How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[Semirhage]

I'm not convinced that this phenomenon is unique to healers. Consider melee DPS, for example. When you start doing a new encounter, you're thinking about how to maintain maximum uptime. At first, you play it safe, but as you learn the fight, you start to test the limits. Think about the first time you try to greed a GCD, and it works! That would be pretty thrilling. But after you've figured out the timing so you know you can reliably greed the GCD, it's not very exciting any more. A new encounter is like a puzzle to solve. Everyone has their own little puzzles to solve within the larger puzzle. Solving the puzzle is more engaging than merely repeating the solution. But that applies to everyone, not only to healers.

I wouldn't consider the phenomenon unique to healers, but it hits them harder and faster. There's very little healing to do in most content in XIV. That's probably not going to change, considering the clear rates Squeenix wants for everyone. When you're not healing (as kits are currently designed), you're dealing damage. Alright, now's the time to figure out how to greed that uptime! Yippee, I got...another Broil.

The reward DPS classes get for playing well is squeezing ever cleverer uptime strategies and getting more out of their job's core function. How satisfying that is varies with the job's design, but there's satisfaction to be had there. The reward healers get for playing well is more time with their boring-as-snot, zero nuance damage rotations. Which from personal experience, isn't as thrilling for quite as long.

[BungleBear]

I wouldn't consider the phenomenon unique to healers, but it hits them harder and faster. There's very little healing to do in most content in XIV. That's probably not going to change, considering the clear rates Squeenix wants for everyone. When you're not healing (as kits are currently designed), you're dealing damage. Alright, now's the time to figure out how to greed that uptime! Yippee, I got...another Broil.

The reward DPS classes get for playing well is squeezing ever cleverer uptime strategies and getting more out of their job's core function. How satisfying that is varies with the job's design, but there's satisfaction to be had there. The reward healers get for playing well is more time with their boring-as-snot, zero nuance damage rotations. Which from personal experience, isn't as thrilling for quite as long.

Hey, I get excited when I hit that extra Broil! But your general point might be right. To be honest, I don't have enough experience playing non-healer jobs at a high level to judge this. I realise people find this hard to believe, but I actually have fun playing healer.

[IceBlueNinja]

Hey, I get excited when I hit that extra Broil! But your general point might be right. To be honest, I don't have enough experience playing non-healer jobs at a high level to judge this. I realise people find this hard to believe, but I actually have fun playing healer.

same though its really cause of ast atm despite its boring cards, i guess since ofc i do noct play over diurnal 100% when with a whm or another ast is more engaging. Funny think how I know I dont touch whm is when I switched to it on pc version to get the queen relic quest started it pops stating i just unlock lilly gage lol, seem i even at times use sch over whm but its only really when i do roll 50 60 70 or lvling and feel game gonna troll me anf gimmie arr content as ast which ugh i hate. only prefer sch over ast for arr. heaven ward and up strict ast. sad cant find no reason to ever wanna whm anymore.

[ty_taurus]

I don't think the activities you've listed are especially engaging for any role, not only for healers. But I think that's fine. Not all content needs to be super engaging. They call it "grinding" for a reason: it's just a mindless repetitive activity. I don't do treasure maps for engaging gameplay. I do them to have a laugh with friends. When I want content that requires a high level of focus and attention, I do savage or ultimate. But when I just want to relax and turn my brain off, I do an alliance raid or a jumping puzzle in the Gold Saucer, or whatever. I think it's good that the game provides this kind of variety.

It seems to me like you're looking for engaging gameplay in the wrong places. If you want to be challenged, don't grind fates, or do treasure maps, or farm fights that you've already cleared.

Hard disagree here. Yes, challenging content like learning new savage and extreme fights is engaging, but maintaining your optimal rotation during grindy content is far more entertaining than doing it as a healer. I switched to be a Dancer main in ShB and I have fallen in love with the job since. Sure it's very simple to play in comparison to some other DPS, and I would certainly appreciate a bit more depth getting added to the job, but I like how I'm always paying attention to my procs and I feel excitement every time I get through any given 30 seconds where I was able to avoid any amount of clipping and my Standard Step goes off cooldown exactly as that last GCD refreshes because I know that I did my job perfectly for those 30 seconds.

And let's take a look at MSQ progression, where virtually no healing needs to be done at all. Playing through the ShB story as Dancer felt exciting. I felt like I was in the story. I couldn't imagine having to have gone through some of those instance fights, like Ran'jit, or the level 56? instance in Lakeland (the one with all the sin eaters) as a healer. What would I even do in those?

To be honest, I can't wrap my head around the mentality that it's okay for the job to have nothing to do in casual content as long as there's challenging content that pressures you to use more. And even then, I would stress that the healers aren't very well designed in that regard right now either.

WHM suffers from dreadful clipping issues, and its selection of GCD healing is bloated with repetition despite the job not actually having a bloat issue.
Pet AI has a glaring, broken flaw that SCH usually can avoid (though that can also make it more easy to fall into that trap than SMNs who are more consciously aware of it), they're the worst barrier healer most of the time (forcing a Crit Adloquium is their only real selling point, but because that fights their DPS, it's only something you want in very specific circumstances). Succor and Adloquium are ignored in most content and not the main focal point of their healing in challenging content.
ASTs can struggle to get all of their seals for their opening Divination and Nocturnal's only value from a meta standpoint is when paired with another AST or WHM, but only when progging content. If you're playing through familiar content, then Diurnal is still better. (I'm sure a certain someone's gonna tell me how much of a meta slave I am for that)

There's a severe lack of understanding of how healers actually play from the developer standpoint which is just a consequence of the main designers just not playing healers ever and thus not having a strong enough understanding of what things actually do.

[BungleBear]

Hard disagree here. Yes, challenging content like learning new savage and extreme fights is engaging, but maintaining your optimal rotation during grindy content is far more entertaining than doing it as a healer. I switched to be a Dancer main in ShB and I have fallen in love with the job since. Sure it's very simple to play in comparison to some other DPS, and I would certainly appreciate a bit more depth getting added to the job, but I like how I'm always paying attention to my procs and I feel excitement every time I get through any given 30 seconds where I was able to avoid any amount of clipping and my Standard Step goes off cooldown exactly as that last GCD refreshes because I know that I did my job perfectly for those 30 seconds.

Is it exciting and entertaining for you to play Dancer against a striking dummy?

[ty_taurus]

Is it exciting and entertaining for you to play Dancer against a striking dummy?

Stop, you're just being an asshole now. I'm so sick of how you look down on casual content. We get it, the only thing that matters to you is TEA. You don't do roulettes. You don't do hunts. You don't play Bozja. You don't go after EX mounts. You don't play through the MSQ. All you do is TEA. You log on and TEA. Anyone who plays casual content should be spit upon and looked down on for wanting to enjoy it, and we should feel bad for wanting it to be fun. I get it. Now enough of your condescending responses.

[BungleBear]

Stop, you're just being an asshole now. I'm so sick of how you look down on casual content. We get it, the only thing that matters to you is TEA. You don't do roulettes. You don't do hunts. You don't play Bozja. You don't go after EX mounts. You don't play through the MSQ. All you do is TEA. You log on and TEA. Anyone who plays casual content should be spit upon and looked down on for wanting to enjoy it, and we should feel bad for wanting it to be fun. I get it. Now enough of your condescending responses.

I apologise if my question seemed facetious. It was a genuine question.

The reason I asked about the striking dummy is that this reduces playing a job to merely executing its DPS rotation. I submit that this is not very engaging even for DPS jobs (at least after you've learnt the rotation and developed muscle memory). At the end of day, it's just pressing buttons in a predetermined order, plus in some cases, occasionally pressing buttons in response to random events. Sure, doing Dancer's rotation may be more engaging than doing White Mage's, but the difference is small. And the difference is negligible in comparison to the difference between, say, grinding FATES and doing ultimate. It seem to me that, in terms of engaging gameplay, the difficulty of content has a much larger impact than the complexity of DPS rotation. So I find it strange to hear healers saying "Please give me a more complex DPS rotation so I can have more engaging gameplay in casual content". If it's more engaging gameplay that you want, then this will be much more effectively achieved by doing harder content.

And as it happens, I don't look down on casual content. I enjoy doing lots of casual content, including most of the things you mention. (I think I said this in a previous comment.) I just don't do them for highly engaging gameplay. I mean, isn't this what makes it casual content?

[Absurdity]

I apologise if my question seemed facetious. It was a genuine question.

The reason I asked about the striking dummy is that this reduces playing a job to merely executing its DPS rotation. I submit that this is not very engaging even for DPS jobs (at least after you've learnt the rotation and developed muscle memory). At the end of day, it's just pressing buttons in a predetermined order, plus in some cases, occasionally pressing buttons in response to random events. Sure, doing Dancer's rotation may be more engaging than doing White Mage's, but the difference is small. And the difference is negligible in comparison to the difference between, say, grinding FATES and doing ultimate. It seem to me that, in terms of engaging gameplay, the difficulty of content has a much larger impact than the complexity of DPS rotation. So I find it strange to hear healers saying "Please give me a more complex DPS rotation so I can have more engaging gameplay in casual content". If it's more engaging gameplay that you want, then this will be much more effectively achieved by doing harder content.

And as it happens, I don't look down on casual content. I enjoy doing lots of casual content, including most of the things you mention. (I think I said this in a previous comment.) I just don't do them for highly engaging gameplay. I mean, isn't this what makes it casual content?

The problem however is that there is barely anything to do when you don't do the casual content. There is only 1, maybe 2, Ultimates per expansion. That means with the current design you have 1 single piece of content every 2 years that is actually engaging.
Okay, let's be generous and include Savage as well because there may or may not be fights that aren't just spamming Broil 180 times in 9 minutes.

That is still not a lot of content compared to all the casual content in the game, which you will inevitably do even as a hardcore player because you can only run the same 4 (5) fights per raid tier so many times until those become boring as well.

The problem is that the casual content does not have, and can not have, the mechanical complexity that savage or ultimate do. And because the job complexity of healers (and increasingly tanks as well) is so low when there are no complex mechanics then you become so incredibly bored that you start to consider just unsubscribing from the game until the next raid tier.

That's just not good enough. Why would it be so unreasonable to ask for atleast somewhat engaging gameplay even in content that isn't mechanically engaging?

I just don't think "you're going to be bored out of your mind in 90% of the game's combat, deal with it" is a good answer.

[Dearche]

And the difference is negligible in comparison to the difference between, say, grinding FATES and doing ultimate. It seem to me that, in terms of engaging gameplay, the difficulty of content has a much larger impact than the complexity of DPS rotation. So I find it strange to hear healers saying "Please give me a more complex DPS rotation so I can have more engaging gameplay in casual content". If it's more engaging gameplay that you want, then this will be much more effectively achieved by doing harder content.

Using fates as a measure is disingenuous at best. Fates aren't normal casual content in the slightest. When was the last time you even did a fate anyways? Maybe for some gem grinding? Or to get the last 150k XP for the next level? It's a minority content that has players engaging in than ARR beast tribes. I mean, the bicolour gems had to be introduced just so people had a reason to do the latest fates, and that died after the first two weeks of ShB's release!

If you want to sound fair, use dungeons. Expert roulette to be more convincing, as that's where most people are after running though the leveling dungeons via the MSQ, casual or not.

And using that as a reference, frankly speaking, DNC is many times more engaging than WHM (or any healer for that matter). DNC has an actual AOE rotation (not just one button spam). DNC has procs to manage. DNC has their fan dances in addition to standard steps and technical steps. And with all that, they even have space to optimize, as they have to consider their resources between pulls and bosses. WHM has...holy and assize, plus afflatus misery every 90s? For healing, you only need asylum and tetra to cover all your needs as long as the tank's not undergeared and lazy.

In boss fights, DNC has their single target rotation, their procs, fan dance again, their two steps, as well as resource consideration for the next trash pull if the boss is getting low on HP. WHM has...dia, glare, assize, afflatus misery, and asylum and tetra. Only the blood lily to worry about when it comes to resources, otherwise you're stuck spamming glare for 30s before you even consider doing anything else.

For bosses, WHM is admittedly the worst off of the healers by far, but in trash pulls, all three healers have it pretty bad. Whereas DNC has all that going for it, and that's only half their kit. In addition, DNC is probably the single most simplest DPS job in the game, yet has that much going for it.

How come the simplest DPS has so much more to do in casual content than ANY healer in the game?

As things stand, healers can get away with hitting follow and macroing spells in casual content. No DPS can get away with that in the slightest.