How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[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?

[Shurrikhan]

Well, I was only addressing the one-to-one comparison between M2 and AoW. If you want to compare SCH's entire dungeon DPS toolkit between SB and ShB, that's another question. It might be interesting to math that out. But it would be tricky, because the SB calculation would depend on how long it takes the mobs to die, and perhaps also on the number of mobs (I vaguely recall that Bane had a falloff). AoW is giving you an extra 60 potency per mob per GCD, compared to M2. Would the dot potency from Bane and Shadowflare oughtweigh that deficit? I don't recall the details of these abilities well enough to answer that.

Put simply, SCH outright melted mass-pull dungeon runs in StB, frequently outperforming DPS. Now? Nah.

Now, that capacity doesn't really matter to me, so long as it meets a decent parity. But the gameplay certainly feels worse for having reduced all that DoT-centric play with which Bane could so synergize in favor of slapping the ground repeatedly.

[BungleBear]

Put simply, SCH outright melted mass-pull dungeon runs in StB, frequently outperforming DPS. Now? Nah.

There's a website where you can fact-check this claim. If you look at the ranking of jobs for dungeon DPS, you'll see that SCH's position in the ranking is basically the same in both expansions.

[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.

[Semirhage]

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

Maybe not, but it at least activates the attentive parts of my brain a helluva lot more than Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Shurrikhan]

There's a website where you can fact-check this claim. If you look at the ranking of jobs for dungeon DPS, you'll see that SCH's position in the ranking is basically the same in both expansions.

Sorry, I'd meant earlier to say just "mass pulls". Regardless...

(1) Take a look at how many mobs you can actually pull then and now (the densest pulls of StB were notably denser than ShB), or what portion of total damage done in a dungeon falls onto trash rather than bosses. As the portion of total damage increasing falls under such pulls, difference in AoE effective ppgcd has a larger effect on the overall, especially if the given pull falls under but near to a single churn of Bane. What was lost accounted for more ppgcd than the difference between Miasma II and AoW's initial potency. Optimized, SCH trucked, especially when it, in combination with range or LoS limitations on the gather itself, scarcely allowed else to set up:

(2) SCH's StB damage was absurdly easy to apply on the run, given Bane's spread radius and its propegating from the target, rather than from oneself (a limiting factor mid-gather, as any melee DPS will have seen when AoEing less than perfectly stacked mobs as they chase the tank).

[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.

[Kabooa]

No DPS can get away with that in the slightest.

You and I both know this isn't true.