Healer dps is unfairly boring

[Lastelli]

To be fair, while it's perhaps hard for you to imagine as experienced healer, when you're inexperienced and are still learning it does take considerable amount of brandwidth to be constantly checking party's health and reacting appropiately/optimally. Especially if you aren't used to doing that all the time because you mainly play dps. Adjusting your mind to doing that keeps you constantly on edge which would probably take a lot of brandwidth, thus it's understandable in that case you'd want dps to be simple

Arguably though every job gets easy once you've mastered it. The problem (like another recent thread suggests) I think is the fact that when you as healer come to that point of mastery, you're stuck spamming 1 abillity all the time instead of having an engaging dps rotation.

I agree, but that's the same for dps, really. Many players can't keep their rotation or stop pressing buttons during mechanics because their brain can't keep up. The difference is that nothing bad happens if a dps is bad at doing damage (unless there's a dps check, but that's relevant for savage and ultimate content only), whereas a bad healer can cause a wipe. But the thing is...a whm that only uses cure 2 and medica 2 is not so different from a brd that only uses burst shot. That's what people should understand. They're both fulfilling their role after all: one is healing, the other is dpsing, right?

[Mesarthim]

To be fair, while it's perhaps hard for you to imagine as experienced healer, when you're inexperienced and are still learning it does take considerable amount of brandwidth to be constantly checking party's health and reacting appropiately/optimally. Especially if you aren't used to doing that all the time because you mainly play dps. Adjusting your mind to doing that keeps you constantly on edge which would probably take a lot of brandwidth, thus it's understandable in that case you'd want dps to be simple

Arguably though every job gets easy once you've mastered it. The problem (like another recent thread suggests) I think is the fact that when you as healer come to that point of mastery, you're stuck spamming 1 abillity all the time instead of having an engaging dps rotation.

Actually it's not hard for me to imagine at all because I'm an experienced healer. Makes it easy to understand all sorts of scenarios. But honestly I do understand your view but I'd attribute it more to how the game handles healing, especially in dungeon content. Let's take copperbell for an example. What in all seven hecks is copperbell preparing a healer for? You can easily beat this dungeon without a healer. What is the second boss teaching a healer? Absolutely nothing because you can outheal it on a gunbreaker with brutal shell since the damage is so insanely low. Then we get to them nerfing the hp of enemies in dungeons from previous expansion content, making things die faster and require even less healing. Then we have later leveling dungeons vs level cap dungeons. Leveling dungeons typically have a strict item level sync so outgearing it is limited. Level cap dungeons are only obnoxious for a select set of healers for the first few weeks until tome gear is acquired, then it becomes business as usual with ilvl powercreep. All they've been doing is basically gradually increasing the damage of autoattacks and "maybe" inserting an extra enemy per pack in dungeons (like 9-10 enemies in a double pull in the lv 73 dungeon as an example). The formula however doesn't change: Wall pull in most dungeons, aoe it down, kill boss, repeat.

ASTs used to have a tool to help deal with this crowd control and it was called Celestial Opposition, or Thal forbid, the old bole. However square decided it was a brilliant idea to remove this stun for yet another oGCD heal. So AST loses their stun, but white mages keep theirs? AST's wasn't even spammable and was previously on a 2 minute cooldown (though it was not the sole function of the skill).

Next we come to how scripted the game is. Trust me when I say that if you play a job with few if any responsibilities you will become painfully aware sooner or later the exact order of attacks dealt by a boss. E4N? You know the first thing he's going to do is a tankbuster and a groupwide aoe, no exceptions. When you acquire enough experience/skill it is less watching the hp of party members and more just preempting what the bosses will do. The game (or more accurately the community) only throws you the occasional curveball by falling for a one shot mechanic (E4N landslides, to use titan as an example yet again). This is just a matter of raising and topping them up afterwards.

If anything you'll eventually notice that the game does not deviate from one pattern: Bosses will auto 2-4 times and then do a cast bar skill. I dabble with all 3 roles and it's getting to the point where I don't need to think at all. It's horrible when I do Sigmascape 4.0 normal. As a tank I play as if I'm a machine.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though. I'll end here by also just saying that when you do get some experience under your belt you'll realize how many ways this game gives you the ability to refill an hp bar, and nothing else. This is why people are getting fed up with what we have now in the downtime because trust me, there's a lot of it when you know how the game plays.

6.0 is going to present a new problem too. Assuming Square finally takes pity on healers and give us something new we have... 1 healer that starts at level 1, 1 healer that starts at lv 30 from a dps class that they may or may not finish separating them from, and a lv 30 healer where you need to hit ishgard first. Going by the track record the next new jobs would be level 70. Combine all of their new abilities with new people and it's going to be uh, interesting?

[Side-Eye]

This would never work with the devs obsession on balance.

If you have a healer with a complex dps rotation and a healer that can do comparable dps with 1 button spam. Then the one with the complex rotation is going to get benched because of all the extra effort and work required to achieve the same results that another class can achieve with 1 1 1 1 1 1..

That's exactly what AST is going through at the moment. LOTS of extra work to contribute a tiny bit to others' DPS, and less than be contributed by another healer (WHM) with a very simplified DPS rotation. Who the hell wants to press or click 6 times to achieve what another job can do with 1 or 2? And THAT is why so many more people are playing WHM than AST .. at least with WHM, those DPS numbers show up as your direct contribution to the group, instead of bits and pieces of extra tacked onto other people's DPS -- that cannot even be observed without using an (illegal) parser.

[Gemina]

How anyone finds healing in this game stressful, outside of maybe ultimate, is beyond me.

Healing is going to be stressful anytime the healer feels he/she is not in control of the situation. This is going to happen in ALL content, and to just about any healer. Any experienced healer can and should vouch for this. The only content that I can't speak for IS savage and ultimate, and the impression that I get from these encounters is that the only healing healers do is to repair the damage that is unavoidable, so it is tightly knit and entirely scripted. Correct me if I am wrong.

You throw yourself in a relevant to somewhat relevant 24-man, or EX trial PUG full of randos, or sometimes even a NM trial/raid and you'll find that control is easily wrested from you. You quickly notice that you don't have enough ogcds to cover the amount of unscripted damage going on, and I grow a little tired this being neglected to be mentioned as if it isn't even a thing, because it is. Big time. Every time I come here talking about raising the healing requirement, I come out of a PUG that would have certainly failed if I didn't use GCDs to heal, or tunnel visioned on damage.

Here's the thing: Why does healing even have to be stressful? It should be fun and engaging. Here is the other thing though. For healers like me, healing is only fun and engaging when I have to do it reactively. It actually is ok for players to make mistakes. I make them all the time. And a major factor the devs have to account for are player derps, and there is only one role responsible for fixing them. Want to guess which one it is?

I'm not really seeing a lot of requests for the healing requirement to be raised though. What I see is constant babbling that our DPS kits are too boring and homogenized, which is why I point at the door that says "DPS apply here". DPSing as a healer being boring isn't some new phenomena that came with ShB. It has always been the role that has the fewest skills allocated towards causing damage, and a large portion of their healing kits go unused in content where the threat level is low. It seems few people acknowledge that putting in a great effort to avoid having to use GCDs on heals is a huge problem within itself, because we are deliberately forcing skills in the healing kit to be underutilized because there is never an optimal time to use them, or they are extremely situational.

Mr. Happy had a somewhat recent video (post 5.1) that goes into this a little bit. He is not a healer main by any means, but he echoed Yoshi's words brilliantly and talked briefly about why healers have such a basic DPS kit. I believe there is a natural aspect to the healing role that healers have to accept, and it's that the role foregoes and sometimes even sacrifices a great deal of offense for sustainability.

To make this short: As a healer main, I want to have fun healing; not DPSing. I will always be in favor of the devs focusing on the former, which is what I know they are trying to do and trying to get right.

[Mavrias]

Healing is going to be stressful anytime the healer feels he/she is not in control of the situation. This is going to happen in ALL content, and to just about any healer. Any experienced healer can and should vouch for this. The only content that I can't speak for IS savage and ultimate, and the impression that I get from these encounters is that the only healing healers do is to repair the damage that is unavoidable, so it is tightly knit and entirely scripted. Correct me if I am wrong.

You throw yourself in a relevant to somewhat relevant 24-man, or EX trial PUG full of randos, or sometimes even a NM trial/raid and you'll find that control is easily wrested from you. You quickly notice that you don't have enough ogcds to cover the amount of unscripted damage going on, and I grow a little tired this being neglected to be mentioned as if it isn't even a thing, because it is. Big time. Every time I come here talking about raising the healing requirement, I come out of a PUG that would have certainly failed if I didn't use GCDs to heal, or tunnel visioned on damage.

Here's the thing: Why does healing even have to be stressful? It should be fun and engaging. Here is the other thing though. For healers like me, healing is only fun and engaging when I have to do it reactively. It actually is ok for players to make mistakes. I make them all the time. And a major factor the devs have to account for are player derps, and there is only one role responsible for fixing them. Want to guess which one it is?

I'm not really seeing a lot of requests for the healing requirement to be raised though. What I see is constant babbling that our DPS kits are too boring and homogenized, which is why I point at the door that says "DPS apply here". DPSing as a healer being boring isn't some new phenomena that came with ShB. It has always been the role that has the fewest skills allocated towards causing damage, and a large portion of their healing kits go unused in content where the threat level is low. It [snip]

To make this short: As a healer main, I want to have fun healing; not DPSing. I will always be in favor of the devs focusing on the former, which is what I know they are trying to do and trying to get right.

Okay. You're wrong. And, I'm real sorry, but wanting to have an interesting dps rotation on a healer is valid despite the fact that you don't understand because you don't do content where it is expected and required.

You can say the devs are trying to increase the focus on healing all you like, but until they actually succeed in that goal, we're going to be dpsing. The least they could do is make it more than spamming 1 button and refreshing a dot every 30 seconds.

[Gemina]

Okay. You're wrong. And, I'm real sorry, but wanting to have an interesting dps rotation on a healer is valid despite the fact that you don't understand because you don't do content where it is expected and required.

You can say the devs are trying to increase the focus on healing all you like, but until they actually succeed in that goal, we're going to be dpsing. The least they could do is make it more than spamming 1 button and refreshing a dot every 30 seconds.

When was it ever interesting? And when did we ever have anything resembling a DPS rotation? If you want healers to have A DPS rotation in this game it just isn't going to happen, ever. That's not to say that they can't add a little more such as an additional DoT, or AoE/ST variants on a CD that provide an additional benefit like an MP restore, haste, healing magic up, or some other benefit. But to sit here and say that healer DPS was ever interesting is something you won't ever see me type on here. It was always boring, especially when it came to leveling and MSQ progression, and it's a big reason why I started playing DPS jobs, which actually focus on that part of combat.

Do you honestly think getting another skill or two to spam is going satiate your need for offense? Do you think another skill or two is going to resolve what is actually going on with healers right now? You can say I'm wrong all you like, but it is simply your opinion.

[Aurturia]

When was it ever interesting? And when did we ever have anything resembling a DPS rotation? If you want healers to have A DPS rotation in this game it just isn't going to happen, ever. That's not to say that they can't add a little more such as an additional DoT, or AoE/ST variants on a CD that provide an additional benefit like an MP restore, haste, healing magic up, or some other benefit. But to sit here and say that healer DPS was ever interesting is something you won't ever see me type on here. It was always boring, especially when it came to leveling and MSQ progression, and it's a big reason why I started playing DPS jobs, which actually focus on that part of combat.

Do you honestly think getting another skill or two to spam is going satiate your need for offense? Do you think another skill or two is going to resolve what is actually going on with healers right now? You can say I'm wrong all you like, but it is simply your opinion.

Well to be fair that's kinda subjective. I used to main sch and I loved stacking my dots and then exploding them with bane, it felt powerful, impactful. I'm sure AoW spam has the numbers but it just feels bad.
Ast on the other hand always had very similar dps tools to whm but then they juggled an interesting but not overwhelming card system, highs and lows made it a fun system to play with. Now the cards feel unimportant something to be tossed about with total disregard for who gets what, the system just feels like busy work, something I'm obligated to do but I dont see a real impact.
And then whm was the only of the three I just didn't like in stormblood it but now everything feels like whm and I'm a red mage now

[AncientCrystal]

Garbage argument, your job is to heal primarily, not dps. DPS doesn't HAVE to be complex.

[Shalan]

Garbage argument, your job is to heal primarily, not dps. DPS doesn't HAVE to be complex.

What a garbage statement.
The role still needs to be engaging, and presently neither DPS or actual healing is particularly so. Our healing kits are so overloaded that we often don't need much beyond our OGCDs, and what little we do need to heal can largely be mitigated or outright negated by tank CDs or dodging AoEs. So we've got a lot of downtime to dps with. Therefore, dps needs to be more engaging or the whole role suffers (as it has been).

Since you flair yourself as a WAR main, how would you like if we change all your DPS + enmity rotations into one button similar to PvP? You might not mind at first, but it gets old *really* fast.

[Mavrias]

When was it ever interesting? And when did we ever have anything resembling a DPS rotation? If you want healers to have A DPS rotation in this game it just isn't going to happen, ever. That's not to say that they can't add a little more such as an additional DoT, or AoE/ST variants on a CD that provide an additional benefit like an MP restore, haste, healing magic up, or some other benefit. But to sit here and say that healer DPS was ever interesting is something you won't ever see me type on here. It was always boring, especially when it came to leveling and MSQ progression, and it's a big reason why I started playing DPS jobs, which actually focus on that part of combat.

Do you honestly think getting another skill or two to spam is going satiate your need for offense? Do you think another skill or two is going to resolve what is actually going on with healers right now? You can say I'm wrong all you like, but it is simply your opinion.

it was much more interesting in HW and ARR, with cleric stance and multiple dots and timers to watch. But then those were removed to "encourage" more to play healer with uh, mixed results.

Also, you are wrong on a fundamental level about savage being more scripted than anything else. The only difference is the difficulty of the fights and the intensity of heal and dps checks. People screwing up in copied factory is no more "non-scripted" than people screwing up in e4s.

"Add a little more dots or cd variants for haste/ mp/ etc." Oh, you mean the stuff they took away?