Who said this and can it apply to healers?

[Jaelommiss]

I personally think the biggest logical mistake people are making is this ADHD obsession with ABC. ABC would have gotten you laughed out of older MMOs. Classic WoW had the mp/5 rule for every 5 seconds you weren't casting you would regenerate a certain amount of mp in combat.

ABC is such a false premise. People doesn't understand that inertia is something. Vanilla WoW utilized the value of the inertia where you stand still and monitor the fight by providing bonus MP regen if you could be smart enough with your triage to go 5 seconds without casting. I'm not saying the solution is a 5 second window, but ABC is just inane folly that really annoys me when people bring it up like it's somehow just natural truth.

ABC was considered suboptimal in older MMOs because the resource systems in those games forced healers to be inactive if they wanted to have sufficient resources to survive a fight. In FFXIV and many other modern MMOs, this bad element of game design has been fixed. From a logistics point of view it can be an interesting puzzle to balance idle time with active time, but it makes for incredibly dull gameplay. This is especially true when only one portion of the population (healers) are forced into this inactivity.

Allowing all party members to continually contribute to party success is not a bad thing. Neither is allowing players to play the game without their participation being severely restricted by punitive resource systems.

As the game is currently designed, (1) healers have many idle GCDs that do not need to be spent on healing. Depending on the healer and the group, this can be in excess of 90% of all GCDs. (2) Healers also do not have significant resource management concerns that mandate idleness outside of a few fringe scenarios. (3) The current toolkit that SE has given healers includes nothing apart from damage spells to use in these idle GCDs. The conclusion, then, is that healers should spend these GCDs on dps because there is a negligible resource cost to doing so and it provides a very significant bonus to party output. So long as this is the case, ABC will remain the logical conclusion for healers in FFXIV.

If any of those three premises changed, then healer dps may no longer be desirable.
If (1) changed by requiring more GCD healing (say, by moving some oGCD heals to the GCD) then there would be less idle time to be spent on damage.
If (2) changed by severely restricting MP as a resource then healer would be forced to conserve their MP and be unable to dps.
If (3) changed by expanding healer GCD options to include buffs or utilities that benefit the party more than that same GCD's damage, then healers would have other options to spend their non-healing time on.

I'd personally prefer a combination of (1) and (3). I can elaborate on what specific changes I would like to see if you're interested.

[Toystore]

If any of those three premises changed, then healer dps may no longer be desirable.
If (1) changed by requiring more GCD healing (say, by moving some oGCD heals to the GCD) then there would be less idle time to be spent on damage.
If (2) changed by severely restricting MP as a resource then healer would be forced to conserve their MP and be unable to dps.
If (3) changed by expanding healer GCD options to include buffs or utilities that benefit the party more than that same GCD's damage, then healers would have other options to spend their non-healing time on.

I'd personally prefer a combination of (1) and (3). I can elaborate on what specific changes I would like to see if you're interested.

Yeah I'm interesting. It's a really neat post. I'd personally disagree with mp/5 being bad design given WoW classic was the peak popularity of any MMO ever.

I'd be interested in hearing your solutions for 3 most because I think that's were the majority of the community here has reached at least the largest consensus on.

I think 2 is the best of those solutions. Not so much severely restricting mp but making mana regen a little more complex than it currently is. Right now piety is worthless, and most of the time we're sitting at 10,000/10,000. I'd rather see healers rewarded with higher mana regen or more potent heals for smart healing than just having an effectively useless mp regen stat like piety while everyone offloads the excess time + mana on nukes.

Even extending afflatus misery as a mechanic where smarter and more efficient healing gives an oGCD burst of damage based on how well you've healed is better than a system with downtime in it. Like some kind of poker pot that keeps getting added to and is offloaded at a few intervals per fight for damage (probably staggered in dot form so it's not a cheesy burst). Something like mana regenerated beyond the cap feeding into that oGCD's damage pot to reward smart healing.

Where healing is the only way to build the potency of that offloaded oGCD and nuking during the downtime will actually be a net loss of dps provided you're excelling at the role metric (healing). I guess the most similar ability I can think of is medante/magic burst in Dragon Quest but even that's not the same. Medante is based on max mp and this is more stored, unused potential accrued through smart and efficient healing.