How to easily have healers dps engaged ( yet another thread)

[Renathras]

quote

Yeah, in SB there was more going on, but this still rings true today. A lot of players don't manage DoTs well. Contrast a 30 sec DoT with WAR's 30 sec buff from Storm's Eye. DoTs are a tiny icon on the enemy. Yeah, you can mess with the UI to make it larger and more visible, focus target and so on, but how often do CASUAL players do this? I didn't even use Focus Target until Memoria because I needed a way to reliably see what Solus was casting even while I was targeting different players for healing. On the other hand, WAR's buff is on their own healthbar. You can clearly see it in your buff list at the top of your screen and on your party bar. If we had to bet money, which do you doubt casual players drop more often and don't remember to reapply? I'd wager DoTs. And, the best part of WAR's buff is you can stack it twice (up to 60 sec), so if you fat finger it early, it isn't a DPS loss unless you're just using SE combo over and over.

And note that this is WORSE with DoTs that have different timers, like the old 15/18/etc second ones, since it's easy to not mentally track different length timers.

DoTs tend to widen the gap between casual and skilled players, not make it smaller. That was the point I was making there.

As to the sustainability argument:

Well, we're now on expansion #2 of this model, and we're not seeing (yet) some mass loss of healers. Indeed, we're more prone to lose healers by encounters being harder (e.g. the nasty bleeds) than from healing DPS rotations being boring. Moreover, this is really closer to expansion 3 or even 5 of this for WHM. WHM had one more DoT reliably used in SB (Aero 2 - a lot of people thought Aero 3 was only a DPS gain in AOE and so didn't use it in single targets) which is partly countered by them having Misery how (hit about 1/3rd as often). HW and ARR also did this, but one could argue that (a) the DoTs were used more often (shorter CDs), (b) more healing was GCD (so it broke up the "rotation" more with other button presses), and (c) there were other interactions (Cleric) that weren't true in SB and beyond. But the point is, we've had this for a while and it's been sustainable thus far. While past isn't always prologue, it doesn't seem to have been horribly detrimental for the game (in terms of numbers and content clearing/filling healer slots) to date, so it PROBABLY isn't doomed, per se.

EDIT (for space):

What it's likely to do is, over time, drive the people that enjoy DPSing on healers to other roles, which isn't a great thing, but that's not the same as causing a shortage in the role itself, since there are still a lot of people that are either fine with, or even attracted to, that playstyle of healers that aren't main DPSers and don't have DPS-like rotations. Though YET AGAIN I'll point out that this is why I DO argue for having different healers have different rotations, so that we have Jobs that appeal to these different playstyle. With 4 healing Jobs, there's no reason that we can't have different rotations between them.

I aggree with the sentiment that WoW probably came out in the right time and did the right things right.

Mhm. We agree on a lot of this. Though I am one who disagrees that healers as DPSers should be a thing in all cases (thematically it DOES fit in some cases, like Paladin, but much less so with, say, Holy Priest or arguably Druid), and I'd say BC is really when healers in WoW (except Disc...) came into their own with developed and functional niches. Disc flirted with being functional in Wrath as a tank healer substitute and damage curve smoother because of shields, and then in...I think it was Mists or Warlords where it shifted into being the RIFT Chloromancer healer that healed through dealing DPS after slapping/rotating that heal buff thing onto allies.

To be honest, I don't think that the problems of FF14s healers go that deep in.

I kinda do, and I think it includes what you mentioned - that the key Devs likely don't play Healers or don't play them much. I would argue it's catered to people that don't enjoy DPSing. Which makes sense to a point as, of the 19 Jobs in this game, 11 are explicitly for DPSing. It's reasonable - despite some people insisting otherwise (not here, but like on Reddit I've literally seen the phrase "If you don't like DPSing, don't play healer", which makes zero sense conceptually; that's like saying "If you don't like carrying a gun and shooting people, don't become a doctor")

The problem is that ENCOUNTER DESIGN assumes healers are DPSing, so the game has this conflicting, Spiderman pointing at other Spiderman-meme thing going where healers are expected to DPS per encounter design, but they aren't given tools to make that DPS interesting or even...distinct. ONE healer being DoT + Nuke is probably fine. FOUR doing so is kind of silly.

Then we have the second role conflict that we discussed in that other thread (I think) where you have GCD heals where oGCD heals look like, based on when you get them leveling and how powerful they are, that they're suppose to be "break glass in case of emergency" - like how Vanilla/BC WoW, Paladin's Lay on Hands ability had a 60 minute CD, and so did Druid in combat battle raise, I think Shaman Reincarnate, etc; and FFXIV has some ultimate abilities with 4 HOUR cooldowns. And yet, the FFXIV "emergency" tools are somehow supposed to be our first-use go-tos? The first button a SCH should hit to deal with party damage, for example, is Fey Blessing or Whispering Dawn, despite them being instant cast and on a moderate 1 minute CD.

Conceptually, this leads to the weird situation where the "emergency" abilities have become the "routine use" abilities, the spamable, routine use abilities have become the emergency ones, and new players are taught to use them exactly the opposite way of this. And because oGCDs so rule, it means all those GCDs you'd have spent on Cure 2 or Medica or Succor and etc are free now. So what do you fill them with?

...Glarespam.

It's that there are just backwards/opposed/competing elements all over the place - Are healers supposed to DPS to beat enrage or not? Are GCD heals or oGCD heals our emergency tools? Are healers for people that don't like to DPS or for people that do like to DPS but oddly won't play a Red icon Job? - that it leads to this bizarre design that WORKS, but conflicts and clashes all over the place.