Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Truen]

1 DD and 1 dot rotations are BORING. They should add more because of that fact alone. B O R I N G.

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

1 DD and 1 dot rotations are BORING. They should add more because of that fact alone. B O R I N G.

They would need to rework their spaghetti code if they were to add a rotation for healers as using a gcd heal would break that rotation. Or have it act like RDM's verstone/fire ready buff.

But not much of anything can be done because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that someone much earlier noted. Healing was made easy/boring thus a drop in playerbase which in turn means the devs need to make healing even easier to make up for less skilled players which causes another drop in healers which again causes the devs to make healing easier and it'll keep continuing because they'd rather not spend the money or work hours to fix the root of the problem: healer dps.

Which could be, hypothetically, solved by; reducing the amount of healing abilties, lowering the strength and the cooldowns of the healing abilities that stay, increasing the strength of gcd heals, lowering the cast time of gcd heals, adding at least 3 or 4 dps abilities (one is a single target ability with a 2 second cooldown, another is a DoT with a 30 second duration and 5 second cooldown, the third could be a single target ability with a 25 second cooldown, and the fourth could be an aoe with a 50 second cooldown) to replace the healing abilties that were removed and keeping Glare, Broil and Malefic for when healing isn't needed and lowering their cast times to 1.5 seconds.

With that you; heal primarily through casting healing gcds and dps through weaving dps cooldowns between casting heals. And if healing isnt needed you still have Glare, Malefic and Broil to use. Dpsing as a healer would at least be more engaging as you'd have more than just 1 DoT and single target spell. You'd be casting a heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil then weave that DoT ability, then after the next heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil you'd weave the next cooldown then go weaving the 2 second ability until the others come off cooldown.

The reason people hate having to spam gcd heals is there are no dps abilities to weave during them that do not have healing tacked on to them. Give dps abilties with very short cooldowns to healers with 0 healing tacked on and people would be content with spamming Cure 1 or Physick because they'd have those to use during the gcd.

An unintended side-effect of that is too much mobility, but who really cares about mobility anymore when nearly every job has heaps of mobility now.

[Flay_wind]

Which could be, hypothetically, solved by; reducing the amount of healing abilties, lowering the strength and the cooldowns of the healing abilities that stay, increasing the strength of gcd heals, lowering the cast time of gcd heals, adding at least 3 or 4 dps abilities (one is a single target ability with a 2 second cooldown, another is a DoT with a 30 second duration and 5 second cooldown, the third could be a single target ability with a 25 second cooldown, and the fourth could be an aoe with a 50 second cooldown) to replace the healing abilties that were removed and keeping Glare, Broil and Malefic for when healing isn't needed and lowering their cast times to 1.5 seconds.

With that you; heal primarily through casting healing gcds and dps through weaving dps cooldowns between casting heals. And if healing isnt needed you still have Glare, Malefic and Broil to use. Dpsing as a healer would at least be more engaging as you'd have more than just 1 DoT and single target spell. You'd be casting a heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil then weave that DoT ability, then after the next heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil you'd weave the next cooldown then go weaving the 2 second ability until the others come off cooldown.

Not counting all death effects and some other BLU specific things, that's basically how BLU Healer mimic plays.
You have Pom Cure with short cast time, after which you can weave your Primals (OGCD damage abilities on various cooldowns) in. You have Gobskin which is ~20% hp party shield without any healing component, so it's a strict mitigation. There's Exuviation (Cure 3 + Esuna)/Stotram (off-brand Medica), Angel Snack which is your busted 2 minutes CD which is *just* super charged off-brand Medica 2. And then there's also White Wind, which in a lot of situations is AoE Benediction (Ahem). No OGCD heals whatsoever, and as someone who has cleared all BLU content, which includes Synced/NoEcho Coils, AlexSavage and OmegaSavage i'd say they are not needed.
You have Song of Torment, aka your 30 seconds 550 total potency DoT. Then you can slot in Rose of Destruction - 30 seconds 400 potency spell, Magic Hammer 90 seconds cooldown restores some MP and is basically a second stackable Addle. Also there's Sonic Boom which is your spammable 1,5 seconds filler spell, after which you can also weave your Primals in.

[Allegor]

You know you screwed up when a DPS playing pretend as healer is more engaging than an actual healer lol

[Raikai]

Healing per se is not engaging in this game because of how encounters are designed.

in most of the content, in the scenario of your group managing to avoid all the applicable telegraphs, you can cover most of the healing with just free OGCDs, so that leaves healers without a lot to do. I think that to make the healer role interesting, they need at least one of these:

a) Revert back them having more dps tools;

b) Add a 'side-game' to every healer, just like AST has with the cards;

c) Change encounter design with a bit less telegraphed choreography and a little more random damage;

[Recon1o6]

Not counting all death effects and some other BLU specific things, that's basically how BLU Healer mimic plays.
You have Pom Cure with short cast time, after which you can weave your Primals (OGCD damage abilities on various cooldowns) in. You have Gobskin which is ~20% hp party shield without any healing component, so it's a strict mitigation. There's Exuviation (Cure 3 + Esuna)/Stotram (off-brand Medica), Angel Snack which is your busted 2 minutes CD which is *just* super charged off-brand Medica 2. And then there's also White Wind, which in a lot of situations is AoE Benediction (Ahem). No OGCD heals whatsoever, and as someone who has cleared all BLU content, which includes Synced/NoEcho Coils, AlexSavage and OmegaSavage i'd say they are not needed.
You have Song of Torment, aka your 30 seconds 550 total potency DoT. Then you can slot in Rose of Destruction - 30 seconds 400 potency spell, Magic Hammer 90 seconds cooldown restores some MP and is basically a second stackable Addle. Also there's Sonic Boom which is your spammable 1,5 seconds filler spell, after which you can also weave your Primals in.

You dont even need all those abilities to have fun as blu healer. I'm missing some of the blu spells and its still a blast. Because i have an actual dps rotation between my heals even if its incomplete, which imo is how the game used to and should be- even without all your abilities you can have fun

blu healer is very close to what i'd hope all healers would be with solid powerful heals and a dps rotation with a bit of utility and crowd control thrown in as well and weaving windows aplenty to fit in the ogcds

Naturally given we are apparently going to be having another chunk out of Ast by the devs, we will have 2 regen healers and 2 shield healers. So a more in depth look at how I'd like it is one member of each has a higher focus on personal damage and the other on raid damage. That's not to say one or the other should lose out though, only have less emphasis

Whm: High pot heals and lower regens, Larger elemental combo based dps rotation with strongest healer attacks. Only one or two utility actions, refunds heal potency like misery
Ast: Low pot heals high power regens, small proc based rotation with cards and actions for lots of strong utility and ability to extend timers
Sch: High pot heals with weaker shields, dot mage rotation with personal damage comparable to whm. Little utility but can spread dots and has fairy to help silence/stun
Sge: Low pot heals but strong shields, burst type rotation with plenty of utility

[Lyth]

You know you screwed up when a DPS playing pretend as healer is more engaging than an actual healer lol

In fairness, pretty much any time that someone suggests giving players choice over what actions they actually bring (i.e. skill tree systems, BLU's pick-and-choose system, etc.) a swarm of extremely self-assured players descends and insists that such systems involving player choice never work in any MMO in the known universe and that the optimal universal setup would be calculated in 12.77 seconds (repeating, of course) by the Excel spreadsheet wizards over at the Balance. And it's not like any other successful MMOs use such systems, either.

And then you get the odd player who notes that BLU has a pretty fun system and gee whiz maybe it would be fun if more jobs worked this way. BLU might not be practical, but it definitely is fun. Maybe we should start by optimizing fun first?

[Recon1o6]

In fairness, pretty much any time that someone suggests giving players choice over what actions they actually bring (i.e. skill tree systems, BLU's pick-and-choose system, etc.) a swarm of extremely self-assured players descends and insists that such systems involving player choice never work in any MMO in the known universe and that the optimal universal setup would be calculated in 12.77 seconds (repeating, of course) by the Excel spreadsheet wizards over at the Balance. And it's not like any other successful MMOs use such systems, either.

And then you get the odd player who notes that BLU has a pretty fun system and gee whiz maybe it would be fun if more jobs worked this way. BLU might not be practical, but it definitely is fun. Maybe we should start by optimizing fun first?

honestly this really is a problem. The players who want folks to stop having fun and play optimally. When that misses the point entirely. Fun is always more important than balance or parse numbers.

[FusionSamurai]

They would need to rework their spaghetti code if they were to add a rotation for healers as using a gcd heal would break that rotation. Or have it act like RDM's verstone/fire ready buff.

But not much of anything can be done because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that someone much earlier noted. Healing was made easy/boring thus a drop in playerbase which in turn means the devs need to make healing even easier to make up for less skilled players which causes another drop in healers which again causes the devs to make healing easier and it'll keep continuing because they'd rather not spend the money or work hours to fix the root of the problem: healer dps.

Which could be, hypothetically, solved by; reducing the amount of healing abilties, lowering the strength and the cooldowns of the healing abilities that stay, increasing the strength of gcd heals, lowering the cast time of gcd heals, adding at least 3 or 4 dps abilities (one is a single target ability with a 2 second cooldown, another is a DoT with a 30 second duration and 5 second cooldown, the third could be a single target ability with a 25 second cooldown, and the fourth could be an aoe with a 50 second cooldown) to replace the healing abilties that were removed and keeping Glare, Broil and Malefic for when healing isn't needed and lowering their cast times to 1.5 seconds.

With that you; heal primarily through casting healing gcds and dps through weaving dps cooldowns between casting heals. And if healing isnt needed you still have Glare, Malefic and Broil to use. Dpsing as a healer would at least be more engaging as you'd have more than just 1 DoT and single target spell. You'd be casting a heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil then weave that DoT ability, then after the next heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil you'd weave the next cooldown then go weaving the 2 second ability until the others come off cooldown.

The reason people hate having to spam gcd heals is there are no dps abilities to weave during them that do not have healing tacked on to them. Give dps abilties with very short cooldowns to healers with 0 healing tacked on and people would be content with spamming Cure 1 or Physick because they'd have those to use during the gcd.

An unintended side-effect of that is too much mobility, but who really cares about mobility anymore when nearly every job has heaps of mobility now.

A rotation doesn't imply combo actions. Also, some combos can be interrupted with no loss, so even that argument falls through.

Combos for healers would be stupid, but I'm just correcting you.

Give healers more things to juggle damage wise. It doesn't have to be a set rotation, just a broad priority system like scholar had in stormblood.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Not counting all death effects and some other BLU specific things, that's basically how BLU Healer mimic plays.
You have Pom Cure with short cast time, after which you can weave your Primals (OGCD damage abilities on various cooldowns) in. You have Gobskin which is ~20% hp party shield without any healing component, so it's a strict mitigation. There's Exuviation (Cure 3 + Esuna)/Stotram (off-brand Medica), Angel Snack which is your busted 2 minutes CD which is *just* super charged off-brand Medica 2. And then there's also White Wind, which in a lot of situations is AoE Benediction (Ahem). No OGCD heals whatsoever, and as someone who has cleared all BLU content, which includes Synced/NoEcho Coils, AlexSavage and OmegaSavage i'd say they are not needed.

A few things to note:

• Pom Cure is roughly the same potency as Cure 1
• Gobskin generates roughly the same strength shield as Succor without the healing component
• Exuviation is the same strength as Medica with Cure 3's AoE
• Stotram is identical to Medica
• Angel's Snack is double the strength of Medica II but can only be used once every 2 minutes
• White Wind is one of the single most expensive power heals in the game and it will drain your MP if you rely to heavily on it and gets weaker the lower your own hp is.
• Angel Whisper is limited to once every 5 minutes.

I wonder if the limits on Angel's Snack, White Wind and Angel Whisper a part of what allows for Healer BLU to be much more engaging.

And then you get the odd player who notes that BLU has a pretty fun system and gee whiz maybe it would be fun if more jobs worked this way. BLU might not be practical, but it definitely is fun. Maybe we should start by optimizing fun first?

Part of what allows BLU to be fun is that it is 10 levels behind and can not be used for progression and party finder content. Make it level 80 and allow it to participate in Savage and players will start optimizing the fun out of it.