More engaging DPS for healers

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

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Adding more buttons and more rotations is not an incentive for lazy healers to do anything...its a dis-incentive....you don't make something more complicated when the damage that can be dealt as a white mage let alone a scholar can be quite sufficient with very little effort.

The AST could use a buff....sure.....but you will not fix this by over-complicating the job....people will be lazy regardless.
You can't even finish the bloody job quests without doing damage in the first place.

The problem starts with the player...not the job. The discussion was over before you even started it...this is just a pie in the sky chat over something that should be dealt with on a player level...not the job.

As i've said before....a decently melded WHM at level 70 can do a SCARY amount of damage with very little effort leaving plenty of mana and time to heal the party. I don't need to stack yet an another hotbar for someones ideal DPS on a healer....I'd sooner toss the job all together and walk away.

This is a tough one. I agree that the lack of synergy between DPS and healing skills is something that coud be dealt with, by adding minor benefits to our damaging spells. However as was already stated, those benefits should not encourage healing even less than before(e.g. by adding shielding effects to Stone/Malefic). Problem is, DPSing as healer is pretty monotonous and boring. This is mainly a problem though, because game mechanics give us plenty of free time to run around or /mogdance during combat. I believe nobody picked a healing class for their DPS capabilities or their "rotations", so instead of prioritizing DPS even more, developers should give us more incentives to actually HEAL instead - which is why we chose those jobs in the first place.

I understand how difficult this is in terms of balancing, since dungeons can and should not have as high a difficulty threshold als extreme primals or savage content, so adjusting incomming damage on parties and tanks to the point where we are forced to heal is by no means a solution, and would only scare newer players away from healing classes. This game does a pretty good job at ramping up difficulty for newcomers, and we tend to forget that, because we have been playing for so long(when I fought Ifrit for the first time at around level 17, I was afraid >.<).

However... since what we want to do is healing anyway - how about picking up the "there is something spawning that requires to be healed"-mechanic, like those vases in Labyrinth of the ancients, or those dragon heads in shinryu extreme?
What if benefic 2 for Astrologians would increase card duration on someone? Sure, it's going to end up in a huge amount of overheal, but honestly - who cares? There is already a huge amount of overheal due to the nature of AoE healing being a thing, and how healing over time effects tick into party members at 100% HP. And since benefic 2 is relatively expensive to cast, spamming it to increase a balance to infinity will drain my mana pool pretty quickly, so I'd have to keep an eye on that too.
There already exist small incentives on our healing spells, that encourages us to use them. Benefic 1 guarantees Benefic 2 to critically heal every now and then. Cooldown for Lightspeed can be reduced by casting Essential Dignity. So how about giving some of our healing spells small dps-increasing incentives too? It's not increasing our personal DPS by any means, but it DOES increase our offensive capabilities in a party.

Healer DPS will never be complicated, and it's fine that way. So instead of making me chain-spam Malefic, I would do so with my healing spells - which in turn makes my party members happy since it's basically their DPS I'm buffing.

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Originally Posted by NephthysVasudan

Adding more buttons and more rotations is not an incentive for lazy healers to do anything...its a dis-incentive....you don't make something more complicated when the damage that can be dealt as a white mage let alone a scholar can be quite sufficient with very little effort.


The AST could use a buff....sure.....but you will not fix this by over-complicating the job....people will be lazy regardless.
You can't even finish the bloody job quests without doing damage in the first place.

The problem starts with the player...not the job. The discussion was over before you even started it...this is just a pie in the sky chat over something that should be dealt with on a player level...not the job.

As i've said before....a decently melded WHM at level 70 can do a SCARY amount of damage with very little effort leaving plenty of mana and time to heal the party. I don't need to stack yet an another hotbar for someones ideal DPS on a healer....I'd sooner toss the job all together and walk away.

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I gotta say it seems like you're responding to your idea of what I've said instead of what I've actually said and it's getting kind of frustrating because you could just read the posts. If you're so set on this then like... go away? You aren't contributing anything to the conversation, just calling people lazy and ranting that nothing will ever change. Try optimism. Or maybe coffee.

To summerize my annoyances with this post alone....

the damage that can be dealt as a white mage let alone a scholar can be quite sufficient with very little effort.

Uhh... duh? Of course? There is nothing I've posted that suggests otherwise. Again, read before responding.

this is just a pie in the sky chat over something that should be dealt with on a player level

What does this even mean? Dealt with on a player level? The game right now clearly does not incentivize dps from a 'pure' healer mindset. These sugestions would. Will there still be lazy people? Sure. Never said there wouldn't. Good luck 'dealing with them' though, I look forward to your meaningful suggestions on this even though it is explicitly not the topic of this thread.

I don't need to stack yet an another hotbar for someones ideal DPS on a healer

You don't but you do need to read the thing you're responding to or you risk looking uninformed. Most of my suggestions don't add any buttons at all and the ones that do are a negligible increase. If I can find space for "Clear Spread" and "Clear RR" on AST I think you'd be fine with a Stone alternative.

I get it. You like what you've got. So do I. We don't have a difference of opinionon healer dps as it stands now. Your opinions aren't facts though and objective facts (observations in DF for instance) tell us dps-free healers exist. What are you suggesting to help that? Because if the answer is "nothing" kindly hit your back browser and complain somewhere else.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

RDM doesn't come off as an engaging DPS despite its duality (it comes off as one of the least engaging, to be honest, since it's so simple)

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Opinion.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

There's also the inherent danger of people becoming so ingrained with the healer-DPS mentality that they actually stop doing their primary job. As in, "Well I could use a cure, but I don't want to lose this 300 potency nuke I built up," and so on.

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Basic slippery slope analogy is basic.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

I don't really see where the need comes from to make their DPS skills more 'engaging' to begin with. DPS don't have to worry about everyone's health meters. And if we're trying to lure no-DPS healers to DPSing more with some added effects related to healing... I don't know what to say. Because what you're doing if you are NOT using your DPS skills when everyone is topped off, is either overhealing, or just standing around. So if someone feels fine with just standing around and doing nothing at all I don't see how they'll be tempted.

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You should talk to the person I've quoted above you, you guys can be pessimistic together :D

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

Opinion.

Basic slippery slope analogy is basic.

You should talk to the person I've quoted above you, you guys can be pessimistic together :D

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You should have taken your own advice and called it a night if this is how you're going to act. Or at the very least not bothered to reply at all.

(sry, English is not my first language and i'm only playing this game since December)

I think the stone-cast is really awful. Can't a healer have a spell that looks like that, when he is doing dmg?

The wind-debuff: The Enemy becomes an halo around his head and becomes dmg over time
Stone: we shoot with incense or something like that?

Cross-debuff duration: 10 sec., can only used once in a fight: While it's active its prolongs the cast-time of the enemy for 2 sec.? Maybe that's something for the boss (running-Mecha).

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Originally Posted by NephthysVasudan

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I've read Moro's post quite a few times...clearly, you did not read the full post. Moro wasn't exactly suggesting adding more buttons to the WHM rotation - in fact, she countered that argument by suggesting a proc system. I associate that idea with what happens with SMNs in that with a proc, their Ruin II automatically turns into a Ruin IV. You're just hitting the same hotkey, only it just adds a higher benefit to it. Similarly, one of the first things she said was that Stone casts would apply a stoneskin to whomever the enemy's target was. How is any of that over complicated? You're not changing anything or adding a rotation with how I simplified things here - other party members just get the benefit from a WHM DPS'ing.

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Originally Posted by Sanako

(sry, English is not my first language and i'm only playing this game since December)

I think the stone-cast is really awful. Can't a healer have a spell that looks like that, when he is doing dmg?

The wind-debuff: The Enemy becomes an halo around his head and becomes dmg over time
Stone: we shoot with incense or something like that?

Cross-debuff duration: 10 sec., can only used once in a fight: While it's active its prolongs the cast-time of the enemy for 2 sec.? Maybe that's something for the boss (running-Mecha).

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WHM used to have the Stoneskin spell, until it was removed in 4.0. I'm 100% for each healers having their own versions of particular spells. The WHM should have the Stoneskin, AST should have something dealing with stars (heck, they could cast Shell), and SCH could have the classic protect.

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Originally Posted by BillyKaplan

What if they made healing more engaging for healers...?

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I have to agree with this one. All of OP's suggestions involved adding more power to healers, which would only increase the downtime of healers and make them even closer to being just support dps. Healers need to be less powerful, not more. A BLM has to use skills to have access to Fire IV and Foul, a SMN has to use skills for Bane and Fester to do anything and a RDM has to work to use Verflare too. And healers just get to use their most powerful moves whenever? We already get encounters with crazy spiky damage because healers have crazy tools to counter almost everything. The encounters wouldn't have to have such spiky damage to keep healers engaged if they had anything resembling a healing rotation.

I want to see the actual healing rotations become more involving in the sense that performing basic actions would unlock the more powerful actions which are necessary to deal with damage mechanics, instead of those skills being ready to use whenever. For example: Cure III, Medica and Medica II only hit party members who have Regen on them, and the MP cost and potency of Regen are reduced to compensate for this change. Another example: instead of reducing cooldowns, Lilies would increase the potencies of Medica, Medica II, Assize and Cure III up to what they are now and without Lilies those skills would not heal much.

Combining both of my suggestions would lead to the healer being very busy with healing in order to survive some mechanics. If encounters had some form of persistent damage aside from boss auto attacks, then continuously healing the party with single target heals would feel more satisfying because the healing wouldn't be wasted. It is possible to add dps spells to mix as well and perhaps create a new healer whose dps spells enhance its healing.

Maybe this is more fitting for the unpopular opinion thread... oh well.

The problem with healer dps is different than this approach would fix.

People really aren't comfortable with minimum viable healing. It's not just reigning in overhealing, it's underhealing to minimize the amount of GCDs spent healing at all. The fact that it exists is because there is very little randomness in boss and trash patterns in FFXIV, so it's possible to keep people at a much lower overall HP threshold than in other games. Like if an aoe hits everyone, you don't doublecast medica to get people to full quickly, you do something like use rouse + whispering dawn and let HP creep up slowly because you know there will be no aoe damage coming in. Dpsing well means knowing the encounter back and forwards, and when its safe enough to convert GCDs to damage spells. In other games, efficiency is just how little you overheal, and the amount of GCDs you spend really doesn't matter; here casts matter too.

I'm not sure that changing dps itself will affect this. It's not really a matter of how engaging the spells are, it's more that mindset of planning the encounter to maximize GCDs spent on offense. You also have trust issues, i.e. you can only do this when you can rely on your party too; uncertainty breaks this down a lot. So you have randomness via other players more than anything, and its hard to plan the encounter if you suffer anxiety, as people really can't be planned for.

I think you'd have to teach people how to minimum heal to change this, and ironically by making things early on a lot easier or more blatant. Like the pattern tends to be auto attacks-tankbuster-moderate aoe damage-mechanic with low/high potential damage if failed-back to auto attacks. So they'd need to know to react to each phase well enough that they can stuff in between with casts.

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Originally Posted by Reinha

Healers need to be less powerful, not more.

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I wrote why this wont work well in the unpopular opinion thread. Basically it means healers can no longer fix a lot of things they can now. Less powerful healers means that Tanks and DPS will need to be more perfect, because they can cause a lot of slow wipes. If a tank misses a cooldown, the healers won't be able to get them up in time, or if multiple dps die, it would end up being a slow wipe instead of recoverable.

OP ideas could work for the next healer in 5.0
It wouldn't change our 3 actual jobs, and it would satisfy those who searching for new healer gameplay.