Healers need an overhaul

[Shurrikhan]

Here's the issue with meaningful choices: The more meaningful it is, the less of a choice it is.

That's largely semantics, though.

Usually "meaningful" would imply both:

1. Chosen from among other competitive choices, and
2. Having a significant impact on surrounding actions or frameworks (by which to assign priorities to actions, which will likely then change surrounding actions at least situationally).

That said, creating meaningful choices is, yeah, pretty difficult, especially since you typically want them to impact surrounding actions without locking or making non-meaningful (creates one relatively powerful choice or has redundant effect on surrounding actions) other featured choices.

Still hugely worthwhile, just... really tough to design.

[Recon1o6]

meaningful choices would need to be designed so making the best choice enhances the gameplay loop/reward while choosing the worst option does not neccesary means its a wrong decision but still a valid one, or even a niche option. The key is making the choice is good but not doing so is the floor.

Better choices= higher skill
Not making any choice= skill floor.

[san-toki]

I 100% play support because of simpler rotations. While technically familiar with every DPS job's proper rotation and competent on a handful at a savage to ultimate level, generally in raid I prefer to just hit a few buttons and spend the rest of my time thinking about where to weave utility. It's chill while being exciting during early prog, and doesn't aggravate my RSI and other injuries as much.

That said, I'd be fully able to handle a 1-2-3(-4) type rotation on a healer, much like a tank. But I also don't know that turning 1-1-1-1-etc. into 1-2-3 would really make it much more flavorful. Tank rotations, even the burstiest and busiest ones like DRK opener/GNB 1 minutes, are not incredibly enthralling, after all.

I think the better solution, short-term anyway, is to give healers lots to do in encounters. I enjoyed this tier for the most part (outside of niche issues with job synergy and a feeling of imbalance playing into certain cohealer jobs), because even at BiS, I had to spend and plan resources and be continually mindful of those kinds of things in P7/8S (P5/6 turned into a snoozefest early on, as expected). I'm not sure if I'm in the minority, but as much as I complained about the bleeds, they were fun to plan around.

I also wouldn't mind leaning more heavily again into DoTs. They seem fitting in that you can set and forget them, allowing you rotational flexibility in half-minute phases, but would give you more to upkeep and manage.

[LeonKeyh]

I 100% play support because of simpler rotations. While technically familiar with every DPS job's proper rotation and competent on a handful at a savage to ultimate level, generally in raid I prefer to just hit a few buttons and spend the rest of my time thinking about where to weave utility. It's chill while being exciting during early prog, and doesn't aggravate my RSI and other injuries as much.

That said, I'd be fully able to handle a 1-2-3(-4) type rotation on a healer, much like a tank. But I also don't know that turning 1-1-1-1-etc. into 1-2-3 would really make it much more flavorful. Tank rotations, even the burstiest and busiest ones like DRK opener/GNB 1 minutes, are not incredibly enthralling, after all.

I think the better solution, short-term anyway, is to give healers lots to do in encounters. I enjoyed this tier for the most part (outside of niche issues with job synergy and a feeling of imbalance playing into certain cohealer jobs), because even at BiS, I had to spend and plan resources and be continually mindful of those kinds of things in P7/8S (P5/6 turned into a snoozefest early on, as expected). I'm not sure if I'm in the minority, but as much as I complained about the bleeds, they were fun to plan around.

I also wouldn't mind leaning more heavily again into DoTs. They seem fitting in that you can set and forget them, allowing you rotational flexibility in half-minute phases, but would give you more to upkeep and manage.

I don't think that you're that much of an outlier on what you want.

I could misunderstand the general consensus on healers, but I think that most healers just want _something_ more.

I think that a majority of the healers bring up a "more exciting DPS rotation" because it's the easiest thing to implement without changes to encounter design and overall balance between healers. I think the "Just give us 1-2-3-(4)" is begging for scraps to see if Squenix will give us...anything....anything at all.

I'm sure that not ALL healers would enjoy "doing more" in encounters, BUT that would require a fairly large change in encounter design and possible healer balance. People worry about big changes like that because you're working with a lot of different abilities and how they counteract with each other. More outgoing damage means that defensive abilities are more important and that means jobs need to be rebalanced, etc etc.

Whereas, if they were just to update the damage rotation, all they really need to do is look at a 30 sec "optimal rotation" and make it the same as (or slightly better to make up for possible mistakes) 1 Biolysis and 11-12 Broils to generally keep balance the same.

I think it would be healthier for the game to give healers "more to do" within their role's namesake. But, I also recognize that you're pulling out several Jenga pieces at the same time with oil on your fingers. Much easier to just pour more complexity within the damage rotation.

[Allegor]

Give us a healer version of Fire III - an instant nuke that procs off casting glarebroilficsis and/or a second (preferrably aoe) dot, that's the bare minimum I think we can ask for.

And that's not even taking into account that even that would just be copy+pasting the same gimmick into 4 "entirely different" jobs

[Cheremia]

Now, I'm by no means good on PvE Sch but I will repeat this:

While SCH does have arguably a greater amount of decision making than WHM (at least if played as not only broil/energy drain mage but also mitigating damage, many actually don't do even that) in PvE -
I love PVP sch. Even if it has less skills, the decision making is still there and trying to deployment your team to buff their damage while also trying to hit as many people with bio as possible (especially FL) is pretty fun.

Even with just 2 Adlos and Seraphs really small deployment range, Sch can actually keep teams fairy full and I saved my friend from death multiple times. You could just always recitation your dot on enemies, but sometimes, big shield saves you and everybody in your team that's close.
Sch can still make others (or you) survive a full hit of Zantetsuken and that's still the funniest thing in the world to me.

And one of the biggest problems on healers is:
Much of the normal content does NOT incentivise you to use your kit.
ESPECIALLY Sage and Sch suffer from it.
There are many Schs that never use: Soil, Excog, big adlo deployments to reduce the amount of healing they have to do. But instead, many Schs use Indom even though their kit for the most time is made to not have to use indom first and only...

If you HAD to use your heals at LEAST somewhat smartly in normal content (some do, i actually LOVE spicy dungeon bulls like Bradams and homister and that one big pull in Dhon meg because tanks don't have every heal in the world at that point and the mobs hit hard).
Healing IS fun if you HAVE to actually HEAL.
The most fun you have as a healer is when shit goes horribly wrong in normal content.
And it really shouldn't need exes/savages/whatever to do so

I'm aware that some extremes/savages don't even need healers with a specific planned out group, but it's still annoying that only savage and some exes actually need more of healer's kit.

Would a bigger dps pool OR having to actually heal scare off those people who are chronically afraid of playing the game (you know who you are...)? Yes, maybe.

Would it actually hurt the casual players? Mostly? Honestly? No, many casuals just adapt to whatever the game demands if it's not some hardcore game that's ultra hard always. You can be a casual and still be good at a game because it's fun to you.
You'll learn fast if you have fun with a game, so always going for the lowest % (the people that play the game without wanting to play it) is bad.


Most casuals are capable of more if the game would actually let them learn what their class does and you have to use your kit so people don't die.

Yes you can make healers have to heal or give them more dps without making it all mega ultra super duper hard. Just look at any other RPG that has healers.
Especially the Tales of Series mvoed from healers that have SOME dps skills to healers that demolish by themself but also can res and heal, duh. No matter what you think of Tales of Graces, Cheria is still one of the most fun healers I ever played.


Anyways, the game literally could go in two ways:
More Heals needed
more dps
And both are better than pleasing the people that legit don't want to play the game. Yes, those exist in the game. They are not casuals

Long weird rant over.
Just give healers something to do in normal content.
I swear it won't scare off as many people as you think it would... many will quite literally just adapt. Please

[Teno]

I 100% play support because of simpler rotations. While technically familiar with every DPS job's proper rotation and competent on a handful at a savage to ultimate level, generally in raid I prefer to just hit a few buttons and spend the rest of my time thinking about where to weave utility. It's chill while being exciting during early prog, and doesn't aggravate my RSI and other injuries as much.

That said, I'd be fully able to handle a 1-2-3(-4) type rotation on a healer, much like a tank. But I also don't know that turning 1-1-1-1-etc. into 1-2-3 would really make it much more flavorful. Tank rotations, even the burstiest and busiest ones like DRK opener/GNB 1 minutes, are not incredibly enthralling, after all.

I think the better solution, short-term anyway, is to give healers lots to do in encounters. I enjoyed this tier for the most part (outside of niche issues with job synergy and a feeling of imbalance playing into certain cohealer jobs), because even at BiS, I had to spend and plan resources and be continually mindful of those kinds of things in P7/8S (P5/6 turned into a snoozefest early on, as expected). I'm not sure if I'm in the minority, but as much as I complained about the bleeds, they were fun to plan around.

I also wouldn't mind leaning more heavily again into DoTs. They seem fitting in that you can set and forget them, allowing you rotational flexibility in half-minute phases, but would give you more to upkeep and manage.

Simpler rotations like 123 and one-button mashing are not rotations, they're lazy placeholders. Scholar was good with all its spells back then (when dots were a core part of the gameplay) while sage has a solid and completely unutilized core identity in eukrasia and offensive healing. At this point they just don't want to move forward with healers.

And if by having more to do you mean more healing (and in the case of barrier healers actually using barriers), plenty of solutions have been proposed to mix it up, like sage eukrasian shield giving a free oGCD toxikon to stay dps neutral. Win-win-win : actually using a gcd heal, interesting interaction, dps relevant.

[Zebraoracle]

I'm really disappointed at how little of a "dps healer" sage actually is.

If I could, I'd make it something like this:

Normal kardia - works as is
Lesser kardia - OGCD with charges that you can place on people, temporary and grants lesser effect of kardia
DPS combo - Damage -> damage/reduces target's damage on next attack by a small amount (I'm not talking necessarily comparative to feint/addle/reprisal levels of reduction) -> damage/shields kardia targets. Each dps spell keeps the kardia healing.
An ability that tethers to the target enemy, dealing damage over a short period while also healing the party for each damage tic. Could be like a special DPS/healing CD that you have to build up for or something.
Have the 123 combo have a chance to generate addersting, and give us something else to do with it. Maybe make it so you can spend an addersting to empower one of the 123 abilities, so like the damage reduction is stronger or the shield is bigger.

Is it perfect? Nope! And it'd require balancing for sure. But it'd still be more interesting that what it is now.

[Shurrikhan]

I 100% play support because of simpler rotations. While technically familiar with every DPS job's proper rotation and competent on a handful at a savage to ultimate level, generally in raid I prefer to just hit a few buttons and spend the rest of my time thinking about where to weave utility. It's chill while being exciting during early prog, and doesn't aggravate my RSI and other injuries as much.

A quick question, though: Would you leave the role if, say, one could get 10% more out of it with double the rotational work / you'd have to do more than a simple minimum in order to get over 90% of its potential throughput?

At present, the primary difficulty in healing is to minimize time spent healing. (Having fewer DoTs or CDs, which would otherwise create more coasting space, actually increases that gap, as it increases the relative weight of each filler GCD of damage that could have been done if not for excess healing.) Would it feel bad to you, though, if more of that difficulty came from rotational considerations, such as synergies to set up between frequent or even no-CD spells/abilities, or a greater variety of damage or utility actions?

But I also don't know that turning 1-1-1-1-etc. into 1-2-3 would really make it much more flavorful. Tank rotations, even the burstiest and busiest ones like DRK opener/GNB 1 minutes, are not incredibly enthralling, after all.

Agreed. Sadly, switching filler spells to, well, filler spell combos would probably minimize any added depth while maximizing adding annoyance. The absolute least bang possible for one's buck.

I think the better solution, short-term anyway, is to give healers lots to do in encounters. I enjoyed this tier for the most part (outside of niche issues with job synergy and a feeling of imbalance playing into certain cohealer jobs), because even at BiS, I had to spend and plan resources and be continually mindful of those kinds of things in P7/8S (P5/6 turned into a snoozefest early on, as expected).

Sounds good. I just hope this tier will be a sign of further growth to come, rather than a brief partial respite.

I'm not sure if I'm in the minority, but as much as I complained about the bleeds, they were fun to plan around.

Probably not the minority there; bleeds are good at increasing healing intensity without feeling overly punishing. Or, put more generally, they offer a good amount of added engagement/difficulty with minimal increase in exclusion or anxiety (from needing a certain skill floor just to not have everyone die instantly).

I too, wouldn't mind leaning more heavily into DoTs.

[Puc]

I do not want healers to get any more complex, they are in a good spot right now, people just need to realize that they can't have everything in one box. Accept that you want to play summoner or red mage for your damage rotation. Having a proc of a fire 3 type spell wouldn't be bad for an extra skill but other than that keep it as simple as possible.