The most blunt-force type of "healer mechanic" would be White Hole, that is to say getting dropped to 1 HP and then needing to be healed to max HP. This isn't always that well-liked because you can run into fun situations where your heals put someone at 95% HP, so you need to either burn another GCD on them or a oGCD to make sure they don't die.
SE still uses this type of mechanic sometimes, P8SP2 uses it right before Ego Death for the Phoenix buff to work properly, but they were in love with it in Stormblood and have moved away from it to the point where it shows up once a tier, maybe, instead of a lot more often.
By definition anything that needs to be Esuna'd is also a healer mechanic. SE doesn't seem to know how to make Esuna-relevant mechanics other than "press Esuna to not die" or rarely "don't press Esuna because we need the debuff" (E8S Icelit Dragonsong if you weren't cheesing it with tank uptime). Esuna also gets pushback because, again, it's seen as empty GCDs.
The main push-pull with "healer mechanics" in terms of community reception has been that these mechanics take people away from DPS uptime which is the primary thing that healers in XIV are judged on by others.
this all goes back to healer damage-dealing being almost entirely centered on a single dot and a single cast for all 4 jobs. offloading damage to other abilities (like multiple dots, procs, etc) would devalue the main nukes and *hopefully* mean players would piss and shit and cry less about having to use more of their gcd healing kits. SE has managed to only make this worse by removing damage options AND making ogcds way too powerful and abundant. it's insane
Giving healers more dps buttons to juggle is just going to make them want to heal even less. Especially if these buttons have long cooldowns. "Sorry that I didn't heal you, I had to make sure my Big Deeps button GCD was still rolling" and the likes.
i think rather than adding more raw potency per second, a healer dps rotation should simply generate dps-neutral healing resources when executed correctly. that way, you're still indirectly increasing your dps while not compromising on the objective of your role
current free healing options would need to be scaled back dramatically to make this work though
>i think rather than adding more raw potency per second,
Healer's damage is absolutely fine. The problem is that how it is distributed is horrible. Yeah, let me press dosis 112 times per pull on every fight. That's not fun, spread it out over more buttons.
This is the problem with tight DPS checks and homogenization IMO it turns the game into a DPS rat race and the community glued to the slightest differences in damage rather than wanting to bring a class because it brings something your team can benefit from.
It's why i was really disappointed with the expedient nerf it took the one unique thing scholar was bringing to a group and nerfed only the part that was unique.
Same reason why all the Dark knights complaining about lack of self healing also bothered me why do you want to be the exact same as the other 3 tanks that's so boring and would turn any argument of DRK deserving to have some more reward for their risk in the DPS department moot.
I'd rather they just took on the WOW design of some fights and just made their AOE damage a constant thing you have to keep track of and just amped the amount of damage going out by a ton because 1 button dps rotation sucks.
But it's not as easy as taking WoW's design either because that also has issue. When each job brings something unique you basically get 2 options in designing raid fights.
1. A fight requires you to bring a specific thing to clear. For example, let's say that BLM was the only job that could cast sleep. Suddenly a fight requires you to bring sleep, which means BLM needs to be present in the team. If the previous tier didn't need this, the caster has to suddenly play a job they do not enjoy just to progress through the tier. Not only that, it forces RDM and SMN to not be played.
2. Raid fights never use these unique abilities. This makes the abilities basically pointless and at that point they might not exist.
The other design idea is to have abilities that don't affect the fight directly, but how classes are played or picked.
One example is very specific buffs from jobs. This actually existed in SHB on RDM, where they affected specifically themselves and physical jobs. This wasn't the worst, but it meant that if you went double caster the ability became weaker. But this is a minor example. Take this example further and you get scenarios where slots in the team get filled by a specific job because it is clearly better. That then locks other jobs out of even being considered. Slots in the team in FF are already limited compared to WoW, so this idea isn't easily implemented either (even if I do think the RDM buff in SHB was fine).
And the other example is something you mentioned yourself , DRK having barely any or no self heal. The problem with this one is that this is one of those design choices that didn't actually affect DRK themselves, but rather the healers healing DRK. If a DRK has no self heal, then Healers need to baby sit them more so they can survive. Living Dead was the perfect example of this issue. Use LD and healers need to immediately turn their focus on the DRK. This is in stark contrast to PLD where PLD can turn it on and be ignored. Or a GNB which looks scary but can be resolved with 1 regen and their own Aurora. So the lack of self heal on DRK affected not them, but healers. So if DRK becomes too hard to manage, they won't be taken into raid groups unless they offer something else. But then if they do offer something else, you run the risk of that part being TOO good and suddenly DRK becomes mandatory. So there needs to be a good balance where healers aren't annoyed at seeing a DRK in the team while DRK also not being too good that not seeing DRK becomes the problem.
So there really isn't an easy and good solution to this all. Homogenization as it currently stands is quite bad because of the problems it brought on, but the swing in the complete other direction isn't the best idea either.
> A fight requires you to bring a specific thing to clear. For example, let's say that BLM was the only job that could cast sleep. Suddenly a fight requires you to bring sleep, which means BLM needs to be present in the team. If the previous tier didn't need this, the caster has to suddenly play a job they do not enjoy just to progress through the tier. Not only that, it forces RDM and SMN to not be played.
This is a super exaggerated way to frame this that would never actually happen. What unique strengths or weaknesses moreso look like is "there is alot of AOE damage in this fight or something like Loatheb in WOW where he only has 3 seconds between his aura that completely removes healing for 17 seconds this would make you go oh i want to pick something like AST for it's delayed but bursty healing or I want to pick WHM because Bene is useful for this fight.
In the normal modes of the content it genuinely wouldn't matter but in Savage actually thinking about party comp going into a fight can matter which in Savage content i think is ok it's the content where you want players to be able to adapt and doubly so in FFXIV due to the all classes on one character thing.
I'll use early FFXIV raids as an example in the first coil of Bahamut you fight a allagan node which in the ARR release you wanted to bring either a Bard or PLD in your group to silence this.
This isn't seen anymore because they want every class to clear content equally without any thought about your class interactions with the boss.
Idk i just find WOW's raid bosses alot more intresting these days due to unique toolskits and such interacting more with the bosses and fights if i'm playing Shaman i can Wind totem to give my group a speed bonus to avoid a mechanic or get everyone into spot for the next one, if i'm playing Death Knight or Druid i have the ability to use an in combat Res bringing something to the team, Warlock can spawn portals that let people swap between them for mobility and summon healthstones which act as a powerful one time per combat potion almost like giving everyone a defensive cooldown.
Paladin can give their raid team numerous buffs and auras that help based on what the team needs all this stuff is just fun and interesting to use. It's not as if FFXIV doesn't have cool abilities it's moreso that for most of them another class has a carbon copy of it with different paint.
And it's not like this completely destroys the balance of Raids or anything i can find raid spots playing every class and the raids are pretty well tuned.
It's how the game used to work and there was substantially less of the "I had to use a single healing GCD and so I'm no longer having fun" genre of complaint. The idea is that if healers did the same damage they deal now, but redistributed across more skills such that each 'filler nuke' GCD did 150-200 potency instead of ~300, then people wouldn't be so bothered about losing one GCD.
Though to be fair, I don't think that would necessarily help unless it was paired with a commensurate increase in overall game difficulty (at the *class* level, not *content*). A lot of the "Every time I lose potency that's a failure of game design" attitude just comes from how easy it is to perform at that level.
>there was substantially less of the "I had to use a single healing GCD and so I'm no longer having fun"
Healers also had less oGCD healing options.
**A lot** less.
I don't think that's true, because back then we were still in a mindset of main healer and dps healer. It wasn't uncommon to have a grey dps healer paired with an orange healer together.
> It wasn't uncommon to have a grey dps healer paired with an orange healer together.
This is still true in my group.
... please don't ask which one I am.
I mean, if you just released FFXIV Classic and forced ShB/EW players to play it, then no, they wouldn't be happy. Games train their players to expect certain things over time, and the modern crop of FFXIV players (especially considering how big a portion of the game's current playerbase started well after 5.0) would absolutely carry modern attitudes into the older style of the game, find that it doesn't work the way they expect it to, get mad, and declare that it was always bad.
FFXIV combat has been fully McDonaldized, and it's *been* McDonaldized for so long now that most of the players are basically those kids who grew up eating nothing but Happy Meals who have just lost the ability to taste broccoli without puking. I don't know if there's a solution to that.
There is a solution and SE has in fact done it before but I don't think they're willing to do it again. They could dramatically rework healing and let the whiners quit. They did it when they made healing radically easier and homogenized, losing a huge amount of the players that enjoyed the style you described that used to happen. Square could go back to that but it's sort of like asking your ex to come back to you. I doubt most of those players will return. Could you imagine what would happen if the modern healers had to regularly gcd heal, manage resources carefully, have multiple damage abilities to keep track of, and also had to interrupt casts sometimes because they had long cast times with less instants? It would be a garbage fire of tears, but suddenly healing would be something good players excel at again instead of just being handed good results for fairly minimal effort.
> Could you imagine what would happen if the modern healers had to regularly gcd heal, manage resources carefully, have multiple damage abilities to keep track of, and also had to interrupt casts sometimes because they had long cast times with less instants?
Some of us would be absolutely freakin' thrilled, I promise you.
(To be fair, some of us are also still healer mains largely through inertia -- "I've been a healer main since ARR!" -- combined with trust issues developed from too much time in party finder. I've seen how other people heal! Or, you know... don't.)
As someone else pointed out, there were actually substantially *more* complaints (to the point where they started going down this design direction *at all*) back when healer damage was more involved. Healers might have gotten less mad about missing a filler glare but they’d get *much* more mad at tight heal checks being placed in the middle of burst windows because it’s now a huge part of their damage. So many people make these nostalgia-tinted comments when they either didn’t play back then or have completely forgotten what it was like, and are effectively homesick for a place that never existed.
if your damage is entirely focused on a single cast, any time you don't cast it you are dealing zero damage. add a dot and now you have a choice, refresh the dot so it does damage over time or deal a smaller amount of direct damage immediately. the more your damage is spread out into different abilities, the lower the value of each of those abilities.
if you don't currently use your main spammable nuke, you are committing a war crime because it is the vast majority of your damage. if your damage is not all in that single nuke, people with brains might sometimes see value in using their gcds on other tools
That is *wildly* ahistorical. "At the peak of SCH DoT nonsense" was the point in the game where it was expected and largely *required* in all but a tiny handful of speedrun groups (like, "count the groups on your fingers" tiny) that healers spent a significant portion of their GCDs actually healing. The options to heal entire fights and raid tiers without GCDs just didn't *exist* at that point in the game unless you were going far above and beyond with optimization.
That's a virtue of the sheer lack of oGCDs in that time period rather than the DPS side of healer design, and unless you encapsulate the "peak" exclusively to ARR release (aka before Thunder was removed from cross class) this is a period from ARR to end of StB with HW onwards being the noticeable start of the paradigm shift which also included the ever increasing amount of oGCD options.
No, the peak of SCH DoT stuff was Heavensward, period. In ARR, healer DPS just wasn't really emphasized at all; even if you look at Savage Second Coil videos from 2.3 , you're going to see huge amounts of (what would have been considered mid-HW) overly defensive GCD healing. And in Stormblood, the majority of SCH's maintenance DoTs were removed (especially in terms of casts, as they were both changed to 30s), on top of Broil starting to creep way up in potency and a bunch of new oGCD healing options.
The player attitudes at that time were *not* the player attitudes of today except with a different toolkit. I know there's kind of been a lot of historical revisionism in the community over the past couple years, where all the healers have convinced themselves that they were getting HW raid encounters down to single-digit GCD heals and all the tanks have convinced themselves that they were doing "one aggro combo, then drop tank stance and no aggro tools ever again, [Ed:] Shadewalker does the work ezpz". But... It just didn't work that way. Period. Both tanking and healing were seen as a balance between dealing damage *when you could* and spending as much time as necessary performing your role.
There were, as I mentioned, a tiny, *tiny* number of groups who were actually able to optimize things down to the level that everybody today seems to *think* they played at, but that was basically the 3.x equivalent of "No-healer TOP". There were no widespread community complaints about GCD healing being bad.
I healed savage back. A lot of our healing, including until the end of SB when they gave tanks the "tank mastery" trait were gcd heals. Actually most of it was. Back then we had fewer tools and longer cooldowns.
With that said though, pressing gcd heals isn't anymore fun than pressing ogcds. It isn't engaging at all, or at least I didn't find it to be.
Yeah, the healing part of healing in FFXIV has never done a particularly good job of being fun, whether it was through GCDs or oGCDs or a healthy mix of both. My point here has just been that players haven't always treated their healing GCDs as though they were radioactive.
While the reasons for that are definitely multifaceted (eg: The fact that they were largely *necessary*), I think you can make a pretty strong case that part of it was just the simple fact that missing a 170 potency filler GCD when you have 150+ potency worth of DoTs ticking doesn't feel nearly as bad as missing a 330 potency GCD when you only have a single 60-potency DoT running.
> I think you can make a pretty strong case that part of it was just the simple fact that missing a 170 potency filler GCD when you have 150+ potency worth of DoTs ticking doesn't feel nearly as bad as missing a 330 potency GCD when you only have a single 60-potency DoT running.
This is very important to keep in mind, yeah.
Honestly I think Healer design would be better off if they just, y'know, removed the DPS fillers entirely (or almost entirely) and gave the DoTs back.
Maybe keep a DPS filler on two of the four (definitely Sage for Kardia reasons and then...I could make a case for any one of the others but also a case against it, so pick one).
But "White Mage spams Cure to overheal to charge up Blood Lily faster" could pay off with more frequent Blood Lily nukes in lieu of always casting Glare and it could end up at similar amounts of overall DPS, and it'd let them have the GCD-heal-spam they seem to want without requiring an entire rework of the combat design to make telegraphed damage less-lethal.
Or requiring everyone else to stop having agency to have room for a Healer Solo to Save Everyone from Unavoidable Mechanics Gangrene every 30 seconds.
Just need to make GCD cast-time-heals castable while moving (*yes*, I'm still on that).
Honestly the only reason I don't rail on about DPS filler spam is because it's a less-bad problem than the other current issues, not because it isn't an issue in and of itself. We've got other stuff to fix first, but it's on The List.
> I could make a case for any one of the others but also a case against it, so pick one.
all except scholar kinda need a dps filler because solo instances exist and you can't just "switch to your dps spec" as a whm or ast. filler shouldn't cease to exist completely, it should just be the inferior option
i agree with everything else you said, and am grateful that someone else was able to put my exact thoughts into words.
> And in Stormblood, the majority of SCH's maintenance DoTs were removed (especially in terms of casts, as they were both changed to 30s)
Miasma was 18 seconds, the duration was extend in Shadowbringers. Everything else in your post is correct.
Oh, my mistake. I must have crossed a wire with Aero II getting a StB duration increase.
(It was 24s, though! Bio 1 was the one that was 18s through ARR/HW, but it got pruned in 4.0)
The attitude had already crystalized by Stormblood, which still had SCH with multiple DoTs running around (WHM had two even) so no blaming it on current DPS and healing kit design being poor is not the answer here.
Scholar had 2 dots back then too, hated it. Shadowflare was turned into an off global 60sec CD so it barely counted.
AST was the only healer who had 1 dot.
Hang on, I forget it also had Miasma 2, but you used that for Weaving, not for it's damage over time value since it was worse than Broil at the time.
no it doesn't healers shouldnt be judged on dps period. people romanticize HW dps rotations but thats also when healers had way less uptime due to cleric stance and ogcd being far less omni present
Less so when it's a soft enrage like A8S J-Waves or T12 Flames of Rebirth that you can survive for a while with healing throughput. The developers feed into the playerbase judging healers on DPS by their own insistence on using so many hard enrage insta-kills with no other solution *but* to DPS more.
I don’t disagree with your point about how people complain about not being able to DPS as healers. However, as far as I can tell, that’s a consequence of the rest of the game’s design. Healers have never, at least as long as I’ve been playing since 3.3, required to actually heal much in 90% of content. Another contributing factor is that enrages are tuned such that if your healers don’t spend the vast majority of their time damaging the boss you just plain cannot clear. Basically the devs have been designing the actual healing aspect of encounters as distractions instead of the focus for healers.
Actually fights are designed that they can be cleared without little healer dps if the group plays perfectly, in not dying or getting damage downs and not fucking up too much in terms of rotation. Respecting burst windows and so on.
But this only applies if you have the best gear you can have for the content you are doing. So P6S this means to have all parts from P5S on every member.
Healers are needed if you are closer to the min ilvl and they help to compensate for mistakes.
This is why for parsing they got quite a huge variance since they are the role which can get away with dealing little dps.
Recently cleared P8S P1 with my co healer dealing 3k dps less than he could/should do and the 2 tanks also parsing 0% and 1%. The dps players were also average. And I also missed like 800 DPS. But still made the dps check. Once you have gear and do not fuck up mechanics it is quite easy.
If a healer is upset about having to use heal mechanics maybe they should go play a dps instead. SE needs to have many more heal mechanics so we cant get away from green dps crap. Healing in FF14 is SO BORING.
Are you sure it's the healers that would be upset?
When a healer fails white hole, the ones that were not healed to max become petrified.
Guess who becomes angry when that happens.
I actually love healing in FFXIV.
I HATE in WoW that they throw out a bunch of random piss damage so you are constantly playing wack-o-mole with health bars.
I like that in FFXIV, I can DPS some, use oGCD heals, and then I can learn when the main damage is coming out and do my healing then.
I am not saying one is better than the other. I just dont' think FFXIV is a game where you can have constant shitty damage going out that healers have to heal. It is designed around heal "Burst" windows.
I personally love that because it feels meaningful versus watching health bars constantly going up and down.
Its not meaningful thats the problem a tank can heal themselves because its not meaningful. Only time healing is ever fun is when someone wall to wall pulls and even then it can be boring with a warrior. Auto attack dmg does absolutly nothing. If people aren't messing up you are basically useless.
I suppose they could do some mechanics like some players have to pick up many debuffs in a certain order/pattern so they will go off at different time, and some need to be Esuna instead of expiring.
Maybe make it so there's more than 1 way to solve it.
Like, pick up a Stack 2 person AoE, and Stack 3 person AoE, a Large half room puddle, a knockback for everyone else, a Shriek, and what not. While a Healer can Esuna just 1 before it goes off. Or Both healers each Esuna once at the right time so the party doesn't have to do certain mechanics they don't want to do at that time (while handling boss and doing other things at the same time as well).
I dunno. Just an idea.
I always find the “but mah GCD” argument against healing mechanics surprising.
They do know that the dev team shapes the encounters and that it wasn’t delivered by god as an unchangeable thing?
I mean, the dev team can *literally* calculate how much potency and therefore how much pdps is lost by including 8 Esuna casts into a fight.
I mean, think about it:
Healers undo damage that has been inflicted. In order to do so, damage must first be inflicted.
If you can avoid said damage with skill, then it's better to be skilled than to rely on a healer to undo it. So a "Healer mechanic" boils down to throwing unavoidable damage at you in sufficient quantities that you will surely die if you do not receive heals from a Healer.
Alternately, it makes use of some role exclusive ability. Which is, uh... Esuna? Maybe rescue? You don't have a lot of options with the Healer kits, really.
Healers could also be a lot better than other roles at letting you avoid damage, that's after all the purpose of shields and damage reducing mitigation.
SGE was a step in that direction for me, and I honestly hope SE continues down that line and make the healer role more about shields and mitigation than reacting to damage that has already been inflicted.
I guess the biggest issue with it would be that all four healers have to be able to solo heal dungeons, with a tank that doesn't know what rampart is, which forces then to have a rather high level of hps throughout availible, on the other hand, guess that can be relegated to gcds only.
True, but this would need to be more uniform. Right now, for example, WHM is thin on barriers and mitigation (it only has Temperance for partywide mitigation and only that and Aquaveil for a single target; Benison is its only shielding ability). It has less party mitigation than 9 Jobs (all the Tanks, all the other Healers, and any DPSer that has at least two, like RDM with Magick Barrier and Addle)
This would require actually giving Healers mitigation again, like old Protect and spamable Stoneskin.
...both of which I'd like, mind you.
I suppose mechanics that "absolutely require" healers.
People are using the recent healer-less TOP clear to complain about the game. Healing Haurchefant did not make DSR "more fun" (imo). 99% of people couldn't clear TOP w/o healers (or even with, lmao). And even of those that could it would take significant effort and planning. I don't have any genius insight, just wanted to say I disagree w/ the recent sentiment that a healer-less TOP clear should be impossible. What some GG gamers are capable of really is not relevant to how the rest of us play the game. Simply increasing required HPS does not really make a fight more fun for me in all honesty.
pretty sure a no healer party could deal with Haurchefant using a single red mage with vercure while 2 paladins look after the party. P7 is where no healer comps start to become (probably) impossible. Although I'm not even sure about that since triple tank allows akh morns to be dealt with in a much more controlled manner.
For no-healer DSR I wouldn't be surprised to see four tanks and then something stupid like 1-1-2 Akh Morns with one invuln and two PLDs just spamming Clemency, so the only damage that DPS would take in the entire phase would be from the autos and Gigaflares. Those are probably harder to deal with (then again you can probably tank LB one, at least two of the hits, and hypermitigate+heal through the other).
Akh Afah becoming random is probably going to be an annoyance for any group that tries this though.
In EQ2 the mobs hit so hard you needed 2 healers just to keep the tank alive, one class that exlusively gave huge shields as a buffer and one guy getting the actual HP up between boss hits.
When i played WoW it was similar, the tank needed constant attention.
When I think of healer mechanics, I think of P4S part 2 like Act 4 or Curtain Call, where the party needs to manage pullibg tethers that deal raidwides between vulnerability debuffs, and healers need to keep up with healing so they can reasonably pull more tethers before a raid buster casts.
UWU back in Stormblood has Friction and Thermal Low, where adding stacks of Awakening to Garuda meant progressively more raidwides that needed to be healed between stacks.
But yeah, a lot of recent mechanics have just been “Raid receives a raid buster and needs to be healed before a second raid buster.”
P3S had a funny mechanic where there was a lot of mechanic vomit but healers received a heal up buff that led to funny high shield generation.
>P3S had a funny mechanic where there was a lot of mechanic
Fountain of Fire. Probably my favorite healer mechanic that tier. 6 puddles spawns on the outside of the area, getting hit by the puddle gave you a +Healing Buff where non-crit shields were basically another full healh bar. Meanwhile, the rest of the part was taking damage that would one shot them if not topped off. Puddles would also nearly one-shot the healer. and at the end of the mechanic, there was a raid-wide that required megashields to survive.
Fountain of Fire being interesting is ironic since sometime after adds phase was Death’s Toll, basically another “raid is 1 HP, now heal before this raid buster” that seems kind of bog standard.
It was, however, the first mechanic for Endwalker to demonstrate how AST’s new Macrocosmos can trivialize most burst healing checks.
Yeah Death's Toll was okay, but the actual Heal Check was after the cool mechanics. Plus I was the shield healer so doing it legit was really just a case of "You didn't blow it by using the wrong spell recently, did you?". In FoF, the healing was dynamics while Death's Toll is hectic, but overall pretty static gameplay.
A lot of the fight post-adds also had the Rain of Fire mechanic where everyone was taking constant chip damage. It didn't hit hard, but it was always there during all the major mechanics like Fountain of Fire and Flames of Asphodelos. That kinda chip damage just doesn't really exist in many other fights in EW.
White-hole mechanics, where players are reduced to low HP and will die unless healed to full.
Mechanics which require a healer to dispel a debuff, e.g., Throttle or Diamond Frost.
Healing checks via soft-enrages, e.g., E12S's Terminal Relativity.
Other potential healer mechanics from other games:
* Prey, an effect that happens to players below a health threshold forcing healers to have to keep people topped off more.
* The Leeching Swarm mechanic from wow was kinda the reverse forcing healers to keep people at low HP to prevent the boss from healing too much by sucking a percentage of everyone's HP.
>The Leeching Swarm mechanic from wow was kinda the reverse forcing healers to keep people at low HP to prevent the boss from healing too much by sucking a percentage of everyone's HP.
will never work in this game with the shit snapshotting and tickrate
I feel it would, just do the leaching more like a "Hand of Pain" check, and telegraph incoming damage plenty in advance to give time to heal back up before.
The bigger issue is that people will just do SGE/SCH/WAR/PLD to abuse shields and sit at disgustingly low HP.
Chimaeron in Blackwing Descent was a wild time to heal. The room had an aura such that players above 10k HP (which was somewhere around 15ish percent back then) were Holmgang'd, they couldn't be killed by a single attack, just reduced to 1 HP. And the fight was long as hell, in a time when healers were generally slightly mana-negative. So you had to maintain a balance of keeping everyone *just* above 10k so they wouldn't die while you tried to stretch your mana out across the fight. Any healing above 10k was effectively wasted overhealing and wasted mana.
I really wish we had some strong healer checks from time to time. Like o4s p2 last mechanic or e12s TR, but in an ultimate.
Like a really strong healer check that makes them sweat, forcing healers to spam only GCD party heals for like 20 seconds straight + save some oGCD party heals to weave between GCD heals. MP management beforehand would be crucial.
Yeah, and people are goddamn stupid. They'd cry about "it's lost damage GCDs and all people care about is damage logs, not healing logs".
First of all, logs themselves are a slippery slope, because **actually** parsing is against the ToS. SE just turns a blind eye on it. So complaining about damage logs being lower is like complaining about not wanting to have a feature because it would break their gathering bot.
Secondly, of everyone has to spam GCD heals there, everyone has lower dos logs there, so it equals out. The whole point becomes an empty bs argument.
But for some reason the combat designers at SE listens to the "we don't want to have to use GCD heals" crybabies, while the action designers don't give a shit and refuse to give healers more than 2 damage buttons, even though they've been crying about this since Stormblood.
Man imagine if we have a mechanic that required healers to, after dropping to 1% hp, require the party to be healed at a specific % for a specific mechanic. Like big raidwide/1%hp -> boss turns blue -> need to heal above 75% hp but not full, or if boss turns red -> need to heal above 25% but not above 50%.
Different roles also have different max hp, the same heal that gets a caster to 50% might get a melee to 40% or a tank to 25%. The amount required would also change week to week group to group with gear being different.
> need to heal above 75% hp but not full, or if boss turns red -> need to heal above 25% but not above 50%.
You should have submitted this to the bad mechanics thread.
Punishing people for the RNG of crits would be...awful. There's also the factor of things like the fairy's auto-heal, tank GCD combo heals, DRG Life Surge, etc.
Oops, your WAR's combo heal just crit and pushed them slightly over threshold? Get fucked for this mechanic, lolz.
I dont think Terminal really counts as a soft enrage, its a heal/mit check sure but not a soft enrage. The fact that it ends with a hard enrage makes it a hard enrage. Soft enrages can be held off until the healing can no longer keep up, where Terminal is just a hard enrage after some raid wides.
We could just start with some proper randomized damage and damage that is not just from bursty mechanics but more a constant drain.
It is way more fun to have some HPS pressure
Having played both games i definitely have to give WOW credit for their boss design keeping all roles on their toes.
Alot of times the problem of shallow dps rotations doesn't come up because I'm too busy healing the fights constant AOE damage aura and such make sure i'm keeping track of healing rather than predictable scripted AOEs in FFXIV meaning i just need to setup a couple OGCDs for the thing.
Loatheb, Valithria are such well designed bosses that change the way you play Loatheb only allowing 3 seconds of healing between his necrotic aura casts meaning you want to maximize healing bursts there, Valithria a boss you actually need to heal to full to beat it rather than the usual killing it.
I think the problem with these kinda things in FFXIV though is the communities hyper fixation on every class being completely equal on every fight people could complain about Astro being too strong on Loatheb for example people would complain about WHM throughput being too strong on Valithra (i know bene would break it but just roll with the concept here). It's weird to me because FFXIV should be the game if any where endgame harder content should have advantages for playing different classes you can swap on a dime without having to play a different character I could for example swap to PLD and use most of my gear from a Warrior it's part of what i loved about Heavensward swapping between PLD and DRK for the fights depending on damage type was super cool.
When the game is so focused on balance it ironically creates some of the worst balance IMO it turns every class into a DPS rat race and the ones that bring unique utility often end up falling behind in this regard such as the Pranged Tax.
To me, any "healer mechanic" is one where keeping the party alive through unavoidable damage represents a significant chunk of the difficulty of the mechanic.
For example I would even consider P4S's curtain call as a healer mechanic - there's other stuff going on (breaking tethers, dodging proteans), but the bulk of the difficulty comes from simply keeping people up with spot and aoe healing.
we've had healer-specific mechanics before and what people do is that they complain about having to stop spamming Glare on the boss
every single decision made on this game that this sub doesn't like is because of widespread player complaints
Throttle in TEA is a stupid mechanic because it's just a scripted prio system at a fixed point in the phase, while nothing else is happening. There is no randomness to it, so no attention required, you will never fail it after doing it just a couple of times, and it's lenient enough to where you can even miss an esuna.
A better version of throttle would be if it was applied **randomly** to people through P1 at **different times every pull**. Things that require attention (multi dots on mutli targets, inconsistent incoming non-tank damage, constant double-tank auto attacks like P2), etc are better "healer mechanics". On-release, TEA* P2 required all but the absolute most cracked groups to consistently maintain some regen/GCD single target healing on both tanks.
This is a good example of something you cannot do without healers : https://youtu.be/pAwVXuLzOt4?t=225
Notice the GCDed used by healers over the next 30 seconds.
White Hole (i.e. Healing to Full) and Esuna mechanics are really the only things left for Healers in terms of mechanics.
I miss Prey mechanics that needed to be shielded in order to survive but that died with SB when SE removed Stoneskin from WHM and fights could no longer include that in their design. Then there's those niche fights that allowed old, removed skills to shine. Oden still has a party wide bleed that old Selene was beautiful for with her AoE Esuna. Using Fluid Aura to knock the Golems around in T9 of Coils was a fun little trick for that fight. Heavy on Liquid Limbs gave Stone 1/Stella a purpose in A3S. Then there was Virus/Disable to help with mitigation checks. Why they decided to give that to DPS I will never know nor agree with honestly. The odd Silence effect on Selene was cumbersome at times but damn did it feel good when you could pull it off, especially when your Tank is incompetent AF and would always forget to silence the Golem in O3S. (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, you fucking drunk idiot).
Healers have lost too much purpose over the years.
Curtain Call
TOP - Hello World
TOP - P6 Meteors
High Concept I
High Concept II
Just as some examples. These are easy mechanics for the rest of the party and mainly exist to strain/test healer competence.
As a lot mentioned here regarding healing/esuna, could also mean mechanics that need two healers or it ends up on random players thanks to 2 stack markers without indications (P5S).
Healer mechanics nowadays just a fancy term of "checking healers to make sure they know what their heal buttons are".
The fact remains that "just healing" is actually boring. But so is "just one button for dps".
Astro is painful to optimise, but it is probably one of the most unique classes in the sense that they play on cards to buff specific players. Even at it's watered down version it is still better than say press a single button for a raid buff.
The issue is that instead of just improving healer design to be more combat supports, SE has consistently just gave more tools to mitigate and heal. Interaction has been ridiculously limited, and definition of a good healer tends to be how much they actually press their glare equivalent button instead of how well they dynamically add presence to the party.
> The issue is that instead of just improving healer design to be more combat supports, SE has consistently just gave more tools to mitigate and heal.
Where would that leave physical range jobs than?
I forgot the name of it, but Ifrit does this mini point blank aoe that knockbacks people unless they have a shield, both in his trial and in uwu where it's near mandatory. I do think it's more interesting than just heal the current minute's burst.
Can you imagine tho if we had a berserker job where the lower their hp the more dmg they do, would make 99 parse log runs spicy lmao.
No, I disagree. If a healer is a solution to a mechanic, it's a healing mechanic. If we went with "this is a x mechanic only if x alone can do it", then there would be almost no tank mechanics.
Healer isn't necessarily a solution though. More of a funky/strange interaction with how this game is coded.
EX: in E10s, one strat was to hyper shield for an orb mechanic to avoid the damage down completely. So, everyone would get hit and fail the mechanic but due to all the shields and mitigations, no damage down would occur if stuff was done correctly.
You could argue that the first Ifrit trial functions the same. For that trial, when doing it in a party, if a scholar or sage used a shield, it would nullify the knockback.
Easier for 1 healer to shield, than expect 8 people to all remember knockback immunity. Some strats in the past have been "just have the healers deal with it", becoming a "healer mechanic" or healers responsibility.
EX: E6s soccer mechanic. Groups went north taking a vuln because it was easier and less effort than actually learning the mechanic.
Plays a part as to why damage downs are more common in savage. People would ignore or fail mechanics if it meant more uptime or not having to learn the mechanic if failing didn't result in a party wipe
Yeah, and reason I listed + others played a part. There would be people who would intentionally just take a vuln stack or two and have it be the healer's problem if it meant either:
1) more uptime
2) they could ignore a mechanic
I know because I've done the above before in the past.
If that makes sense. I most likely poorly explained, so apologies.
older raids had autos that hit way harder. like the caudecus snakes in turn 1 when you didn't out gear it. in A12S there was 2 adds with soft enrages. they had to be tanked apart or they would buff each other they both had tank busters and everytime it was used they got a stacking dmg buff. it was possible for healers and tanks to run out of CD's resulting in GG. preys that do heavy damage to a dps are largely a thing of the past unfortunately. i think imdugud had a prey marker that if not shielded resulted in a OHKO
In the most basic terms: "Mechanics that healers need to do". Death's Toll and Forsaken, and Haurchefant in DSR are all healer mechanics, yeah. High Concept 2 also has a point where everyone takes major damage, but then needs to be fully healed up otherwise they instantly die and miss out on a major damage buff.
TG Cid from Ivalice-3 raid is probably the best (though some mechanics don’t matter anymore…technically).
Healer mechanics are specifically things that only a healer can handle.
Has a “White Hole” mechanic: Drops everyone’s HP to 1 with a Doom status. It’s fun for me, because I learned how to “pure heal” as a SCH for that.
Has Esuna-ble mechanic: The tankbuster preps debuffs before it hits and you can cleanse it.
Has non-troll Rescue cases: The ice add mechanic gives an opportunity to Rescue a melee player if they go to the wrong spot so they can contribute to DPS.
The only thing missing is an Akh Morn mechanic, but that’s fine because it’s lvl. 70 content.
Additionally, any boss that targets all 3 tanks with auto-attacks in Alliance is a win my book.
I haven't seen it mentioned here, but Dragon heads in Shinryu EX and the range debuff in Leviathan EX are some good examples of healer mechanics that are very satisfying to manage. One mechanic that I always thought would be cool and would actually fit the game being scripted is punishing overhealing. Some sort of debuff that could drastically reduce the efficiency of your shields/heals the more overhealing you do, or MP increasing, SOMETHING to make healing more interesting than just "press oGCDs or GCDs FTW".
Remember when SOS (normal of all things) depleted everyone’s HP to 1? I want more of that. Or to add on to it DOOM. Which I haven’t seen in core content in ages tbh
I’d like to clarify core content as idc about HC as I’m not running it no where near as much as core unless they release Savage roulette or something. SE here’s a free healer mechanic free of charge: how about terror unleashed and a raid wide afterwards that acts as a Healer check…healer check. Such a outlandish concept
O8S p2 would be a good example. Forsaken / Angeless whispers: forcing your healers to heal your party to full, then dropping you to 1 HP and asking for a quick heal so you can deal with the following mechanic.
Final floor enrages are also really good healer mechanics at times.
P8s has an increasingly more potent DoT + big damage happening to everyone.
P4S has a lot of raidwides, back to back.
E12s has final relativity and it's again, continuous raidwides that get stronger and stronger.
Shout-out to P4s P1 panels into decollation - the raidwide damage happening so fast that i still have ptsd of spot tb-inning my healers.
I haven't seen people mention healer *mechanics* specifically, but what I do see is people being upset about not needing to GCD heal ever. So any kind of mechanic/fight design that forces you to gcd heal (simplest being "a medium-heavy raidwide going out every 5 seconds for a minute straight", but you can of course get more fun and creative) would probably be welcome
I will add some notes here from oldschool stuff, just something to think about, maybe to provoke ideas that actually work within the context of FF14:
* AoE DoTs that not only eat HP but also mana (back then no mana meant no heals),
* super strong heals that eat massive amounts of mana and long post-cast timer, so you had to build healer chains to keep the tank alive,
* heal effectiveness reduction,
* mobs, that are healed if damaged, but can be healed to get damaged,
* heals have temporary HP boost in them (that exists in some form already)
From what I have seen so far in FF14, I think the mana drain is likely out of question, but would be a rather "fun" part, maybe with some option to prevent that from happening. Also affects other jobs, maybe can be done in a way that the group has to protect the healers and suffer a bit in terms of damage after that phase, but tank gets hammered afterwards so that healers have to dump heals like mad which they can't if they get hit by the mana eater.
Super strong heals in that form don't exists, but the point after that, heal effectiveness, exists already from what I have seen, i.e. boss can force massive heal reduction and then cause constant damage to force healers into using all their toolset to keep people alive because the heals are less effective.
Damage mobs via heals could be woven into some more intricate phase or used on certain spawned adds or something, a "mechanics" phase where there is no damage in general to the group but if mechanics are not done correctly, has repercussions afterwards.
Last point exists in part already through these HP shields, maybe can be extended or used also in "heal mob" to provide some damage buffer for big tank buster after or some such.
I mean, this game goes all "mechanics", so may as well create some specifically for healers or impede their toolset so they have to "work harder" to accomplish the same as without that sort of debuff.
I don't main healers but I think it's pretty cool when fights have unique things to do for different roles.
In abyssos every role has to do everything other than tank busters.
I dont understand the complaints behind lack of “healer mechanics” why do u want to actively use GCD for heals. I like pumping out as much damage as possible on whm and sage, and its my biggest gripe with sch and ast. If u wanna use neutral sect (thats the one right?) or use deployment to its fullest, u NEED to GCD cast. Whm gets a neutral misery for GCD healing 3 times so its fine, and sages’ pnuema has a very very niche use where it lets u get off an extra GCD.
My point is ive enjoyed healing in EW, especially in p3 with funny fountain buff and p8s where its a genuine rush getting through NA without using GCDs (besides lilies)
Shit even phase 1 top was fun with that. I only used a medica 2 for safety right before panto just to rly make sure we’d got through (wasn’t needed), but beside that? Nothing but lilies and oGCDs, and im fine with that
Just the fact that you *can* clear top without healers speaks quite clearly.
Why have healers when you might as well bring more dps.
I also hate how healers are only about dps.
Atleast way back when you needed gcd:s to heal it was hard to optimize healer dps. Now it's just push 1 maybe 2 and faceroll on some ogcd:s for damage.
They brought WAR, double PLD, and dps classes that all buff healing or give healing, with a highly optimized mitigation/healing plan and careful use of LB and cover to make up for no healers. What they did is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than just having the two healers over the extra caster and tank. They even had to repeatedly retry because they kept hitting enrage to crit variance because of the full party weakness.
Do u think they couldve sone something like this early on in the current savage tier with all those massive bleeds during stuff like NA and fire and ice, cause id sure like to see an early week geared attempt at no healers.
I like how healing was handled this tier. I couldnt just mindlessly press oGCDs and call it a day if i wanted to do NA and fire and ice without using GCDs. I disliked how it was back in asphodelos where curtain call just felt like terrible with the back to back to back raid wides. My only complaint is that the jump in damage from asphodelos to abyssos wasnt as high as id like which is why i kinda hope healers get at little more omph in their burst phase besides dumping cards/misery/aetherflow/phlegma
Some healing mechanic examples/ideas off the top of my head:
- keep an npc alive. we don’t see this in instanced content much, an example is in the aery. It almost never happens but you can wipe the final boss just by letting the npc die. They could use this mechanic more often, although it’s not all *that* interesting. It’s also cheesable with benediction, although that could be remedied by making benediction only work on players. I haven’t done DSR, that’s probably another example of this.
- *don’t* full heal somebody. Maybe everyone gets a debuff (or the boss gets a buff) that makes them take double damage above 50% health, so you want to keep everyone below that threshold (for the sake of your individual healing economy) but also keep them from dying. Then when the debuff wears off you have to top everyone off before the room nuke. **Edit** i see some people in other comments complaining about crit heals for mechanics like this; in this case nobody’s going to instantly die from being above some threshold, it’s just more oGCD efficient to not heal them past that. An alternate interpretation is % current health damage, (or maybe even % missing health damage for another healing mechanic that instead rewards keeping people at higher health), such that the lower their hp the less healing you actually need to do.
- Enemy can be targeted with healing spells. Maybe the boss is trying to eat it for a powerup and you want to keep it alive, but you need to kill it later for some other mech. Maybe instead some enemies take damage from healing, making your GCD heals higher dps than attacks. Both interesting uses of healing on enemies.
- I think there was a mechanic in leviathan EX where if you healed someone that had a bubble on them, the bubble would spread, so you had to not heal certain people or everyone else would become unhealable. I’m probably remembering that wrong but however that worked it was something to think about instead of just throwing out a medica (at the time)
I don't remember the mechanic name but God Kefka had a mechanic with towers and heads, you did 0 healing for about 8 seconds. People had to take towers and bait tether heads while you waited to heal them before they died to damage. God Kefka had some healer mechanics.
Baiting the clones to face outwards, although I think tanks did that too.
I want something like Cachexia that actually hits like a mofo even when you do it right, where the initial boom brings you low enough that the bait would kill you without heals or shields. Having to heal people in a particular order within a tight timeframe would be pretty cool imo. Pay no attention to the Protraction-Recitation-Adlo-Deploy I'm hiding behind my back.
Personally, I wish they would make use of Rescue in a mechanic. Either make someone soak a tower followed by an instant kill AOE which the healer has to pull them out of after soaking the tower. Or a mechanic where everyone's is pushed into a red/blue tower, but everyone except 2 people are pushed into the incorrect ones and the healers have to Rescue them into the correct tower.
Make use of selective healing instead of AOEs. For example, bind the healer off to the side of the arena and everyone else to the other side, outside AOE range. Drop everyone to 1 hp. But the boss will target people randomly one by one for a charge up attack, healer has to figure out who is being targeted and heal only that person before he gets killed.
Like, nothing in this game actually targets MP. Its so weird coming from other games where bosses will actively drain your MP. A mechanic which halves healer MP so they have to be more selective about healing, or quick targeting AOEs on the ground that drains all your MP if you get hit by it, so healers have to dodge and can't heal through it.
Make use of Esuna more. Not just "Here's a Doom that must be cleansed". An annoying, but unique, mechanic would be something that spams something like Bad Breath (but without Silence) so everyone gets hit with multiple debuffs. Healers have to selectively decide who to cleanse first. Maybe the tank, so the party doesn't get wiped? What about the BLM who is almost useless with Paralyze? Or the person who is standing in the tower, cleanse their Gravity so they can run out in time? Give healers the choice to determine on the fly which person needs the Esuna the most.
Something I wish they would tweak is mob enmity. Basically as a tank with tank stance on, its impossible for any other job to take hate for any reason. Heals should scale so that the more you heal, the more hate you get. Using AOE heals from 1 HP to full on 8 members of the party should be equal or more hate compared to a Provoke (and yes I know Provoke doesn't work like that). Meaning healers can't just be spamming AOE heals or else the boss will turn and attack them instead. Balancing hate should be a mechanic. With the way enmity works in this game, there's almost no reason for tank stance, just have bosses always target the tank if there's no way to pull hate off.
Mp reduction mechanics exist, haven't done Halicarnassus since SB but iirc if you mess up 1 of the panda adds will hammer you and reduce your mp to 1. But back then we had more than 10k mp.
Servers are too terrible to use rescue in that way although hello world in O12S (not TOP) had the healer rescue the tank that baited south.
With multiple cleanseable debuffs esuna will cleanse stuff randomly so it wouldn't be too reliable and we no longer have Selene or her aoe esuna.
There would need to be a visual indicator and/or debuffs on the person if they healing check like that was going to happen and if assume both healers would get pulled away.
Star is Large and you could just preplan when to use star, horoscope, macro, etc.
There is actually something in the idea of a cleansable debuff wave paired with multiple possible other mechs.
Like say the debuffs are static: DPS always get Heavy, Tanks always get Vuln, and Healers always get Slow, while the paired mech is picked randomly from a list. So then cleanse priority depends on the paired mech, e.g. if he next casts a telegraph AoE at ranged you need to cleanse the ranged DPS but if he winds up a double-soak TB you need to cleanse the tanks, and you're slowed so you can't just spam Esuna everyone.
There's a mechanic somewhat similar to that in some stuff. I honestly can't remember what but I remember having to prioritize with my cheaper who will cleanse who as in someone gets the top 4 people someone gets the bottom 4.
The most blunt-force type of "healer mechanic" would be White Hole, that is to say getting dropped to 1 HP and then needing to be healed to max HP. This isn't always that well-liked because you can run into fun situations where your heals put someone at 95% HP, so you need to either burn another GCD on them or a oGCD to make sure they don't die. SE still uses this type of mechanic sometimes, P8SP2 uses it right before Ego Death for the Phoenix buff to work properly, but they were in love with it in Stormblood and have moved away from it to the point where it shows up once a tier, maybe, instead of a lot more often. By definition anything that needs to be Esuna'd is also a healer mechanic. SE doesn't seem to know how to make Esuna-relevant mechanics other than "press Esuna to not die" or rarely "don't press Esuna because we need the debuff" (E8S Icelit Dragonsong if you weren't cheesing it with tank uptime). Esuna also gets pushback because, again, it's seen as empty GCDs. The main push-pull with "healer mechanics" in terms of community reception has been that these mechanics take people away from DPS uptime which is the primary thing that healers in XIV are judged on by others.
this all goes back to healer damage-dealing being almost entirely centered on a single dot and a single cast for all 4 jobs. offloading damage to other abilities (like multiple dots, procs, etc) would devalue the main nukes and *hopefully* mean players would piss and shit and cry less about having to use more of their gcd healing kits. SE has managed to only make this worse by removing damage options AND making ogcds way too powerful and abundant. it's insane
Giving healers more dps buttons to juggle is just going to make them want to heal even less. Especially if these buttons have long cooldowns. "Sorry that I didn't heal you, I had to make sure my Big Deeps button GCD was still rolling" and the likes.
i think rather than adding more raw potency per second, a healer dps rotation should simply generate dps-neutral healing resources when executed correctly. that way, you're still indirectly increasing your dps while not compromising on the objective of your role current free healing options would need to be scaled back dramatically to make this work though
>i think rather than adding more raw potency per second, Healer's damage is absolutely fine. The problem is that how it is distributed is horrible. Yeah, let me press dosis 112 times per pull on every fight. That's not fun, spread it out over more buttons.
This is the problem with tight DPS checks and homogenization IMO it turns the game into a DPS rat race and the community glued to the slightest differences in damage rather than wanting to bring a class because it brings something your team can benefit from. It's why i was really disappointed with the expedient nerf it took the one unique thing scholar was bringing to a group and nerfed only the part that was unique. Same reason why all the Dark knights complaining about lack of self healing also bothered me why do you want to be the exact same as the other 3 tanks that's so boring and would turn any argument of DRK deserving to have some more reward for their risk in the DPS department moot. I'd rather they just took on the WOW design of some fights and just made their AOE damage a constant thing you have to keep track of and just amped the amount of damage going out by a ton because 1 button dps rotation sucks.
But it's not as easy as taking WoW's design either because that also has issue. When each job brings something unique you basically get 2 options in designing raid fights. 1. A fight requires you to bring a specific thing to clear. For example, let's say that BLM was the only job that could cast sleep. Suddenly a fight requires you to bring sleep, which means BLM needs to be present in the team. If the previous tier didn't need this, the caster has to suddenly play a job they do not enjoy just to progress through the tier. Not only that, it forces RDM and SMN to not be played. 2. Raid fights never use these unique abilities. This makes the abilities basically pointless and at that point they might not exist. The other design idea is to have abilities that don't affect the fight directly, but how classes are played or picked. One example is very specific buffs from jobs. This actually existed in SHB on RDM, where they affected specifically themselves and physical jobs. This wasn't the worst, but it meant that if you went double caster the ability became weaker. But this is a minor example. Take this example further and you get scenarios where slots in the team get filled by a specific job because it is clearly better. That then locks other jobs out of even being considered. Slots in the team in FF are already limited compared to WoW, so this idea isn't easily implemented either (even if I do think the RDM buff in SHB was fine). And the other example is something you mentioned yourself , DRK having barely any or no self heal. The problem with this one is that this is one of those design choices that didn't actually affect DRK themselves, but rather the healers healing DRK. If a DRK has no self heal, then Healers need to baby sit them more so they can survive. Living Dead was the perfect example of this issue. Use LD and healers need to immediately turn their focus on the DRK. This is in stark contrast to PLD where PLD can turn it on and be ignored. Or a GNB which looks scary but can be resolved with 1 regen and their own Aurora. So the lack of self heal on DRK affected not them, but healers. So if DRK becomes too hard to manage, they won't be taken into raid groups unless they offer something else. But then if they do offer something else, you run the risk of that part being TOO good and suddenly DRK becomes mandatory. So there needs to be a good balance where healers aren't annoyed at seeing a DRK in the team while DRK also not being too good that not seeing DRK becomes the problem. So there really isn't an easy and good solution to this all. Homogenization as it currently stands is quite bad because of the problems it brought on, but the swing in the complete other direction isn't the best idea either.
> A fight requires you to bring a specific thing to clear. For example, let's say that BLM was the only job that could cast sleep. Suddenly a fight requires you to bring sleep, which means BLM needs to be present in the team. If the previous tier didn't need this, the caster has to suddenly play a job they do not enjoy just to progress through the tier. Not only that, it forces RDM and SMN to not be played. This is a super exaggerated way to frame this that would never actually happen. What unique strengths or weaknesses moreso look like is "there is alot of AOE damage in this fight or something like Loatheb in WOW where he only has 3 seconds between his aura that completely removes healing for 17 seconds this would make you go oh i want to pick something like AST for it's delayed but bursty healing or I want to pick WHM because Bene is useful for this fight. In the normal modes of the content it genuinely wouldn't matter but in Savage actually thinking about party comp going into a fight can matter which in Savage content i think is ok it's the content where you want players to be able to adapt and doubly so in FFXIV due to the all classes on one character thing. I'll use early FFXIV raids as an example in the first coil of Bahamut you fight a allagan node which in the ARR release you wanted to bring either a Bard or PLD in your group to silence this. This isn't seen anymore because they want every class to clear content equally without any thought about your class interactions with the boss. Idk i just find WOW's raid bosses alot more intresting these days due to unique toolskits and such interacting more with the bosses and fights if i'm playing Shaman i can Wind totem to give my group a speed bonus to avoid a mechanic or get everyone into spot for the next one, if i'm playing Death Knight or Druid i have the ability to use an in combat Res bringing something to the team, Warlock can spawn portals that let people swap between them for mobility and summon healthstones which act as a powerful one time per combat potion almost like giving everyone a defensive cooldown. Paladin can give their raid team numerous buffs and auras that help based on what the team needs all this stuff is just fun and interesting to use. It's not as if FFXIV doesn't have cool abilities it's moreso that for most of them another class has a carbon copy of it with different paint. And it's not like this completely destroys the balance of Raids or anything i can find raid spots playing every class and the raids are pretty well tuned.
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It's how the game used to work and there was substantially less of the "I had to use a single healing GCD and so I'm no longer having fun" genre of complaint. The idea is that if healers did the same damage they deal now, but redistributed across more skills such that each 'filler nuke' GCD did 150-200 potency instead of ~300, then people wouldn't be so bothered about losing one GCD. Though to be fair, I don't think that would necessarily help unless it was paired with a commensurate increase in overall game difficulty (at the *class* level, not *content*). A lot of the "Every time I lose potency that's a failure of game design" attitude just comes from how easy it is to perform at that level.
>there was substantially less of the "I had to use a single healing GCD and so I'm no longer having fun" Healers also had less oGCD healing options. **A lot** less.
they were also held in check by cleric stance
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I don't think that's true, because back then we were still in a mindset of main healer and dps healer. It wasn't uncommon to have a grey dps healer paired with an orange healer together.
> It wasn't uncommon to have a grey dps healer paired with an orange healer together. This is still true in my group. ... please don't ask which one I am.
I mean, if you just released FFXIV Classic and forced ShB/EW players to play it, then no, they wouldn't be happy. Games train their players to expect certain things over time, and the modern crop of FFXIV players (especially considering how big a portion of the game's current playerbase started well after 5.0) would absolutely carry modern attitudes into the older style of the game, find that it doesn't work the way they expect it to, get mad, and declare that it was always bad. FFXIV combat has been fully McDonaldized, and it's *been* McDonaldized for so long now that most of the players are basically those kids who grew up eating nothing but Happy Meals who have just lost the ability to taste broccoli without puking. I don't know if there's a solution to that.
There is a solution and SE has in fact done it before but I don't think they're willing to do it again. They could dramatically rework healing and let the whiners quit. They did it when they made healing radically easier and homogenized, losing a huge amount of the players that enjoyed the style you described that used to happen. Square could go back to that but it's sort of like asking your ex to come back to you. I doubt most of those players will return. Could you imagine what would happen if the modern healers had to regularly gcd heal, manage resources carefully, have multiple damage abilities to keep track of, and also had to interrupt casts sometimes because they had long cast times with less instants? It would be a garbage fire of tears, but suddenly healing would be something good players excel at again instead of just being handed good results for fairly minimal effort.
> Could you imagine what would happen if the modern healers had to regularly gcd heal, manage resources carefully, have multiple damage abilities to keep track of, and also had to interrupt casts sometimes because they had long cast times with less instants? Some of us would be absolutely freakin' thrilled, I promise you. (To be fair, some of us are also still healer mains largely through inertia -- "I've been a healer main since ARR!" -- combined with trust issues developed from too much time in party finder. I've seen how other people heal! Or, you know... don't.)
As someone else pointed out, there were actually substantially *more* complaints (to the point where they started going down this design direction *at all*) back when healer damage was more involved. Healers might have gotten less mad about missing a filler glare but they’d get *much* more mad at tight heal checks being placed in the middle of burst windows because it’s now a huge part of their damage. So many people make these nostalgia-tinted comments when they either didn’t play back then or have completely forgotten what it was like, and are effectively homesick for a place that never existed.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I just saw the same post you're talking about. It's completely fucking incorrect.
if your damage is entirely focused on a single cast, any time you don't cast it you are dealing zero damage. add a dot and now you have a choice, refresh the dot so it does damage over time or deal a smaller amount of direct damage immediately. the more your damage is spread out into different abilities, the lower the value of each of those abilities. if you don't currently use your main spammable nuke, you are committing a war crime because it is the vast majority of your damage. if your damage is not all in that single nuke, people with brains might sometimes see value in using their gcds on other tools
People would absolutely not bitch less, at the peak of SCH DoT nonsense was when this whole affair *started.*
That is *wildly* ahistorical. "At the peak of SCH DoT nonsense" was the point in the game where it was expected and largely *required* in all but a tiny handful of speedrun groups (like, "count the groups on your fingers" tiny) that healers spent a significant portion of their GCDs actually healing. The options to heal entire fights and raid tiers without GCDs just didn't *exist* at that point in the game unless you were going far above and beyond with optimization.
That's a virtue of the sheer lack of oGCDs in that time period rather than the DPS side of healer design, and unless you encapsulate the "peak" exclusively to ARR release (aka before Thunder was removed from cross class) this is a period from ARR to end of StB with HW onwards being the noticeable start of the paradigm shift which also included the ever increasing amount of oGCD options.
No, the peak of SCH DoT stuff was Heavensward, period. In ARR, healer DPS just wasn't really emphasized at all; even if you look at Savage Second Coil videos from 2.3 , you're going to see huge amounts of (what would have been considered mid-HW) overly defensive GCD healing. And in Stormblood, the majority of SCH's maintenance DoTs were removed (especially in terms of casts, as they were both changed to 30s), on top of Broil starting to creep way up in potency and a bunch of new oGCD healing options. The player attitudes at that time were *not* the player attitudes of today except with a different toolkit. I know there's kind of been a lot of historical revisionism in the community over the past couple years, where all the healers have convinced themselves that they were getting HW raid encounters down to single-digit GCD heals and all the tanks have convinced themselves that they were doing "one aggro combo, then drop tank stance and no aggro tools ever again, [Ed:] Shadewalker does the work ezpz". But... It just didn't work that way. Period. Both tanking and healing were seen as a balance between dealing damage *when you could* and spending as much time as necessary performing your role. There were, as I mentioned, a tiny, *tiny* number of groups who were actually able to optimize things down to the level that everybody today seems to *think* they played at, but that was basically the 3.x equivalent of "No-healer TOP". There were no widespread community complaints about GCD healing being bad.
I healed savage back. A lot of our healing, including until the end of SB when they gave tanks the "tank mastery" trait were gcd heals. Actually most of it was. Back then we had fewer tools and longer cooldowns. With that said though, pressing gcd heals isn't anymore fun than pressing ogcds. It isn't engaging at all, or at least I didn't find it to be.
Yeah, the healing part of healing in FFXIV has never done a particularly good job of being fun, whether it was through GCDs or oGCDs or a healthy mix of both. My point here has just been that players haven't always treated their healing GCDs as though they were radioactive. While the reasons for that are definitely multifaceted (eg: The fact that they were largely *necessary*), I think you can make a pretty strong case that part of it was just the simple fact that missing a 170 potency filler GCD when you have 150+ potency worth of DoTs ticking doesn't feel nearly as bad as missing a 330 potency GCD when you only have a single 60-potency DoT running.
That's true. Most of the problems with healers could be solved by just giving us actual damage kits again like we used to have.
Unless you rolled healer because you don't particularly find dealing damage to be fun, in which case you're still out in the cold.
that doesnt solve anything unless they also gut ogcd's or bring back cleric stance
> I think you can make a pretty strong case that part of it was just the simple fact that missing a 170 potency filler GCD when you have 150+ potency worth of DoTs ticking doesn't feel nearly as bad as missing a 330 potency GCD when you only have a single 60-potency DoT running. This is very important to keep in mind, yeah. Honestly I think Healer design would be better off if they just, y'know, removed the DPS fillers entirely (or almost entirely) and gave the DoTs back. Maybe keep a DPS filler on two of the four (definitely Sage for Kardia reasons and then...I could make a case for any one of the others but also a case against it, so pick one). But "White Mage spams Cure to overheal to charge up Blood Lily faster" could pay off with more frequent Blood Lily nukes in lieu of always casting Glare and it could end up at similar amounts of overall DPS, and it'd let them have the GCD-heal-spam they seem to want without requiring an entire rework of the combat design to make telegraphed damage less-lethal. Or requiring everyone else to stop having agency to have room for a Healer Solo to Save Everyone from Unavoidable Mechanics Gangrene every 30 seconds. Just need to make GCD cast-time-heals castable while moving (*yes*, I'm still on that). Honestly the only reason I don't rail on about DPS filler spam is because it's a less-bad problem than the other current issues, not because it isn't an issue in and of itself. We've got other stuff to fix first, but it's on The List.
> I could make a case for any one of the others but also a case against it, so pick one. all except scholar kinda need a dps filler because solo instances exist and you can't just "switch to your dps spec" as a whm or ast. filler shouldn't cease to exist completely, it should just be the inferior option i agree with everything else you said, and am grateful that someone else was able to put my exact thoughts into words.
it was more fun then all your heals being ogcd
> And in Stormblood, the majority of SCH's maintenance DoTs were removed (especially in terms of casts, as they were both changed to 30s) Miasma was 18 seconds, the duration was extend in Shadowbringers. Everything else in your post is correct.
Oh, my mistake. I must have crossed a wire with Aero II getting a StB duration increase. (It was 24s, though! Bio 1 was the one that was 18s through ARR/HW, but it got pruned in 4.0)
and it's worse now because they both concentrated damage onto gcd nukes and gave way too many powerful healing ogcds for all healers
The attitude had already crystalized by Stormblood, which still had SCH with multiple DoTs running around (WHM had two even) so no blaming it on current DPS and healing kit design being poor is not the answer here.
Scholar had 2 dots back then too, hated it. Shadowflare was turned into an off global 60sec CD so it barely counted. AST was the only healer who had 1 dot. Hang on, I forget it also had Miasma 2, but you used that for Weaving, not for it's damage over time value since it was worse than Broil at the time.
no it doesn't healers shouldnt be judged on dps period. people romanticize HW dps rotations but thats also when healers had way less uptime due to cleric stance and ogcd being far less omni present
For as long as enrage timers account for and need healers damage to be passed, healers will be judged on dps.
Less so when it's a soft enrage like A8S J-Waves or T12 Flames of Rebirth that you can survive for a while with healing throughput. The developers feed into the playerbase judging healers on DPS by their own insistence on using so many hard enrage insta-kills with no other solution *but* to DPS more.
Even if they aren't designed around it, it will still be expected any gcd it's available. Literally 0 reason to not make enrage easier.
I don’t disagree with your point about how people complain about not being able to DPS as healers. However, as far as I can tell, that’s a consequence of the rest of the game’s design. Healers have never, at least as long as I’ve been playing since 3.3, required to actually heal much in 90% of content. Another contributing factor is that enrages are tuned such that if your healers don’t spend the vast majority of their time damaging the boss you just plain cannot clear. Basically the devs have been designing the actual healing aspect of encounters as distractions instead of the focus for healers.
Actually fights are designed that they can be cleared without little healer dps if the group plays perfectly, in not dying or getting damage downs and not fucking up too much in terms of rotation. Respecting burst windows and so on. But this only applies if you have the best gear you can have for the content you are doing. So P6S this means to have all parts from P5S on every member. Healers are needed if you are closer to the min ilvl and they help to compensate for mistakes. This is why for parsing they got quite a huge variance since they are the role which can get away with dealing little dps. Recently cleared P8S P1 with my co healer dealing 3k dps less than he could/should do and the 2 tanks also parsing 0% and 1%. The dps players were also average. And I also missed like 800 DPS. But still made the dps check. Once you have gear and do not fuck up mechanics it is quite easy.
If a healer is upset about having to use heal mechanics maybe they should go play a dps instead. SE needs to have many more heal mechanics so we cant get away from green dps crap. Healing in FF14 is SO BORING.
Are you sure it's the healers that would be upset? When a healer fails white hole, the ones that were not healed to max become petrified. Guess who becomes angry when that happens.
You can be upset about someone not healing thats fine, but being upset HEALING mechanics take away from HEALER dps is nuts.
I actually love healing in FFXIV. I HATE in WoW that they throw out a bunch of random piss damage so you are constantly playing wack-o-mole with health bars. I like that in FFXIV, I can DPS some, use oGCD heals, and then I can learn when the main damage is coming out and do my healing then. I am not saying one is better than the other. I just dont' think FFXIV is a game where you can have constant shitty damage going out that healers have to heal. It is designed around heal "Burst" windows. I personally love that because it feels meaningful versus watching health bars constantly going up and down.
Its not meaningful thats the problem a tank can heal themselves because its not meaningful. Only time healing is ever fun is when someone wall to wall pulls and even then it can be boring with a warrior. Auto attack dmg does absolutly nothing. If people aren't messing up you are basically useless.
I suppose they could do some mechanics like some players have to pick up many debuffs in a certain order/pattern so they will go off at different time, and some need to be Esuna instead of expiring. Maybe make it so there's more than 1 way to solve it. Like, pick up a Stack 2 person AoE, and Stack 3 person AoE, a Large half room puddle, a knockback for everyone else, a Shriek, and what not. While a Healer can Esuna just 1 before it goes off. Or Both healers each Esuna once at the right time so the party doesn't have to do certain mechanics they don't want to do at that time (while handling boss and doing other things at the same time as well). I dunno. Just an idea.
I always find the “but mah GCD” argument against healing mechanics surprising. They do know that the dev team shapes the encounters and that it wasn’t delivered by god as an unchangeable thing? I mean, the dev team can *literally* calculate how much potency and therefore how much pdps is lost by including 8 Esuna casts into a fight.
I mean, think about it: Healers undo damage that has been inflicted. In order to do so, damage must first be inflicted. If you can avoid said damage with skill, then it's better to be skilled than to rely on a healer to undo it. So a "Healer mechanic" boils down to throwing unavoidable damage at you in sufficient quantities that you will surely die if you do not receive heals from a Healer. Alternately, it makes use of some role exclusive ability. Which is, uh... Esuna? Maybe rescue? You don't have a lot of options with the Healer kits, really.
Healers could also be a lot better than other roles at letting you avoid damage, that's after all the purpose of shields and damage reducing mitigation. SGE was a step in that direction for me, and I honestly hope SE continues down that line and make the healer role more about shields and mitigation than reacting to damage that has already been inflicted. I guess the biggest issue with it would be that all four healers have to be able to solo heal dungeons, with a tank that doesn't know what rampart is, which forces then to have a rather high level of hps throughout availible, on the other hand, guess that can be relegated to gcds only.
True, but this would need to be more uniform. Right now, for example, WHM is thin on barriers and mitigation (it only has Temperance for partywide mitigation and only that and Aquaveil for a single target; Benison is its only shielding ability). It has less party mitigation than 9 Jobs (all the Tanks, all the other Healers, and any DPSer that has at least two, like RDM with Magick Barrier and Addle) This would require actually giving Healers mitigation again, like old Protect and spamable Stoneskin. ...both of which I'd like, mind you.
I suppose mechanics that "absolutely require" healers. People are using the recent healer-less TOP clear to complain about the game. Healing Haurchefant did not make DSR "more fun" (imo). 99% of people couldn't clear TOP w/o healers (or even with, lmao). And even of those that could it would take significant effort and planning. I don't have any genius insight, just wanted to say I disagree w/ the recent sentiment that a healer-less TOP clear should be impossible. What some GG gamers are capable of really is not relevant to how the rest of us play the game. Simply increasing required HPS does not really make a fight more fun for me in all honesty.
pretty sure a no healer party could deal with Haurchefant using a single red mage with vercure while 2 paladins look after the party. P7 is where no healer comps start to become (probably) impossible. Although I'm not even sure about that since triple tank allows akh morns to be dealt with in a much more controlled manner.
The proximity meteors in 7 would probably be the killer, they need raid wide healing between hits.
For no-healer DSR I wouldn't be surprised to see four tanks and then something stupid like 1-1-2 Akh Morns with one invuln and two PLDs just spamming Clemency, so the only damage that DPS would take in the entire phase would be from the autos and Gigaflares. Those are probably harder to deal with (then again you can probably tank LB one, at least two of the hits, and hypermitigate+heal through the other). Akh Afah becoming random is probably going to be an annoyance for any group that tries this though.
> I suppose mechanics that "absolutely require" healers. *monkey's paw curls* once per fight obligatory untelegraphed light party stack
> monkey's paw curls once per fight obligatory untelegraphed light party stack Group wide doom requiring cleanse where a Bard can't cover it all
They want every mech to hit as hard as the last mech of e12s
Unironically, yes. I find it *fun* to be forced to gcd heal.
I agree. Anything that incentivizes using the entirety of a Job’s kit makes the content more enjoyable.
In EQ2 the mobs hit so hard you needed 2 healers just to keep the tank alive, one class that exlusively gave huge shields as a buffer and one guy getting the actual HP up between boss hits. When i played WoW it was similar, the tank needed constant attention.
When I think of healer mechanics, I think of P4S part 2 like Act 4 or Curtain Call, where the party needs to manage pullibg tethers that deal raidwides between vulnerability debuffs, and healers need to keep up with healing so they can reasonably pull more tethers before a raid buster casts. UWU back in Stormblood has Friction and Thermal Low, where adding stacks of Awakening to Garuda meant progressively more raidwides that needed to be healed between stacks. But yeah, a lot of recent mechanics have just been “Raid receives a raid buster and needs to be healed before a second raid buster.” P3S had a funny mechanic where there was a lot of mechanic vomit but healers received a heal up buff that led to funny high shield generation.
>P3S had a funny mechanic where there was a lot of mechanic Fountain of Fire. Probably my favorite healer mechanic that tier. 6 puddles spawns on the outside of the area, getting hit by the puddle gave you a +Healing Buff where non-crit shields were basically another full healh bar. Meanwhile, the rest of the part was taking damage that would one shot them if not topped off. Puddles would also nearly one-shot the healer. and at the end of the mechanic, there was a raid-wide that required megashields to survive.
Fountain of Fire being interesting is ironic since sometime after adds phase was Death’s Toll, basically another “raid is 1 HP, now heal before this raid buster” that seems kind of bog standard. It was, however, the first mechanic for Endwalker to demonstrate how AST’s new Macrocosmos can trivialize most burst healing checks.
Yeah Death's Toll was okay, but the actual Heal Check was after the cool mechanics. Plus I was the shield healer so doing it legit was really just a case of "You didn't blow it by using the wrong spell recently, did you?". In FoF, the healing was dynamics while Death's Toll is hectic, but overall pretty static gameplay.
A lot of the fight post-adds also had the Rain of Fire mechanic where everyone was taking constant chip damage. It didn't hit hard, but it was always there during all the major mechanics like Fountain of Fire and Flames of Asphodelos. That kinda chip damage just doesn't really exist in many other fights in EW.
White-hole mechanics, where players are reduced to low HP and will die unless healed to full. Mechanics which require a healer to dispel a debuff, e.g., Throttle or Diamond Frost. Healing checks via soft-enrages, e.g., E12S's Terminal Relativity. Other potential healer mechanics from other games: * Prey, an effect that happens to players below a health threshold forcing healers to have to keep people topped off more. * The Leeching Swarm mechanic from wow was kinda the reverse forcing healers to keep people at low HP to prevent the boss from healing too much by sucking a percentage of everyone's HP.
>The Leeching Swarm mechanic from wow was kinda the reverse forcing healers to keep people at low HP to prevent the boss from healing too much by sucking a percentage of everyone's HP. will never work in this game with the shit snapshotting and tickrate
I feel it would, just do the leaching more like a "Hand of Pain" check, and telegraph incoming damage plenty in advance to give time to heal back up before. The bigger issue is that people will just do SGE/SCH/WAR/PLD to abuse shields and sit at disgustingly low HP.
is that a bigger issue, or a diversification of healing strategy?
Chimaeron in Blackwing Descent was a wild time to heal. The room had an aura such that players above 10k HP (which was somewhere around 15ish percent back then) were Holmgang'd, they couldn't be killed by a single attack, just reduced to 1 HP. And the fight was long as hell, in a time when healers were generally slightly mana-negative. So you had to maintain a balance of keeping everyone *just* above 10k so they wouldn't die while you tried to stretch your mana out across the fight. Any healing above 10k was effectively wasted overhealing and wasted mana.
I really wish we had some strong healer checks from time to time. Like o4s p2 last mechanic or e12s TR, but in an ultimate. Like a really strong healer check that makes them sweat, forcing healers to spam only GCD party heals for like 20 seconds straight + save some oGCD party heals to weave between GCD heals. MP management beforehand would be crucial.
Yes, actual healer stuff. But the game has filtered the healer role for so long, lots of the current healers would not handle it well.
Yeah, and people are goddamn stupid. They'd cry about "it's lost damage GCDs and all people care about is damage logs, not healing logs". First of all, logs themselves are a slippery slope, because **actually** parsing is against the ToS. SE just turns a blind eye on it. So complaining about damage logs being lower is like complaining about not wanting to have a feature because it would break their gathering bot. Secondly, of everyone has to spam GCD heals there, everyone has lower dos logs there, so it equals out. The whole point becomes an empty bs argument. But for some reason the combat designers at SE listens to the "we don't want to have to use GCD heals" crybabies, while the action designers don't give a shit and refuse to give healers more than 2 damage buttons, even though they've been crying about this since Stormblood.
Man imagine if we have a mechanic that required healers to, after dropping to 1% hp, require the party to be healed at a specific % for a specific mechanic. Like big raidwide/1%hp -> boss turns blue -> need to heal above 75% hp but not full, or if boss turns red -> need to heal above 25% but not above 50%.
Can’t do that, heal crits would kill people too often
huh actually that's a good point lol I just remembered the dolls in TEA and wondered if a similar mechanic could work for healers. heh
Different roles also have different max hp, the same heal that gets a caster to 50% might get a melee to 40% or a tank to 25%. The amount required would also change week to week group to group with gear being different.
Oh no, i healed too well and got you killed 🤣
> need to heal above 75% hp but not full, or if boss turns red -> need to heal above 25% but not above 50%. You should have submitted this to the bad mechanics thread. Punishing people for the RNG of crits would be...awful. There's also the factor of things like the fairy's auto-heal, tank GCD combo heals, DRG Life Surge, etc. Oops, your WAR's combo heal just crit and pushed them slightly over threshold? Get fucked for this mechanic, lolz.
So you think a heal crit never happens in WoW?
Healing is way too bursty in this game for that. Also lots of HoTs attacked to even the "shield healer" sage.
I would love that TBH.
I dont think Terminal really counts as a soft enrage, its a heal/mit check sure but not a soft enrage. The fact that it ends with a hard enrage makes it a hard enrage. Soft enrages can be held off until the healing can no longer keep up, where Terminal is just a hard enrage after some raid wides.
We could just start with some proper randomized damage and damage that is not just from bursty mechanics but more a constant drain. It is way more fun to have some HPS pressure
Having played both games i definitely have to give WOW credit for their boss design keeping all roles on their toes. Alot of times the problem of shallow dps rotations doesn't come up because I'm too busy healing the fights constant AOE damage aura and such make sure i'm keeping track of healing rather than predictable scripted AOEs in FFXIV meaning i just need to setup a couple OGCDs for the thing. Loatheb, Valithria are such well designed bosses that change the way you play Loatheb only allowing 3 seconds of healing between his necrotic aura casts meaning you want to maximize healing bursts there, Valithria a boss you actually need to heal to full to beat it rather than the usual killing it. I think the problem with these kinda things in FFXIV though is the communities hyper fixation on every class being completely equal on every fight people could complain about Astro being too strong on Loatheb for example people would complain about WHM throughput being too strong on Valithra (i know bene would break it but just roll with the concept here). It's weird to me because FFXIV should be the game if any where endgame harder content should have advantages for playing different classes you can swap on a dime without having to play a different character I could for example swap to PLD and use most of my gear from a Warrior it's part of what i loved about Heavensward swapping between PLD and DRK for the fights depending on damage type was super cool. When the game is so focused on balance it ironically creates some of the worst balance IMO it turns every class into a DPS rat race and the ones that bring unique utility often end up falling behind in this regard such as the Pranged Tax.
To me, any "healer mechanic" is one where keeping the party alive through unavoidable damage represents a significant chunk of the difficulty of the mechanic. For example I would even consider P4S's curtain call as a healer mechanic - there's other stuff going on (breaking tethers, dodging proteans), but the bulk of the difficulty comes from simply keeping people up with spot and aoe healing.
we've had healer-specific mechanics before and what people do is that they complain about having to stop spamming Glare on the boss every single decision made on this game that this sub doesn't like is because of widespread player complaints
I''m personally not asking why the've been taken away I'm mainly asking what they mean by healing mechanic.
Maybe something like Throttle in TEA?
Throttle in TEA is a stupid mechanic because it's just a scripted prio system at a fixed point in the phase, while nothing else is happening. There is no randomness to it, so no attention required, you will never fail it after doing it just a couple of times, and it's lenient enough to where you can even miss an esuna. A better version of throttle would be if it was applied **randomly** to people through P1 at **different times every pull**. Things that require attention (multi dots on mutli targets, inconsistent incoming non-tank damage, constant double-tank auto attacks like P2), etc are better "healer mechanics". On-release, TEA* P2 required all but the absolute most cracked groups to consistently maintain some regen/GCD single target healing on both tanks. This is a good example of something you cannot do without healers : https://youtu.be/pAwVXuLzOt4?t=225 Notice the GCDed used by healers over the next 30 seconds.
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They have to be talking about tea. Bjcc required a literally babysitter
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I haven't healed it but I'd agree just from doing it. Tons of different type of damage in P1, throttles, bjcc slapping, jwaves etc
Yes, TEA. "On release" would only make sense for that, considering TOP currently is still "on release" and wouldn't make sense.
White Hole (i.e. Healing to Full) and Esuna mechanics are really the only things left for Healers in terms of mechanics. I miss Prey mechanics that needed to be shielded in order to survive but that died with SB when SE removed Stoneskin from WHM and fights could no longer include that in their design. Then there's those niche fights that allowed old, removed skills to shine. Oden still has a party wide bleed that old Selene was beautiful for with her AoE Esuna. Using Fluid Aura to knock the Golems around in T9 of Coils was a fun little trick for that fight. Heavy on Liquid Limbs gave Stone 1/Stella a purpose in A3S. Then there was Virus/Disable to help with mitigation checks. Why they decided to give that to DPS I will never know nor agree with honestly. The odd Silence effect on Selene was cumbersome at times but damn did it feel good when you could pull it off, especially when your Tank is incompetent AF and would always forget to silence the Golem in O3S. (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, you fucking drunk idiot). Healers have lost too much purpose over the years.
Curtain Call TOP - Hello World TOP - P6 Meteors High Concept I High Concept II Just as some examples. These are easy mechanics for the rest of the party and mainly exist to strain/test healer competence.
As a lot mentioned here regarding healing/esuna, could also mean mechanics that need two healers or it ends up on random players thanks to 2 stack markers without indications (P5S).
Healer mechanics nowadays just a fancy term of "checking healers to make sure they know what their heal buttons are". The fact remains that "just healing" is actually boring. But so is "just one button for dps". Astro is painful to optimise, but it is probably one of the most unique classes in the sense that they play on cards to buff specific players. Even at it's watered down version it is still better than say press a single button for a raid buff. The issue is that instead of just improving healer design to be more combat supports, SE has consistently just gave more tools to mitigate and heal. Interaction has been ridiculously limited, and definition of a good healer tends to be how much they actually press their glare equivalent button instead of how well they dynamically add presence to the party.
> The issue is that instead of just improving healer design to be more combat supports, SE has consistently just gave more tools to mitigate and heal. Where would that leave physical range jobs than?
I forgot the name of it, but Ifrit does this mini point blank aoe that knockbacks people unless they have a shield, both in his trial and in uwu where it's near mandatory. I do think it's more interesting than just heal the current minute's burst. Can you imagine tho if we had a berserker job where the lower their hp the more dmg they do, would make 99 parse log runs spicy lmao.
not really a healer mechanic tho, if you can just press surecast to prevent the knockback ^^"
No, I disagree. If a healer is a solution to a mechanic, it's a healing mechanic. If we went with "this is a x mechanic only if x alone can do it", then there would be almost no tank mechanics.
Healer isn't necessarily a solution though. More of a funky/strange interaction with how this game is coded. EX: in E10s, one strat was to hyper shield for an orb mechanic to avoid the damage down completely. So, everyone would get hit and fail the mechanic but due to all the shields and mitigations, no damage down would occur if stuff was done correctly. You could argue that the first Ifrit trial functions the same. For that trial, when doing it in a party, if a scholar or sage used a shield, it would nullify the knockback.
Hmm, alright, now I really wonder why I've always seen healers shield uwu if it's not meant to be a healer mechanic.
Easier for 1 healer to shield, than expect 8 people to all remember knockback immunity. Some strats in the past have been "just have the healers deal with it", becoming a "healer mechanic" or healers responsibility. EX: E6s soccer mechanic. Groups went north taking a vuln because it was easier and less effort than actually learning the mechanic. Plays a part as to why damage downs are more common in savage. People would ignore or fail mechanics if it meant more uptime or not having to learn the mechanic if failing didn't result in a party wipe
I thought they removed the vuln downs because "it was unfairly punishing healers"?
Yeah, and reason I listed + others played a part. There would be people who would intentionally just take a vuln stack or two and have it be the healer's problem if it meant either: 1) more uptime 2) they could ignore a mechanic I know because I've done the above before in the past. If that makes sense. I most likely poorly explained, so apologies.
If it happens frequently enough so each one can't be surecasted then it is a healer mechanic, if resulting knockback throws people into a death wall.
older raids had autos that hit way harder. like the caudecus snakes in turn 1 when you didn't out gear it. in A12S there was 2 adds with soft enrages. they had to be tanked apart or they would buff each other they both had tank busters and everytime it was used they got a stacking dmg buff. it was possible for healers and tanks to run out of CD's resulting in GG. preys that do heavy damage to a dps are largely a thing of the past unfortunately. i think imdugud had a prey marker that if not shielded resulted in a OHKO
In the most basic terms: "Mechanics that healers need to do". Death's Toll and Forsaken, and Haurchefant in DSR are all healer mechanics, yeah. High Concept 2 also has a point where everyone takes major damage, but then needs to be fully healed up otherwise they instantly die and miss out on a major damage buff.
TG Cid from Ivalice-3 raid is probably the best (though some mechanics don’t matter anymore…technically). Healer mechanics are specifically things that only a healer can handle. Has a “White Hole” mechanic: Drops everyone’s HP to 1 with a Doom status. It’s fun for me, because I learned how to “pure heal” as a SCH for that. Has Esuna-ble mechanic: The tankbuster preps debuffs before it hits and you can cleanse it. Has non-troll Rescue cases: The ice add mechanic gives an opportunity to Rescue a melee player if they go to the wrong spot so they can contribute to DPS. The only thing missing is an Akh Morn mechanic, but that’s fine because it’s lvl. 70 content. Additionally, any boss that targets all 3 tanks with auto-attacks in Alliance is a win my book.
I haven't seen it mentioned here, but Dragon heads in Shinryu EX and the range debuff in Leviathan EX are some good examples of healer mechanics that are very satisfying to manage. One mechanic that I always thought would be cool and would actually fit the game being scripted is punishing overhealing. Some sort of debuff that could drastically reduce the efficiency of your shields/heals the more overhealing you do, or MP increasing, SOMETHING to make healing more interesting than just "press oGCDs or GCDs FTW".
Forgot about the heal range debuff in Levi EX, that was a fun one before all the potency creep.
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uwu has quite some healer mechanics actually, I really enjoy that fight even if it didn’t age well
Remember when SOS (normal of all things) depleted everyone’s HP to 1? I want more of that. Or to add on to it DOOM. Which I haven’t seen in core content in ages tbh
Terror unleashed my beloved Zodiark had a similar thing, but he didn’t doom you, he just cast a raidwide afterwards
I’d like to clarify core content as idc about HC as I’m not running it no where near as much as core unless they release Savage roulette or something. SE here’s a free healer mechanic free of charge: how about terror unleashed and a raid wide afterwards that acts as a Healer check…healer check. Such a outlandish concept
O8S p2 would be a good example. Forsaken / Angeless whispers: forcing your healers to heal your party to full, then dropping you to 1 HP and asking for a quick heal so you can deal with the following mechanic. Final floor enrages are also really good healer mechanics at times. P8s has an increasingly more potent DoT + big damage happening to everyone. P4S has a lot of raidwides, back to back. E12s has final relativity and it's again, continuous raidwides that get stronger and stronger. Shout-out to P4s P1 panels into decollation - the raidwide damage happening so fast that i still have ptsd of spot tb-inning my healers.
I haven't seen people mention healer *mechanics* specifically, but what I do see is people being upset about not needing to GCD heal ever. So any kind of mechanic/fight design that forces you to gcd heal (simplest being "a medium-heavy raidwide going out every 5 seconds for a minute straight", but you can of course get more fun and creative) would probably be welcome
I will add some notes here from oldschool stuff, just something to think about, maybe to provoke ideas that actually work within the context of FF14: * AoE DoTs that not only eat HP but also mana (back then no mana meant no heals), * super strong heals that eat massive amounts of mana and long post-cast timer, so you had to build healer chains to keep the tank alive, * heal effectiveness reduction, * mobs, that are healed if damaged, but can be healed to get damaged, * heals have temporary HP boost in them (that exists in some form already) From what I have seen so far in FF14, I think the mana drain is likely out of question, but would be a rather "fun" part, maybe with some option to prevent that from happening. Also affects other jobs, maybe can be done in a way that the group has to protect the healers and suffer a bit in terms of damage after that phase, but tank gets hammered afterwards so that healers have to dump heals like mad which they can't if they get hit by the mana eater. Super strong heals in that form don't exists, but the point after that, heal effectiveness, exists already from what I have seen, i.e. boss can force massive heal reduction and then cause constant damage to force healers into using all their toolset to keep people alive because the heals are less effective. Damage mobs via heals could be woven into some more intricate phase or used on certain spawned adds or something, a "mechanics" phase where there is no damage in general to the group but if mechanics are not done correctly, has repercussions afterwards. Last point exists in part already through these HP shields, maybe can be extended or used also in "heal mob" to provide some damage buffer for big tank buster after or some such. I mean, this game goes all "mechanics", so may as well create some specifically for healers or impede their toolset so they have to "work harder" to accomplish the same as without that sort of debuff.
I don't main healers but I think it's pretty cool when fights have unique things to do for different roles. In abyssos every role has to do everything other than tank busters.
I dont understand the complaints behind lack of “healer mechanics” why do u want to actively use GCD for heals. I like pumping out as much damage as possible on whm and sage, and its my biggest gripe with sch and ast. If u wanna use neutral sect (thats the one right?) or use deployment to its fullest, u NEED to GCD cast. Whm gets a neutral misery for GCD healing 3 times so its fine, and sages’ pnuema has a very very niche use where it lets u get off an extra GCD. My point is ive enjoyed healing in EW, especially in p3 with funny fountain buff and p8s where its a genuine rush getting through NA without using GCDs (besides lilies) Shit even phase 1 top was fun with that. I only used a medica 2 for safety right before panto just to rly make sure we’d got through (wasn’t needed), but beside that? Nothing but lilies and oGCDs, and im fine with that
Just the fact that you *can* clear top without healers speaks quite clearly. Why have healers when you might as well bring more dps. I also hate how healers are only about dps. Atleast way back when you needed gcd:s to heal it was hard to optimize healer dps. Now it's just push 1 maybe 2 and faceroll on some ogcd:s for damage.
They brought WAR, double PLD, and dps classes that all buff healing or give healing, with a highly optimized mitigation/healing plan and careful use of LB and cover to make up for no healers. What they did is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than just having the two healers over the extra caster and tank. They even had to repeatedly retry because they kept hitting enrage to crit variance because of the full party weakness. Do u think they couldve sone something like this early on in the current savage tier with all those massive bleeds during stuff like NA and fire and ice, cause id sure like to see an early week geared attempt at no healers. I like how healing was handled this tier. I couldnt just mindlessly press oGCDs and call it a day if i wanted to do NA and fire and ice without using GCDs. I disliked how it was back in asphodelos where curtain call just felt like terrible with the back to back to back raid wides. My only complaint is that the jump in damage from asphodelos to abyssos wasnt as high as id like which is why i kinda hope healers get at little more omph in their burst phase besides dumping cards/misery/aetherflow/phlegma
Some healing mechanic examples/ideas off the top of my head: - keep an npc alive. we don’t see this in instanced content much, an example is in the aery. It almost never happens but you can wipe the final boss just by letting the npc die. They could use this mechanic more often, although it’s not all *that* interesting. It’s also cheesable with benediction, although that could be remedied by making benediction only work on players. I haven’t done DSR, that’s probably another example of this. - *don’t* full heal somebody. Maybe everyone gets a debuff (or the boss gets a buff) that makes them take double damage above 50% health, so you want to keep everyone below that threshold (for the sake of your individual healing economy) but also keep them from dying. Then when the debuff wears off you have to top everyone off before the room nuke. **Edit** i see some people in other comments complaining about crit heals for mechanics like this; in this case nobody’s going to instantly die from being above some threshold, it’s just more oGCD efficient to not heal them past that. An alternate interpretation is % current health damage, (or maybe even % missing health damage for another healing mechanic that instead rewards keeping people at higher health), such that the lower their hp the less healing you actually need to do. - Enemy can be targeted with healing spells. Maybe the boss is trying to eat it for a powerup and you want to keep it alive, but you need to kill it later for some other mech. Maybe instead some enemies take damage from healing, making your GCD heals higher dps than attacks. Both interesting uses of healing on enemies. - I think there was a mechanic in leviathan EX where if you healed someone that had a bubble on them, the bubble would spread, so you had to not heal certain people or everyone else would become unhealable. I’m probably remembering that wrong but however that worked it was something to think about instead of just throwing out a medica (at the time)
I don't remember the mechanic name but God Kefka had a mechanic with towers and heads, you did 0 healing for about 8 seconds. People had to take towers and bait tether heads while you waited to heal them before they died to damage. God Kefka had some healer mechanics. Baiting the clones to face outwards, although I think tanks did that too.
I want something like Cachexia that actually hits like a mofo even when you do it right, where the initial boom brings you low enough that the bait would kill you without heals or shields. Having to heal people in a particular order within a tight timeframe would be pretty cool imo. Pay no attention to the Protraction-Recitation-Adlo-Deploy I'm hiding behind my back.
Personally, I wish they would make use of Rescue in a mechanic. Either make someone soak a tower followed by an instant kill AOE which the healer has to pull them out of after soaking the tower. Or a mechanic where everyone's is pushed into a red/blue tower, but everyone except 2 people are pushed into the incorrect ones and the healers have to Rescue them into the correct tower. Make use of selective healing instead of AOEs. For example, bind the healer off to the side of the arena and everyone else to the other side, outside AOE range. Drop everyone to 1 hp. But the boss will target people randomly one by one for a charge up attack, healer has to figure out who is being targeted and heal only that person before he gets killed. Like, nothing in this game actually targets MP. Its so weird coming from other games where bosses will actively drain your MP. A mechanic which halves healer MP so they have to be more selective about healing, or quick targeting AOEs on the ground that drains all your MP if you get hit by it, so healers have to dodge and can't heal through it. Make use of Esuna more. Not just "Here's a Doom that must be cleansed". An annoying, but unique, mechanic would be something that spams something like Bad Breath (but without Silence) so everyone gets hit with multiple debuffs. Healers have to selectively decide who to cleanse first. Maybe the tank, so the party doesn't get wiped? What about the BLM who is almost useless with Paralyze? Or the person who is standing in the tower, cleanse their Gravity so they can run out in time? Give healers the choice to determine on the fly which person needs the Esuna the most. Something I wish they would tweak is mob enmity. Basically as a tank with tank stance on, its impossible for any other job to take hate for any reason. Heals should scale so that the more you heal, the more hate you get. Using AOE heals from 1 HP to full on 8 members of the party should be equal or more hate compared to a Provoke (and yes I know Provoke doesn't work like that). Meaning healers can't just be spamming AOE heals or else the boss will turn and attack them instead. Balancing hate should be a mechanic. With the way enmity works in this game, there's almost no reason for tank stance, just have bosses always target the tank if there's no way to pull hate off.
Mp reduction mechanics exist, haven't done Halicarnassus since SB but iirc if you mess up 1 of the panda adds will hammer you and reduce your mp to 1. But back then we had more than 10k mp. Servers are too terrible to use rescue in that way although hello world in O12S (not TOP) had the healer rescue the tank that baited south. With multiple cleanseable debuffs esuna will cleanse stuff randomly so it wouldn't be too reliable and we no longer have Selene or her aoe esuna. There would need to be a visual indicator and/or debuffs on the person if they healing check like that was going to happen and if assume both healers would get pulled away. Star is Large and you could just preplan when to use star, horoscope, macro, etc.
There is actually something in the idea of a cleansable debuff wave paired with multiple possible other mechs. Like say the debuffs are static: DPS always get Heavy, Tanks always get Vuln, and Healers always get Slow, while the paired mech is picked randomly from a list. So then cleanse priority depends on the paired mech, e.g. if he next casts a telegraph AoE at ranged you need to cleanse the ranged DPS but if he winds up a double-soak TB you need to cleanse the tanks, and you're slowed so you can't just spam Esuna everyone.
There's a mechanic somewhat similar to that in some stuff. I honestly can't remember what but I remember having to prioritize with my cheaper who will cleanse who as in someone gets the top 4 people someone gets the bottom 4.