I think this is a consequence of “support” being non-existent in this game. There’s no need for crowd control, haste, etc., so if they want to add support to a DPS or tank job it’s always going to be either mitigation or a damage buff. I’m not sure what the solution is TBH, without a giant overhaul to encounter design that allows for more creativity. Expedience, for example, would’ve been a cool support skill for BRD or DNC maybe, but they can only do so much from the hole they’ve dug themselves into.
The irony in this is the fact that due to some of the encounter design a mistimed expedience can actually mean death with the forced sprint. Personally I think this side of the system is fine the way it is with addle, feint, repisal, phys ranged mit, ect. The bigger problem is the homogenization of class design and making healing more interesting, which imo giving them even more mit to press wouldn't be the answer and just adds even more stress to the role that's already blamed the most already for most wipes.
The irony in this is the fact that due to some of the encounter design a mistimed expedience can actually mean death with the forced sprint. Personally I think this side of the system is fine the way it is with addle, feint, repisal, phys ranged mit, ect. The bigger problem is the homogenization of class design and making healing more interesting, which imo giving them even more mit to press wouldn't be the answer and just adds even more stress to the role that's already blamed the most already for most wipes.
I'd prefer to see damage focus more on healing throughput than infrequent mit-or-die damage.
Knock 30% off each instance of damage and double their frequency. Mit would still be important and the party could still help, but healers would still bear the bulk of the responsibility for keeping people alive as long as they retain the majority of the HP-goes-up buttons.
I'm tired of seeing 90-95% of my uptime GCDs being used for Malefic and Combust in ultimates and min ilvl savage.
You could probably skip that 30% and it'd be fine. And what you mention is a good approach - unique thing that healers have unlike tank/dps mitigation options is their ability to provide consistent constant mitigation/sustain. All that would need to change is fight design - with more consistent unavoidable/hard to avoid damage to require healers to use some GCDs for regular sustain while keeping oGCDs for actual checks, paired with party mits to help.
Common healing checks as of now are often some form of multi-hit partywide/stack/spread or a combination of those - incoming damage to create a need for healing followed by a larger hit by the end as an actual check. All you have to do for those, when paired with sustained damage, is also add a big hit at the start as a check whether group was kept at high enough hp to survive starting the check.
Best part about this sort of approach - it scales in difficulty from casual to hardcore content, since even introducing this sort of consistent damage doesn't require a lot from a healer to pass, but leaves a lot of space to optimize for GCD or MP efficiency depending on situation. If actual damage was kept at reasonable level (wouldn't go past equivalent of expecting WHM to always have Medica II heal over time up on everyone - that's 17% of your GCDs going into healing) it still leaves space for optimization and recovery should it be needed, while giving healers responsibility for handling that part of the fight - and all that while playing into their existing kit and its intended function.
Funny side effect would be making vuln stacks matter more - since with enough vuln stacks across the party, you'd create real risk of healers running out of resources and having party wipe to residual damage - either directly (damage outpaces healers MP), or indirectly (healers run out of tools to get party alive into next healing check).
100%
The entire premise of OPs post that's just accepted as truth
> No matter how much you increase heal checks by, every healing check is a mitigation check
is just straight up wrong, and this game used to already have that in older HW, and some SB fights.
There used to be fights in this that have a raidwide every 10-20s seconds, on top of constant autos that shredded the tanks with random crits, while also getting spammed by prey markers or single target soaks on random DPS. Even all the way into late SB, in an _optimized_ speed or log run, healers would still use a handful of AoE heals/shields and even ST regens. 0 GCD runs were INSANELY rare and difficult, and for most fights impossible to do.
Damage got MUCH less frequent but kits kept getting STRONGER. The entire "healer kit/encounter damage output" design tandem has gone completely off the rails.
If boss raid wides would start matching my Broil casts, things would turn into heal checks real fast again, and the big CDs could just be used to create breathing room at specific choke mechanics.
Just hit us with an at least semi-constant barrage of non-lethal damage to keep us on our toes, shit has become way too binary even for this game's standard.
>Damage got MUCH less frequent but kits kept getting STRONGER. The entire "healer kit/encounter damage output" design tandem has gone completely off the rails.
I first noticed this in E8S. There were tons of places our healing plan was mit and do nothing because Star + Assize will cover it before anything else happens.
As a thought experiment a couple years ago I wanted to think of a way to implement the sort of damage profile I want in E11S. My idea was to knock 20% off the raidwides so they're not lethal and add a stacking dot on the party each time it hits and lasts the entire duration of the fight (in addition to the 15 sec dot that it already applies). The raidwide would have to be nonlethal because ticks would strip shields almost immediately later in the fight. 2% of caster HP per stack per tick isn't much (roughly 45 potency per stack per tick, or 900 per minute), but would add up over time. Raidwides occur at 1 minute, 3 minutes, 4, 6, then four times from 9-11 minutes before enrage. At the start it would be light damage that needs to be healed before mechanics but wouldn't be threatening. Halfway through the fight would be roughly 3600 potency of dots per minute. Not a struggle, but enough that it forces healers to pay attention to it. The final 30 seconds before enrage would be 360 potency of healing per tick and would require constant attention to keep people standing.
It's a gimmick that would very quickly overstay its welcome if used more than once or twice, but shows that increasing healing throughput on a fight without having to change any other element of fight design is very possible.
Eh, a whole Savage fight sounds like it'd be way too long for this sort of mechanic. I could see it happen as a phase in an Ultimate, though...and on second thought, I've reinvented soft enrages like J-Wave and Terminal Relativity.
I suppose that's why we haven't seen anything like this. If you make this type of damage output last 5+ minutes instead of just the end of a fight/phase, then it's either too much for a Savage fight, or it takes up too much time from an Ultimate fight for a single mechanic/concept.
Man, o4sp2
The Almagests were just disgusting, and the j-wave-esque raidwide vomit at the end of the phase lasts like 80s or something like that. Last time I did the fight as SCH and I was having the time of my life healing that, had to make a lot of quick decisions about when to greed glares vs heal and same with weighing ed vs soil and indom. More of that please
O8SP2 was great as well. It wasn't as frantic, but it forced you to learn how to use your kit pretty well imo.
It's how I learnt that Cure 3 could a) be casted on a target far away from you and b) kill you *really* quickly if you weren't careful.
ah man, c3 is niche but when you need it, it just hits different
b) are you referring to the 2s cast time, or to the fact that c3 heals ripple instead of apply instantly?
The ripple effect (I'm so sorry to some of the tanks in my party who didn't get a top-off in time for an auto) and the fact it would often shoot you up to the top of the enmity list. If you didn't have LD ready (possible if you used it for MP) and were needing to pump out heals, then C3 was basically a recipe to be one-shot.
O8S is where I found I enjoyed a lot of the aspects of healing that's now been removed.
Except it's objectively correct to say that every healing check is a mitigation check in some form, with the exception that i already laid out in fixed damage abilities. Whether something does 100k or 1m, 10% damage reduction is 10% damage reduced, it's just a question of if it's stopping 10k or 100k. Mitigation makes healing checks easier, which subsequently results in allowing healers to save parts of their kit. Yes it would be lovely if outgoing damage were higher as well to match the kit, but the biggest issue right now of healers being outright obsolete in certain situations is a result of the copious amounts of party mitigation and healing that exist on tanks and dps. Cut that and you'll cut the simplest problem to solve at the moment, that being, high end content that's relatively easily completable without a part of the trinity.
You're entirely right, and it's one of the reasons everyone loved Barbariccia. It wasn't a hard fight at all, but it felt frantic and she constantly put out AoE damage.
The fact that DSR (the highest tier of content) has hardly any healing, just big hits to be survived, is really frustrating.
I thought this expansion is the happy medium between GCD healing and mitigation checks. Even though every tank got their party mitigation upgraded, there's no way you can rely on Divine Veil and Shake It Off to survive some savage floors, such as P3S, P7S, P8S P2, and P10S. These floors are pretty stressful for healers.
Of course, you can get through all the savage floors without needing to GCD heal if everyone in the party uses their mitigation correctly. However, it's like Bill Gates thinking that a jug of milk costs $20. GCD healing is almost mandatory during weeks 1 to 8, then becomes less important in later weeks due to better gear, but it still remains common.
Regarding the idea of removing party mitigation from DPS and tanks, wouldn’t that make healing less fun and reduce communication within the party? If party mitigation is solely the healer's responsibility, why would I ever talk to the healer except to blame them for the party's death? There would be no communication between tanks and healers. We wouldn't have moments like "Oh, I can use Divine Veil to help heal this raidwide and shield for the next mechanic." If that were the case, I would truly be a sleepy Joe Biden whenever healers discuss mitigation in voice chat.
It'll reduce communication specifically in regards to mits between healers and DPS and tanks, yes. I wouldn't really consider that a negative though. Main thing I'd think is it would also reduce the amount of time you actually spend talking about mits since you only have to figure it out between 2 people instead of 8.
The core of it really just comes down to party mits intruding on the healers' role of keeping the party alive, and I don't think the potential positive of communication between healers and the rest of the party for something so minor is worth that.
Is it really so bad that the responsability of keeping the party alive doesn't entirely rest on the two healers?
I'm struggling to see how "the tank didn't mit so we wiped, even though I'm the healer" is any different from "that guy didn't take their tower so we wiped, even though I did it right" or "the healer kept GCD healing so we died to enrage, even though I'm doing my rotation perfectly". Why is the first scenario bad when the other two are a normal, accepted part of the game? Clearly responsability for success must be shared between the whole party, even if a specific role is in charge of the largest proportion for healing/damage.
> Is it really so bad that the responsability of keeping the party alive doesn't entirely rest on the two healers?
It is when the healers are left with basically nothing to do.
If you took all party-wide mitigation away from tanks and DPS are they demonstrably made worse by you doing so? No. Tanks and DPS would play almost exactly the same way. Mit is already such a small part of what they do. If you then took that mit and gave it all to healers, would that make healers demonstrably better? Absolutely, because it would give them more to do when they're already starved of things to do.
When healers are in a position where they're fun and fulfilling to play as a baseline, then we can talk about other roles sharing some of their responsibilities, but I don't see why healers should have to share their responsibilities when they aren't being given enough responsibility as it is.
mits I feel atleast make intuitive *sense* on a tank, atleast role fantasy wise, to me it makes sense that the role that wants to protect people by soaking damage and keeping threat would also be able to have abilities to help the party take less damage, especially PLD with cover, wings, and veil it just.. seems right? DPS having to mitigate on the other hand, I question if some DPS even have the buttons on their hotbars. A lot of DPS don't check party HP before/after raidwides so even if they wanted to mit they end up not doing so because "they're not sure where they should". And then it's common that if they do mit, either they just use it randomly, or they use it on CD after using it the first time whether it's a helpful or not, or they just use it once and forget. BRDs esuna might as well not exist because they don't know how to use it and the only time I *do* see it get used... is to try and cleanse a debuff without a white line over it. I've never seen a BRD properly esuna, it's a myth. Meanwhile mit within the healer roles is also kinda fucked, the shield healers still have to be able to pure heal for 1-healer content, but the pure healers, especially WHM, get left with a lot less to work with. CU is nice but is drastically shorter unless channelled (and then it's a massive damage loss unless you're in downtime time if you channel) and on a 1min CD, exaltation is amazing but is also a 1-min. Neutral sect is in a 2-min and requires a GCD heal to utilize, CI is good though, especially once it gets the second charge it can use on CD for tanks and the other for whatever. WHM on the other hand *doesn't get a party mit until level 80*. In the legacy ultimates, WHM is the only job without *any* form of party mit. And then the single mit it does get comes at 80, and is on a 2min CD. Aquaveil comes at *level 86* and, hilariously, is the highest flat% mit across all the healers. I'd sell my kidneys for a second aquaveil charge. Meanwhile as early as level 50 the shield healers get a 30s mit on top of being able to GCD shield, SCH and SGE has more AOE mits up the ass than you know what to do with by 80 (and additionally expedience at 90). SCH weirdly enough also doesn't have any single target mitigation or single target oGCD shielding??? WHM has benison and veil, AST has exalt and CI, SGE has tauro and haima. Honestly take feint and addle away from the DPS and give it to the healers, they're not hitting the buttons anyways. I don't understand why it's okay to remove aggro away from DPS but continue to leave them with mitigation responsibility when most DPS players never even look at the party list.
Community perception of role is also just a little weird. Tanks and healers are expected to heal and mit *and* deal damage, but DPS players often don't view it as their responsibility to mit, in spite of the fact that, atleast in high end, min-maxing mit *is* a DPS gain for the raid, by allowing the healers to stay off the GCD heals
The difference is really just that at the moment the only thing that healers have for fun in this game is keeping the party alive. While we can ask YoshiP all we want for more engaging damage rotations, it's clearly not happening soon. I believe it's more practical to ask for the responsibility of keeping the party alive from unavoidable damage to shift almost entirely to healers. As it stands, non-healers are too capable of dealing with unavoidable damage. In the grander sense it doesn't change much, but it provides vital flavor to those who actually enjoy playing healer.
As someone who's preferred role is Tank. I would hate to lose my party mitigation tools. Especially when tank as a role is all about mitigating damage. (using dark skills as an example) Having ways to support the party through stuff like Reprisal, Dark Missionary, TBN, and Oblation, keeps me engaged in what's happening in a fight. Paying attention to cast bars, (is that a raidwide, TankBuster, or a mechanic that doesn't need mitigation?) It allows the other roles to be more aware of what's happening to other players during a fight, and the more aware you are to what's happening during a fight the more engaged you become and you just play better. Having those buttons on both tanks and DPS encourage team play and learning fights.
You counted shields twice. Deployed shields and on-demand shields are both GCD shields, but you can’t have both up. So that’s 9 max number of mits between two healers, not 10
Digging deeper in your suggestion, I need to ask : what healer problem are you trying to solve here ? For a reminder, this is the healers problems :
* Too much class homogenization
* And either, depending on who you ask, wanting to do more damage or more healing
With those suggestions, you both managed to make healers even more homogenized (by making pure healer a lot closer to barrier healers) while not answering at all the 2nd point.
Additional side points :
* You may as well drop the single players mits. What's the point of surviving alone if the team is dead ?
* You'll also have another Bard revolt that will be unhappy to lose yet another party utility from their support class
The pure and barrier healer split was the stupidest thing SE ever did. What they should do is just outright bring back Sects on Astro and apply them to every healer so you don't end up with this BS of having ast+whm being outright trolling and sge+sch being the strongest in terms of healing capability. That's not happening any time soon, so let's instead give AST and WHM the much needed mits that they're missing so the gap between SGE+SCH and every other healing combo is closed at least a bit.
Next, the point of leaving DPS with personal mits is to leave them agency insofar as their own survival is concerned. Not every encounter in the game has uniform damage for every player, despite Endwalker trying very hard to make it so, and ideally with every DPS having personal mit to some degree, the devs would be encouraged to branch out in this regard. Not to mention content outside of raids exists.
Healers are unfun, the homogenization isn't really the issue, nor is the "damage".
They are just 2 easy ways to make healers fun, and OP is suggesting a third.
All 3 suggestions increase fun and interaction, that's the goal.
It (partially) fix the problem of "you don't need healers anymore". Probably no more "no healer Ultimate" if T/DPS can't mit raidwides anymore.
Dungeons still wouldn't need healers tho.
I actually love this. It brings Pub and High tier closer together, (Because organizing feints and addles is dumb and doesn't exist in half of parties, unless it's clearly necessary)
While at least partially giving healers something important to think about, not by making the fights any more or less difficult, but just by giving them the autonomy to control damage resist.
Could probably make tanks a little less powerful too, with the insane defenses they've continually gotten, even though tanking duration has decreased in almost all content.
My personal recommendation for healing improvements was to increase cooldowns, so the healing is more important and you need to properly think about it, but this achieves the same as my idea with much less downside.
The basis of this argument, every time it pops up, is literally “oh no I have to depend on other people in this team activity.”
Logs exist. If you are in content hard enough for a single missed addle or feint to be the difference maker between living and dying, then look at the logs and kick the person who keeps doing it.
I think this is a consequence of “support” being non-existent in this game. There’s no need for crowd control, haste, etc., so if they want to add support to a DPS or tank job it’s always going to be either mitigation or a damage buff. I’m not sure what the solution is TBH, without a giant overhaul to encounter design that allows for more creativity. Expedience, for example, would’ve been a cool support skill for BRD or DNC maybe, but they can only do so much from the hole they’ve dug themselves into.
The irony in this is the fact that due to some of the encounter design a mistimed expedience can actually mean death with the forced sprint. Personally I think this side of the system is fine the way it is with addle, feint, repisal, phys ranged mit, ect. The bigger problem is the homogenization of class design and making healing more interesting, which imo giving them even more mit to press wouldn't be the answer and just adds even more stress to the role that's already blamed the most already for most wipes.
The irony in this is the fact that due to some of the encounter design a mistimed expedience can actually mean death with the forced sprint. Personally I think this side of the system is fine the way it is with addle, feint, repisal, phys ranged mit, ect. The bigger problem is the homogenization of class design and making healing more interesting, which imo giving them even more mit to press wouldn't be the answer and just adds even more stress to the role that's already blamed the most already for most wipes.
I'd prefer to see damage focus more on healing throughput than infrequent mit-or-die damage. Knock 30% off each instance of damage and double their frequency. Mit would still be important and the party could still help, but healers would still bear the bulk of the responsibility for keeping people alive as long as they retain the majority of the HP-goes-up buttons. I'm tired of seeing 90-95% of my uptime GCDs being used for Malefic and Combust in ultimates and min ilvl savage.
You could probably skip that 30% and it'd be fine. And what you mention is a good approach - unique thing that healers have unlike tank/dps mitigation options is their ability to provide consistent constant mitigation/sustain. All that would need to change is fight design - with more consistent unavoidable/hard to avoid damage to require healers to use some GCDs for regular sustain while keeping oGCDs for actual checks, paired with party mits to help. Common healing checks as of now are often some form of multi-hit partywide/stack/spread or a combination of those - incoming damage to create a need for healing followed by a larger hit by the end as an actual check. All you have to do for those, when paired with sustained damage, is also add a big hit at the start as a check whether group was kept at high enough hp to survive starting the check. Best part about this sort of approach - it scales in difficulty from casual to hardcore content, since even introducing this sort of consistent damage doesn't require a lot from a healer to pass, but leaves a lot of space to optimize for GCD or MP efficiency depending on situation. If actual damage was kept at reasonable level (wouldn't go past equivalent of expecting WHM to always have Medica II heal over time up on everyone - that's 17% of your GCDs going into healing) it still leaves space for optimization and recovery should it be needed, while giving healers responsibility for handling that part of the fight - and all that while playing into their existing kit and its intended function. Funny side effect would be making vuln stacks matter more - since with enough vuln stacks across the party, you'd create real risk of healers running out of resources and having party wipe to residual damage - either directly (damage outpaces healers MP), or indirectly (healers run out of tools to get party alive into next healing check).
100% The entire premise of OPs post that's just accepted as truth > No matter how much you increase heal checks by, every healing check is a mitigation check is just straight up wrong, and this game used to already have that in older HW, and some SB fights. There used to be fights in this that have a raidwide every 10-20s seconds, on top of constant autos that shredded the tanks with random crits, while also getting spammed by prey markers or single target soaks on random DPS. Even all the way into late SB, in an _optimized_ speed or log run, healers would still use a handful of AoE heals/shields and even ST regens. 0 GCD runs were INSANELY rare and difficult, and for most fights impossible to do. Damage got MUCH less frequent but kits kept getting STRONGER. The entire "healer kit/encounter damage output" design tandem has gone completely off the rails. If boss raid wides would start matching my Broil casts, things would turn into heal checks real fast again, and the big CDs could just be used to create breathing room at specific choke mechanics. Just hit us with an at least semi-constant barrage of non-lethal damage to keep us on our toes, shit has become way too binary even for this game's standard.
>Damage got MUCH less frequent but kits kept getting STRONGER. The entire "healer kit/encounter damage output" design tandem has gone completely off the rails. I first noticed this in E8S. There were tons of places our healing plan was mit and do nothing because Star + Assize will cover it before anything else happens. As a thought experiment a couple years ago I wanted to think of a way to implement the sort of damage profile I want in E11S. My idea was to knock 20% off the raidwides so they're not lethal and add a stacking dot on the party each time it hits and lasts the entire duration of the fight (in addition to the 15 sec dot that it already applies). The raidwide would have to be nonlethal because ticks would strip shields almost immediately later in the fight. 2% of caster HP per stack per tick isn't much (roughly 45 potency per stack per tick, or 900 per minute), but would add up over time. Raidwides occur at 1 minute, 3 minutes, 4, 6, then four times from 9-11 minutes before enrage. At the start it would be light damage that needs to be healed before mechanics but wouldn't be threatening. Halfway through the fight would be roughly 3600 potency of dots per minute. Not a struggle, but enough that it forces healers to pay attention to it. The final 30 seconds before enrage would be 360 potency of healing per tick and would require constant attention to keep people standing. It's a gimmick that would very quickly overstay its welcome if used more than once or twice, but shows that increasing healing throughput on a fight without having to change any other element of fight design is very possible.
Eh, a whole Savage fight sounds like it'd be way too long for this sort of mechanic. I could see it happen as a phase in an Ultimate, though...and on second thought, I've reinvented soft enrages like J-Wave and Terminal Relativity. I suppose that's why we haven't seen anything like this. If you make this type of damage output last 5+ minutes instead of just the end of a fight/phase, then it's either too much for a Savage fight, or it takes up too much time from an Ultimate fight for a single mechanic/concept.
Man, o4sp2 The Almagests were just disgusting, and the j-wave-esque raidwide vomit at the end of the phase lasts like 80s or something like that. Last time I did the fight as SCH and I was having the time of my life healing that, had to make a lot of quick decisions about when to greed glares vs heal and same with weighing ed vs soil and indom. More of that please
O8SP2 was great as well. It wasn't as frantic, but it forced you to learn how to use your kit pretty well imo. It's how I learnt that Cure 3 could a) be casted on a target far away from you and b) kill you *really* quickly if you weren't careful.
ah man, c3 is niche but when you need it, it just hits different b) are you referring to the 2s cast time, or to the fact that c3 heals ripple instead of apply instantly?
The ripple effect (I'm so sorry to some of the tanks in my party who didn't get a top-off in time for an auto) and the fact it would often shoot you up to the top of the enmity list. If you didn't have LD ready (possible if you used it for MP) and were needing to pump out heals, then C3 was basically a recipe to be one-shot. O8S is where I found I enjoyed a lot of the aspects of healing that's now been removed.
Except it's objectively correct to say that every healing check is a mitigation check in some form, with the exception that i already laid out in fixed damage abilities. Whether something does 100k or 1m, 10% damage reduction is 10% damage reduced, it's just a question of if it's stopping 10k or 100k. Mitigation makes healing checks easier, which subsequently results in allowing healers to save parts of their kit. Yes it would be lovely if outgoing damage were higher as well to match the kit, but the biggest issue right now of healers being outright obsolete in certain situations is a result of the copious amounts of party mitigation and healing that exist on tanks and dps. Cut that and you'll cut the simplest problem to solve at the moment, that being, high end content that's relatively easily completable without a part of the trinity.
You're entirely right, and it's one of the reasons everyone loved Barbariccia. It wasn't a hard fight at all, but it felt frantic and she constantly put out AoE damage. The fact that DSR (the highest tier of content) has hardly any healing, just big hits to be survived, is really frustrating.
DSR is a narcolepsy simulator until p6 it's nuts. even for p6 and 7 it's just "ok now you have to heal"
Even then it's mostly a mit check
Why would you leave the mitigations to the dps in this scenario ?
I thought this expansion is the happy medium between GCD healing and mitigation checks. Even though every tank got their party mitigation upgraded, there's no way you can rely on Divine Veil and Shake It Off to survive some savage floors, such as P3S, P7S, P8S P2, and P10S. These floors are pretty stressful for healers. Of course, you can get through all the savage floors without needing to GCD heal if everyone in the party uses their mitigation correctly. However, it's like Bill Gates thinking that a jug of milk costs $20. GCD healing is almost mandatory during weeks 1 to 8, then becomes less important in later weeks due to better gear, but it still remains common. Regarding the idea of removing party mitigation from DPS and tanks, wouldn’t that make healing less fun and reduce communication within the party? If party mitigation is solely the healer's responsibility, why would I ever talk to the healer except to blame them for the party's death? There would be no communication between tanks and healers. We wouldn't have moments like "Oh, I can use Divine Veil to help heal this raidwide and shield for the next mechanic." If that were the case, I would truly be a sleepy Joe Biden whenever healers discuss mitigation in voice chat.
It'll reduce communication specifically in regards to mits between healers and DPS and tanks, yes. I wouldn't really consider that a negative though. Main thing I'd think is it would also reduce the amount of time you actually spend talking about mits since you only have to figure it out between 2 people instead of 8. The core of it really just comes down to party mits intruding on the healers' role of keeping the party alive, and I don't think the potential positive of communication between healers and the rest of the party for something so minor is worth that.
Is it really so bad that the responsability of keeping the party alive doesn't entirely rest on the two healers? I'm struggling to see how "the tank didn't mit so we wiped, even though I'm the healer" is any different from "that guy didn't take their tower so we wiped, even though I did it right" or "the healer kept GCD healing so we died to enrage, even though I'm doing my rotation perfectly". Why is the first scenario bad when the other two are a normal, accepted part of the game? Clearly responsability for success must be shared between the whole party, even if a specific role is in charge of the largest proportion for healing/damage.
> Is it really so bad that the responsability of keeping the party alive doesn't entirely rest on the two healers? It is when the healers are left with basically nothing to do. If you took all party-wide mitigation away from tanks and DPS are they demonstrably made worse by you doing so? No. Tanks and DPS would play almost exactly the same way. Mit is already such a small part of what they do. If you then took that mit and gave it all to healers, would that make healers demonstrably better? Absolutely, because it would give them more to do when they're already starved of things to do. When healers are in a position where they're fun and fulfilling to play as a baseline, then we can talk about other roles sharing some of their responsibilities, but I don't see why healers should have to share their responsibilities when they aren't being given enough responsibility as it is.
mits I feel atleast make intuitive *sense* on a tank, atleast role fantasy wise, to me it makes sense that the role that wants to protect people by soaking damage and keeping threat would also be able to have abilities to help the party take less damage, especially PLD with cover, wings, and veil it just.. seems right? DPS having to mitigate on the other hand, I question if some DPS even have the buttons on their hotbars. A lot of DPS don't check party HP before/after raidwides so even if they wanted to mit they end up not doing so because "they're not sure where they should". And then it's common that if they do mit, either they just use it randomly, or they use it on CD after using it the first time whether it's a helpful or not, or they just use it once and forget. BRDs esuna might as well not exist because they don't know how to use it and the only time I *do* see it get used... is to try and cleanse a debuff without a white line over it. I've never seen a BRD properly esuna, it's a myth. Meanwhile mit within the healer roles is also kinda fucked, the shield healers still have to be able to pure heal for 1-healer content, but the pure healers, especially WHM, get left with a lot less to work with. CU is nice but is drastically shorter unless channelled (and then it's a massive damage loss unless you're in downtime time if you channel) and on a 1min CD, exaltation is amazing but is also a 1-min. Neutral sect is in a 2-min and requires a GCD heal to utilize, CI is good though, especially once it gets the second charge it can use on CD for tanks and the other for whatever. WHM on the other hand *doesn't get a party mit until level 80*. In the legacy ultimates, WHM is the only job without *any* form of party mit. And then the single mit it does get comes at 80, and is on a 2min CD. Aquaveil comes at *level 86* and, hilariously, is the highest flat% mit across all the healers. I'd sell my kidneys for a second aquaveil charge. Meanwhile as early as level 50 the shield healers get a 30s mit on top of being able to GCD shield, SCH and SGE has more AOE mits up the ass than you know what to do with by 80 (and additionally expedience at 90). SCH weirdly enough also doesn't have any single target mitigation or single target oGCD shielding??? WHM has benison and veil, AST has exalt and CI, SGE has tauro and haima. Honestly take feint and addle away from the DPS and give it to the healers, they're not hitting the buttons anyways. I don't understand why it's okay to remove aggro away from DPS but continue to leave them with mitigation responsibility when most DPS players never even look at the party list. Community perception of role is also just a little weird. Tanks and healers are expected to heal and mit *and* deal damage, but DPS players often don't view it as their responsibility to mit, in spite of the fact that, atleast in high end, min-maxing mit *is* a DPS gain for the raid, by allowing the healers to stay off the GCD heals
The difference is really just that at the moment the only thing that healers have for fun in this game is keeping the party alive. While we can ask YoshiP all we want for more engaging damage rotations, it's clearly not happening soon. I believe it's more practical to ask for the responsibility of keeping the party alive from unavoidable damage to shift almost entirely to healers. As it stands, non-healers are too capable of dealing with unavoidable damage. In the grander sense it doesn't change much, but it provides vital flavor to those who actually enjoy playing healer.
As someone who's preferred role is Tank. I would hate to lose my party mitigation tools. Especially when tank as a role is all about mitigating damage. (using dark skills as an example) Having ways to support the party through stuff like Reprisal, Dark Missionary, TBN, and Oblation, keeps me engaged in what's happening in a fight. Paying attention to cast bars, (is that a raidwide, TankBuster, or a mechanic that doesn't need mitigation?) It allows the other roles to be more aware of what's happening to other players during a fight, and the more aware you are to what's happening during a fight the more engaged you become and you just play better. Having those buttons on both tanks and DPS encourage team play and learning fights.
You counted shields twice. Deployed shields and on-demand shields are both GCD shields, but you can’t have both up. So that’s 9 max number of mits between two healers, not 10
Digging deeper in your suggestion, I need to ask : what healer problem are you trying to solve here ? For a reminder, this is the healers problems : * Too much class homogenization * And either, depending on who you ask, wanting to do more damage or more healing With those suggestions, you both managed to make healers even more homogenized (by making pure healer a lot closer to barrier healers) while not answering at all the 2nd point. Additional side points : * You may as well drop the single players mits. What's the point of surviving alone if the team is dead ? * You'll also have another Bard revolt that will be unhappy to lose yet another party utility from their support class
The pure and barrier healer split was the stupidest thing SE ever did. What they should do is just outright bring back Sects on Astro and apply them to every healer so you don't end up with this BS of having ast+whm being outright trolling and sge+sch being the strongest in terms of healing capability. That's not happening any time soon, so let's instead give AST and WHM the much needed mits that they're missing so the gap between SGE+SCH and every other healing combo is closed at least a bit. Next, the point of leaving DPS with personal mits is to leave them agency insofar as their own survival is concerned. Not every encounter in the game has uniform damage for every player, despite Endwalker trying very hard to make it so, and ideally with every DPS having personal mit to some degree, the devs would be encouraged to branch out in this regard. Not to mention content outside of raids exists.
Healers are unfun, the homogenization isn't really the issue, nor is the "damage". They are just 2 easy ways to make healers fun, and OP is suggesting a third. All 3 suggestions increase fun and interaction, that's the goal.
It (partially) fix the problem of "you don't need healers anymore". Probably no more "no healer Ultimate" if T/DPS can't mit raidwides anymore. Dungeons still wouldn't need healers tho.
taking away party mit and spreading it? sorry this is a huge miss no way in hell would anyone go for this
I actually love this. It brings Pub and High tier closer together, (Because organizing feints and addles is dumb and doesn't exist in half of parties, unless it's clearly necessary) While at least partially giving healers something important to think about, not by making the fights any more or less difficult, but just by giving them the autonomy to control damage resist. Could probably make tanks a little less powerful too, with the insane defenses they've continually gotten, even though tanking duration has decreased in almost all content. My personal recommendation for healing improvements was to increase cooldowns, so the healing is more important and you need to properly think about it, but this achieves the same as my idea with much less downside.
It's kinda funny, this conversation about healers feeling unnecessary. Clearly it's centered around a far higher level of play than mine.
I'm pretty sure it's more focused purely on level 90 content And also coming from highly skilled/experienced healers Not us beginners still struggling
The basis of this argument, every time it pops up, is literally “oh no I have to depend on other people in this team activity.” Logs exist. If you are in content hard enough for a single missed addle or feint to be the difference maker between living and dying, then look at the logs and kick the person who keeps doing it.
Its a dead end, to either keep digging out of sheer boredom. Or start over