Thoughts on shorter CD condensed Toolkits?

[YovelaLindswood]

In general the classes in this game feel bloated in all the wrong areas. There are a lot of redundant actions. Since healing in this game is mostly body checks anyway or healing up from 10-20% to full between major mechanics the toolkits just feel out of place in general.

Would anyone be opposed to cleaving a good deal of the healing actions out, reducing the cooldowns of the remainder(ie 2mins going to 1min or 1mins going to 30sec), and bringing back more gcd healing?

This would allow healers to still competently heal but with reduced bloat it would allow things like adding more of a dps presence to increase healer engagement at all levels of the game.

Let me know your thoughts.

[Supersnow845]

Depends on the healer

WHM feels fine on number of healing actions

SGE and AST both feel ridiculously bloated of actions you can’t even call useless because they are so overpowered

SCH is the one where I won’t deny it’s bloated but it at least feels like it’s trying to be the “you have many ‘parts’ you can stick together but each part isn’t a whole action itself”. It still has too many actions that are full pieces themselves (like seraph, seraphism or indom) but it feels like it’s trying to be that way while the other two just feel bloated with complete actions

All of the healing actions are too powerful on every healer regardless

[Valence]

I think they need to change the encounter model to get closer to a sustain paradigm rather than a binary paradigm (as you said: body checks or just topping people between major mechanics).
Replacing all the oGCD bloat by GCD heals would help, but it wouldn't fundamentally alter why healing feels so shit in the game in its current state, because in its current state, it's not about fighting damage beyond some mitigation checks, it's about dancing in the proper spots. Game has "half" ceased being about healing a long time ago.

[Connor]

bringing back more gcd healing?

adding more of a dps presence to increase healer engagement at all levels of the game.

Let me know your thoughts.

These are two conflicting points. Increasing GCD healing decreases dps presence unless you turn all their dps oGCD. You’d literally be dps’ing less , which would cause an absolute uproar and kill the game

[Carighan]

These are two conflicting points. Increasing GCD healing decreases dps presence unless you turn all their dps oGCD. You’d literally be dps’ing less , which would cause an absolute uproar and kill the game

Plus from the perspective of the current healer loadouts, it'd be far less overall rework to increase the need for healing greatly, to the point where GCD heals become a significant and hopefully majority component of gameplay. Sure, instead they could scrap 50%-70% of the healing kit and replace it with a caster-like DPS kit, but that begs two questions:

* Why do all that rework that needs the fights to be all rebalanced anyways, if that effort could also just make the current kit work?
* Why not just play a DPS Caster instead?!

[Connor]

Plus from the perspective of the current healer loadouts, it'd be far less overall rework to increase the need for healing greatly, to the point where GCD heals become a significant and hopefully majority component of gameplay. Sure, instead they could scrap 50%-70% of the healing kit and replace it with a caster-like DPS kit, but that begs two questions:

* Why do all that rework that needs the fights to be all rebalanced anyways, if that effort could also just make the current kit work?
* Why not just play a DPS Caster instead?!

I agree, but most people will argue that even something like making Cure etc gcd heals have the slightest reason to exist will break the game because they have to redesign pretty much every fight in the game to be done with gcd healing (pretty sure it already is because trusts) and ruin everything. So they should just delete them all and replace them with the upgraded versions so we can have more dps spells.

And yeah, I’d question whether such ‘healers’ (that are exclusively healing with short cd oGCDs and focusing casts solely on DPS output) are really any different from just a DT Summoner with Lux Solaris and Phoenix / Enkindle

[Supersnow845]

To be fair there is alot of baked in design decisions that would force redesigns if they moved back to GCD healing (which they should anyway)

Healer DPS would tank which would affect enrages, the healer GCD’s are mana expensive and the healer mana economies are completely static and cannot handle the GCD’s being anything besides last second emergencies. The healer GCD’s are also limited in range in modern content that is built around every heal hitting every person from any point (rip whispering dawn)

It would affect EW’s savages worse than DT’s admittedly but a return to 80-90% of healing being done with GCD heals would necessitate quite a few changes in design and render some fights damn near impossible without changes

[Carighan]

I mean don't get me wrong, in general our healer kits are massively overwrought, yes.

We do not need so many so similar oGCDs. I'd rather have better and deeper gameplay focused around just a handful of abilities, than use 20+ buttons on something this shallow.

But retooling healers would also need touching every single raid fight simply because there's now 2 more DPS in the fight.

[YovelaLindswood]

These are two conflicting points. Increasing GCD healing decreases dps presence unless you turn all their dps oGCD. You’d literally be dps’ing less , which would cause an absolute uproar and kill the game

Not really. It becomes an actual skill of healing and dpsing in between. Don't need a whole dps toolkit either just a couple actions as a filler rotation you can do when not actively healing. Ideal playstyle being doing your damage rotation until you need to heal obviously prioritizing off your shorter cd off globals and filling with gcds where needed. Goal is to Fill the 11111111111 spam with something engaging enough but not so complicated it detracts from healing. While removing a lot of the bloated actions that don't really serve a purpose. Theres a lot of actions in the game that are just slight variations of one another.

[Connor]

To be fair there is alot of baked in design decisions that would force redesigns if they moved back to GCD healing (which they should anyway)

True, it’s not like they could just move everything onto gcd healing then just call it a day lol; that would still just give healers that don’t match content design at all. Which, while maybe a different topic, we can all agree needs something after all this time lol.

Healer DPS would tank which would affect enrages, the healer GCD’s are mana expensive and the healer mana economies are completely static and cannot handle the GCD’s being anything besides last second emergencies. The healer GCD’s are also limited in range in modern content that is built around every heal hitting every person from any point (rip whispering dawn)

I mean, it’s heavy-handed and lazy, but couldn’t they address the first point by just inflating filler/DoT potencies to compensate for reduced uptime? 2000p Biolysis plz Yoshi lol. For mana economy couldnt they solve that issue by making piety like, even remotely worth using? Even if you max out on it you barely actually get any MP recovery boost. Maybe making it more significant could resolve that and make it more worthwhile as a stat. As for range considerations, I imagine they’ll make every aoe heal like 50y at some point regardless of what happens lol, given their current track record. Probably remove the cast times too. But if they wanted to do something more interesting maybe they could do like a Sacred Prism role skill (it made your spells aoe in like 1.0 I think lol) that increases the radius of the next aoe heal? Maybe it could have some other effect like reducing MP cost of the next cast so it’s not literally just a ‘make your spells reach everyone during specific mechanic’ button lol.

It would affect EW’s savages worse than DT’s admittedly but a return to 80-90% of healing being done with GCD heals would necessitate quite a few changes in design and render some fights damn near impossible without changes

I wonder how much of this is partly related to the way they design every job around the max level then just sort of spread out abilities wherever they want without much thought to how it affects level sync content? Though that doesn’t solve the problem of toolkits not matching the content design.

It becomes an actual skill of healing and dpsing in between. Don't need a whole dps toolkit either just a couple actions as a filler rotation you can do when not actively healing. Ideal playstyle being doing your damage rotation until you need to heal obviously prioritizing off your shorter cd off globals and filling with gcds where needed.

Isn’t that just the exact healer design we have now though? They even gave new dps abilities in DT (120s cool-down dot woohoo). The problem is that even the highest difficulty content is designed around reducing gcd usage to the absolute minimum. It wouldn’t matter if we have 10000 dps abilities or 1; 10000 healing gcds or 1, we’d still never touch those GCDs under any circumstances for the reasons listed above. Reducing the amount and increasing frequency of ogcd usage wouldn’t change how we heal - it would just make people be expected to do the entirety of the healing with the remaining short cd oGCDs. Which, is as much as a job design issue as it is an encounter design issue unfortunately. I don’t disagree that your idea is how the majority of people see ‘ffxiv healer playstyle’ and I do think the majority would want what you’re asking for. More dps variety, less bloated healing kits, etc. I just personally think we need something a bit more drastic, or it’s more like a band-aid fix than something that’ll last.