they seemed to find it challenging to solve it (ended up being as simple as changing the Affinity).

True, however it is definitely less so, and a tank in a dungeon can be ressed where a healer usually cant. Meaning they get to keep playing the game and can participate in the team again.

We have Red Mages and Summoners to rez as well. Maybe the increase in the amount of jobs over the years has diluted how often you see Red Mages or Summoners, but when Stormblood came out, Red Mages were everywhere and rezzing a healer was possible most of the time due to it. Their popularity has dwindled over time but that's probably in part due to variety of jobs now.

This is good, yes. I like people being resilient to difficulty and I do not want the solution to be making everything easy to clear. I simply thing that the balance of responsibility needs a LITTLE adjustment, not a complete overhaul.

While I agree, the truth is there are people playing the game purely for the story or for social reasons and are completely hopeless at games, and I think that's the primary reason that the main story has to have a mode of some form that makes it possible for them.

And ironically we see the opposite issue in a lot of savage fights of the last expansion where a SINGLE death meant a wipe because mechanics were designed to obliterate you if you didnt have everyone up.

Well that is Savage. I wasn't referring to Savage. But if you get ARR, Heavensward or Stormblood fights and scale them up (like we have with Unreals), the difference is clear between then vs now. A major part of the difficulty in those fights in the past was needing to rely entirely on the healers to keep you alive, whereas now a Warrior can use Shake It Off and numerous self-heals to make fights like Sofia and Ultima way easier. Although they still need the healer in these fights usually, it is still a big advantage over how it was in the past.

Damage also got really really bursty with like raidwide damage back to back to make sure you couldnt survive without a healer. Once again they chose a bad solution to a problem.

I feel like people really did ask for this. SE, who felt they had attempted this before, tried making it rougher in Abyssos so they could say "we told you so" when healers started avoiding PF.

The raidwide back-to-back thing though has always been in Savage really. Usually as a soft enrage mechanic in particular.