Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Rolder50]

Important to note this only applies to Savage and Ultimate, as any content below that doesn't really have damage checks that require healer dps. So a dps rotation on healers in Normal mode content would make no difference as you aren't required to use it. There's no added responsibility there.

It's all about trying to get casual players who aren't very good at healer and don't really want to learn, clears in Savage and Ultimate. That's why the role is butchered.

At the same time, in content below Savage, you can straight up go AFK for a majority of the fight if you're not DPSing. Fun role.

[baklava151]

Just passing through to drop these



https://www.fflogs.com/reports/QbPfv...pe=damage-done

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV15Y411T74m

[Azuri]

Just passing through to drop these



https://www.fflogs.com/reports/QbPfv...pe=damage-done

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV15Y411T74m

Look, at least that AST was engaged, right?

[Payotz]

FF14 has no excuse not to have dps rotations for healers when damage in this game is so predictable that you can literally go ahead and plan out mitigation and healing cooldowns throughout an encounter.
There's no variations on damage unless you have people sit on an AoE, and even then they're just gonna be one shot anyway, so you're just a rez bot instead.

And before you say that "oh, it's impossible to have both a more than barebones dps rotation and more unpredicatable damage", let me introduce you to the game that everyone loves to shit on, World of Warcraft .

I'm going to tackle on both Disc Priest and Holy Priest as these are the only healers that I've used to heal content with, and by god, they're a LOT more fun than both White Mage or Scholar.
These two jobs have better DPS rotations and one of them even have better healing rotations than their FF14 counter parts.

Because of how the game works (Talents and Covenants), I'm going to discuss my Priest builds, so YMMV and priests may or may not build different from how I do it.

--

DPS Rotations

Holy Priest (WHM equivalent)'s dps rotation is not actually a 1111111111 2 11111111111. Crazy right? Let me explain:

Smite is glare, but with a twist. It lowers the cooldown of your big boi nuke Chastice, giving it basic synergy.
Chastise is your big boi nuke. It stuns your target for 6 seconds and deals 140% spell power to it. It deals thrice as damage as Smite does, and like I said, its cooldown gets lowered by spamming Smite.
Shadow Word: Pain is your combust/aero/bio clone. It is what it is. Every healer needs a 2, this is its 2.
Holy Fire is your second DoT. It hits harder than your usual filler DoT, but its duration is shorter, and you want to deffo keep this up.
Shadow Word: Death is an execute. Remember the old days where most classes have an execute? This is theirs.
Divine Star is literally you throwing an orb of light that heals any ally that it touches, while damage every ally it passes. It's not an insignificant damage dealt either. It's literally a Smite to any enemy it touches. It also bounces back, so it can heal and damage twice .
Holy Nova is your filler aoe spell. Your holy, your art of war and your gravity. Self explanatory really. It both heals your allies and damages enemies at the same time. It's an insta cast holy but without the stun essentially.

So your single target dps rotation is literally:

- Apply Holy Fire and keep it up
- Chastise on cool down
- Apply Shadow Word: Pain and keep it up
- Smite (until Chastise is up)
- Shadow Word: Death when the target is below 25%.

And that's Holy's single DPS rotation. Now let's look at Disc Priest's:

So Disc shares a lot of skills with holy because they're specs under a single class. It has some changed behavior across the specs too. Think of it like old SMN and SCH.

- Smite is your usual glare. Yada yada yada.
- Shadow Word : Pain is your usual DoT but with a twist. It has a 50% chance of proccing a perk called Power of the Dark Side which empowers the next spell.
- Penace is probably the most versatile tool you have on a Disc Priest. It can be channeled to deal damage to a single enemy OR to heal a party member instead. It's also a useful movement tool because you can move while it's being cast.
- Solace is a single target nuke that you use on cooldown to regain mana. Self explanatory really.
- Mind Blast is your next nuke that deals twice as much damage as your smite, and reduces the damage of your the enemy you hit by a certain amount.
- Mind Sear is your filler AoE. You sit still and channel into a party member or an enemy and it will deal damage to nearby enemies.
- Divine Star is literally you throwing an orb of light that heals any ally that it touches, while damage every ally it passes. It's not an insignificant damage dealt either. It's literally a Smite to any enemy it touches. It also bounces back, so it can heal and damage twice .
- Shadow Fiend is literally Living Shadow. You summon a fiend that damages the enemy for you for X amounts of seconds.
- Shadow Word: Death is an execute. Remember the old days where most classes have an execute? This is theirs.

And Disc Priest's DPS rotation is actually tied to its healing, as a portion of Disc Priest's damage is converted to healing through Atonement. I'll explain this later.
But for now, the filler disc priest rotation is:

- Keep Shadow Word: Pain up
- Solace off cool down to regenerate mana.
- Mind blast off cooldown
- Penace off cooldown to either heal the tank or deal damage
- Smite
- Shadow Word: Death if the target is in execute range

Now I don't know about you, but that's now infinitely a lot more interesting than FF14's current dps rotation, and I haven't even talked about the Covenant abilities, like Boon of the Ascended or Mindgames or even talent specific choices like Schism or Halo, but let's go to the healing rotation part of the healers, specifically Disc Priest.

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Healing Rotations

Holy Priest is a dead simple healing rotation. You dump cooldowns, and everytime you use your gcd heals, the cooldown for your healing cooldowns decrease.
It's very standard, not unlike WHMs, but with little bits of synergy here and there.

Disc Priest is where the fun is. You've heard how Sage is supposed to be "Disc Priest" in FF14? No lol. Sage isn't even close to Disc Priest at all.

Disc Priest healing revolves around this little buff called Atonement, and Atonement scales off your Mastery stat. So if you want to increase your healing through Atonement, you better have more Mastery. For reference, right now on my Disc Priest, roughly 25% of my damage gets converted to Atonement healing.

Now Disc Priest has a number of different ways to apply Atonement You can either apply with the following:

1. Shadow Word: Mend which is essentially you're Cure 1/ Cure 2. It's a bog standard direct heal that has a cast time. It applies Atonement with its full duration.
2. Power Word: Shield which is essentially old Nocturnal(RIP I miss you :c ) Astro's aspected benefic. Insta cast, applies a shield but no heals. Just a shield. It applies Atonement with its full duration.
3. Power Word: Radiance which is essentially you're Succor, except it only has two charges, on a 20 second cooldown per each charge, and only applies Atonment for 60% of its normal duration.

Now that that's out of the way. How do we heal as Disc?
Simple. We apply Atonement to everyone, and burst the living shit out of anything that moves.

Now because of the nature of Disc Priest healing, you'd want to save your big damage cooldowns like Shadowfiend or, Boon of the Ascended, or Divine Star, or even Solace if you don't have anything, to when you're gonna have to get everyone back up.
Now you can spam shadowmend as an emergency, and that's fine. I do it at times too, but more often than not, the fact that 25% of your dps is your healing is what makes Disc the most fun healer. Your dps synergises with your healing.

Now this is just a Barebones overview of the two healing classes I play in WoW. There's all sorts of different healers that are distinct from one another and I can't in good fatih, try to explain all those other healers without playing them so, you'll be stuck with these two for now.

----

Content

Now. You have a barebones idea of the dps and healing toolkit of two healers in WoW. Now let's talk about content. Let's talk about Mythic +.

Mythic + Dungeons have very unpredictable damage due to the nature of it.
There are specific add mechanics that will chunk your tank all of a sudden if the tank makes mistake, like an add empowering another add that will turn their auto attacks into tankbusters that leave behind a nasty bleed, to literally adds silencing your school of spells, so you can only cast either Holy spells (Smite, Power Word Shield) or Shadow spells (Shadowmend, Mind Sear). The dungeons have so much unpredictable mechanics and damage sources compared to FF14 dungeons or even content as a whole that fitting all of them in this forum post isn't viable.

So let's just talk about the affixes:

These affixes change the dungeon in such a way that it demands more healing in various parts of the dungeons depending on the week.
It can either make the trash significantly stronger or the bosses, and thus the raid wides, a lot stronger.
It can make it so that killing the adds will explode, leaving a puddle where any enemy that sits in it will be healed slowly back to full hp.
It can make it so that killing the adds will explode, leaving a dot that stacks on your entire party.

You know the drill. These affixes also become available and hits harder and harder the higher you're "Key" level is. So your "+2 key" will be significantly easier than your "+9 key" as well, giving you harder variable heal checks the more you invest in the content.
Now is this content perfect? No lol. It has its problems, but it's probably the only content in any MMO I've had fun healing in.

And guess what, even in higher keys, I still engage in my DPS rotation. Even with unpredictable, heavy hitting damage I still DPS.

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Conclusion:

So Yoshi-P and every healer job designer has NO EXCUSE on why they're refusing to add a little bit of depth to the healer rotation as a whole when another game that demands more healing in its content has a more complex dps rotation.

I'm not asking for healers to have a DPS' rotation. I'm asking for an engaging filler, just like Holy Priest and Disc Priest, in a game where you're going to spending more time dpsing than healing.

WoW proves that having more "complex" rotations is possible and WILL work, despite their more Heals per second oriented community, despite their content having damage spikes, despite healer damage not mattering as a whole.

Accessibility is not an excuse for reducing the fun in a video game. You can still have baby healers do the old 111111 2 11111 rotation as their learning and in casual content, that's fine.

Giving healers the possibility of pressing more buttons will not make skill floor higher, it will make the skill ceiling higher, and make the game more fun.

[ForteNightshade]

Important to note this only applies to Savage and Ultimate, as any content below that doesn't really have damage checks that require healer dps. So a dps rotation on healers in Normal mode content would make no difference as you aren't required to use it. There's no added responsibility there.

It's all about trying to get casual players who aren't very good at healer and don't really want to learn, clears in Savage and Ultimate. That's why the role is butchered.

Sadly, I think it goes beyond even that and the devs actively want a role where casual players can essentially get away with very little contribution. Hence the constant mention of healer DPS being optional outside of week 1 prog and Ultimate. They want better players to carry the load. Hell, Yoshida has come right out and admitted that when nobody was queuing for Castrum in Bozja. And later added they want to explore more large scale content like that because it allows better players to "help" less experienced ones.

Their concern seems to be that if they were to give healers even tank rotations, it'd immediately become the expected norm especially at the Savage level. Which it would. The fact they view that as a bad thing speaks volumes.

[Aarchie]

Just passing through to drop these



https://www.fflogs.com/reports/QbPfv...pe=damage-done

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV15Y411T74m

Oh hey! They are clearing the new ultimate with only one healer even before the a new patch drops?

So finally the healer found engaging content: solo healing ultimate.

Now I get what you meant Yoshi P. Visionary.

[Amenara]

Oh hey! They are clearing the new ultimate with only one healer even before the a new patch drops?

So finally the healer found engaging content: solo healing ultimate.

Now I get what you meant Yoshi P. Visionary.

And their most used spell was still Fall Malefic...

[ZedxKayn]

Just passing through to drop these



https://www.fflogs.com/reports/QbPfv...pe=damage-done

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV15Y411T74m

Hahaha oh wow.

[Colt47]

Important to note this only applies to Savage and Ultimate, as any content below that doesn't really have damage checks that require healer dps. So a dps rotation on healers in Normal mode content would make no difference as you aren't required to use it. There's no added responsibility there.

It's all about trying to get casual players who aren't very good at healer and don't really want to learn, clears in Savage and Ultimate. That's why the role is butchered.

I don't really want the game to be all about who does the most damage wins the fight and the dev team doesn't want that reality either. Savage is not supposed to be the root purpose of a job, it is an extension of the base game that is designed to be as hard to beat as the game designers are willing to go, since it is very easy to make unbeatable content, but incredibly difficult to make content that is tight on "correctness" in playing a set of 8 jobs without blasting the entire group into oblivion.

[Nizzi]

I don't really want the game to be all about who does the most damage wins the fight and the dev team doesn't want that reality either. Savage is not supposed to be the root purpose of a job, it is an extension of the base game that is designed to be as hard to beat as the game designers are willing to go, since it is very easy to make unbeatable content, but incredibly difficult to make content that is tight on "correctness" in playing a set of 8 jobs without blasting the entire group into oblivion.

Jobs are literally designed and balanced around Savage and Ultimate, what are you talking about?