Worthless Live Letter

[Saefinn]

I mean, you know how the role plays. You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else. You're not a dps, you don't need an overly complex damage rotation that'll punish you for stopping to heal.

It's bad enough that healers are expected to heal as little as possible in order to pump out as much damage as possible.

It's the "go go go, rush rush rush" problem that WoWs M+ has that keeps a lot of tanks and healers away.

If you want to have a full interesting dps rotation, then maybe you should play a dps job.

This is a tired old argument that gets repeated a lot.

But I guess the first point I'll address is:
"You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else."

I started playing this game before the ARR release. I've mained SCH since it has come out. This means I got into SCH when it didn't mean being bored during the healing downtime. So I've not got into this with those expectations.

This is because SCH had a good balance between its healing toolkit and its DPS toolkit.

The problem is this perception that more DPS abilities = more DPS focus.

I'd probably argue that there's more of a DPS focus in 2021 in ShB than there was in 2013 in ARR, because what controls this is the encounter design and the healing tools we have to handle it. We're at a poisition where downtime is higher and our DPS is mostly stripped down.

But let's actually look at what SCH looked like when the job was released just from a downtime perspective:

Ruin, Ruin II, Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II, Shadowflare, Bane, Energy Drain, Cleric Stance (from cross class skills), Aero (from cross class skills) and Thunder (from cross class skills), Fey Glow, Fey Light

That's a tool kit consisting of 14 different abilities you'd use in your downtime (3 of them from Selene). Granted Aero and Thunder were less commonly used but still were technically still useful.

Despite this, Scholar healing worked great. It complemented WHM very well and all of us still new to the game at the time managed to all handle this 'complexity' just fine because we build our foundation as healers first and learned to work in our DPS. Heck, I can look at my Titan EX clear, which is on YouTube and feel embarrassed that I didn't cast a single DPS spell, because it was a progression group (and we lost a tank) and I wanted to focus more on my healing...so I did. But once I did get better I was able to weave more and more of my DPS abilities in and it was a rewarding feeling. So when people on these forums here me talk about how DPS raises the skill ceiling without raising the skill floor? This is the kind of thing I meant. How complex DPS was didn't matter because my focus was on getting good at healing first and I was able to get as far as EX clears (and heck Twintania too) on that philosophy, because my DPS contribution was not required and for the vast majority of content, it's still the case. And it was the content and my healing kit that controlled how much focus I had on DPS.

Now SCH's old DPS kit sounds like a lot, but it was something you could weave between heals, so it's not like you had an upfront burst and open with dropping all your many DoT's at once, but was a gradual affair.

But a DPS contributing kit of some 14 skills was doable on a healer without it being detrimental in this game. Now I am not saying we need that many, but draw on this example to show that actually, we've done just fine with more complex DPS rotations.

So I might not go with as many as 14 in 2021 because higher content is balanced around a larger healing kit but I'd certainly advocate for something a lot better than what we've got. Especially with the downtime. Sage if anything is a step in the right direction here, it's 7 abilities and by the looks of it, many of the AoE abilities remain useful in a single target situation and its DPS & healing mechanics looks like it'll require you to weave Cardia target changes and shields as part of it (given shields build up Adder's Sting)


Compare those 14 to what SCH has now:
Biolysis, Broil, Ruin II, Art of War, Energy Drain, Chain Stratagem. And note: unlike SGE's abilities, fewer of these abilities are shared before single target and AoE target, so you are more inclined to your Broil spams and Art of War spams.

Now, I realise there's also this "healers are healers not DPS" rhethoric, but the following needs to be taken into consideration:
- This game was designed to favour healers DPSing. It has been a part of its design since the beginning. It's hinted in lore, in quests, in instructions etc.
- Your performance is purely measured around your overall rDPS regardless of your role because the objective of the fight is to get your enemy's HP to 0 in the quickest time, which is then further enforced by DPS checks, enrage timers and the ability to skip certain mechanics based on good DPS. Healing if anything counts as a contributor to rDPS because a dead DPS isn't doing DPS. ​
- Final Fantasy games have often given healing jobs/characters more to do than just heal. They sometimes embrace making hybrids. So if anything it works for an FF MMO, just as it did in FFXI
- The game is scripted and therefore predictable, it means healers can optimise their healing to a level where they've got a lot of room to DPS and don't have to keep people topped off constantly just in case they need to take damage and it makes sense for healers to have something else to do.

I feel the best answer for healers in this game is to embrace the concept healers and DPSing and Sage is an example of them showing some return-to-form on that.

And I guess finally because I feel like ShB has proven it: a complex DPS rotation makes little to no difference on healers forgetting to heal. It's an age old complaint we've had since ARR and if anything it's got worse in recent times and a factor I suspect is part of it is how easy it is tunnel vision when you're spamming 1 or 2 buttons for extended periods of time. This I put down to there being an advantage to DPSing as a healer and to some degree, an expectation to DPS and that's not going to change because of some core designs of this game (nor should it).