Whatever happened to “We don’t balance fights around healers needing to do damage?”

[Sebazy]

Being that astrologian is the closest thing we have to a healer with a full DPS rotation we can tell that (a) the ability bar gets bloated to high hell and (b) its disappointing to have to sacrifice the DPS for healing when heal checks come up.

Uh no.

First off, just to make this very very clear

**AST DOES NOT HAVE A DPS ROTATION**

Outside of it's two minute burst window it is close to the same as any other healer in this game. You spam your nuke, you keep a 30 second dot ticking and you try to maximise value from your 'DPS' oGCD (Earthy Star in AST's case).

AST's kit isn't bloated because of a DPS rotation. It's bloated because it's a horridly designed job. Celestial Opposition in it's current form is a poster child for Bloat, Undraw is a poster child for bloat, the whole convoluted split Draw/Play combo is a poster child for bloat. None of these abilities are part of the job's DPS rotation. (Before you say Draw, no it is not. You dogpile as many cards as you can into the 2 minute burst window, if you're just mindlessly pulling on cooldown, that's a you problem).

DPS rotations don't need to be bloated monstrosities that front load everything into a 10 second burst followed by a minute and 50 of monotony. You play Dancer, it's Endwalker incarnation was a perfect example of how a job could be super simple yet fun and engaging don't you agree?. There are lots of different ways to achieve this without the need for umpteen buttons.

Lots of non-heal related ability weaving is absolutely an issue for healers because they need to be paying attention to everyone's health/status bars, incoming raid wides, tank busters, etc.

There's one huge glaring (Sorry not sorry) issue with this point.

Everything is scripted, everything is timed, everything is memorisable. Designing jobs entirely around fresh new content is all well and good, but it ignores the problem of how bland things get once people have learnt the content.

And before it gets said. If the boss is doing enough damage to actually be threatening, chances are that mistakes will simply result in a forced death/party wipe. Classing other peoples mistakes as something healers need to be ready to react to is fine, but the content in which you can carry people through repeated mistakes typically puts out so little damage that A) You've got most of your kit up most of the time to just oGCD bomb them between nukes that it's irrelevant until the vuln stacks get them one shot right through it and B) If you've got multiple people making the occasional mistake, circumstantial 'splash' healing from the likes of Assize, Earthy Star, Lilies etc will typically do just fine given that unavoidable AoEs are usually a minute + apart and decidedly non threatening anyway.