It's time to kill the argument that DPS abilities keep healers from healing.

[Grimoire-M]

Snip.

When I say healing rotation I’m not talking about planning cooldowns around a specific fight. I’m talking about taking a specific cadence of actions that is necessary just to get a more efficient outcome. You can choose to heal inefficiently and not get punished for it due to how similar most healing actions are. DPS by contrast have a nearly static rotation irrespective of the fight itself, built on setting up their full potential first then only minorly adjusting around specific needs within each instance, and if you blatantly ignore it you’re immediately punished for it. Healers by design do not have that. It creates a minimum skill requirement just to be on par efficiency wise. Imagine if Scholar had to use Physick just to gain access to its shields and/or an aetherflow action for 15s, or if AST had to land a 3 seal Divination just to be able to use Star twice. SE is vehemently against such restrictions, but those are common in other MMOs, and there’s examples of that on DPS here. Think about how that kind of restriction affects blind prog or the first-time healer experience. And the habits it encourages that only vets know how to get around.

A good example of a DPS that could be molded into a healer if not for that restriction would be Samurai. Any Iaijutsu and sen combination could produce any healing GCD you wanted. Shifu could affect healing potency. Anything that spends Kenki could be converted into an equivalent healing ability apart from Kaiten (which would be a suitable filler DPS and healing ability), and gyoten/yaten (as they’re both for positioning). Would it be fun? Probably! But SE will never make that kind of healer.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Why can you not predict your healing? The tanks hps are what they are and your heals are not fluctuating by some random amount, outside of a crit.

Well they fluctuate based on level sync on content unless I just stick to level80 stuff. Am I really expected to memorize my heal amounts at max level??

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Boss can't even crit past Stormblood anymore anyway, so tank hp literally go down at a certain rate so you just need to heal every x seconds. I feel like people are blaming balance and optimization or raid for their own lazyness to learn.



I mean, that's what a lot of healers do, heal the damage that was just done? You only need to plan if you want very high parses (95+). Even as a scholar, a good scholar will only pre shield when the damage would kill.. so "sometimes" in savage, maybe twice a fight. By learning mechanics you realize how mostly everything is just rehashed mechanics, even in savage: what you call "patterns" are just those basic mechanics in a certain sequences or with a different skin.

And ... after 80 lvl you are supposed to know how much your heals are doing?? A heal without crit wont magically go from 25 to 50k, the same way damage doesnt randomly appear. You look once how much your heals are doing once, and most of them have the same potency anyway, so you know what they will do.

Hmm I never knew this. I just figured learning that stuff was some diamond + type league jazz and I have no intention of ever climbing pass diamond and putting in that effort sooooo…you can still clear as a reactionary healer but I guess I could learn my heal amounts somehow. Do dummies work for it?

Also I always assumed that unless the person is lower hp your heal would be less. So you could only learn if you got someone low first.

[Payadopa]

I had quite a few healers (okay, it's always WHMs) who think healing is beneath them, to be fair. lol

[QooEr]

Well they fluctuate based on level sync on content unless I just stick to level80 stuff. Am I really expected to memorize my heal amounts at max level??

??? you can just pay attention to the hp bar as soon as you cast a heal and just remember it. cure 2 is usually about 1/3 of a tanks hp

there's no need to memorize anything

[AnotherPerson]

Well they fluctuate based on level sync on content unless I just stick to level80 stuff. Am I really expected to memorize my heal amounts at max level??

You can just eyeball it? That's why all skills list their 'potency' rather than their 'heal' amount. Because healing "potency" doesn't change in a healer's toolkit, and you can use 'potency' as a rough estimate to how much each heal would do after using it once.

Tetra heals 700 potency, Afflatus Solace heals 700 potency, both heal around usually 1/3 of a tank's HP, at lower ilvl it's usually more. That means I can top them off in an instant when someone drops to 1/3 HP with 2 heals. The same goes with DPS, except usually one 700 potency heal can bring them to near half HP or around 40% because their HP is lower than the tanks' Hp.

By that same token, if I can figure out ~700 potency is around 1/3 of a person's max HP, then Cure II with the same 700 potency will also heal 1/3 of their HP.
Afflatus Rapture would be roughly ~300 potency, so around 1/2 of Afflatus Solace. Then I would need 2 Afflatus Raptures to get roughly the same output as a Tetra.

Just know the potencies of your skills in your toolkit, the rest is just basic math after eyeballing a player's HP from a heal. If the heal isn't enough because you deviated too much, then you throw an extra GCD heal.

If you want to heavily optimize, you do take into account for those extra deviations to ensure you aren't wasting extra GCD heals.

[Gemina]

The only time healing is actually remotely fun is in Bozja where the lost actions that eat at your mp pretty hard actually mix up the boring gameplay some, and that's only really because you're doing a lot of damage.

It would actually be kind of nice to see healers get MP dump skills that increase damage and then other skills that help with recovering from the MP dump skills, but pretty sure that would never happen because it's not very sprout friendly

In contrast I find healing fun in a variety of content and actually despise Bozja. While I will agree that spamming one button 90% of the time is boring and unengaging, I will not agree with the impression that some healers give off that the only place this does not take place is in Savage and Ultimate. And while Bozja does offer a different take into encounters, it isn't the norm. PvE as we know it in regular 8-man trials and raids is what will continue to exist into next expansion, and the one after that.

As a healer, I am the most engaged when I get to open up my kit. This is why I say just giving me more skills to cause damage isn't going to do jack to make healing more fun for me. That is why I will become dismissive and tell healers who want to do more damage to stop being a wolf in sheep's clothing, and just play a DPS job. This dev team can do a whole hell of a lot better than just giving us a couple more DPS buttons to push. Healing is a very situational role to play, the amount of DPS a healer can do is dictated by two things: their willingness to do it, and the competency of their group. With emphasis on the latter, a healer can find themselves burning up oGCDs and going into GCD healing even to dungeon bosses. While rare, it can and does happen, and that's the point.

I find that with so many healers wanting more ways to contribute to the damage pool, then it is without question the best way to reward them. As such, each of them should have mechanics that take advantage of this.

[RopeDrink]

+1

Hate spending all of my time healing in WoW. A 50/50 hybrid with semi DPS rotation and on demand healing is WAYYYY more enjoyable.

I like it - but that's from the PoV of a Resto Shaman pushing 20's in M+, where damage is sporadic enough to keep you engaged and constantly on your toes for that potential one-shot out of nowhere, but not enough to stop you competing with DPS during downtime - with RSham having very respectable damage. And yes, you will totally be expected to do damage there, just like you are here -- but not to the same degree seeing as high M+ is infinitely more chaotic and reactive compared to FFXIV's preemptive dance routine, where I can literally heal a stack-marker with Cure III so on time that the health bars don't even move, with me halfway through my next Glare cast the very next second.

Meanwhile, I'm just out of a dungeon where a WHM secured 58% Overhealing by doing nothing but spamming MedicaII pre, mid, and post every single trash fight and boss throughout the entire ordeal -- not casting a single Holy -- and doing maybe 1-3 glares now and then, despite the fact that neither the tank nor the damage-dealers health bars were moving at all without all that dreck. People can claim they're so bored with it that they intentionally play less effective for want of Netflix, but there are definitely people out there who obviously believe they're just a health battery and nothing more. They're as good as delaying the run for everyone else by acting like half their spells don't actually exist.

I absolutely do want more damage -- or at least a more engaging version of what we already have at the very least. I thoroughly enjoy healing and have WHM'd since ARR, but I also understand why everyone is so utterly bored spamming Glare/Holy and little else. As fine as I am with this being the 'inverse' of what I do in WoW, and have no problem spewing Glare all day long, I'm still considering swapping to tank or damage as far as 'mains' go when Endwalker hits. Not that they don't have their own problems.

[BooPoo]

I like it - but that's from the PoV of a Resto Shaman pushing 20's in M+, where damage is sporadic enough to keep you engaged and constantly on your toes for that potential one-shot out of nowhere, but not enough to stop you competing with DPS during downtime - with RSham having very respectable damage. And yes, you will totally be expected to do damage there, just like you are here -- but not to the same degree seeing as high M+ is infinitely more chaotic and reactive compared to FFXIV's preemptive dance routine, where I can literally heal a stack-marker with Cure III so on time that the health bars don't even move, with me halfway through my next Glare cast the very next second.

Meanwhile, I'm just out of a dungeon where a WHM secured 58% Overhealing by doing nothing but spamming MedicaII pre, mid, and post every single trash fight and boss throughout the entire ordeal -- not casting a single Holy -- and doing maybe 1-3 glares now and then, despite the fact that neither the tank nor the damage-dealers health bars were moving at all without all that dreck. People can claim they're so bored with it that they intentionally play less effective for want of Netflix, but there are definitely people out there who obviously believe they're just a health battery and nothing more. They're as good as delaying the run for everyone else by acting like half their spells don't actually exist.

I absolutely do want more damage -- or at least a more engaging version of what we already have at the very least. I thoroughly enjoy healing and have WHM'd since ARR, but I also understand why everyone is so utterly bored spamming Glare/Holy and little else. As fine as I am with this being the 'inverse' of what I do in WoW, and have no problem spewing Glare all day long, I'm still considering swapping to tank or damage as far as 'mains' go when Endwalker hits. Not that they don't have their own problems.

Yeah I'm not okay with the current damage "rotation" healers get. But instead of shifting towards WoW, I much rather they just add more abilities and increase the rotation complexity a bit.

If they want us to "pure heal" in this game, then the next step is to remove every damage ability healers get. It just feel so underwhelming if you can barely function without a team. In FFXIV at least WHM can pump out a respectable portion of damage during solo/dungeon. The last time I played WoW, despite disc priest being the "DPS healer", they barely output 1/5 of DPS's damage. I can't even fathom how boring it is for healers outside of raids.

[BooPoo]

To be fair, you should still be doing a fair amount of damage as a healer, even in M+.

Heck, that's the very reason Holy Paladin has so often been meta.

But yes, having some healing-downtime depth would be much appreciated.

The last time I checked logs Holy Paladin isn't doing a fair amount of damage though. They were doing approximate <1/5 of DPS's damage? Please correct me if I'm wrong.