General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[ForsakenRoe]

accusing Ren of her favorite insult of the week

there is no insult in that post targeted at you, unless you count 'most people are idiots' as directed at you. people might be more sympathetic to your argument if you stopped playing the victim

I'm pointing out that consensus is likely not what you think it is.

the quote 'I recognize the council has made a decision, but given it is a stupid-ass decision, I have elected to ignore it' comes to mind.

no one is singing the praises of Glare and nothing else

then why do you keep campaigning for WHM to stay in the position of 'cast 150 glares in a raid encounter'? yes, 'cast glare and nothing else' taken in it's most literal sense is 'not true' because you occasionally have to press dia, and misery once per minute, and assize on CD. BUT, we all know when people say 'press glare and nothing else' it's not meant to be literal, it is a description of how it feels to play the class. The only part we remember is the Glare, because 80% of the fight is the Glare.

In the end, because you and those like you won't compromise, you get nothing.

I already said I'll let Sage be the 'idiot proof' healer with the current '150 Dosis in one fight' design. The reason I want the old healers to have complexity added back is because they USED to have complexity, back in HW and SB. New healer for Nu-Design, old healers get the old design. But there shouldnt NEED to be a compromise here, asking to have one healer left behind just doesn't make sense to a lot of us, including me. The whole 'gotta keep it simple for the newbobs' doesn't wash, because as i've said several times, there's plenty of skill expression on other classes. Again, I can clear new EX as DRG or RPR or heck MNK, because I get how the basic rotation works. But if i wanted that 99 as MNK i'd have to use some non-intuitive opener, get hella lucky in chakra procs
and crits, lock my framerate to some weird non-standard number (how do people discover this stuff), but i dont want to do any of that because i dont play monk that much, and dont care to optimise it to that level.

WHM vs WAR

1-2-path/eye means that you have to consider whether to refresh eye not 'now' but 'in 3 GCDs' when you're looking at your heavy swing. say you have 10 sec left on your gauge, and the boss leaves in 10 sec. your next step is heavy swing, what do you do? well, you could go 1-2-path instead of eye, then fill that last GCD with a fell cleave to dump, for example. Alternatively, if the boss jumps away for less than 20 seconds, you could instead choose to eye, so you have the buff on for when you refresh it AFTER the boss comes back. the 1-2 might seem like busywork on the surface, but it adds a layer of complexity that some people might not notice at first. not that i'm saying 'yeh lets add 123 combos to glaredosisbroilmalefic' cos that is a more 'physical' thing. Fellcleave is like misery in that it's your big hit that your gauge builds to, but you also have Infuriate to instantly give you a 'Misery', you can pool up to 2 so you have leeway on WHEN to dump them, Infuriate later allows you to get 'Misery but harder', Enhanced Infuriate trait means when you 'Misery', you get 'instantly gives one Misery' back sooner. Finally, IR gives you '3 Misery Stacks' and 'Super Ultra Misery (now with gapclosing effect)', and so obviously you put these inside raidbuff window, but you cant just choose to dump Rend whenever you like, because SE loves to look at 2min windows and say 'okay lets put every mechanic here', LimitCut in P2S, Act 2 in P4S, now we have the RNG of whether it's Dog or Snake first on the doorboss dictating if the 2min window falls inside the 'lmao go spread out' part of Manifold Flames or not in P8S.

To make WAR 'comparable to WHM' as you say, we'd have to rework it a bit. Path and Eye both no longer need to be preceded by HeavySwing - Maim, they are now standalone GCDs. Neither give gauge, and the only way to get FellCleave is by infuriating, once per minute. FC no longer reduces INF's cooldown. IR does not give Primal Rend, nor 3 stacks of Fellcleave, it instead lets you press Storm's Path 20% faster. Upheaval is deleted. Orogeny now does 400 potency AOE with no damage falloff, but is a 45sec CD. Your rotation is now Eye, IR, Infuriate, Path, Path, FC, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Eye refresh here probably, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Path, Pa

Does this sound fun to anyone?

Lastly, other people might say it's 'fine' but I'm one of those boomers who misses 4.1 WAR, when you had to do on-the-fly maths to balance how much gauge you had going into raidbuffs, dumping with onslaught or fellcleave as needed to go in with 100/100 without overcapping. I also miss 'DA spam' DRK but that's neither here nor there, since that class was a 'sustained damage' type and SE has now decided that everything has to burst at 2min or get left behind.

Lilies are easy to use, but you still have to avoid overcap

I'm not 100% convinced we need to avoid overcap, as far as I see it, I just need to make sure you have a Misery ready for raidbuffs. If you only need to heal twice in the 2 mins before raidbuffs come back, then it's completely fine to overcap because you use one more lily outside of raidbuffs and have Misery ready. The only benefit to 'make sure you don't overcap' is you save 400 MP per extra lily you use i guess, but at the cost of 'well now i cant adapt to someone standing in the fire unexpectedly'. Since I PF stuff, I can't rely on people playing 100% effectively (myself included), so I tend to only use the lilies when I KNOW I need to use them to get the lily prepped, and hold them the rest of the time in case something goes bad. You know, so I can 'heal' like a 'healer', instead of using the whole gauge as 'this is for damage'?

calling back to WAR though, would be nice if blood lily could stack to 2 like Infuriate so we had less risk of overcap, but i guess that'd lead to some degen play where people would try and get 2 Misery's prepped for each raidbuff instead of just 1, meaning all 6 lilies are accounted for 'damage-wise' and zero are spare for doing the actual job of healing. The Energy Drain effect again as it were

as well as using Presence of Mind at the right time

so when it comes off CD 95% of the time, and 'delayed along with everyone else's buffs if the fight design requires a delayed raidbuff window' in the other 5%. Since every job has to do that same delay, it's not exactly a 'thing that WHM has to consider', like we don't count Tactician on MCH as a 'utility MCH has' because DNC and BRD have equivalents.

and checking your Dia timer so you can refresh it at the right time without overcapping it or overwriting it too soon.

so once per 30 seconds, unless you know the boss will die within the next 15 seconds, at which point you might as well just Glare instead. Pinnacle of interactivity

You don't have to do any of this to properly play WHM, but it's still fun to manage.

no, you dont have to do any of this to play WHM, but you do to properly play it, because proper play of a class is to get as close to it's theoretical maximum damage output as possible. Or so say the barsebrains, i just hit boss and get loot. Should note, I don't properly play WHM either, but I don't like the concept of 'barse runs'. I look at it as like racing Usain Bolt in a 100m. Sure, after X number of runs, maybe he trips over his shoelaces and I beat him. Does that make me 'faster than Usain Bolt' if that's the only run that gets shown on TV to the world? Perhaps like most of my analogies, it doesn't make sense to others, or it is flawed in some way. But like barsing, I also just dont care. Whatever I get in the weekly reclears, that's my barse. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but I feel that's a more 'true' representation than a group that does the fight over and over and over and only uploads the runs where they got 99s

Heavy Swing - Maim - Storm's Path is Glare with extra busywork that adds nothing to the experience.

as above, what one person considers 'extra busywork', others might see as 'subtle nuance with room for skill expression'. I'll tell you what IS busywork though: Pressing Glare 150 times in a fight, interspersed with a DOT that totals up to 'about 2 Glares of damage lmao'

Or, put another way, when was the last time you seriously messed up the 1-2 in your 1-2-3 rotation? I can count the instances of doing that on probably one hand.

So we should remove all instances of 1-2? IE from the DPS too? I'm sure NIN will enjoy pressing Aeolian Edge 12 times in a row, only to then press Armor Crush once every 30s to refresh their Huton. Or DRG pressing Heaven's Thrust 12 times, interspersed with once-per-30s Chaos Thrust to refresh the dot. Wait, I'm getting this weird sense of deja vu...

I don't want Fluid Aura (which at this point is thematically pointless for WHM AND would just be a second Assize taking up an additional hotbar space for no good reason) OR Aero 3.

In order:
-'thematically pointless' is addressed by changing it's VFX and name at 72 along with the rest of the stuff that turns into lightshows (Literally just reuse the VFX for Lost Banish, job done)

-you say 'second assize' like we didnt just get Aquaveil/Exaltation/Protraction at 86, which I have to remind myself to use because they're pretty surplus to requirements. Admittedly, this tier Aquaveil gets a bit more use because of bleed TBs and how they snapshot, but I'm not expecting SE to keep that design because 'tier hits too hard, healers quit en masse'. In fact, since it's just busywork to press a 'second assize', would that mean you'd get rid of 'first assize' if you could? we only press it for damage anyway, so they could remove the damage potency from it and bump glare by 10 potency to compensate, leaving assize as a healing only tool. god that sounds awful why did i even think of this, its cursed

-what's wrong with aero 3? the VFX dont match the current theme of WHM? (lost banish 3 is an aoe, just saying), the fact it's an extra dot to manage? it taking extra hotbar space? (as it stands, WHM is 4 buttons behind compared to some other classes, but those classes IMO need a prune, like SAM, why tf is shoha and shoha2 seperate? why do we need ikishoten to give 50 when we can just have guren and senei give 25 and get the same effect?) complaining about 'extra dot' is literally begging for the 'skill issue' response, but instead we could retool the way the ability works, since SE apparently wants to remove dots from classes (except PLD and GNB who need to keep 2 for reasons). Knowing SE though, their 'retool' would be 'its Misery, but at a lower level and does less damage lmao'. As for hotbar space, well there's a few things that could be done to alleviate hotbar issues anyway, like UPGRADE CURE 1 INTO CURE 2, AND UPGRADE MEDICA 1 INTO MEDICA 2 . wow there's the 2 buttons we'd need for fluid aura/water/banish, and for aero 3's glorious return, hotbar problem solved.

Though I wouldn't mind a thundercloud-like proc for Dia, the problem is healers don't work well with proc based effects when things get busy, and as someone said earlier, that only sounds fun until people seeing wild swings in their parses based on weather they got good or bad RNG on the procs.

we already have wild swings in barses based on any number of things. someone gets hit by a mechanic? barse affected because we have to potentially divert resources to keeping them alive. someone DIES? barse ruined cos we drop a GCD to res them (and the killtime gets scuffed). didnt crit misery inside raidbuffs? barse ruined because the only thing that seems to matter in 2022 barsing is 'did your raidbuff window pop off'. did you get bad luck on AST cards while trying to barse on AST? barse ruined, hope you enjoy those Ladys, i sure love overheal!

designing around 'what is good for barsing' is the quickest path to a bland and sterile game. 'if everyone's able to get a good barse, noone will have a good barse' - syndrome from incredible movie probably idk i watched it like years ago

the Devs are likely to just continue what they're doing since the majority of the community seems to like easier healers and the people that don't won't actually compromise on the point.

diluting the 'WHM player count in raids' down to 'they play it because they like easier healers' is kinda reductive, there's plenty of reasons people play certain classes over others. I play Sage over SCH because I like the way Panhaima works, and how Kerachole sticks to allies instead of being a ground AOE. I don't care if it's 200 dps behind SCH because a clear's a clear in my book. I am a WHM main because I don't like pressing all the stuff AST has to in it's burst window. Lots of people moved off of AST this tier and onto WHM, because of how much work you have to put into AST to get the same results as a WHM who does a fraction of the effort, which frees up brainspace to focus on the mechanics more. This doesn't mean they're suddenly WHM mains, or that they now hate AST, or they 'prefer easier healers', they made a conscious decision for the sake of their group, to play one class for an advantage it has over another. Heck, I did it last tier even, I'd mainly play AST in P3S despite being a WHM main, because I ain't dealing with that Life's Agonies crap with cure3 spam when I can just throw out a macrocosmos as AST and call it a day. That didn't suddenly mean 'oh Sam's an AST main now'

that also doesn't include the fact that 'easier' vs 'harder' is subjective. idk maybe someone who's been a diehard AST main for so long might find WHM 'clunky' because they're used to being able to heal with OGCDs, and being locked to the 2.5 timer to heal might catch them out a bit at first. only at the literal first though, because i assume they'd realise after that first mistake 'oh right, WHM's stuck in 2010 class design mode' and adjust. but anyway, looking at forbidden stats on forbidden website says that more people have cleared P5S as GNB than as WAR. is GNB the 'easier class' because of this? some would say yes, some would say no. I'd say it doesn't matter, and those people play GNB for whatever reason they hold, more damage, aesthetic, preference in how the mitigation works, yadda yadda.

people won't compromise on the point of 'community prefers easier healers' because A: correlation =/= causation, you can't just look at data saying 'WHM most played' and draw a definite conclusion, and B: the data we DO have is a very small subset of said community. Not everyone raids, and of those, not everyone has the log uploaded. Yeh, for the most part it's better to design the class's 'theoretical maximum performance' around those who are able to push that max performance, but it's also a good idea to design the 'just picked up the job rock, what does this button do' experience to be quite intuitive and easy to understand. WHM has the latter down pretty well, due to being a pure healer. HP goes down, press cure 2, HP bar go up. the issue is when you hit the limit of skill expression on the job, which is kinda fast. there's no more growth to be done. We're like those watermelons people grow in jars to make them square shaped and such. Keep growing us in a jar if you really have to, but can we at least make it a funny shaped jar so we're not all square? can we have some of us be like, cone shaped watermelons? or a cylinder shaped watermelon? or if funny shapes are out, can we have a bigger jar, so the people who want to 'grow' can have more room to, and the people who dont feel inclined to grow for whatever reason they hold can stay as a tiny melon that doesnt fill the whole jar that's fine too

Is his view any better though?

i think this just proves the real point, the whole topic is exceptionally polarizing in both directions, and there is no real middle ground to be had here. either you are for, or against 'more complexity in healer's dps rotations', you're either for, or against 'more healing required in encounters'. his 'raid will be impossible' is pretty funny though because he seems to be under the impression that people are asking for like 20 button rotations like actual DPS (at least how he sounds on first watching, to my ear). Like if we had Ren's 123 before Glare, that doesn't really change the fact I'm looking for an opportunity to press a not-healing GCD, and filling it with a damaging GCD. The same priority will apply in either case of 'is the party going to die if I blow this GCD on damage?' and if they are going to live, I'm going to Glare. or 'Glare - Glara - Glarega' as the case might be in the 123 world. 'mitigate for the first time properly' isnt really the point he thinks it is either, because i've seen some people who didnt mitigate in Asphodelos either. ive seen people not mitigate here in Abyssos, despite our 150Glare rotation. If a Sage player cant work out how to mitigate now, when we have 1 nuke, 1 dot, and phlegma, that's one thing. But if enough people were to think they're hotshots, go into raid as a Sage, get slapped and complain 'this too hard' cos they dont mitigate, should SE capitulate to them because they're 'the community consensus'? is it as simple as 'majority rule' when it comes to changes in class design?

this is part of the reason 'influencers' are a terrible idea, they dont influence the company, they just influence their viewerbase, and oftentimes, that means that an influencer's opinions are just echoed by the base. Worse, the fact the influencer IS an influencer convinces some people that they must be 'right', and that galvanises their opinions and makes them double down on it. People tend to latch onto the first opinion they form and it takes a lot of effort to change it, look how long it took for Mr Happy to shift the reputation of his guides being crap because they outright skipped over mechanics (because it was HW and his groups DPS was good enough to force phase pushes). bringing up the name MTQ STILL gets an occasional 'clear the fight before making a guide for it KEKW' because of that one time in Deltascape. If the influencers who went to the media tours were able to affect any real change on the direction of the design, this whole issue wouldnt even exist, because the amount of times Yoshi-P's been hit by the 'healers have nothing to heal, and the DPS rotation isn't very fun after a while, any changes?' would be enough for most people to take a hint that maybe, just maybe, there's nothing to heal and the DPS rotation isnt very fun after a while. But not SE, apparently.

Apparently the solution was under our noses all along, 'go play ultimate'. well i haven't done the newest one, but i can't imagine it's going to suddenly be some insane jump up from on-content TEA level of healing needed (because we'd run out of MP), and looking back at my TEA runs, it looks like i have (on this one im looking at) around 75 total healing GCDs (including the esunas for throttle), and 154 Glares. so not including any other damage GCD, just Glare, we're already at 66ish% 'fight is this full of DPS spell'. and the best/worst/ironic part of this? this was my 'best run', where I got a 40. imagine how many medica's were shaved out, how many better Asylum's to cover it, how many more GLARES better players than me are able to fit in instead of all my panic overhealing? 'Go play ultimate' is probably the real 'reason' a lot of healers quit, not the damage, not the 1 button spam, but the outright dismissal of any concerns about the design direction with 'lmao try harder stuff then'. Many of the people who have these complaints about the design DO do that harder stuff, what do they do now, go to Yoshi-P at fanfest and say 'yeh so you said do ultimate. So i did, and i'm still pressing Glare over and over. what gives?' is SE going to add an even harder difficulty above Ultimate, to really shut up those people who dare question the genius design of '111111111111112111111111111112'? or would it not be the simpler solution (that occam's razor thing that was mentioned before) to just make the current stuff more engaging by adding a couple more buttons?

[Icecylee]

ya'll have really got to stop responding to Ren's post with "okay but what if we suddenly changed tank or dps rotations to be just like healers, huh?? wouldn't that just suck and be awful and wouldn't you hate it???" because his post history should make it obvious his answer is always going to be a resounding "No, I'd love it!" and just forces that particular sticking point to be repeated over and over and not really do anything other than annoy everyone involved.

What we should instead be pointing out is that, yeah, there are some jobs with light rotations that are *theoretically* very similar to WHM As Is if we're only really looking at number of actions... the frequency and variety of the button presses makes a hell of a lot of difference to most people. This is why people get so stuck on bitching about the Glare spam. It's why people keep going "no, WAR really isn't like WHM at all!" There's a very different tactile feel to doing long stretches of hitting one button primarily while having a couple others that you occasionally toss on with moderate timers between them, and having a small amount of buttons that you're frequently cycling between. There's also more interplay between WARs buttons compared to WHMs, which does just a tiny bit more to keep your brain engaged, too.

[flowerfairy]

Currently, those theorycrafts do work into the 2 minute burst window. Now, I would want to see that changed, but I don't really know how I'd approach it on a macro level other than probably going back to the 1, 2, 3, 6 burst window system. So I don't really want to try and address that in my theorycrafting right now, but I would certainly see some of the tools drift a little in cooldowns to compliment whatever direction we could go away from the 2 minutes.

Gotcha, I can definitely see it in 2 minute buffs. I'd like to see your SCH ideas too, the unique fairy abilities was a nice way to clean up button bloat and I think it was libra? was an interesting take on Aetherflow.

Lilies are easy to use, but you still have to avoid overcap and pay attention to the amount you have left and how much Blood Lily you've accumulated so you can fit Miseries into raid buffs (and also not overcap the Blood Lily), as well as using Presence of Mind at the right time and checking your Dia timer so you can refresh it at the right time without overcapping it or overwriting it too soon (something Storm's Eye is actually more flexible with since you can stack it to 60 sec). You don't have to do any of this to properly play WHM, but it's still fun to manage.

Accumulating Beast gauge is just far more engaging than pressing 1-2 lily spells before raid buffs come up. You used PoM in my Infuriate sentence which is kinda funny. Storm's Eye's flexibility actually adds even more thoughtful gameplay since you can arrive at situations like choosing to either refresh the buff to get to 100 meter or use a Fell Cleave immediately to fit in another Storm's Path, and you'll also have to keep an eye one when the even minute buffs are coming back so you get the most Fell Cleaves out of it. Maim grants 10 Beast gauge which, once again, makes you think more in either eating the overcap or pressing Fell Cleave now to accumulate more for later. You see it as busywork, I see it as space for optimization. Something Glarespam sorely lacks.

Now, with Fluid Aura/Aero III, of course I'd prefer proper reworks over that but it's still at least something to look at to keep your eyes slowly drooping down after pressing 1111111. The random proc & parse thing really isn't a problem if BLM isn't complaining about it, in general I'd like Aero III as something that extends the DoT and spreads it to surrounding enemies instead of being its own DoT, that way you can choose to cast it if the DoT is about to fall off for an extra tinge of optimization, and the random procs allows for more instant-cast movement.

[flowerfairy]

What we should instead be pointing out is that, yeah, there are some jobs with light rotations that are *theoretically* very similar to WHM As Is if we're only really looking at number of actions... the frequency and variety of the button presses makes a hell of a lot of difference to most people. This is why people get so stuck on bitching about the Glare spam. It's why people keep going "no, WAR really isn't like WHM at all!" There's a very different tactile feel to doing long stretches of hitting one button primarily while having a couple others that you occasionally toss on with moderate timers between them, and having a small amount of buttons that you're frequently cycling between. There's also more interplay between WARs buttons compared to WHMs, which does just a tiny bit more to keep your brain engaged, too.

Pretty much what I wanted to say in that post. Sorry if I'm just adding more fuel to the fire that is "Renathras Vs. The World" but I can't think of any other way to explain it.

[T-Owl]

there is no insult in that post targeted at you, unless you count 'most people are idiots' as directed at you. people might be more sympathetic to your argument if you stopped playing the victim

If I could swoop in, the same person just called me a butt in another post and I think we are all mature enough to know that what he meant was "asshole", but trying to be clever and go below moderation with that one.

the quote 'I recognize the council has made a decision, but given it is a stupid-ass decision, I have elected to ignore it' comes to mind.

The issue is also that most of these discussions are about people on all level of play who get bored with the low healing requirements and stale dps gameplay in this game, so improvements on the dps toolkit would be specifically aimed towards people who are already comfortable with playing with high dps uptime and feel bored by it, nobody else would be much affected by it.

Lastly, other people might say it's 'fine' but I'm one of those boomers who misses 4.1 WAR, when you had to do on-the-fly maths to balance how much gauge you had going into raidbuffs, dumping with onslaught or fellcleave as needed to go in with 100/100 without overcapping. I also miss 'DA spam' DRK but that's neither here nor there, since that class was a 'sustained damage' type and SE has now decided that everything has to burst at 2min or get left behind.

Damn, old DRK was such a blast. Miss Dark Arts spam too, though what I really miss the most really is the old blood weapon, that was more comparable to PLDs fight or flight or GNBs No Mercy, just with a speed buff instead, which in my opinion gave DRK a firm identity as the fast tank.

as above, what one person considers 'extra busywork', others might see as 'subtle nuance with room for skill expression'. I'll tell you what IS busywork though: Pressing Glare 150 times in a fight, interspersed with a DOT that totals up to 'about 2 Glares of damage lmao'

I'd like to add that even a 1-2-3 rotation with maybe an interchangeable 3 is already much more engaging than just spamming 1. Is anyone here denying that most melee classes are much more fun at around 26 when they get their full 3 part combo as compared to level 1 when they just press one button? I at least remember starting the game and experiencing how classes got more fun with more buttons to press over time.

In order:
-'thematically pointless' is addressed by changing it's VFX and name at 72 along with the rest of the stuff that turns into lightshows (Literally just reuse the VFX for Lost Banish, job done)

-you say 'second assize' like we didnt just get Aquaveil/Exaltation/Protraction at 86, which I have to remind myself to use because they're pretty surplus to requirements. Admittedly, this tier Aquaveil gets a bit more use because of bleed TBs and how they snapshot, but I'm not expecting SE to keep that design because 'tier hits too hard, healers quit en masse'. In fact, since it's just busywork to press a 'second assize', would that mean you'd get rid of 'first assize' if you could? we only press it for damage anyway, so they could remove the damage potency from it and bump glare by 10 potency to compensate, leaving assize as a healing only tool. god that sounds awful why did i even think of this, its cursed

-what's wrong with aero 3? the VFX dont match the current theme of WHM? (lost banish 3 is an aoe, just saying), the fact it's an extra dot to manage? it taking extra hotbar space? (as it stands, WHM is 4 buttons behind compared to some other classes, but those classes IMO need a prune, like SAM, why tf is shoha and shoha2 seperate? why do we need ikishoten to give 50 when we can just have guren and senei give 25 and get the same effect?) complaining about 'extra dot' is literally begging for the 'skill issue' response, but instead we could retool the way the ability works, since SE apparently wants to remove dots from classes (except PLD and GNB who need to keep 2 for reasons). Knowing SE though, their 'retool' would be 'its Misery, but at a lower level and does less damage lmao'. As for hotbar space, well there's a few things that could be done to alleviate hotbar issues anyway, like UPGRADE CURE 1 INTO CURE 2, AND UPGRADE MEDICA 1 INTO MEDICA 2 . wow there's the 2 buttons we'd need for fluid aura/water/banish, and for aero 3's glorious return, hotbar problem solved.

There is also the matter of fact that many people enjoyed the themes of White Mage being the mirror to Black Mage and using the other half of the elemental wheel in their toolkit. White Mage was originally a good mix of the traditional more priestly version of White Mage and the FF7 more nature-focussed interpretation of the job with Aerith. I'd love a version of White Mage who uses the elements while having the holy element utilized as more this big hitting spectacular move, like it was with the original White Mage, when Holy was this massive extremely hart hitting AOE Attack. I'd like elemental spells to be the White Mages generic tools while things like Glare and Dia are more akin to despair or xenoglossy, being hart hitting powerful special moves.

diluting the 'WHM player count in raids' down to 'they play it because they like easier healers' is kinda reductive, there's plenty of reasons people play certain classes over others. I play Sage over SCH because I like the way Panhaima works, and how Kerachole sticks to allies instead of being a ground AOE. I don't care if it's 200 dps behind SCH because a clear's a clear in my book. I am a WHM main because I don't like pressing all the stuff AST has to in it's burst window. Lots of people moved off of AST this tier and onto WHM, because of how much work you have to put into AST to get the same results as a WHM who does a fraction of the effort, which frees up brainspace to focus on the mechanics more. This doesn't mean they're suddenly WHM mains, or that they now hate AST, or they 'prefer easier healers', they made a conscious decision for the sake of their group, to play one class for an advantage it has over another. Heck, I did it last tier even, I'd mainly play AST in P3S despite being a WHM main, because I ain't dealing with that Life's Agonies crap with cure3 spam when I can just throw out a macrocosmos as AST and call it a day. That didn't suddenly mean 'oh Sam's an AST main now'

I would also add that many people just enjoy the aesthetics of White Mage but would hate it, to be the baby healer without skill ceiling. Like, I like White Mage in terms of its aesthetics and identity the most, especially since I really dislike the weapons of the other jobs. I don't want to fight with drones or a globe floating on me, I like a simple staff, but while playing White Mage I was seriously pushed away from playing it, just due to the state it was in 6.0. And I would hate it even more, if other healers ever evolve and my thematically favorite healer is left behind, forcing me to play others which I don't enjoy as much visually just to have fun.

And to be honest, at this point I feel like healer design in FF14 is so bad and stale, that I would recommend everyone to just play WoW if they main healers, seriously. I mean, to all of here, just look up gameplay previews of the Preservation Evoker and between it and Sage, tell me which one looks like the more interesting new healer.

[AmiableApkallu]

I largely agree, its the quintessential FF healer so absolutely needs to be accessible. But that doesn't mean it can't have a high ceiling; and DPS complexity is where that ceiling could come in to play

All it takes to keep WHM as the easy and accessible healer is to maintain its core healing skills as "restore 'lots' of HP after damage hits" and to make those skills available on demand. Which is to say, all it takes is to leave the Lv.50 healing kit (Cure, Medica, Regen) well enough alone. It's an intuitive model of healing that works well as long as single hits don't delete entire HP bars.

The DPS kit could be a tangled mess that'd give optimizers a run for their money, but so long as its obvious how to do the "healer" part of a job that's called "healer," it'd be fair to say that the job is easy and accessible.

[Renathras]

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Okay, because people get onto me (not anyone else, but just me) for writing long posts, I’m going to TRY to make this shorter. It may seem curt (also why I tend to not make short posts), but it’s not meant to be harsh, just to address your points while being somewhat brief. And it still won't be short, but that's just because you said a lot and some need at least a little detail to rebut.

You’re wrong. Stop white knighting. Her insult was accusing me of citing fallacies as sophistry.

You’re wrong again. You guys appeal to consensus all the freakin’ time. You can’t pretend it’s beyond the pale now to point out you don’t have it.

You’re wrong AGAIN. I’m not advocating for WHM to cast Glare and nothing else. If you guys want me to stop beating this dead horse, stop trotting it out over and over again!

You’re wrong HERE because this is the far worse thing. To make SGE “the idiot proof healer”, here is what we’d have to do: Remove Eukrasia Dosis and Kardia. Convert Eukrasia Prognosis and Eukrasia Diagnosis into Medica 2 and Cure 2. Convert Durochole to Solace, Ixo to deal damage as Assize, Taruo would have to be turned into Aquaveil, the game would lose the enjoyable Kerachole as it’s turned into Asylum, Toxicon would need to build from Addersgall use, the Job would need to start at level 1 and have a class created so it can start as that class, we’d need 6 Class quests and a further 20 or so Job Quests all created and implemented through all the expansions, Pneuma would need to be changed into Cure 3, and Plegma removed. Contrast WHM being this healer for the game which would require: Changing nothing and not altering anyone’s playstyle, class staring levels, or existing abilities. Which of those makes more sense?

The reason I advocate for WHM to be this is because it’s already this and would require no changes to the game, the Job, the CNJ class, nor for players already playing it. To make SGE into this would require completely changing the Job, adding a Class, tons of quests, and basically every ability that isn’t non-Eukrasian Diagnosis and Prognosis. If you can’t see why that’s the larger hurdle to jump, I cannot help you.

You’re wrong yet again. I don’t know if it’s your skill speed, but I tend to come up on Path/Eye when it’s roughly even 30 sec times. MOREOVER, because it can stack to 60 seconds, it’s not “in 3 GCDs” it’s “anytime in the next 30 seconds I just end a combo with Eye”. Usually I think about it when I’ve already hit 1-2, so it’s actually “next GCD”, making it no different than Dia. And it’s easier to manage than Dia because you can stack it twice. That makes things ridiculously easy compared to things with a 30 sec hardcap. The 1-2 is busywork. That’s why so many players want all melee and tanks to go the PvP route where the 1-2-3 combos are just a single button. A majority of players in this game do NOT see it as interesting or nuanced gameplay, no matter how much you want to sell it as such. BUT: I have proposed before that one of our healers have a 1-2-3 gameplay rotation. I wouldn’t mind that being WHM if we remove the DoT and just make it like MCH’s 1-2-3 with no frills. You don’t want that, either. Though I wouldn’t be opposed to a Rhizomata type ability that gives Lilies. Granted, that’s just more homogenization, but that would be the Infuriate parallel. And you use Infuriate on CD, every second one is in buff windows. This is what Presence of Mind does, it’s just on a 2 min CD to begin with. If PoM let you use three Miseries without charge, that would be fun and I’d be fine with that. But I feel like it would be bad for the game and Job because it would shove WHM even more into that stupid 2 min model that everyone knows is bad and doesn’t want more of, wouldn’t it?

Path and Eye don’t need a Heavy Swing and Maim – I’d love that! Yes, let’s do it. You don’t get Fellcleave by Infuriating once per minute, you get it by using Bloodwhetting and/or Nascent Flash 3 times with a 20 sec CD. Orogeny also would throw out a large party heal and restore Beast Gauge (MP). But yeah, that sounds pretty fun, actually. Ship it!

I do agree that Misery stacking to 2 would be nice, though. They could make at least the first two parts of the “bloom” still go even if you have one already bloomed. Though here I’d expect you guys to complain that’s making the Job “easier” and “less punishing” since players wouldn’t have to worry about a loss by casting a Solace/Rapture while Misery is already up.

Yes, it’s not exactly “a thing WHM has to consider” – thank you for making my point! – this was the point I as making to the person I replied to: That isn’t unique to WAR, that’s something basically every Job, including WHM, already does, so cannot be raised as a point of distinction.

Yes, once per 30 seconds. Which makes it more punishing than Storm’s Eye, which can be cast twice within any given 30 second timeframe and give the WAR extra time and flexibility. Dia is more difficult/challenging/hard than Storm’s Eye is.

“to properly play it” – that’s literally what I said. Why are you contesting something I outright said that was noting what the other poster said about WAR is also true of WHM?

Yes, what one person considers extra busywork others might see as something it isn’t – nuance and skill expression – but that’s why we have FOUR healers and I’ve already said make THREE OF THEM have your nonexistent “skill expression”. I will point out yet again that a large portion of the playerbase has repeatedly asked for the 1-2-3 PvP treatment, meaning most people do not, in fact, see it as nuance and skill expression and, in fact, see it as unnecessary busywork.

“Should we remove” – People have literally asked for that, yes. I personally have no strong opinion on it because I tend to not play DPS, so I’ll defer to the people that deal with it every day that have asked for it for something like 4 years now.

You’re still wrong – WAR has Upheaval and Orogeny, but only one is used in a given fight. Having another Assize, why not just give Assize a second charge instead? That would be far more useful and not add unnecessary complexity for complexity’s sake. You mention Aquaveil then even point out in badmouthing it how it’s useful and does something nothing else in the kit does. Indeed, Exaltation is really the only one that might not have been needed. Protraction allows SCH’s to amplify Adlo shields and has good synergy with Deployment Tactics and introduces actual skill expression (that thing you always talk about wanting in the dps kits, but seem not to care about being in the healing kits), meaning it was a good addition to its kit. Aquaveil is a fantastic addition to WHM’s kit since it’s actually WHM getting a button that doesn’t step on the toes of an ability they already had. Aquaveil and Lilybell both are actual new things WHM was lacking before (a strong single target mitigation and a powerful reactive “waves of attack” heal). As for Aero 3:

I hate it when people are “stuck in the past” and “can’t let it go”. Aero 3 added nothing to WHM gameplay. In practice, you’d cast it once the tank gathered mobs AFTER 3x Holy casts, then resume Holy spam. It added nothing to the gameplay. At the time, most people and guides said it was a single target DPS loss, so it wasn’t used in single target fights. And I’m already amply on record as hating DoTs. Adding ANOTHER to EVERY healer Job is just dumb. No thank you. This is also like people desperate to add SOMETHING called Cleric Stance because they’re married to the term. Literally: Just let it go. WHM is not “four buttons behind”. It has more than any of the casters and all of the Ranged Physical. As I’ve said before, 30 buttons is the most that Jobs IN GENERAL should have, since that completely fills two crossbar sets (controller players) when Sprint and LB are added, and 30 is a LOT OF BUTTONS. There’s no good argument that all Jobs need 34+ buttons. It’s fine if some have that many (cough-PLD-cough), but WHM is the only healer (before SGE) that did not pass that number. It actually has exactly as many buttons as it should, meaning any new buttons need to remove an existing button. 29 is actually the ideal (extra slot for potion in fights or mount in the field), so we actually need to lose one.

“we already have wild swings” – Yeah, but due to Human issues. Throw in RNG on top of that and it gets worse. People in the tank and dps forums are talking all the time about how “feelsbad” it is when they use abilities like Double Down in raid buffs and don’t get any crits out of them; where the difference between one run and another is “did you get luck with crits” even if they do their rotation and correctly perform mechanics the exact same way both times, but one way gets them 5-10% more damage. Now throw in all you just said about unexpected healing/deaths and that just makes it even worse.

There are reasons people pick one Job over another. That is absolutely true. And harder and easier are subjective, this is also true…but when people are SELF-defining these Jobs as easier, and picking them, putting 2 and 2 together isn’t hard. You have to be trying not to see it in order not to see it.

Correlation does not equal causation – this is true – but causation always includes correlation. The point here is that the data we do have, at the very least contests your position. The obvious solution is to leave one healer as it is to ensure that the people that like it have an option. And as I said above, WHM is the only logical choice to do so with.

People like you won’t compromise because (a) you all want to have your cake and eat it, too, selfishly taking all the healer Jobs to yourselves and refusing to share, and (b) I suspect you all know, as I do, that you’re wrong, and that if we had even ONE simple healer with the others all complex, the playerbase would flock to the simple healer proving you are both wrong and in the minority, and that’s something you can’t stand, so you don’t want people to have the option where you might be proven wrong.

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The ”middle ground” IS to make 2-1 healers more complex, 1 in kind of a middle ground, and 1-2 leave as they are now.

That IS the compromise position.

It's the position you and the rest are outright rejecting.

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ya'll have really got to stop responding to Ren's post with "okay but what if we suddenly changed tank or dps rotations to be just like healers, huh?? wouldn't that just suck and be awful and wouldn't you hate it???" because his post history should make it obvious his answer is always going to be a resounding "No, I'd love it!" and just forces that particular sticking point to be repeated over and over and not really do anything other than annoy everyone involved.

Absolutely correct. Until people recognize that some people like non-convoluted - I've been charitably using the word complex vs simple, but convoluted vs straightforward is more apt - gameplay, they just will be arguing with a brick wall, because they fail to recognize they're stating a point as somehow fact that clearly is not.

What we should instead be pointing out is that, yeah, there are some jobs with light rotations that are *theoretically* very similar to WHM As Is if we're only really looking at number of actions... the frequency and variety of the button presses makes a hell of a lot of difference to most people. This is why people get so stuck on bitching about the Glare spam. It's why people keep going "no, WAR really isn't like WHM at all!" There's a very different tactile feel to doing long stretches of hitting one button primarily while having a couple others that you occasionally toss on with moderate timers between them, and having a small amount of buttons that you're frequently cycling between. There's also more interplay between WARs buttons compared to WHMs, which does just a tiny bit more to keep your brain engaged, too.

And this I also agree with. I don't think the solution is more actions or DoTs, I believe it's more repurposing the existing actions to achieve a more varied effect. But I will note again many people have been asking for 1-2-3s to be turned into 1 button, which means a lot of people actually would prefer the 1 button business. The problem is what to do that ISN'T just a glorified 1-2. RDM's Dualcast is effectively a 1-2. Verthunder/Aero are DPS gains but only when instant cast and not hardcast, and Dualcast creates a 1-2 situation. It has the added steps of having two paths (sorta like MNK) and an annoying Proc system that wouldn't work with a healer, though I've proposed myself a SGE system that's effectively Verfire/stone/aero/thunder as a rotation style. Note that RDM isn't focused on healing and has no DoTs. But something like every third Glare doing something like triggering an empowered thundercloud Dia (this would remove the RNG since it's just 3x Glare + Dia no matter what) might be more interesting. Or just removing Dia's DoT and making it a direct cast spell that does lower damage (like Ruin 2) but every 3rd Glare OR 3rd GCD heal cast empowers it to do 2-3x Glare's potency would be kind of neat, imo. I'd also absolutely love Holy benefitting from this in some way and being changed to be like Cure 3 where you can cast it on a target within 25y OR cast it on yourself/no target where it would work like it does today. This would allow it to be put into the single target rotation somewhere (maybe casting "Dia 4" empowers a Holy immediately cast after it) and be useful in boss fights even if the WHM is forced out of melee by spread mechanics or the like.

See? There are changes to WHM I'm open to, provided they don't involve another DoT, Aero 3, Cleric Stance, Seraph Strike, shorter DoT CDs, etc, but that would make the rotation a bit more interesting and even more versatile. The simplest one would be to make Dia like Ruin 2 but that turns into Ruin 4 every third GCD cast (either Glare or GCD heals), which incidentally would make GCD heals more useful and Solace/Rapture DPS gains.

Storm's Eye's flexibility actually adds even more thoughtful gameplay

So making Dia stack to 60 seconds would add even more thoughtful gameplay?

Not asking in snark, just curious.

in general I'd like Aero III as something that extends the DoT and spreads it to surrounding enemies instead of being its own DoT,

Why make another button for this? We could just make Holy or Misery or assize or even GLARE do this (giving it a purpose in AOE fights). And Aero 3 wasn't instant, I don't believe. Come to think of it, Glare having an "additional effect" of "Spreads Dia (if on target) to all nearby enemies within 8y. Duration: Remaining duration of target's Dia debuff" would be fine with me, too. I hate DoTs in general and most AOE packs in dungeons die in 25-35 seconds making this generally useless, but it would be neat for DoTting the second pack of the 2 pack pull (where I usually go into Holy spam instead) if I could smack a Dia on a target, hit it with a Glare, then go into Holy spam and have the Dots spread (and refreshed on the first pack at that point). That would kind of be a neat little trait, actually.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Well crap. Here we go again.

Sermon time.

[ForsakenRoe]

everything

at first i was thinking 'no way could someone want WAR to be even more simplified' when i made those joking 'change suggestions' so dripping with sarcasm, wow is my worldview upended

you know the saying 'give them an inch and they'll take a mile'? my point is that WHM SCH and AST had a mile taken from them in the SB-SHB transition, but your stance seems to be 'ok SCH and AST can have their mile back, but only if WHM's mile stays confiscated' like they've been grounded for bad behaviour. 'friendly to newbies' doesnt mean it HAS to start at level 1, like look at Demon Hunter in WOW, it used to start at 98 in Legion when it first came out, got to 100 by doing the starter area, then just had 10 levels to go, to get to max level, and it's as new player friendly as it came. Sage starting at 70 would not have to mean it cant be the 'new healer friendly' design, doubly so considering that we can have solo instances specifically designed to teach the player what the job's skills do. your 'compromise' stance has now shifted from 'leave 1 as ungabunga' to 'leave 1-2 as ungabunga', so now i guess you're gonna start compromising with your own stance since noone else here will? getting hit by 'have your cake and eat it too' always makes me laugh, like what the hell else am i gonna do with a cake, put it on a pedestal and display it like a piece of modern art? waste of good cake, anyway i think im done writing essays now that i understand just how pointless trying to convince each other really is, so i'm gonna just go back to lurking and contributing to the healer shortage by not being in PF outside of raidlogging. gotta say preservation evoker is looking kinda interesting so far...

on which note, have you considered playing classic WOW? i'm pretty sure mages still have like 2 button rotations in Wrath, seems like it'd be right up your alley

oh yeh edit: aero 3 was 100% used in single target, you can go look up the old tooltip on gamerescape, the data is still there, it was apparently 370 total potency, compared to stone 4 which was 280? at the time, i dont remember exactly but i know for sure it never breached 300 so yeh, also you wouldnt cast 3 holys back to back, you'd do holy, aero3, holy holy because that way you wouldn't clip 1.5 seconds of the first holy's stun duration off by refreshing it early, and you'd get the aero dot ticking sooner, while the enemy still had HP to tick off. idk what guides you were looking at but i dont think they were the ones i saw, and if, like in this vid here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MGGYnq3JvA, aero 3 is good enough for 'world first clear' teams to use in single target, i think i did an alright decision in using it in single target too. directly contrasting my AWFUL decision in choosing to main WHM at the start of SB

[ty_taurus]

So making Dia stack to 60 seconds would add even more thoughtful gameplay?

Not asking in snark, just curious.

Actually, I don't think this works for DoTs, nor do I think it would ultimately give you the experience you're looking for. The issue is because of damage calculations. DoTs snapshot the user's current state, including during buff windows, so you have to ask the question: "What happens when you overwrite a buffed Dia DoT with an unbuffed one to extend the duration?" What would most likely happen for balance reasons would be the DoT potency would update the moment you extended it, meaning that optimal use of your DoT would be probably as rigid as it is now. You'd want to double DoT during buff windows, then let the full 60 seconds deplete before refreshing again at the 1 and 1.5 minute markers, then double DoT again during the next buff window.

If we undid the 2 minute windows and went back to the 1, 2, 3, 6 structure, this actually becomes more rigid as you're basically always building up a 60 second DoT with 2 casts rather than 1 because every minute is a buff window of some kind.

If that means you feel like you have to pay attention to your DoTs less frequently at least, then perhaps that's not a bad thing, but the effect of Snapshotting is not explained to players, and it would silently punish players who didn't realize how the snapshotting works and were just casually maintaining their DoT whenever feels right to them.