Broil

[Boizinho]

Oof, I can't believe all of Astro's extra buttons only heal, and in fact all heal in exactly the same way with exactly the same cooldown and exactly the same targets with no other differences between them or considerations to make.

Astro's basically the sole exception with its card busywork. Outside of that, yes you pretty much have 12-15 buttons for "heal stuff" on any given healer. Their differences aren't interesting either. There's a clear priority list to follow on which ones to use first, and the gaps in raid-wide damage can be so long that it becomes a non-decision anyway. You Excog one tank buster then what do you use for the next one? Excog. Sacred Soil a raid-wide and what do you use next time? Sacred Soil.

You're acting like healer toolkits are some kind of complex swiss army knife, but when you unfold all the tools inside the knife you realize it's 20 corkscrews, some smaller and more rusted than others, and you're just sitting around hoping that someone has trouble opening a wine bottle so you can feel useful for 3 seconds before folding up the knife and putting it back in your pocket. Give the Fire 1 spamming BLM 12 different versions of Addle, some stronger than others, some on the GCD and some oGCD, and see what kind of complex gameplay loop comes out of it. It would play exactly like healers do now. They would wait for the boss to cast a raid-wide, use the strongest Addle that was off cooldown at the time, and go back to Fire 1.

[Kabooa]

Astro's basically the sole exception with its card busywork. Outside of that, yes you pretty much have 12-15 buttons for "heal stuff" on any given healer. Their differences aren't interesting either. There's a clear priority list to follow on which ones to use first, and the gaps in raid-wide damage can be so long that it becomes a non-decision anyway. You Excog one tank buster then what do you use for the next one? Excog. Sacred Soil a raid-wide and what do you use next time? Sacred Soil.

You're acting like healer toolkits are some kind of complex swiss army knife, but when you unfold all the tools inside the knife you realize it's 20 corkscrews, some smaller and more rusted than others, and you're just sitting around hoping that someone has trouble opening a wine bottle so you can feel useful for 3 seconds before folding up the knife and putting it back in your pocket. Give the Fire 1 spamming BLM 12 different versions of Addle, some stronger than others, some on the GCD and some oGCD, and see what kind of complex gameplay loop comes out of it. It would play exactly like healers do now. They would wait for the boss to cast a raid-wide, use the strongest Addle that was off cooldown at the time, and go back to Fire 1.

No, I'm not. I'm asking for the same, comparable kit.

"All the buttons are healing" and "You only use it 10% of the time" isn't that. I don't think asking people to elaborate for a hypothetical is asking for too much. You may consider them to have no additional mechanics, but that is false. I am asking that this hypothetical Black Mage have an equal kit, in a responder's eyes, to the current healers, because the proposed one is not equal. It's lesser.

I would obviously not play Black Mage if it was White Mage with no mechanics. White Mage, despite what will be claimed, has mechanics. It has decision points, it has considerations. In this hypothetical of literally having two buttons and no mechanics, I would obviously just play White mage. Or any of the healers. Or literally any other job, because even current Monk has mechanics. Even Machinist has mechanics.

It is a bad comparison.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

No, I'm not. I'm asking for the same, comparable kit.

"All the buttons are healing" and "You only use it 10% of the time" isn't that. I don't think asking people to elaborate for a hypothetical is asking for too much. You may consider them to have no additional mechanics, but that is false. I am asking that this hypothetical Black Mage have an equal kit, in a responder's eyes, to the current healers, because the proposed one is not equal. It's lesser.

I would obviously not play Black Mage if it was White Mage with no mechanics. White Mage, despite what will be claimed, has mechanics. It has decision points, it has considerations. In this hypothetical of literally having two buttons and no mechanics, I would obviously just play White mage. Or any of the healers. Or literally any other job, because even current Monk has mechanics. Even Machinist has mechanics.

It is a bad comparison.

Finally someone gets it other than me.

[Aword3213]

Astro's basically the sole exception with its card busywork. Outside of that, yes you pretty much have 12-15 buttons for "heal stuff" on any given healer. Their differences aren't interesting either. There's a clear priority list to follow on which ones to use first, and the gaps in raid-wide damage can be so long that it becomes a non-decision anyway. You Excog one tank buster then what do you use for the next one? Excog. Sacred Soil a raid-wide and what do you use next time? Sacred Soil.

You're acting like healer toolkits are some kind of complex swiss army knife, but when you unfold all the tools inside the knife you realize it's 20 corkscrews, some smaller and more rusted than others, and you're just sitting around hoping that someone has trouble opening a wine bottle so you can feel useful for 3 seconds before folding up the knife and putting it back in your pocket. Give the Fire 1 spamming BLM 12 different versions of Addle, some stronger than others, some on the GCD and some oGCD, and see what kind of complex gameplay loop comes out of it. It would play exactly like healers do now. They would wait for the boss to cast a raid-wide, use the strongest Addle that was off cooldown at the time, and go back to Fire 1.

If you put it that way, aren't DPS jobs boring as well?

What are the DPS toolkits about? They are all damage. Even more brainless than healers because most dps abilities are used as soon as they're up. No thinking nor decision making is required.

There are some exceptions though, like mitigations and utilities here and there, but you get my meaning.

[Boizinho]

snip

Nah, cause at least you're using all of them all the time. Maintaining your rotation in the face of mechanics that want to interrupt it is the fun of DPS, and extra damaging abilities only add to that challenge. You have a precise order you've set up to make sure you're using all of your abilities as soon as you can, and you need to make the encounter work around that no matter how much the encounter tries to stop it from happening. Healing is the complete opposite. You never want to use it if you don't have to, and you're relying on the encounter itself to give you permission to use those abilities. The boss tries to stop DPS from using DPS abilities, and it tries to force healers into using healing abilities.

Problem is, there just isn't enough outgoing damage relative to the bloated healing kits, so the choice about which spell to use isn't very important. You can think of it like this: imagine if you're a level 58 DPS that's bored waiting in queue for Palace of the Dead, so you decide to go out and walk around killing random gazelle outside Quarrymill. For the first one, you're probably going to pick an instant oGCD to one-shot it with. As a RDM, I would kill the first one with a Fleche. Second gazelle, I toss out Contra Sixte. Third one I kill with Corps-a-corps. As you can see, it takes a lot of gazelle to make me start hard-casting Jolt. If it's already been 25 seconds since I killed the first gazelle, then my go-to spell becomes Fleche again, and if I continue at this pace I will probably never reach a point where I'm casting Jolt.

Healing opportunities are rare, fleeting, and the game decides when and if they happen. If there's no gazelle around, that Fleche will sit off cooldown until I find one. Now imagine that I'm constantly taking some form of heavy poison damage during my hunt. The moment a gazelle appears, I'm ready to Fleche it. I've been waiting to do that. But I can't do it until it spawns. In the mean time though, I'm taking heavy damage over time. This leads to me casting Vercure over and over until a gazelle spawns. Despite the fact that I have a wealth of DPS buttons at the ready, I'm spending 70% of my time casting Vercure, my one heal, interminably. The rate at which gazelle are spawning is making my high-priority attacks come off cooldown before I can even consider using the less powerful ones. Vercure Vercure Vercure Vercure Fleche, Vercure Vercure etc.

This is what they've done to healers currently. A DPS with a large suite of DPS spells is using all of them all the time if they can help it. A healer with 20 healing spells and 1 damage spell is going to be using the 1 damage spell until the scripted encounter decides it's time to use a heal. Well, if that opportunity is one measly tank buster in a 30 second time period, I'm just gonna throw an Excog out and not worry about it, because the game's going to tell me ahead of time if another gazelle is about to show up.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

This is good it keeps the healers able to focus on healing not optimal dps.

[Roeshel]

This is good it keeps the healers able to focus on healing not optimal dps.

That's not true. Optimal DPS exists for every role. And we have a lot oGCD healing abilities so that we can focus on optimal DPS.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

That's not true. Optimal DPS exists for every role. And we have a lot oGCD healing abilities so that we can focus on optimal DPS.

Optimal dps shouldn’t exist for healers is the problem.

[Teno]

Optimal dps shouldn’t exist for healers is the problem.

Why shouldn't it ? With scholar, it had the form of shadow flare for instance, and I think it was the right solution. A very minimal positional dps gain that healers can play around to optimize, yet because it's so small you weren't missing out too much if you didn't care to use it the smartest way.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Optimal dps shouldn’t exist for healers is the problem.

The only way to do this is to delete any sort of dpsing action that healers has. Glare? Malefix? Broil? Combust? Dia? Biolysis? Yeah, those. Delete them all, including our auto attacks.

Even if they nerf our main damage spell down to 1 potency, that will still be the button we press -all the time- as long as no healing is needed at the moment.

Given how majority of FFXIV encounter works, we'll have plenty of time to watch netflix as we 'play' our healer of choice unless everybody we're paired with simply lack of situational awareness 98% of time.