Can we get a rework of healers for 6.0

[Semirhage]

to dogmatically say making heal intensive fights would somehow make fights "just as boring" as the current savage tiers where an Astro can solo heal them while also using malefic the entire time is just plain wrong. if you think its unfair im picking the hardest encounters in the game, what makes those encounters hard is mostly mechanics. a hard hitting fight with simpler/more accessible mechanics is possible too. think e4s phase 3

Yeah, that's totally what I'm saying: that increasing heal intensity is bad. That's exactly it. That's the main thrust of my posts 100%. In no place have I drawn attention to the fact that fight design is part of the problem.

I'm being sarcastic, naturally. It's a problem. I'm responding to people claiming that current healer kits are essentially NOT a problem. Yeah, having a damage kit where you put up a single dot and spam one nuke spell over and over and over again, that's not an issue. Having heal kits where, once you run out of oGCDs, you put up one regen and then spam one or two healing spells over and over and over again isn't a problem either.

The healers' kits are not the problem.

I'm reacting to that sentiment, right there. Yeah, having a damage kit that consists of Dia -> Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare
pssssh, that's just fight design, what am I talking about.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I'm reacting to that sentiment, right there. Yeah, having a damage kit that consists of Dia -> Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare
pssssh, that's just fight design, what am I talking about.

It is a flaw in Fight design when the White Mage's gcd rotation is supposed to be more like this:

Regen -> Dia -> Cure -> Cure -> Proced Cure 2 -> Glare -> Medica 2 -> Medica -> Regen -> Glare -> Cure -> Cure -> Solace -> Dia -> etc...

All three healer's dps rotations are designed to be intermixed into their healing when they have some free space. Even the inclusion of a small spell -> big spell combo wouldn't really work if you are only casting damaging spells every 3rd or 4th gcd. If fights were designed properly you wouldn't have room to cast Glare twice in a row which would be necessary for dps spell combos to be a good addition.

What you are seeing with the Glare spam is the result of combat rarely needing the healing output the rotation intends so that Glare starts filling up all the free space that would have been healing spells making a fairly varied rotation into a something monotonous.

[owolett]

Healers are never ever going to do something like you suggest unless damage is going out VERY frequently and you struggled with MP so you actually use Cure I (bleh). Even still I'm 100% sure that most healers would still be prioritising their oGCD tools - it's just what's optimal if you want to make the most contribution to your party. That kind of thing also becomes difficult to do when you factor in movement and mechanics - you can't always stand still and spam heals, and your party isn't always stacked together so sometimes there's delay since your AoE heals propagate. If healers were required to always be hard casting GCDs to heal damage it makes it harder to design mechanics the way they currently are. Besides, another poster already pointed out fights that do indeed challenge healers to use their full toolkit without going full healbot.

There's also the issue with story/normal mode content. A friend of mine quit the game because he started the game on CNJ and was literally just spamming rocks. Pressing two buttons for 80 levels straight shouldn't be accepted. For group content, SE will never actually up the healing requirements for normal mode content for fear it'll be too difficult. People die all the time in Alliance Raids. Furthermore, healing Extreme/Savage is not easy when you first learn the game and before gear levels get high. SE also for some reason stubbornly refuses to make targetting easier for PC players (mouseover). You only need to look at how they made AST's mana management so much easier even though the job was already overtuned and it wasn't even that hard in the first place.

Yes we shouldn't always appeal to the lowest common denominator, but the issue is that healing is a requirement otherwise your party dies. Before content with actual DPS checks you have more responsibility than DPS players. A terrible healer can wipe the party at any point but a bad DPS will only wipe the party during enrage. It's binary in nature - your party either dies or they don't. If they don't you continue with DPS.

That's why people are suggesting that healers have slightly more ways to optimise their DPS and have more interesting toolkits that actually feel like proper job mechanics rather than all being very similar. It's something that raises skill cap but keeps the accessibility of learning a job. Spamming the current healing buttons as you suggest isn't really that interesting when they don't even have any depth or synergise with the rest of the toolkit and they are quite literally all the same between the healers.

[YusiKha]

It is a flaw in Fight design when the White Mage's gcd rotation is supposed to be more like this...

You realise that if fights actually required constant intense healing like that the entire casual playerbase, who struggle to have casting uptime above 60%, would immediately be unable to clear fights due to the sheer amount of incoming damage. That a minor lagspike or server delay would have the potential to outright kill someone with no way of countering it?