Healing Focus or DPS Focus

As long as they're heavily time/resource gated and there's much fewer oGCD heals, DPS neutral GCD heals don't have to be a problem. The main benefit I think they'd bring in comparison to oGCD healing is the fact they slightly break the 111 monotony if done right. They become bad when they're always readily available and have no risk to use, this is the problem that the current healing paradigm has with its glut of oGCD heals where we can ignore the base GCD heals because they're just not needed most of the time.

Ideally healing should have some cost associated with it rather than being always neutral. If you want top DPS as a healer, then you need to also have the most efficient healing, not just simply having healing available, top DPS as a healer should be a highly risky venture as you're ultimately playing with everyone's life. The cost doesn't have to be much, a "loss" of about 100-150 potency per resource (GCD/Stack of whatever/Gauge/MP) similar to Energy Drain.

Out-of-combat prepping I don't think is a bad thing either; a lot of jobs generate some resources outside of combat, cooldowns themselves are something that generate outside combat, so using some healing reserves to charge an attack isn't necessarily bad, but mob damage should be increased so that it's riskier to do so. Worst case scenario Square could always slap a "while in combat" condition to the heals to not generate those resources.

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Originally Posted by TheDustyOne

As long as they're heavily time/resource gated and there's much fewer oGCD heals, DPS neutral GCD heals don't have to be a problem. The main benefit I think they'd bring in comparison to oGCD healing is the fact they slightly break the 111 monotony if done right. They become bad when they're always readily available and have no risk to use, this is the problem that the current healing paradigm has with its glut of oGCD heals where we can ignore the base GCD heals because they're just not needed most of the time.

Ideally healing should have some cost associated with it rather than being always neutral. If you want top DPS as a healer, then you need to also have the most efficient healing, not just simply having healing available, top DPS as a healer should be a highly risky venture as you're ultimately playing with everyone's life. The cost doesn't have to be much, a "loss" of about 100-150 potency per resource (GCD/Stack of whatever/Gauge/MP) similar to Energy Drain.

Out-of-combat prepping I don't think is a bad thing either; a lot of jobs generate some resources outside of combat, cooldowns themselves are something that generate outside combat, so using some healing reserves to charge an attack isn't necessarily bad, but mob damage should be increased so that it's riskier to do so. Worst case scenario Square could always slap a "while in combat" condition to the heals to not generate those resources.

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Yeah but if they added more dps neutral skills and made that the entire role, there would be little difference from reaching your OGCD + continuing your dps combo (1,1,1,1,1....2)... it's either 1,1,1,1,1,1....2 (dot), 3 (OGCD rare heal if needed)....or 1,1,1,1,1,1....2 (dot), 3 (DPS neutral heal if needed). DPS neutral skills fall under the same issue as OGCDs, that's why I said it's basically the same thing and doesn't look to influence really any real decision making unfortunately. I/e they end up in the same boat and do not influence monotony as monotony in the current healer design is as follows: If it isn't a dps gain, it's considered a heal and if it is a heal then it is monotonous in nature (That's why Assize is seen as a dps tool rather than a heal one). That's why you turn them into DPS gains which would look to influence the risk/reward scenario where they influence other skills for a certain amount of time and would make you want to press them to change (1,1,1,1,1,1...). Heals atm are just too powerful no matter what healer, and are barely needed (they need to focus on that while also solving the monotony crisis). Which is why I think windows would be great in that regard while also reducing our potency unless under a certain condition, they would add more decision making which unfortunately the role has lost entirely.

For all intents and purposes DPS neutral GCD heals are just oGCD heals

Pnuema and macrocosmos are technically a gain in cleave content but in single target pnuema is just dosis+oGCD cure 3

Lilys at least actually allow you to move glares into the burst window you normally wouldn’t be able to fit inside the burst window but that’s not really much because then since they become a gain they basically become a “must press”

So “neutral” heals are either a gain (in which they go the way of gap closers” or can achieve the same thing by being an oGCD

Neutral GCD vs oGCD is purely down to style and preference, they both heal without interrupting the stream of damage, it only tackles how one might go about designing the healing part of the kit, not the damage part. The big problem we have on the healing side is we have too much available healing and not enough incoming damage to put a dent in any of it, and if we were to stress that kit, we'd quickly find that amount of incoming damage would be too much for the average player, this would be true regardless of GCD vs oGCD.

Whatever refund system a neutral GCD uses should be complementary to a damage kit, not just merely a lily clone, like unlocking a DoT on SCH when a shield breaks, or a buff that AST can give to a teammate, etc. It doesn't have to be a storage of 3 stacks that burst all at once, it could be spent little by little to refund the damage, or it could pull a pneuma and do both at the same time. Or a job could just simply have oGCDs and not worry about a refund system at all.

I do think a subtle loss is better than completely neutral, as it prevents the whole "store for raid buffs" thing if the loss is big enough. Completely neutral ends up feeling like you can just use anything and it wouldn't matter, you'll get the same result anyway, better to make not healing risky but rewarding.

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Also to put in my 2 cents for the main topic at hand, ideally it shouldn't be a healing or dps dichotomy; it should be both. We heal when we need to because we should be the only ones capable of meeting the healing requirements, and we damage when we don't need to heal. The 2 parts of the kit should synergize and feel cohesive to the fantasy of the chosen jobs. One of the problems at the moment is the low healing requirements, so even if we made the damage kits engaging, we'd still be relatively unnecessary in a half-decent group in casual content and could be replaced by a DPS, so healing absolutely needs to be better, but of course you can't make inevitable healing downtime dull, so our DPS kits need improving too.

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Originally Posted by TheDustyOne

Also to put in my 2 cents for the main topic at hand, ideally it shouldn't be a healing or dps dichotomy; it should be both.

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Sums up my opinion about threads like these. The job design for healer is just straight up bad on every end. Every button is its own contained silo that has 0 interaction with the rest of the kits.

Imagine this treatment with the dps. "DPS job is to deal damage". Let's streamline the process and make a caster with 1.5s GCD attack and fill the rest with abilities like fleche, contre sixte, sidewinder, shadowbringer, upheaval, sonic break, etc. It's obviously bad for anyone that plays DPS but this is the treatment we get for our healing cooldowns.

Anyway, get ready to be dissapointed in 2 days when we get another healing button.

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Originally Posted by Katish

Yeah but if they added more dps neutral skills and made that the entire role, there would be little difference from reaching your OGCD + continuing your dps combo (1,1,1,1,1....2)... it's either 1,1,1,1,1,1....2 (dot), 3 (OGCD rare heal if needed)....or 1,1,1,1,1,1....2 (dot), 3 (DPS neutral heal if needed). DPS neutral skills fall under the same issue as OGCDs, that's why I said it's basically the same thing and doesn't look to influence really any real decision making unfortunately. I/e they end up in the same boat and do not influence monotony as monotony in the current healer design is as follows: If it isn't a dps gain, it's considered a heal and if it is a heal then it is monotonous in nature (That's why Assize is seen as a dps tool rather than a heal one). That's why you turn them into DPS gains which would look to influence the risk/reward scenario where they influence other skills for a certain amount of time and would make you want to press them to change (1,1,1,1,1,1...). Heals atm are just too powerful no matter what healer, and are barely needed (they need to focus on that while also solving the monotony crisis). Which is why I think windows would be great in that regard while also reducing our potency unless under a certain condition, they would add more decision making which unfortunately the role has lost entirely.

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its funny that youre focusing on the dps trotation part which i also said was an issue but i dont think people would have as much an issue with if healing rotations wer ya know actual rotations while keeping the dps up.

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Originally Posted by Rozeee

Sums up my opinion about threads like these. The job design for healer is just straight up bad on every end. Every button is its own contained silo that has 0 interaction with the rest of the kits.

Imagine this treatment with the dps. "DPS job is to deal damage". Let's streamline the process and make a caster with 1.5s GCD attack and fill the rest with abilities like fleche, contre sixte, sidewinder, shadowbringer, upheaval, sonic break, etc. It's obviously bad for anyone that plays DPS but this is the treatment we get for our healing cooldowns.

Anyway, get ready to be dissapointed in 2 days when we get another healing button.

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At this point my hope meter has disintegrated into “maybe we will get another off the wall good skill like expedient on SCH” and that’s it

I’ve given up hope for the other 3

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Originally Posted by Rozeee

Sums up my opinion about threads like these. The job design for healer is just straight up bad on every end. Every button is its own contained silo that has 0 interaction with the rest of the kits.

Imagine this treatment with the dps. "DPS job is to deal damage". Let's streamline the process and make a caster with 1.5s GCD attack and fill the rest with abilities like fleche, contre sixte, sidewinder, shadowbringer, upheaval, sonic break, etc. It's obviously bad for anyone that plays DPS but this is the treatment we get for our healing cooldowns.

Anyway, get ready to be dissapointed in 2 days when we get another healing button.

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another healing button, an upgrade to basic gcd, a healing trait of some kind and a capstone well use only in high end

What has happened over time is that the role of healer has been eroded over time, because players keep trying to green DPS with them. So with this many poorly performing healers, SE's response was to lower the healing requirements by buffing the tank's enmity control.

Remember how casting any group heal would rip the enmity off the tank? Remember when casting regen would rip the enmity off the tank? Remember when there were debuffs you had to cleanse instead of heal through? Remember the ill-designed Cleric Stance that made players rip your face off if you used it? All that went away with HW.

Healing before HW was "healers should heal, and not DPS" and anyone who did otherwise was playing poorly. Then by Stormblood, the healing requirements were nerfed to the point that you could quite literately sit out boss fights in story content if the DPS don't step in any bad. I've pointed this out on streams where I'd sit back and watch the NPC players do the entire fight. That should not be a thing. The NPC DPS players have perfect positioning because they are scripted to.

The pendulum has to swing back the other way, where monsters and bosses cast cleanable debuffs that last the entire fight if not removed. Where a combination of the tank mitigation and a group heal afterwords is required. There are enough ways to overheal 8-player content. One healer with shields and one healer with regen was always the preferable thing. Nobody is ever sitting there casting esuna, because anything that needs to be cleaned, doesn't exist. Only the Teratotaur in Qarn ever made Esuna required for a fight. We've never seen this mechanic since. Likewise the "sleep" spell, it was only "required" for Brayflox Longstop, and even then people just faceroll past this now.

Healers utility is basically next-to-worthless, and any casts we had for utility no longer exist anyway. Remember "Water", remember what Water was for? To push the mob back. Tanks got (rightfully) annoyed with it sending monsters all over the place. It was a very useful skill when playing solo storyline ARR content, but it was made all party content frustrating.

And then you have players who think that if you don't use every single skill, you're playing wrong. Which leads back to all of the above, where casters use skills that are either not needed, or should not be used in party content, and likewise skills that are kinda redundant for playing solo content. Healers could pretty much do all ARR content without Cleric Stance turned on, but it took 10x longer, and you had to use things like Sleep and Water to be able to actually defeat things. That's no longer a thing. If you turned cleric stance on, then your heals did pretty much nothing, so you'd just die frequently in solo content.

I don't want to return to a time where "Cleric Stance" made healer play frustrating because of the two factions of "healers must only heal" and "green DPS's that never heal", what we have is a compromise where players can choose to heal or DPS as much as they are comfortable doing. But this seems to just keep leading us to content with barely any critical healing components, which makes you wonder why you have so many healing kits.

Just don't add more DPS complexity to healers. If you want to play healer, play a healer. You get your one AOE, your one DOT, and your one single target attack. You need nothing else. Leave that complex DPS stuff on DPS. They gave us Sage because of the amount of people who want to green DPS.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

What has happened over time is that the role of healer has been eroded over time, because players keep trying to green DPS with them. So with this many poorly performing healers, SE's response was to lower the healing requirements by buffing the tank's enmity control.

Remember how casting any group heal would rip the enmity off the tank? Remember when casting regen would rip the enmity off the tank? Remember when there were debuffs you had to cleanse instead of heal through? Remember the ill-designed Cleric Stance that made players rip your face off if you used it? All that went away with HW.

Healing before HW was "healers should heal, and not DPS" and anyone who did otherwise was playing poorly. Then by Stormblood, the healing requirements were nerfed to the point that you could quite literately sit out boss fights in story content if the DPS don't step in any bad. I've pointed this out on streams where I'd sit back and watch the NPC players do the entire fight. That should not be a thing. The NPC DPS players have perfect positioning because they are scripted to.

The pendulum has to swing back the other way, where monsters and bosses cast cleanable debuffs that last the entire fight if not removed. Where a combination of the tank mitigation and a group heal afterwords is required. There are enough ways to overheal 8-player content. One healer with shields and one healer with regen was always the preferable thing. Nobody is ever sitting there casting esuna, because anything that needs to be cleaned, doesn't exist. Only the Teratotaur in Qarn ever made Esuna required for a fight. We've never seen this mechanic since. Likewise the "sleep" spell, it was only "required" for Brayflox Longstop, and even then people just faceroll past this now.

Healers utility is basically next-to-worthless, and any casts we had for utility no longer exist anyway. Remember "Water", remember what Water was for? To push the mob back. Tanks got (rightfully) annoyed with it sending monsters all over the place. It was a very useful skill when playing solo storyline ARR content, but it was made all party content frustrating.

And then you have players who think that if you don't use every single skill, you're playing wrong. Which leads back to all of the above, where casters use skills that are either not needed, or should not be used in party content, and likewise skills that are kinda redundant for playing solo content. Healers could pretty much do all ARR content without Cleric Stance turned on, but it took 10x longer, and you had to use things like Sleep and Water to be able to actually defeat things. That's no longer a thing. If you turned cleric stance on, then your heals did pretty much nothing, so you'd just die frequently in solo content.

I don't want to return to a time where "Cleric Stance" made healer play frustrating because of the two factions of "healers must only heal" and "green DPS's that never heal", what we have is a compromise where players can choose to heal or DPS as much as they are comfortable doing. But this seems to just keep leading us to content with barely any critical healing components, which makes you wonder why you have so many healing kits.

Just don't add more DPS complexity to healers. If you want to play healer, play a healer. You get your one AOE, your one DOT, and your one single target attack. You need nothing else. Leave that complex DPS stuff on DPS. They gave us Sage because of the amount of people who want to green DPS.

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1: The part in bold, please refer to 'literally any discussion in the healer forums from the past several years', this point has been debated and debunked again and again. If you want to play a healer to 'heal and only heal', Cataclysm Classic comes out in 4 days. It was also the expansion where players quit healing en masse due to how much healing it demanded, when it first came out, so it's not like we haven't got evidence of what happens when the pendulum swings too far in that direction

2: All of those issues were addressed over time, with SB addressing the main pain point of Cleric Stance. Removing all the damage actions in SHB wasn't exactly necessary, when the 'barrier to entry' of Cleric Stance had been torn down

3: People were 'healers should heal and not DPS' because the enrages in ARR were so lax, and they were playing cautiously for a clear. Remember that at the time, Mists of Pandaria was the current WoW expansion, and so players were likely bringing their gameplay habits and expectations over from it. If we had the game knowledge of today, but in the ARR kits and encounters, you'd see a lot more Stone2's thrown about.

4: Spoken like someone who doesn't do Savage, since we had 'cleanse this debuff or bad things happen' in P12S (tankbuster). Sleep, I agree, is underutilized, as is Bind, Heavy and Stun, with the last fight I remember those being 'required' on being E8S back in SHB. Those 'cleansable debuffs' you're asking for don't exist in casual content, because casuals are the least likely to remember to actually press Esuna. Even then though, that's not entirely true I suppose, since there's dooms in things like Troia/Lapis Manalis/Lunar Subterrene, but only if you fail mechanics.

5: Yes, I remember Fluid Aura, a damaging OGCD with a knockback effect. Then they removed half of it's effect, and it was 'just a knockback', and then it was removed. How different things might be, if they had just removed the 'useless' part of the skill, and left it as a damage OGCD withOUT the knockback, or made it GCD and improved its damage (to make it worth using instead of Stone)

6: All of the rest is getting condensed into one bulletpoint response, because it all amounts to the same bad take: that Healers shouldn't have more damage buttons to use 'because it's not the role's job'. Despite Tanks getting new damage buttons at every damn turn, even though 'its not their role's job'. They too could make do with 'one AOE, one ST attack, one ranged attack to secure aggro on distant mob', but they don't have to suffer such dreadful design decisions. SB's removal of Cleric was a good decision. I agree that we shouldn't bring Cleric back, and have issues like 'oops I used Lustrate/Tetra with Cleric on and it healed for 300hp', but that doesn't mean that we cannot have some more variety in what shape of twinkly lights we throw as WHM.


I wrote a series of questions in a post once for those that believe that 'healers should have to heal more':

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- How do you expect us to heal more in harder content, where we're already having to spam Succor and Cure3 to handle healing at certain times for week 1 prog (Harrowing Hell Savage, the 11-hit Styx in Savage)? If the solution is 'heal more often' (eg by having raidwides happen more often), has the potency of skills been considered? EG, we can pump out 4000 potency a minute as WHM by just maintaining 100% uptime on Medica 2. How hard and how fast do we need to be hit to actually challenge our total accessible healing potency?

- If we are forced to heal more, has the increased MP cost per minute of our healing been factored in? If we have to use Medica and Cure2 more often (due to having not-enough Lilies to heal everything without damage loss), has their MP cost been factored in, or are we looking at going OOM without a massive amount of Piety added to our gear, or MP cost adjustments across the board?

- Would the 'increase in healing required' affect casual content like EX roulette? If so, has it been considered how it would affect lower-skilled players, and how many would no longer be able to keep up?

- If the 'increase in healing required' does NOT affect casual content, what is there to make that content more 'engaging' for a higher-skilled player? Or is the 'increase in healing required' solution only a solution to a certain difficulty of content? In which case, how does it 'solve' the problem, when it wouldn't be doing anything to the content that arguably needs 'a solution' the most?

- If people become more practiced at the new healing requirements, what stops them from reaching the current plateau, of 'I have X% of my time spare to DPS, so I'll just DPS during it'? If we go from 70% of our GCDs being damage related to... say, 50%, does that 'solve' the issue? If we are always going to have 'some time to deal damage', what ratio of 'GCDs spent on not-damage' to 'GCDs spent on damage' is the 'fix'? And is this 'fix' still forgiving enough to give time for recovery from mistakes, and forgiving enough to allow for less-skilled players to have breathing room (amount of breathing room dependent on content difficulty level)?

- Going forward, if we cannot have 'more damage buttons in rotation' because that is not our role (just ignore that tanks get new ones every expansion, despite it not being 'their role', I guess? Love double standards), what suggestions of 'new additions to the job' are there for later expansions? Is there any new 'thematic' ways to add new non-damage buttons to the healers that feel unique and novel? If a button adds a 'utility' (eg Expedient), how does said utility's effect balance 'feels good to use' with 'is not so strong that it makes the job mandatory for certain content'?

- Finally, would this 'increase to healing required' be going forward, or retroactively applied to all content? If the former, how will people adjust to a sudden increase of healing required when it has never been asked of them (compared to previous content of the same difficulty level)? If the latter, how much extra dev work has to be done to make sure that the jobs can clear old content, with the new adjusted kits, and the new healing required?

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See how many additional problems arise from the seemingly simple ask of 'can we make healers have to heal more'?

Current encounter design makes it impossible to make healers have to heal more in any interesting or nuanced way that is enjoyable. Higher healing difficulty is just pressing another OGCD button or spam GCD healing. Neither is interesting. The easiest route to make healers more engaging to play is with a DPS rotation, no matter how simple or complex it is.

Tanks have a DPS rotation, there's really no excuse as to why healers do not have one.