More engaging DPS for healers

[hydralus]

To be honest, it doesn't really sound more engaging at all. So far the suggestions are just some added effects tacked-on to the already 'boring' 1-1-1 button spam which is what we already do for the most part. And the effects seem... kinda useless? We've got oGCD skills that accomplish these for the most part (shielding, a couple of emergency heals, spell speed buff, enemy damage down debuff) so adding even more would be a bit of overkill I'd wager.

[MoroMurasaki]

I sadly agree I get so tired of Regen, Aero 3, Aero 1, Stone 4/Holy spam, Tetra, repeat.. Its even worse on astro Regen, Combust 2, Malefic 3/Gravity spam..

GIve me something like ogcds damage, Or give me something meaningful to be aware of maybe rework the gauge systems you know????????

Very much my thoughts - I want more decision making as a healer, particularly in casual content.

Actually, I think o5n is the first time its highly encouraged since you die if you don't lol. We need more mechanics like this that force a healer to dps to get themselves or their group out of a bad spot. :3

I agree! I'd love more boss mechanics like those ghosts.

To be honest, it doesn't really sound more engaging at all. So far the suggestions are just some added effects tacked-on to the already 'boring' 1-1-1 button spam which is what we already do for the most part. And the effects seem... kinda useless? We've got oGCD skills that accomplish these for the most part (shielding, a couple of emergency heals, spell speed buff, enemy damage down debuff) so adding even more would be a bit of overkill I'd wager.

I don't think more buttons is the route to more engaging play. We have two sets of spells that we cast all the time and they don't interact at all. Most other roles with that kind of duality have a mechanic that makes one side matter to the other (BLM Fire/Ice, RDM White/Black Mana) and yet there is no interaction with a healer's dps spells at all apart from the Stun on Holy.

[loreleidiangelo]

Interesting, this is basically what I was discussing in a bit in the big thread on page 1 about O5N. I didn't have clear-cut ideas, but the point about Assize/Aetherflow stacks not having a lot of good elements of choice involved with them was a point I particularly brought up because it resonates with me.

That said, I'm not exactly sold on the idea of "casting deeps makes you have to heal less" (your suggestions about Stone spells adding shields to the tank, for instance), since I feel like healers already have plenty of tools at their disposal to weave the two (oGCDs in particular). DPS combos are a little more intriguing but the healer playerbase already seems taxed to the limit mentally just at upkeeping DoTs, if the furor on the forums is to be believed. I think the best option would be something based around resource consumption like SCH stacks, where you have meaningful choices on whether to use it for healing or for DPS (Energy Drain could use some more damage oomph wrt that though). That way healers who can barely keep up with the DPS moves we have now can still use those resources for healing (revamp WHM lilies, make up something like Minor Arcana for AST but not eat your card draws, etc) but healers who push the envelope on optimization will have meaningful choices to make about whether they use their moves to heal or do damage.

Revelation Online, though a garbo game in a lot of rights, actually had a great hybrid class that was built around this philosophy - every one of Occultist's moves could be toggled to heal or do damage, but shared a cooldown so you had to use them appropriately depending on the situation (did you want to HoT the tank, or DoT the boss? decisions decisions). WoW's Discipline Priest is another healer that produces decent output relative to other healers but has a significantly higher skillcap, which could also be something that we mimic here in FFXIV. People always talk about "if a healer is a lot harder to get the same output as other healers no one will play them" but tbh people play Disc despite the extreme mental overhead relative to other healers (Mistweaver Monk is another one that is suitably more complex than say, Restoration Shaman/Holy Priest). A lot of people tried to make 3.0 AST work as well, the problem was just that it was tuned poorly and the devs chose to make a myriad of buffs to it thoughtlessly hoping that something would stick, and that in turn made it basically as easy as any other healer to play, definitely easier than SCH now.

Finally, to round out my thoughts on this discussion, I am really, really pessimistic that people aren't DPSing while healing in this game because "it's too hard to do both". They're not avoiding it because the game makes it too hard on them, they're either a.) new/used to other MMOs where the healing requirements are much stricter and once the other shoe fails to drop with regards to healing they'll start DPSing more, b.) just kinda bad overall and play healer because they can skate by without doing DPS which = less buttons they have to pay attention to and odds of them being flamed over this are fairly low, or c.) they just plain don't like to feel like a damage mage instead of a healer and resist doing damage out of stubbornness (not unheard of I'd imagine, but definitely not as common as the forums/Reddit would have you believe). Making healer DPS easier won't change this - the devs tried this with the removal of Cleric Stance/DoT prune, and we're still seeing people losing their minds over this debate. I hate to sound fatalistic but at this point the only thing that MIIIIIIIGHT impact the community's divide on this is a massive sweeping balance change that push healers so far in one direction or another that the "choice" of DPS is solved for them. And I can definitely see why the devs are so hesitant to take a firm stance on this extremely hot-button wedge issue.

[MoroMurasaki]

snipsnip.

I'm trying reeeeeealy hard to avoid engaging in anything like the healer dps debate in this thread because I'm sure with the title it could get out of hand quickly. That said I want to clarify something on my main post that perhaps wasn't clear enough...

None of these changes are coming from a place of trying to make dpsing as a healer easier. I don't think there is much of the playerbase that couldn't handle dpsing as a healer with or without these changes and yet we still see people choosing to stand still rather than contribute damage.

One of my goals was for people who only look at healing and mitigation to see an actual benefit to them by pressing their dps buttons. I'm 100% sure potencies would have to be tweaked for any of these things to come about and in most cases they'd have to be lowered to retain the modicum of difficulty we currently enjoy with healing.

I think your suggestion about Aetherflow stacks on SCH is a fair one but I would be hesitant to slap a similar gague on each healer because homogenization is a danger here, that's why I stayed away from that can of worms specifically.

I agree we will likely never get an answer from the devs about this and that's totally okay, they want money from everyone whether they dps as ahealer or not and alienating one side of that isn't a sound financial decision.

[KaivaC]

snip

How have we not run into each other yet lol. Who knows, I'm in a transitional period with my FC starting to disband so I may end up roaming around to a different server soon (I really do not want to give up my house lol). I'll link up with you on discord, though.

I would love it if the devs were to introduce something like specializations...kinda like an advanced version of what they did with Arcanists (just not as badly implemented)....but I'm going to stop here because I don't want to derail this thread. I'm for the idea of WHMs getting some stoneskin to go along with their casts. If the devs really wanted to dip into their well, one of the healing classes could include haste and -let me preface this by saying I don't think this will ever happen- the ever classic reraise (which could be a WHM-exclusive skill). Maybe even tie reraise only being accessible with DPS and something with Lilies to make them useful (they'd need to have a massive cooldown, though...even 180 seconds seems generous).

snip

Ahhh...I see now. Yeah, I can understand why you would be having a hard time, then. From one controller RDM user to another, I'd just say if you go back to the class, get a true feel of the RDM - the good thing about the job is that nothing really changes as far as rotation goes from level 50 onwards - just more things are added. Not sure how much you played after that video, but it looked like you were using your melee stuff way too early. Ideally, you want to hardcast one of your spells before a pull, then start doing your normal rotation. For me, I go with Verthunder, then Verfire if it procs, otherwise I'll cast Veraero. Then I'll hit Jolt, then Verthunder. After that, I just rotate between my spells - ideally, you want to keep either your black or white mana higher than the other for when you go into your melee rotation (after lvl 68.) I don't touch melee at all until my RDM mana is at least 100/80.

[NephthysVasudan]

No...absolutely not.

Healers need to get off their lazy ass's and participate...stop over-complicating a job that isn't complicated.

Healers heal first...DPS second...end of discussion.

[loreleidiangelo]

I'm trying reeeeeealy hard to avoid engaging in anything like the healer dps debate in this thread because I'm sure with the title it could get out of hand quickly. That said I want to clarify something on my main post that perhaps wasn't clear enough...

None of these changes are coming from a place of trying to make dpsing as a healer easier. I don't think there is much of the playerbase that couldn't handle dpsing as a healer with or without these changes and yet we still see people choosing to stand still rather than contribute damage.

One of my goals was for people who only look at healing and mitigation to see an actual benefit to them by pressing their dps buttons. I'm 100% sure potencies would have to be tweaked for any of these things to come about and in most cases they'd have to be lowered to retain the modicum of difficulty we currently enjoy with healing.

I think your suggestion about Aetherflow stacks on SCH is a fair one but I would be hesitant to slap a similar gague on each healer because homogenization is a danger here, that's why I stayed away from that can of worms specifically.

I agree we will likely never get an answer from the devs about this and that's totally okay, they want money from everyone whether they dps as ahealer or not and alienating one side of that isn't a sound financial decision.

I'm not trying to stir up the debate either, sorry if it seemed like I was. I just thought that your suggestions as they were currently (before you mentioned nerfing potencies and whatnot to compensate) seemed like you wanted to remove the risk element from healer DPS, which I don't think is healthy overall. If the idea is to encourage newbie healers to weave in damage spells, well...I mean, I feel like the people who want to are already doing that, no? When I was new to the game I didn't DPS a ton, until as time went on I realized I was standing around doing turd-all and that I might as well do damage. Even in World of Warcraft, where healers have a MUCH higher healing "participation" so to speak, I still look for windows to do damage (it just doesn't eclipse over 50% of my casts like it does here). I didn't need something like, "three Holy casts in a row refreshes all active Regens" or whatever, I just chose to actively fill my globals with things that were useful.

That's why I made my last paragraph - I feel like new players who want to improve will learn this in time, without the game handholding them into it, and players who aren't good, who are lazy, or who are stubbornly clinging to the way "other MMOs do things" aren't going to change no matter what kind of carrot you add to the DPS stick. I'd much rather work on engaging the healers who ARE playing optimally and making it more fun/interesting for them than try to entice a subset of people into playing "our way" with a bunch of arbitrary buffs.

[MoroMurasaki]

No...absolutely not.

Healers need to get off their lazy ass's and participate...stop over-complicating a job that isn't complicated.

Healers heal first...DPS second...end of discussion.

If you look at my post history I've been saying this for like.... since I joined the forums. Sadly it hasn't gotten me any ground in most of those discussions

Also I don't think any of what I suggested is overcomplicated, merely an attempt at luring some of those not dpsing healers off their butts with the promise of something other than making health bars go down.

Also very much not the end of the discussion

snip

I mean, honestly short answer is maybe you didn't need incentive to dps as a healer, I certainly didn't, but that doesn't mean other people don't :/

No apologies necessary, I knew this topic would edge around The Great Debate simply by nature of what it's discussing.

snipp

There is enough here that I'm going to sleep on it - Reraise is such an iconic spell and I am currently in love with the concept. I've also been awake for 22 hours though and I feel sassy Moro incoming so in an effort to not sass people in my own thread I'll call it a night!

I'll look forward to your friend request!

[AphraelAmarantha]

snip

Yeah I was level 70 in that vid trying to see if I can legitimately dps o1s (which I could not, and no I didn't need a parser to figure this out). Maintaining rotations is one of my weakpoints because I have a tendency to forget where I am in the rotation if I'm doing mechanics. I guess I have a sort of rotation with WHM, I will use Diving Benison on a Tank first then use regen on same tank, swift cast holy, use thin air and then spam Holy until thin air runs out, then try to keep the tank alive, sometimes throwing out an Aero 3 to maintain dps. (I will spam Stone on single targets or when Im trying to conserve mp from spamming too much Holy) The fact that DB no longer needs a lily to cast has been a godsend and makes protecting the tank from death much easier when they are pulling tons of mobs.

But uhm yeah, I have no intention of going back to RDM, I just suck at it too much. I like WHM where it is at now because its simple for me, its not stressful, and I feel i can contribute by keeping people alive. Tbh, I have no idea if I would have still been playing this game if they had kept stance dancing with cleric stance though. That woudl have been a nightmare for me and glad they got rid of it :/

Anyway, sorry, my point is that I like where WHM is at rn, I really don't think it needs any changes, but that's just my opinion. If it becomes too complicated, I guess I will drop it, probably even quit the game entirely I guess (not like Im playing much, this patch was sadly empty)

[hydralus]

Most other roles with that kind of duality have a mechanic that makes one side matter to the other (BLM Fire/Ice, RDM White/Black Mana) and yet there is no interaction with a healer's dps spells at all apart from the Stun on Holy.

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), and I don't see how 'push 1 button 3 times and apply a tiny shield' or other such minor buffs are going to make or break how involved the damage dealing is. If they're strong enough to completely nullify the effects of our oGCDs, then that, to me, makes the class even simpler to play. If they're weak enough that you still need to use your oGCDs regardless, which is the best case scenario, then as I said they're kinda useless overall and bordering on overkill. Besides if we're using DPS duality as an example, shouldn't healer DPS skills interact with other healer DPS skills? As we have it now, there's interaction between healer's healing skills (lilies reducing cooldowns, proccing free heals, crit-lo, fairy gauge, whatever AST gets) but I don't see RDM getting anything special for their vercure to make things more engaging when they have to emergency heal. Heck even the most comparable thing - PLD's razuiquet (or however that is spelled) increases healing by 20%... but that's just an oGCD skill, and WHM gets one of those to increase their spell-speed considerably.

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.

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.