Dear Square Enix, do something with GCD healing please.

[Semirhage]

I think this is more a matter of "Filler is boring" -> "Yes, inherently so; as such, let's have less filler (or more reason to cast non-filler), rather than just making it bloated (or attempting awkward gimmicks by which to reduce the cost of anything else)."

I could turn around and beat the exact same strawman about Cure spamming and how boring it is. We could make healing more interesting sure, but I'd rather just say "whatever, healing is boring filler anyway so who cares, active tank mitigation is boring too so I don't know what you're complaining about. It's a baseline requirement so it's meant to be boring.".

Let's not pretend as if healer downtime activity being boring is an Immutable Law Of Game Design Physics that only silly plebeians in the healer subforum fruitlessly rail against.

[Shurrikhan]

I could turn around and beat the exact same strawman about Cure spamming and how boring it is. We could make healing more interesting sure, but I'd rather just say "whatever, healing is boring filler anyway so who cares, active tank mitigation is boring too so I don't know what you're complaining about. It's a baseline requirement so it's meant to be boring.".

Let's not pretend as if healer downtime activity being boring is an Immutable Law Of Game Design Physics that only silly plebeians in the healer subforum fruitlessly rail against.

I never said healer downtime has to be dull. I merely pointed out that giving it n rigid steps, up from 1 -- sacrificing n-1 further actions to support it or giving every healer a greater button count than a modern, unconsolidated AST -- isn't going to fix that.

To make healer downtime interesting there needs to be significant and variable cost. That doesn't mean Cure spam. That doesn't mean Cure II spam. That does, however, mean stretches of synergetic offensive action and/or particular moments at which the value of offense is greater than typical and which we therefore want to make room for. DoTs significantly more powerful than our filler actions, for instance, provide that variable offensive cost for healing. But, of course, that variability only matters if preparing for those offensive GCDs actually takes a degree of skill.

Put simply, how interesting healer "downtime" is depends at least as much on the complexity of its "uptime".

(Simply giving healers the tank combo treatment, on the other hand, isn't likely to do a damn thing beyond button bloat.)

[Semirhage]

I never said healer downtime has to be dull. I merely pointed out that giving it n rigid steps, up from 1 -- sacrificing n-1 further actions to support it or giving every healer a greater button count than a modern, unconsolidated AST -- isn't going to fix that.

To make healer downtime interesting there needs to be significant and variable cost. That doesn't mean Cure spam. That doesn't mean Cure II spam. That does, however, mean stretches of synergetic offensive action and/or particular moments at which the value of offense is greater than typical and which we therefore want to make room for. DoTs significantly more powerful than our filler actions, for instance, provide that variable offensive cost for healing. But, of course, that variability only matters if preparing for those offensive GCDs actually takes a degree of skill.

Put simply, how interesting healer "downtime" is depends at least as much on the complexity of its "uptime".

(Simply giving healers the tank combo treatment, on the other hand, isn't likely to do a damn thing beyond button bloat.)

And what I'm saying is, every single time someone here even whispers that downtime should be more interesting, there's always a dismissive retort about "tank combo treatment" as if every person who ever suggested making downtime kits more interesting just wants combos or something.

Some people in the subforum do. I'm not one of them.

[Shurrikhan]

And what I'm saying is, every single time someone here even whispers that downtime should be more interesting, there's always a dismissive retort about "tank combo treatment" as if every person who ever suggested making downtime kits more interesting just wants combos or something.

Some people in the subforum do. I'm not one of them.

Thank you for the quick and frank clarification. I had not meant to accuse you of wanting tank combos or the like. Rather, in the context of others in this very thread asking for a rotation of skills, your interpretation of the quote in your post which I had responded to seemed odd to me so I offered my own as an alternative (though I perhaps read too far into its potential relation to the thread's original post).

To attempt a very quick summary of a string of posts that I've doubtless missed at least some of the complexity behind, it read to me like:

1. Kabooa: "Tank no-CD/no-constraint 123 combos are likewise filler."
2. Thorne: "Why mention this?"
3. Kabooa: "How we fix that 'filler' is just as important as that we recognize that it should be fixed. However, differences in how we define filler will change how we attempt to correct it. (If we see a tank filler as any different, fundamentally, from healer filler, then that suggests that merely throwing more buttons at the issue, rather than competing decisions, contexts, the like, would be a sufficient solution. It is not.)"
4. You: "You make it sound like filler is unfixable and we should therefore just deal with it."

At which point I suggested that the meaning was less likely that "We should just deal with filler being filler" than "Filler can't be made to feel less like filler simply by giving it more actions" (i.e., a clarification of viable solutions, not a suggestion that no solutions exist).

If I had misread that chain of reasoning, I apologize.