Why Refunding Damage for Healing is Bad.

[Aravell]

Bad and unnecessary designs get removed all the time, and both words are partially influenced by player engagement and perspective, not just clinical design analysis. If players don't enjoy a mechanic, and it happens to a large enough degree that the devs feel it impacts the overall "feeling" among players, they'll have to look at it at some point. No matter how objectively perfect your game is designed, players gotta enjoy and like it. If they don't, it isn't actually as perfect as you might have thought it is.

You know very well that this isn't true. The dev team hasn't taken player enjoyment of game mechanics as a point in their balancing for a very long time now. See how the removal of Kaiten was overwhelming pushed back on and the devs doubled down. VPR also had a very small amount of people asking for the removal of the debuff yet the dev team decided that it "impacts the overall feeling of the job among players"? That's a laughable notion. The dev team isn't balancing for the players, they've just been working towards removing friction between players, they've even admitted to this themselves on stream.

Anyone can see that the changes lately haven't been focused on the players at all, it's all been for the sake of the mythical "perfectly balanced utopia with no player friction" they're endlessly chasing.

Also, you thinking the things I listed don't actually happen is what's the funniest thing here. You know what else actually happens in game? Tanks not mitigating because they're mid-burst, do we demand to take away their damage rotations and give them only 1 spammable button so they can mitigate with no trouble? There's also melee players who don't Feint, casters who don't Addle, do we forcibly take away their tools because they don't know how to use them? Or do we demand their rotations be simplified and their OGCDs removed so they can support their team? If people demand healers be kept simple and impossible to fail, it's only fair that the other jobs are made simple and impossible to fail too, no?

[Laerune]

If the encounters are changed, if enemies deal more and harder damage, then healing rewards more damage might be a good change.

We still havent seen the shield healers, I will wait with making a judgement untill I learn more.

[Carighan]

You know very well that this isn't true. The dev team hasn't taken player enjoyment of game mechanics as a point in their balancing for a very long time now. See how the removal of Kaiten was overwhelming pushed back on and the devs doubled down.

[citation needed]

VPR also had a very small amount of people asking for the removal of the debuff yet the dev team decided that it "impacts the overall feeling of the job among players"? That's a laughable notion. The dev team isn't balancing for the players, they've just been working towards removing friction between players, they've even admitted to this themselves on stream.

... you might want to reread that line. It's disagreeing with yourself.

Also, you thinking the things I listed don't actually happen is what's the funniest thing here. You know what else actually happens in game? Tanks not mitigating because they're mid-burst, do we demand to take away their damage rotations and give them only 1 spammable button so they can mitigate with no trouble?

Uuuuh... you're not going to like hearing this, but this was the stated reason for removing damage from DRK and GNB charge moves, yes. Too many oGCD weaving slots filled already, and if these had to be woven for damage, too many GCDs filled with all-damage and hence players would opt to not press mitigation buttons. That's why that was removed, yes.

Or do we demand their rotations be simplified and their OGCDs removed so they can support their team? If people demand healers be kept simple and impossible to fail, it's only fair that the other jobs are made simple and impossible to fail too, no?

Again, I hate to repeat myself, but "Uuuuh....". You may want to check in on most classes in this game. The game is very intentionally designed with unnaturally simplistic class gameplay, in turn the combat is a "ballet" of never-ending quite specific movement and coordination requirements. Which do not care about your specific class, which would lead me to believe they originally went this route realizing they had started adding too many classes to do the gameplay class-side; but I have no verification for this, might be any other reason, too. In any case, failure statue is in the encounter, not the class. Ninja is maaaybe an exception since they can genuinely blow up their mudra combos.

I'm really not quite sure what you are trying to get at, sorry. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loathe the class (non-)design in this game, and while I think Evolved is a massive improvement this is entirely because it cuts two-third. So it's still all bad, but just less bad, which is already better. However, I can also kinda see why the design is the way it is, and as much as I loathe the class design, I like (most of) the encounter design. And while I wish they could get both done, even over all the years playing MMORPGs since M59, I can't really say I saw someone pull it off in a way where I could point at it and go "Just do that instead". Not really. All things I could point at come with their own list of caveats, like how GW2 does its class design would be even better than what we're getting in Evolved Mode, but it also comes with the negative that is their millions of newbie-trap combinations for every class and more importantly the flattening effect that class design has on encounter design. Would it be cool to have? Maybe. Could also be bad.

If the encounters are changed, if enemies deal more and harder damage, then healing rewards more damage might be a good change.

We still havent seen the shield healers, I will wait with making a judgement untill I learn more.

Exactly.

Now IMO the chances of them actually requiring actual amounts of healing in EC are slim at best. And that's being very generous. On the plusside, the massively overloaded and overburdened current then-legacy loadouts could trivially handle it, too, and for the evolved loadouts they just have to keep the potencies of the raw GCD heals high enough and it's all smooth sailing.

We also know from other MMORPGs that healer mechanics where healing compensates damage (and vice-versa, something I'm still missing tbh but we've only seen 25% of kits) work very well and also just feel "nice" to use. You feel like you're doing well if you're busy saving everybody and then also get one or more huge hits in as a result of that, squeezing them between heals where they can fit.

Again I can't really see them change encounter design so much, but I sure hope they do. It'd be the single biggest fix they could do to so many things: Overall healer design issues, specific healer kit design issues, tank defensive loadout problems, even DPS utility skills. There's a huge room for a slew of cool non-damage skills, but they all need the breathing space that the raid constantly taking medium+ damage would create.

[Supersnow845]

Why are people still begging on encounter design to fix the issues

Not only have they failed to fix it for years but there is also years and years of built up legacy content that DONT do this

I’m sure the 8.0 savage tier will be FANTASSSSSSTIC while you get CT in your roulette again and run around spamming glare with no CD

[Carighan]

Why are people still begging on encounter design to fix the issues

Not only have they failed to fix it for years but there is also years and years of built up legacy content that DONT do this

That's basically why I think there's a slim chance at best, and with slim I mean "none". There'd be so many legacy designs to update. But then again, maybe they just won't? (that's where the ultra ultra unlikely chance it might happen comes from) Just accept old encounters are now weird as hell, and only balance 8.0 and forward. Which honestly would do the game some good (axe old stuff I mean) but both WoW and GW2 have done this before and both times it has shown that players viciously hate the idea of "having missed content" even if it was 10y+ old content. So I heavily doubt anybody is ever going to try that again.

And hence why I agree it won't happen, which is a shame as it is the single change that'd improve all aspects of all classes' design, not just healers'.

[ForsakenRoe]

One thing I want to highlight is that this isn't a problem in other games. We always pretend like it'd be a huge issue if they expected actually serious amounts of raw healing, and yet other MMORPGs all show that no, players understand that you can mash the green buttons just as much as the red ones, button mashing is an innate MMORPG-player-skill.

We had a time in this game where you DID have to 'mash green buttons' somewhat. 5.0 AST. People complained about it, and it got buffed like crazy in the patch that added Savage, with some lines in the patch notes being 'the effect is literally doubled, the CD is literally halved, etc.' It was fun to level, in its own twisted way, but as a playerbase, would we have learned to live with Healers being designed like that, demanding more GCD Healing usage? If WHM and SCH had been released at that level of HPS too, would people have thought the design was good? I doubt it, people would likely complain enough that SE would relent.

We can see from E.Dyskrasia, or VPR's debuff, that if it means less player friction, SE will absolutely backtrack on a decision. Heck, even WHM's Lilies, at the time a design of 'you lose a bit of damage for Healing, but far less than you would if you pressed Medica/Cure', were considered a 'trap' by some players, resulting in some just... not pressing Healing buttons, and so now, Misery is damage neutral. The playerbase, as a whole, is too enamored with 'do maximum damage at all times', even on non-DPS Roles, that any attempt to increase how many GCD Heals we do is likely doomed to failure, unless it is made 100% damage neutral like Sanctity will be. Hell, we got an entire expansion of MASSIVE HITBOX, in part because Tanks were not happy about how they had to disengage from the boss in E6S for four GCDs to point a Cone out of the arena. The damage loss of having to press Tomahawk or Shield Lob four times instead of 1231, caused certain players to whine like babies about 'my damage this sucks SE pleae'

Because of how Healers have been designed for so long, we've forgotten as a playerbase, some of the most basic basics of being a Healer. Like 'managing MP'. You say that in other MMOs, 'players understand you can mash green buttons', what MMO? Every MMO I've played, 'mashing green' gets you an empty mana bar and a dead party because 'sorry oom'. Medica costs 800MP according to the Evolved Demo. 'Mashing' that, would run you dry in about 40s, so unless they changed MP ticks to restore like 1000MP per 3s, no, you're not 'mashing' that

Again, I hate to repeat myself, but "Uuuuh....". You may want to check in on most classes in this game. The game is very intentionally designed with unnaturally simplistic class gameplay, in turn the combat is a "ballet" of never-ending quite specific movement and coordination requirements. Which do not care about your specific class, which would lead me to believe they originally went this route realizing they had started adding too many classes to do the gameplay class-side; but I have no verification for this, might be any other reason, too. In any case, failure statue is in the encounter, not the class. Ninja is maaaybe an exception since they can genuinely blow up their mudra combos.

The point is, in earlier raids in the game, there was a 'ballet' of sorts, but it was far less strict on the movement and coordination, because more complexity was coming from the Job kits. By reducing Job complexity, they have to increase Encounter complexity to compensate, else Savage would be easier and the Hardcore players would complain that it's now 'causal babby-fied' etc. What you're effectively saying is 'because they made it this way, now it has to stay this way and also double down on being this way', it's a self-feeding cycle. You know there's a lot of players who hold Stormblood as one of the greatest times in the game, in terms of content, in part because it was a better balance of Job and Encounter complexity? EX Roulette felt like less of a chore, because even in Hells Lid, you had the AST Card gameplay, Royal Roading to empower a Card, holding one for later with Spread, etc. Or spreading your DOTs (yes plural) through the trash pack on SCH with Bane, being able to buff allies with Fey Wind from Selene vs heal them with Whispering Dawn from Eos because it was a different toolkit instead of just a Glamour option, etc.

The idea that 'it's okay that they reduce Job complexity, because then Encounters can be more interesting' is a myth. For a start, it got us stuff like P6S and P7S, which are (IMO) two of the most boring fights in the whole game. But it also means that lower level content for a higher-skill player, is destined to be treated as nothing more than 'chores', because the Encounters in that content will never be able to match that player's threshold of 'I find this engaging'. And I dunno about anyone else (including SE) but having 90%+ of the content in the game fall into the category of 'stop complaining it's not designed for you, go do Savage' is a really strange design decision IMO. Why is EX Roulette 'not designed for me', I'm a player too, aren't I? Just because I do harder content, doesn't mean that I should have 'outgrown' content entirely. I should be able to go into such content and still have some ways to derive engaging gameplay from it

Meanwhile, the failure state being on the encounter, not the class, is arguably terrible design for casual players. Now, instead of something like a 24man in HW where a casual player could completely botch their rotation, but still clear because the mechanics were a lot more lenient (eg for Echidna in Void Ark, the only really threatening thing is Petrifaction), now instead we get something like Shadowlord's 'remember these three cleaves, also these two from an add, also this halfroom cleave, also this halfroom from a different add', or Kum'Lanaut's... everything, or whatever the heck visual mess the third boss uses in the new 24man. If you make a mistake in your rotation, or even just don't do your rotation at all and just spam 1111, it's a lot harder for someone to notice that in the chaos of battle without a TOS-breaking 3rd party tool, compared to the very obvious reward for your mechanical mistakes: Damage Down/Weakness/Brink icons in your debuff bar

Why are people still begging on encounter design to fix the issues

Wasn't that what people were saying about this expansion? I mean, there was some stuff that was 'different', like the 2nd boss in Meso throwing you in your own individual Jails but... Nothing I've seen in this expansion is something that makes me think 'wow, they could never have done this if we didn't go through several rounds of simplfication'

[Carighan]

Meanwhile, the failure state being on the encounter, not the class, is arguably terrible design for casual players.

Ah I might have worded that badly, I'm absolutely agreeing with this point. I don't like that design. It enables the ballet that is unique and engaging about FFXIV's harder raids like savages or ultimates, but it comes with a slew of design problems and flaws. I can see how they got here (mostly the overload of classes) but I don't like it.

Luckily as a hard failure-state this is mostly in extremes/savages/etc, but this also means any non-hard fight is inherently too easy.

[Valence]

Player behavior always has to be considered. This is just naive.

Its why the original cleric stance and tank stance dancing was removed.

I'm actually surprised you manage to speak about those two stance issues without having even played through the game when they were a thing.
It certainly doesn't resonate with my own experience, when I do have played through that time era.

I do believe they were removed for entirely different reasons having literally nothing to do with player greed at all.

[Supersnow845]

It also speaks that from someone who remembers that time the biggest concern wasn’t the existence of cleric stance it was that it had no cast time but a recast time

People didn’t like that it could be turned off then accidentally back on again given how bad the servers were back then. That was a way more common complaint than it actually existing

But apparently me remembering ARR is meaningless

[ty_taurus]

Heck, even WHM's Lilies, at the time a design of 'you lose a bit of damage for Healing, but far less than you would if you pressed Medica/Cure', were considered a 'trap' by some players, resulting in some just... not pressing Healing buttons, and so now, Misery is damage neutral. The playerbase, as a whole, is too enamored with 'do maximum damage at all times', even on non-DPS Roles, that any attempt to increase how many GCD Heals we do is likely doomed to failure, unless it is made 100% damage neutral like Sanctity will be.

I don't think it's a fair accusation to blame the playerbase with being too enamored with max damage. No matter what role you play, everyone has essentially the same core responsibility: Work together to win the fight as effectively and efficiently as possible. Damage is the metric that equates to raw progress for actually winning the fight, but healing is, to some degree, required along the way in standard content otherwise the party will be forced into a game over before that win condition can be met, whether the healer is the one doing the healing or not. Assuming they are, what is a more effective and efficient use of your resources? Healing the necessary party members, or healing the necessary party members and doing damage? The later is the obvious answer. In the past, it wasn't typically possible to do that all the time, so sacrificing your damage for healing was just a natural part of healer gameplay, but in modern FFXIV, there are a lot of circumstances where it's not particularly difficult to hold max DPS uptime while maintaining your healing. GCD healing has become frowned upon, generally speaking, because we have the knowledge that it probably wasn't necessary. The Shadowbringers Lily system would've been great during the time of ARR or HW where DPS loss was normal, but at the time of Shadowbringers, DPS loss was no longer very common for standard healer gameplay due to a variety of factors, so the system ended up feeling more like a pity system, and pity systems don't really feel good. But that's not the fault of the players, it's the fault of the devs.

Despite the devs' outright refusal to add anything to each healer's offensive, every single change they've ever made to the healer role has only made maximizing healer DPS uptime easier and easier. Almost every healing resource after ARR that's been added has been DPS neutral, removing old cleric stance, reducing standard attack spell cast times to ensure every cast has a weave window, streamlining fight design to be more heavily scripted and predictable, adding more healing to non-healers, making healer DPS mandatory for DPS checks, even the refusal to add more DPS variety itself just means the pressure to maximize uptime increases every time spell potency increases because then each GCD matters that much more. Almost your entire rotation's worth of potency is baked into one button, so every loss of that button hurts your damage so much more than if it was broken up across several actions.

All of these examples say the same thing: Deal. More. Damage.

Now, modern fights are balanced around this, so it's incredibly difficult to backtrack. What we need to do, devs included, is accept that reality of how fight design has changed and instead of fight that, build around it. Having ways to heal and get your damage back is a good way to do this, but it's something that should be decided based on player agency, not automatic timers or inherent aspects of your standard healing.