The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ty_taurus]

For the concepts:

Well, first, on a light note, all of the action names are taken from Aerith in FFVII Remake, the closest White Mage to XIV's White Mage who actually does utilize nature in her gameplay. This includes Soul Drain, which is why I went with that name. That aside...

I respect the deep number crunching; however, one thing that I think is very important to keep in mind when we talk about theorycrafted ideas is that none of us have access to a prototyping build for the game. A handful of the issues you mention are things that are a result of lack of specificity, or things that could be easily caught during prototyping, like the issue of drifting. Another example would be you mention the rigidity of Soul Drain being a combo of sorts, but we never said casting a heal, or Dia, or Misery, or anything has to break that combo. Flexibility is important for healers, so anytime I think of ideas that work with procs or combos on healers, I default to the mentality that nothing breaks the combo except for simply timing out of it. And if we feel that the idea of it being a combo is still too restricting, then there are other simple solutions, like instead of a combo, it's a stack that you can spend of which you can stack multiple.

Ultimately, what I care about most is the idea, because if the concept is sound, then any knots in the structure would just be worked out if it were actually brought to testing. This is something that every job change has to go through anyway. Even a job that faces little change needs to be rigorously tested against the changes of those within the same role. And I don't want you or others to spend potentially hours trying to number crunch an idea of mine just to see if it works as it is written (unless of course you really want to I suppose). Cooldowns, stacks, numbers... all of these are very easy values to adjust and would be when pressure tested.

In other words, is the concept of building toward Tempest, Soul Drain, and Holy feel like a good idea, given that you can also have the option to have the process partially automated for those that maybe don't want to engage with it consciously.

Now, to talk about Afflatus Budding for a moment. One thing to note is that it was meant to have 2 charges, and it was meant to also nourish the Blood Lily since it's on the GCD and would ultimately increase the frequency of Afflatus Miseries. The other reason behind the idea was that it gives WHM total freedom to use their lilies on any GCD heal rather than feeling like Regen, Medica II, and Cure III are buttons you want to stay away from. That said, if it does feel like it's bottlenecking things too intensely, then we can simply cut that out and instead of the Holy trigger reducing the cooldown of that action, it just accelerates automatic lily generation by 5 seconds.

Another adjustment I mentioned in the past that I kind of just default to in my mind for WHM is that you should be able to generate 2 blood lilies, and just assign a cooldown of 20 seconds to Misery to prevent storing and dumping during buff windows. This would help with any issues of buff alignment on lilies because you can now more comfortably hold onto your blood lily for an upcoming buff window and not feel like you can't heal until after.

On the concerns for the Soul Drain MP generation feeling mandatory, a big part of MP management is because of a healer DPSing. If someone's not keeping up with their DPS, they're spending less MP. If that's taken into account with the values assigned to it vs what's gained through Lucid Dreaming or any other sources of MP management, such as Thin Air, then I don't think it's problematic. Instead, you can look at it as a way to manage the MP for someone that is maintaining their DPS. And for those that don't, it still allows them to have access to a very easy, "endless" source of MP at a loss, but anyone in that situation probably doesn't care about that loss anyway.

[Shurrikhan]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

I get there are a lot of "That's impossible..." what-ifs. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend. As I noted above, on at least some level, this was how healing in ARR worked, and players were (at the time) largely satisfied with this, with many loving both healers despite their individual focuses. Set aside the "impossible" and "ARR wasn't REALLY like that by 2.4 and on..." and so on, just a thought experiment.

Just my $0.02:

To me... probably not, but it depends (on whether there were already established thematic grounds players were attached to and would have aspects trimmed from to suit those categories, and/or whether there'd be cohesive designs possible likewise blocked off by that adherence to sub-roles).

I feel like we get far more bang for the buck, up to a pretty high threshold, from competing choices in gameplay rather than just competing choices in menu-play alone (just picking job A or job B, or build A or B, etc., before entering the given activity). While I like class/job/build to have their own unique advantages and features (atop their unique playflows and aesthetics), I don't feel like there's ever been a whole delineation in who's been allowed to do what that ever increased the total depth available to players; instead, those delineations just more quickly let devs be content with less on each choice they provide. In that case, good mechanics are, for the worse, purposely held hostage to/by certain builds, rather than each build competing to make the most interesting/attractive/fun cohesion and synergies they can out of whatever they like / find fitting.

Or, to put it another way, take any thematic kit you can imagine: Time-Space, Druidism, Elemental, Alchemical, Life-Death, Onmyou, Blood, Incarnation, etc. There's almost always some element of that kit, whatever it may be, would want to be allowed access into more "advanced" (deep, interestingly set up, etc.) healing or into "support" options. Some may, in the course of grabbing what seems to fit best around their iconic tools, end up with especially high value or intricacy or button counts of aspects A, B, C, or D, etc., but there's no point in dividing those jobs into any sort of halves or taxonomies just to say what can or can't be given to a particular theme/aesthetic.

I wouldn't mind a slightly more deeply heal-focused healer, but it shouldn't be "heal-focused" just because it lacks anything else (see, traditionally and still largely today, XIV WHM). And no theme or job concept ought to be constrained just to fit an arbitrary sub-role.


Full related disclosure: I dislike any sort of template-based design. I prefer a job happening to end up with some unique arrangement of various capacities as might suit a pentagonal strengths graph rather than being designed around any hard constraints other than "Make this theme as fun as possible."

[Venur]

Random aside: Suppose for the sake of argument it was possible to do something like ARR where we split healing as a role into two parts that were...actually functional (unlike the Pure/Barrier split which seems to basically be meaningless outside of WHM/WHM comps since everyone else has barriers anyway...)

Where we had one that was a healing focused set of healers, and the other a support/damage focused set.

The former are designed to have powerful and efficient heals with a slimmed down damage kit while the latter are designed to have a more expansive damage suite and dynamic gameplay shifting between support healing and buffing the party vs optimizing their damage potential.

If there was a way to do this where it wouldn't devolve into a meta of 2x supports (let's pretend this is possible), would that not be an interesting and possibly useful change to satisfy everyone?

It is not possible to achieve this without going in the 2x support meta for single group content.

Otherwise, you either make one of those 2 healing group useless. If the support/heals can't main heal your group why would you pick them but if they can main heal why would you want a pure healer that would simplie makes your run slow and more prone to failing a group mechanic ?


Vanguard was probably the most notorious one for the heal+off heals for meta. Support healer where basicaly second tier DPS with good secondary healing.

Two pure healer was too much heals for slow killing and one wouldn't be enough or cause lots of whipe. So a pure healers and a support healers (tier 2 DPS and tier 2 heals) would make things easier while not slowing the group down too much.

As content got older it could be single healed but off-healers could just stop healign completly and focus on damage dealing.

But such game are more for a niche group of players IMO.

[Renathras]

We technically have this dynamic now with DNC...

True, but that's kind of my point - it's not a Healer Role split. It's a DPS Role split, and it's kind of haphazard. 3/4 Jobs sort of have it and sort of not:

PLD - A Tank with a lot of party healing and mitigation. All the tanks, honestly, have some capacity for party healing and mitigation (WAR does as well), but PLD has the most on-demand between Clemency, an extra raid mitigation, and the rare uses of Cover. No Raise for a "second healer". Its healing is a DPS loss, to the point it's rarely used without condemnation.
DNC - More a buff focus than a healing focus, but with some healing abilities. But its healing abilities weaved within its damage formula but also gated by long CDs preventing any kind of sustained support healing. No Raise for a "second healer".
RDM - Potential for sustained party healing, but the healing is more or less as weak as it can be and not be completely trivial. Best Raising potential in the game. Its healing/Raising is a complete DPS loss, however.
SMN - The only other non-healer with a Raise, but its healing outside of Phoenix once every 2 minutes is less than trivial. Phoenix healing is enough to be significant, but is time gated and cannot be held for situations needed, making it often useless overhealing.

We don't have a Healer system with this basis. Although here we could note that other than PLD (for rotational issues), the other three are widely loved classes, and of the people who do love PLD, one of the reasons is because of that support capability. SMN is the most played Caster (and possibly the most played DPS Job), RDM is still very popular, and DNC is the most played Ranged.

I'm not saying it's what would be used for SGE, but SCH and AST having a kind of hybrid support profile would probably be very popular. In effect, isn't this what most of you are asking for already? ARR SCH? Healer Jobs that maintain a DPS rotation and uptime with some damage ability interactions/CDs and such where most healing is done through oGCDs or ability interactions?

This would make the "Support Healers" more fun (rather than stale) in easier content for the players who are bored now, since you'd actually be playing something like DNC or RDM when no healing was needed, shifting more heavily into your healing tools only when the situation demanded it. I don't know DNC that well, but I know RDM decently.

[EDIT to clarify - I mean "A healer/new healer/SGE/SCH, whatever that played like this"]

I would envision something like imagine if RDM had its present day rotation with a few tweaks. Acceleration has a shortish CD (30 sec, maybe) and can be used on heals. Using it on heals generates more Black/White Mana of some set amount (less than if you were using your DPS rotation, but enough to partly refund GCD healing with damage) than their standard non-acceleration amount (which would be as much as Jolt 2) and make them instant cast. Maybe it guarantees procing Stone or Fire Ready (whichever Mana you have less of), the details aren't overly important here. It gains the abilities Vermedica (a simple AOE heal) and Vercure 2 (a larger single target heal). It would also have an AOE oGCD heal with a CD around 60 seconds (Vermedica 2, perhaps), a single target heal like Lustrate/Durchole with a 60 sec CD (Vergrammaton), a second heal that's basically the same thing, but consumes 10/10 or something White/Black Mana (Ver...lustrate?) (so like SCH with non-Energy Drain healing abilities, optimization would be to avoid using it, but it's there if you need spikes of single target emergency healing; RDM also already has something like this in live as a DPS with Enchanted Reprisal as a movement tool but one you generally want to avoid using unless you have to), and probably some kind of oGCD single target barrier, like VerStoneskin as either a Benison or Aquaveil equivalent (every healer has some kind of Aquaveil at this point other than MAYBE SCH depending on how you want to look at Protraction). Finally, healing GCDs don't break the melee/burst combo. If we wanted to, we could make more oGCDs use Mana or add an AOE oGCD that does or something, but this is just a framework.

So your oGCD kit consists of something akin to Physis, Tetra, Lustrate (spamable with Mana), and Divine Benison, along with, of course, Magick Barrier, which is outright (a weaker version of) Temperance right now, backed up by a strong single target spamable GCD backup heal (Vercure 2) and a AOE spamable GCD backup heal (Vermedica). And, of course, Verraise.

The gameplay would consist of performing the rotation just like today, and when your Pure Healer teammate needed more support, you could use your oGCD healing tools for spot or emergency healing, and in crisis situations, you could support with Dualcast 2x Medica or Cure 2 spam.

This would be a lot like ARR SCH with a main focus on DPS upkeep with oGCD healing support, having GCD backup heals for moments of crisis. The GCD heals could also be used with Acceleration to generate Mana, or could be used as Dualcasts at a minor DPS loss. Using it as the lead cast of a 2 spell pair would refund some of the damage lost by generating a Jolt 2's (spell you want to avoid/"consolation prize" rotation ability when you don't have Fire/Stone anyway) worth of mana. Still a damage loss vs Jolt 2 (what with not doing damage), but wouldn't interrupt your rotational flow if you're able to heal in this way - remember that being one of my considerations for the DPS minded healer, that their rotation flow be as little disrupted as necessary by healing needs in a general sense outside of emergencies.

Surely that wouldn't feel stale, especially since you were just mentioning how stylish and fun RDM looks?

It would still probably be looked at as inherently flawed by many dedicated healing players.

That's the point - dedicated healing players would, instead, play the other Healer subrole, let's call it Dedicated Healing (DH vs SH) to avoid confusion with the current "Pure" or "Barrier" names.

Again, just like in ARR where dedicated healing players didn't enjoy SCH and so played WHM, under this model, they wouldn't play the Support Healer unless they wanted that playstyle. In ARR, if a dedicated healer picked up SCH, they either adapted to or it swapped back to WHM when they realized Adlo wasn't Cure 2 and Succor wasn't Medica.

...I also find it a bit confusing you're arguing against this. Isn't this what you were asking all healers to become? o.O

The game would also need to output damage constantly in order to justify the healer role and not have the meta kill it for a 2x support scenario you mentioned,

P5-P8S say hai. Not trying to be snarky, just a smidge of humor. We just saw this, so it's clearly not a "change" here, it's what we have right now. It's also what we had in ARR and HW. I think you said before you'd been playing since then as well. Do you remember back when boss autos were actually dangerous AND could occasionally crit? That makes P5S's bleed look tame since at least it's anticipated and controlled.

and who knows how that would impact MSQ instance content.

It wouldn't. As you guys are fond of saying in your idea to change all the healers, MSQ would remain unchanged for the casual player so Healers not into that could play as they do today. No reason to change that.

Likewise, in casual 2 healer content, 2x Supports would work entirely fine. For example, in 24 mans now, you don't need a Pure and Barrier healer. You arguably could probably solo heal all those fights if your party members are avoiding avoidable damage. So for the purposes of ques - 24 mans, leveling dungeons, and so on - there would be no healer shortage even if the Sustain Healers were unpopular (they wouldn't be, btw), since the game could just grab Support Healers to slot in and have no problems.

You'd probably just have a different game entirely at that point.

P5-8S are in this game right here. And again, ARR and HW. I'm not sure it would be "different game entirely" nor "entirely alien" since it's both been this game in the past and is arguably this game this tier.

The reality is, that idea of healer is one that is dying because it was historically very unpopular in older MMOs

Not really. While it's true that some less players want to play them (hence splitting the role so you only need half as many), healers were traditionally more played than Tanks, and still are in a lot of games. Even in FFXIV, Tanks and Healers are roughly equivalent in number of players, and this is with the healing model being unsatisfying for many. So it's never been historically very unpopular, and has often been more popular than Tank. Still arguably is except in games that allow for a Support role. Note also that Support is something a lot of players enjoy, despite games not having it as a fleshed out role.

Non-scientific, but in polls of the Pantheon community, the split is roughly 18% Tanks, 22% healers, 30% Support, and 30% Damage players. Not exact, but Healers are a bit more than Tanks, and the DPS players split. In many games (no Support role), those players are forced into one of the other three roles, and tend to play either Healer or something like DNC/RDM and find themselves dissatisfied because it's not QUITE what they like best, instead preferring something like a Mesmer/Enchanter/Bard (Everquest type, not FFXIV type). Which is to say, there are a lot of players that genuinely want that playstyle and are kind of just left in the cold.

It turns out a significant amount of people kind of DO want to be a party cheerleader, just a lot of them want to be a different type of cheerleader.

Moreover, I don't think Dedicated Healers are nearly the vanishing base of players you do. I know players who ONLY play healers in games, and they don't DPS. You guys talk all the time about how many 0 DPS Sylphies you run into in all your dungeon and Party Finder Raids, right? Someone earlier said she ran into a healer that ran away from the enemies so they didn't damage any with Assize. Clearly there are a lot of these players (by your collective anecdotes) rather than it being a dying or vanishing playeerbase. If it was vanishing as you say, then you guys wouldn't have all those stories of the 0 DPS healers, right?

They want to engage with the gameplay, just from an angle of someone who prioritizes support and needs to make decisions based on the situation their in of when to attack, when to heal, when to support, etc.

At the risk of taking us to the unproductive place we were a few pages ago - I think here you're stating your own opinion as if it is shared by everyone. You say "They want to engage with the gameplay". Two issues with this are (1) Dedicated Healers ARE engaging with the gameplay, they just aren't engaging with a DPS rotation and (b) why is "They"? I get that "They" includes you, but are you of the mind that you can speak for the entire healing playerbase across all of gaming? Is that not a bold claim?

that these are suggestions would work within the structure that this game provides.

Ahem...

...many are not. For example, your two concepts (particularly the first one) above would not work with the current game encounter design and party structure as we have it today.

Moreover, what I proposed actually would work just fine. For non-Savage content, it would be irrelevant. For Savage content, you could probably brute force it just like people were able to get a single healer Ultimate clear. Dedicated players could probably 2x Support Healer it if the party as a whole made some modifications (DPS with more healing/mitigation utility) and played well (no taking avoidable damage at all), while the majority would opt for taking one of each healer. It would be no different than P5S if you had one Healer focused on healing all the bleeds while the other Healer focused on DPS, shifting to support healing during the heavy damage phases.

The game is already working like this in the current tier, and did in 6.1 (selfish WHM's forcing their co-healer to do 80+% of the healing is a perversion of this idea, and it literally worked - people hated it because it wasn't intended and designed for)

So I'm confused why you're saying this idea would require a "ground-up rework of the game" considering both of the previous raid tiers (both in the EW expansion) have had examples of this in the live game (clearly it hasn't required a total rework!), and the game also has this as the roots of what we have today, being the way healing worked in ARR and arguably HW...

I'm a bit confused how you're thinking it requires entire reworks when it's already what we have in live?

.

We don't "need to accept that DPS is a major part(y) of healer gameplay". Again, at the risk of before, that's what you need me to accept for your position to be the default and have precedence. (In other words, for your position to win "by default".) But there's no actual reason or necessity to do so. Current encounter design and healer gameplay shows we do not, in fact, need to accept that.

But besides that, this WAS a thought experiment. A "what if" and "how would it work if we did it"?

You will never appeal to Healers that don't like offense if you're presenting them with a choice of do more offense or be a worse player. Forcing them into casting non-healing support is only a marginal solution, as it will only appeal to a few, and will mostly appeal to Support players (from the Tank/Heal/Support/Damage paradigm), not to Heal players. In other words, it will appeal to players like you more than to players like me.

Imagine in reverse if we had a system where all your damage spells were treated by the community as a Paladin casting Clemency - you being bad. That you're only to use them in very niche cases. Surely you can realize you would find Healing very un-appealing in a game design where you were told to not cast DPS spells in group play and that they were just for doing solo instances. I'm not sure how you think the reverse is going to appeal to people who are your mirror. Can you explain this?

That is, I think you don't understand people that disagree with you like me. You seem to think my mindset is "I don't want to damage the enemy personally", or think that I/we want to play as a pacifist. Like I think it was Sem who said the Healer ran away from the enemy pack to not accidentally hit them with Assize. While I won't say NO ONE plays that way, I'll say that's not the majority of us on the other side. As I've expressed before, what I don't like are damage rotations and upkeep buttons/CDs. Like take RDM. I don't mind Jolt/Stone/Fire/Aero/Thunder/Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution, per se. I don't like being stuck in a rigid damage rotation while trying to heal. I also don't like abilities I need to use on CD or line up. It's why I hate DoTs and having to upkeep them, and on SCH often forget Chain Strat. My mind just isn't in that space.

Conversely, it's why I don't mind dealing damage (one-button Glarespam/Dosispam/etc) because I have no aversion to hurting the enemy. I have an aversion to something distracting me from party healthbars. It's also why I'm okay with charge CD direct damage abilities (like Phlegma) because I can use them in a wide span without a performance loss. I have a 40 second window to use Plegma in as opposed to Dia where I have a single GCD I must use it on or suffer a performance loss. It's the lack of flexibility that I had issue with in both your WHM change proposals, especially the first because of the length and rigidity in the burst window.

In short: It's not harming the enemy I/we have an aversion to, it's being locked in a rigid damage rotation or damage rotation that steals mental focus away from the fight and healing needs of the party.

Replacing "damage" with "support/buffs" tends to lead to the same result. It's why I don't find AST appealing (well, also the aesthetic, but the playstyle), and would only find it slightly more appealing if the Cards were GCDs, but not much more.

I'm just curious about how you're so certain of what other people think or how they'd react to changes... I agree that many players have the same focus and interest that you do. If I didn't think so, I would never have proposed changing any of the healers at all. I'm just confused why you are so resistant to see that the opposite is also true. Dedicated Healers (players) are no more dying than Support Healers are, for example. I'm just confused about how you're so certain of these things, as I've seen no data to really support it anywhere, and anecdotally, I'm hardly alone in how I think. Hell, as I noted, I purple/blue in 24 mans. That means around 3/4ths of Healers in FFXIV in general content (not high end raiders) dps less than I do.

.

But anyway, the point of the thought experiment was to see if you would like a Support/Damage-Hybrid Healer as a playstyle or not.

.

EDIT: And it's a bit ironic to me you guys are against that kind of Healer since...imo, I'd find a RDM Healer Job that played more or less as I described RDM above and slotted into the second Healer slot as...dare I say I would find it fun to play?

[Renathras]

Well, first, on a light note...

That's so weird. The only games I can think of (other than that one) where there was a Soul Drain type ability, it typically would either be Black Mage (Drain/Osmose) or some incarnations of Dark Knight, I think?

I respect the deep number crunching; however, one thing that I think is very important to keep in mind when we talk about theorycrafted ideas is that none of us have access to a prototyping build for the game.

This is true. But I guess my point here is that these changes would be identified and have to be changed. More saying I don't think it works out quite as you intend. Your intent seems to be to have an ability that normalize another to 3 uses per minute, but the problem is, this second ability is only used 2 times per minute. So there will naturally be some weird sync/desync/drifting.

One solution might to toss the Budding idea and just have Lilies naturally generate at a rate of 1/30 sec and have Banish exist to knock off 10 sec from that (like BRD/MCH can take off 15 sec from their oGCDs during that one BRD song/MCH's Hypercharge), but Banish would need a 20 sec CD for that to work. But this basically makes Budding a slightly more annoying GCD version of Presence of Mind - something you need to press like a metronome on CD.

...it is funny; it occurs to me that you guys hate a metronome 1 button spam (dipping bird with a 2.5 sec period could play the game for you outside of healing and Dia refreshing), but people like me hate a CD metronome (right now, I could set a dipping bird with a 60 sec period over my PoM button or 2 min over my Chain Strat button)

We both hate metronomes because we see them as annoying and uninteresting busywork where a dipping bird could play the game for us, but we hate different kinds of metronomic play.

...I feel like maybe there's a point of agreement/compromise there somewhere, but I'm not quite sure HOW since we each prefer the other form of metronome. XD

A handful of the issues...

Fair (for Second Concept). I assumed "after Tempest" meant "immediately following" rather than "sometime in the next 4 GCDs". That could work better (though I again think Budding does not). The First Concept still has the Banish/Budding/Dia/Misery problem due to CD drift, however. Like Dia isn't restricted by combo action, it's restricted by trying not to drift it.

Ultimately, what I care about most is the idea, because if the concept is sound...

100% understand. The first question to ask is "Is something like this feasible? If so, we can hammer out the details. If not...then there's no reason pushing the idea further."

From my take, your First Concept is not feasible without largely changing how the game, encounter design, and healing for WHM makes. Something like it would be feasible for SCH or particularly SGE, however, as I noted, because SCH can continue to heal even during those rigid points and SGE would be healing due to working through those rigid points via Kardia.

In other words, is the concept of building toward Tempest, Soul Drain, and Holy feel like a good idea...

I don't know how it would work with the option to engage with it or not (having Tempest be a separate button would create optimization where you would delay it for burst windows, so that would become "mandatory" and not optional). The more basic concept of several spells building to a bigger spell is fine. I think we've more or less seen this in different forms across Jobs. RDM uses it with Dualcast - Jolt/Stone/Fire into Thunder/Aero; AOE Aero/Thunder into Impact is basically this on a very small scale - and on a larger scale, with the Black/White Mana leading to the melee/finisher burst combo. PLD does this with its 1-2-3 leading to Atonement and now to Holy Spirit. WAR does this with Beast Gauge and Fell Cleave. MCH does this with Heat Gauge and Hypercharge.

...note the distinction between "builder/spender" and "cooldown". PLD 1-2-3 gives you a powerful attack (...sorta...) to use, which is distinct from FoF/Req/Conf, which is "use on CD/every 60/120 seconds. The latter is controlled by CDs, time gating, and the player having to remember to use a button around a certain time or set a stopwatch when they start the fight or have a raid leader in voice chat (who probably does that) tell everyone when the window is coming up. Conversely, the builder/spender gameplay is lower mental budget and part of actions the player is taking, thus making it more under the player control. Granted, this is much less than in the past when the player had options, such as PLD/WAR you really only have your 1-2-3 combo so it's just a "hidden CD" (were in the past you had several different combos and the Threat combo you could use, so there was more player choice in the rate these resources would be generated), but I think that's the distinction. Player agency/control vs the player being a slave to a CD clock.

But anyway, WHM even has a version of this with Misery, it's just not part of its standard rotation since Glare doesn't contribute.

Hence why I proposed myself every couple Glare/Dia casts (say 3 casts of either) leading to High Glare. It's basically the same concept, so I find that agreeable. (Dia included so you wouldn't have weird High Glare drifting and it's simply every X7.5 sec through the fight where you cast it, downtime aside). My issue is more the comboing and the drifting, and in the case of making the optional control scheme, optimizing distinction.

But the core concept of "every X casts, you get to cast something else that is bigger and feels a smidge more satisfying" I find agreeable in vacuum.

Now, to talk about Afflatus Budding for a moment...

Right, I understand. But I think the solution here is just to make Regen/Medica1/2/Cure1/2/3 generate a Blood Lily 1/3rd when used. The reason is because your proposal is trying to do this same thing, but on a CD, meaning they are only buttons you don't want to stay away from once every 20 seconds. So that doesn't really fix the problem, since you already can use Cure 2/Medica once every 20 seconds without a DPS loss anyway (Solace/Rapture). It's just the same rotation as today with extra steps and a SLIGHT change in that you'd use Medica 2 instead of Medica 1 (Rapture is Medica 1 but Medica 2 is better in every way at only a slight MP different) and could use Regen without a damage loss (but it's already an instant cast, so that doesn't change anyway)

And it's only once every 20 seconds, so it doesn't introduce any additional flexibility in that sense.

And as I said, it rings too close to me to SB WHM Lily interactions with oGCD CDs. And I've made no secret about how I feel that was the single worst iteration of WHM in the entire history of FFXIV. It was the one expansion I DID NOT main WHM, that's how bad it was.

I just feel like "reduce CD on..." abilities are not good design for heals. They only seem to work well, imo, to DPS oGCDs, and only when the rotation is really strongly tuned for that, like MCH is.

Another adjustment I mentioned in the past that I kind of just default to in my mind for WHM is that you should be able to generate 2 blood lilies,

See, this I disagree with for the argument Shurrikhan was making - it highly prioritizes unintuitive "heal when no healing is needed" gameplay to stock Miseries for burst windows. It actually is the opposite of what I'd do. Sure, you could have the CD on it for 20 sec, but (a) some buff windows are longer (Searing Light is 30 seconds) and (b) now there's no point in being able to stock them in the first place other than it gives a TINY bit more flexibility to Lily heal use, but that's already an 80 second window, so more flexibility (to prevent overcapping) there isn't really useful or needed.

...because you can now more comfortably hold onto your blood lily for an upcoming buff window and not feel like you can't heal until after.

Yes, but another solution is to just have Misery be DPS neutral and all heal GCDs generate 1/3rd a Misery charge. This way, you feel like you can heal whenever you want/need to, and you just cast a Misery after any 3 heals. The only niche optimization is if you have a multi-hit attack (SoSEx, ZodEx, etc) and you Medica 2 the first strike, Cure 3 the second strike, Medica the third strike, and Cure 3 the fourth strike, then let your HoT from Medica 2 heal up the party after the fifth strike, you'd overcap a Misery there. But this is a pretty edge case that I don't think is really a problem in the grand scheme because of (a) how unusual these mechanics are and (b) how the focus is more on just getting through them anyway, so sitting on a Misery wouldn't feel TOO terrible, not to mention if you were about to have a Misery when it started, you could just cast the Medica 2 early and then dump the Misery. Not to mention in the live game right now, when you do have to do that, it's an absolute DPS loss anyway. At least this way you'd get some refund of that.

I dunno, I just don't feel like it's a big enough problem overall to require a Misery change to stacks, and then we'd be having to do things like band-aid the 20 sec CD and stuff to prevent misuse. Just seems like a solution to a niche problem that generates more problems. Like giving someone a medicine for a minor issue they aren't even complaining about and that's not a threat to them that then requires another medicine to deal with the side effects.

If someone's not keeping up with their DPS, they're spending less MP.

I...think it's the opposite. All heals cost as much MP (or more, as much as 3x more) than our DPS buttons. You go into a MP deficit when you cast heals. All the healers are designed right now, with nominal levels of Piety, to be approximately MP neutral for long periods if they're only casting their DPS spells while using Lucid and Assize/Aetherflow/Draw/Astrodyne/Addersgall abilities on or near CD.

Honestly, I hate Lucid (now that it's not useful for threat reduction like Shroud of Saints). My personal opinion is that it's yet another "dipping bird" ability. I'd rather Piety just be boosted so we have the same overall MP regen over a fight. It's only REALLY useful if you use it just after being Raised. But if you're using it somewhat on CD, it's likely to be on CD when you get Raised anyway, meaning it loses that supposed flexibility.

Super short, though:

I don't have any problem with a sort of 1-1-1-boosted setup. And I already made a suggestion for Water as a low level Assize. And I still think GCD heals generating 1/3rd Misery is a good idea. So within there we have agreement on...uh...Water being added as a low level oGCD that upgrades to Assize, which itself has a "release" secondary effect once used to better make use of the heal.

...hey, it's not EVERYTHING, but some agreement is still agreement. Progress! \o/

.

One more quick aside to the spell effects:

Honestly, call me easily amused, but I just love the casting animations in this game. The character model and visual effects. I have spent literal minutes just casting Holy before in my inn room just because I like the visual effect of it and the float cast animation. When I'm bored, I'll sometimes start/cancel cast that spell over and over just because I like the way my dude spins and hovers. I've said since ShB gave Glare the same animation I wish there was a HEALING SPELL that used the float cast, like Cure 3/4 would be a good candidate, if not Medica 2. All the WHM healing spells are much more grounded. I still love them, but I'd like to change it up a bit.

And from the moment I started the game as a CNJ 9 years ago, I fell in love with the little Cure 1 cast kind of gathering power in the staff before raising it to heal someone. I took part in the "Cure Initiative" back in the day. I also LOVE Physic's cast and am genuinely sad we don't get to see it more. One hand across the other arm as you charge power in your book. That's just so cool to me. Also Adlo/Succor's book slam. There's something of a "I SAID you aren't hurting my ally; last word!" finality of it. Like putting my foot down or something. Even the sound of the book slamming shut is well done. And I love Eu Diagnosis with the Nouliths spinning around to deploy the shield, but honestly, have you ever sat and just cast Prognisis? The non-Eukrasia one? Arms out to the side, gathering power in the Nouliths, then deploying it. Another cast I almost never get to see except when spamming it for Hunt trains so the boss doesn't die TOO quickly and my party still gets full credit (based on agro generated, so AOE overhealing works a treat)

So you talk about being bored with spell animations...I'm not sure that's even possible with me.

Just my $0.02:

Worthwhile points.

Tot he thematic kit argument, though - keep in mind this is always true. Priests in WoW can heal or DPS, but they can't tank. Maybe you love Priests, but if you want a Priest-tank, you have to play a Protection Paladin and just kind of headcanon it. Other than a TINY point in Cata/Mist/Warlords (I forget which, but that one Demonology Glyph), you can't tank (or heal) on a Warlock. There's a point where thematic kits are limited.

The issue here is more FFXIV's engine/battle system is...very rigid. You can't really lean into different directions. You're either playing right or you're playing wrong. RDM's can't play as pure casters, they HAVE to use their melee combo. They also can't play as pure melee just getting the Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution finisher periodically. I mean, in theory they could KIND of do that (using Manafication with their 1-2-3 and Fleche/Contre on CD as their filler), but it's clearly playing wrong and will tank their performance. The only real exception to this is BLU.

Would it be cool if RDM was tuned where you could EITHER use the Jolt/Stone/Fire/Aero/Thunder gameplay today to build into an Enchnated Melee combo OR you could somehow use 1-2-3 and play as a melee to do so (e.g. every time you complete the Combo, it reduces the CD of Manification, and the non-enchanted 1-2-3 is tuned to where both playstyles do the same DPS; and likewise have a CD you could use in place of Enchanted 1-2-3 that does roughly the same damage and grants access to Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution so if someone wanted to play RDM as a pure Caster with no melee they could)? Oh absolutely! I would love it if you could flex and do any of those three you wanted to.

...but the game's battle engine is way too rigid and doesn't allow that.

I would love it if FFXIV was more flexible, but it sadly isn't. There's one right and wrong way to play a given Job, and if you're not playing the "right" way, you're wrong. So there's not really a way to make flexible playstyles within a given Job. There IS a way to make different playstyles within a given Role, however.

.

Hm...just an aside:

Did you play SCH in ARR?

If so: Did you like it?

It is not possible to achieve this without going in the 2x support meta for single group content.

Why?

Otherwise, you either make one of those 2 healing group useless.

Howso?

If the support/heals can't main heal your group why would you pick them but if they can main heal why would you want a pure healer that would simplie makes your run slow and more prone to failing a group mechanic ?

Well, they'd do similar levels of damage, though the AST/SCH situation would still exist...but that exists today. So at worst, we'd be no worse than we are today.

As for the "Why would you pick them?", until you overgear the content, the Pure healer can't solo heal. But you don't need 2x Pure unless you want a big safety buffer, but you could use SOME suplemental healing. This is why you would bring the Support early in the tier. As the tier got longer on and people got more gear, your Support needs to do less and less damage until you get to the point your Pure can more or less solo heal it. At that point, you have two options, you can either swap out the Support and solo Pure heal it with an extra DPS Job (for faster clears) OR you can swap out the Pure for Support/Support for them to share the healing load while buffing the party's output enough to also speed up clears. OR you could just keep your same party you've been clearing all this time with no issues; your Pure healer is healing and your Support healer is doing damage and throwing buffs and is still there for spare healing if people make mistakes or your Pure healer dies/Pokeball DCs at a bad time.

Now, people could do Pure/Pure early in the tier if they wanted, just like people can do SMN/RDM double caster now if they want super wipe prevention. But in practice, few parties do this, and if that's an option for the extreme risk averse parties...why are options bad? Conversely, very high end players might push Support/Support early. But again, why would it be bad for a few people to do a thing they have a choice in the matter of? And how is this different than parties running AST/SCH today?

People still didn't generally SCH/SCH in ARR, or WHM/WHM in ARR, even though they could have, because they did have trouble with the healing requirements. In SB (and some later in ShB), one of the few bright spots for WHM was that it was useful in late-tier solo-healer runs. During the tier, the general flow was Pure/Barrier, then you could branch into either Support/Support or Pure solo for late tier (once content was overgeared) parties. So you'd start the tier with WHM or dAST + nAST/SCH, and later in the tier, you'd have dAST/SCH or WHM/extra_DPS_Job. But, both were functional, so if a friend group only had two WHMs or two SCHs, they could still clear content, they'd just have to have their party adjust.

This is, of course, a niche optimization thing - only very high end players would even be considering this, so it wouldn't affect 99% of the game. But your trade-off late tier or in Ultimates would be 2x Support OR solo Pure if you're pushing for speedruns. But for casual or midcore groups, or even some hardcore groups that are chill and not pushing speedruns, this wouldn't be an issue at all. So even in that situation, it wouldn't turn into a Support/Support meta OR a meta that excludes Support.

And if we were REALLY worried about Support/Support becoming meta, we could just make it where their buffs don't stack (Bloodlust/Heroism in WoW with the "Sated" debuff) to hard-code prevent that. But I don't think that would be necessary at all.

Finally, consider the proposed changes (making all healers play a Support Healer playstyle instead of a Pure/Dedicated Healer one) as the alternative simply REMOVE the Dedicated Healer playstyle entirely, meaning if we're worried about Pure Healers being out in the cold of the Support/Support meta, if ALL Healer Jobs are turned into Support, then the entire game would all be Support/Support anyway!

Again, it's important to note that this is no worse than the situation we already have today. So at its worst, this idea produces an end result no different than what we already have now. What this allows is more party/player choice and options, which is a good thing.

[ty_taurus]

We don't "need to accept that DPS is a major part(y) of healer gameplay". Again, at the risk of before, that's what you need me to accept for your position to be the default and have precedence. (In other words, for your position to win "by default".) But there's no actual reason or necessity to do so. Current encounter design and healer gameplay shows we do not, in fact, need to accept that.

Accepting that DPS is a part of healing in this game doesn't necessarily translate to DPS rotations like what gets discussed. It just means accepting that DPS will always be the metric that is used to determine what actions a healer takes. What action either directly or indirectly yields the most damage? Even when you heal, you're making this decision either intentionally or unintentionally. Reviving a DPS? That's more damage than hitting Glare. Esuna-ing the Slow off the BLM? That damage the BLM is losing is probably worth more than your Glares. Using Medica II? Ideally, it's because the regen gained will result in less Glares lost than perhaps Cure III. This is even true of old Final Fantasies. There's not a prize for topping off the party. You're trying to not lose people so you can continue the battle and win the fight. Many players actually try not to heal in battle and instead heal after battle in older turn based RPGs, because all healing in battle does is slow everything down unless it's preventing KOs. An example of where this is accepted was in the buff to Afflatus Misery. It means accepting that players would not use lily healing for any other reason than being forced to as the reward of misery was not a reward, but a consolation prize.

[Renathras]

Accepting that DPS is a part of healing in this game doesn't necessarily translate to DPS rotations like what gets discussed. It just means accepting that DPS will always be the metric that is used to determine what actions a healer takes. What action either directly or indirectly yields the most damage? Even when you heal, you're making this decision either intentionally or unintentionally. Reviving a DPS? That's more damage than hitting Glare. Esuna-ing the Slow off the BLM? That damage the BLM is losing is probably worth more than your Glares. Using Medica II? Ideally, it's because the regen gained will result in less Glares lost than perhaps Cure III. This is even true of old Final Fantasies. There's not a prize for topping off the party. You're trying to not lose people so you can continue the battle and win the fight. Many players actually try not to heal in battle and instead heal after battle in older turn based RPGs, because all healing in battle does is slow everything down unless it's preventing KOs. An example of where this is accepted was in the buff to Afflatus Misery. It means accepting that players would not use lily healing for any other reason than being forced to as the reward of misery was not a reward, but a consolation prize.

I don't disagree that many people play this way. However, many do not.

Ask Jonny Casual if he's thinking about the difference between a lost Glare or a dead DPS doing more damage than him when he casts Cure 2 or Raise and he will look at you in utter confusion. "When someone's dead, I Raise them. That's what healers do. When someone's damaged, I heal them so their health bar isn't as empty and they aren't as likely to die. That's what healers do."

A midcore player (who isn't REALLY trying to optimize or parse) will probably mention the DPS difference, but it's more an aside than anything. They aren't actively thinking, when choosing to Raise or not "Would my Glare potency be more or less than this dead player's?" It's not a part of their active decision making process. (It probably isn't for most hardcore players, either, they've just internalized the decision.)

The buff to Misery wasn't "players would not use lily healing for any other reason". It was "high end raiders trying to maximize their parse or clear tight Enrages would not use lily healing for any other reason". And it wasn't even true of all high end raiders. People were using Lilies before the change. Some where just complaining about it. A lot.

I think part of the problem with the language barrier here is you are accurately describing a portion of the player base and gamers in a more general sense. The problem isn't that you aren't accurately describing that part (Double negative, but the point is, the part you're describing you are describing correctly). The problem is you aren't accurately describing them/us all as a whole. You're describing a part and then extrapolating that part's view onto the whole, leading to confusion and a difficulty to understand and reconcile the disconnect when you run into someone that is from the part you aren't accurately describing. It also seems to cause you to believe the part you're describing is either the whole or at least such an overwhelming majority as to be functionally equivalent (in terms of how the game should be designed), when we don't actually have evidence to support that and, at the very least (again, the Lucky Bancho numbers: https://i.imgur.com/t6eJLaj.png ) have evidence showing a significant portion of the player base (at the very least a large minority) doesn't fit into that.

[Shurrikhan]

To the thematic kit argument, though - keep in mind this is always true. Priests in WoW can heal or DPS, but they can't tank. Maybe you love Priests, but if you want a Priest-tank, you have to play a Protection Paladin and just kind of headcanon it.

Right, but that's because the thematic space of divine magics was already split into two classes -- one Plate, on Cloth. By Warcraft lore, a Paladin is literally a Priest who has joined a knight order and/or has received special training for the front lines.

And we're not talking the most basic of basic roles here; we're talking sub-roles. Those instead compose constraints by which, say, an Elementalist should be forbidden access to barriers or a Galvanic access to HoTs not necessarily because either is unfitting for either theoretical job, but simply because every healer/support/medic has to be either of Type A or Type B.

You can't really lean into different directions. You're either playing right or you're playing wrong. RDM's can't play as pure casters, they HAVE to use their melee combo.

That's a consequence of the game leaning so deep into role templates, though, and the kits offering no choice, not anything to do with its engine or even necessarily the game's broader combat philosophy ("WASD-DDR atop Other-Buttons-DDR").

Remember, it wasn't always that way. 2.0 WAR almost nothing like 2.0 PLD despite both being capable enough tanks (WAR favorable for adds and dungeoning, PLD for tanking bigger hits). Before that, even PGL and LNC could act as tanks.

Take, for instance, a SMN by that older design. Instead of simply deciding on an order for their three basic summons between alternating Bahamut and Phoenix phases, you'd have fewer, if any, pure damage summons and you'd use them as best you could leverage those additional features/differences, be they healing, mit, CC, party resource gen, or whatever else. At which point, yeah, a SMN could even off-tank or snap-tank via Titan and Alexander or off-heal or snap-heal via Phoenix or Slyph, etc. But more importantly to discussion of "sub-roles", they could preempt mechanics in order to better suit whatever's at their core -- rooting themselves in place under Titan or Slyph to avoid uptime loss to knockbacks, charging to target for additional uptime under Ifrit -- a slight excess of capacity overall kept in check because it can't all be used at once nor be used without foresight.

Now, in terms of 'sub-roles', would that make them a "mobile caster" because they could sprout wings and cast while moving while in Garuda's form? A "turret-caster" because they could start nuking via up to a few 3.5s casts? A "speed-caster" because they could use reduced GCDs, potentially helpful for constantly resetting stagger on a lower-HP but threatening enemy? Yes and no; mostly, they'd just... be "a Summoner". That means leveraging summons, which in turn means a ton of options none of which individually have quite the same depth ceilings of other jobs but collectively lead to a pretty gigabrain job just because that's what makes the most sense given the button-efficiency of having multiple gameplay-shifting keys (those summons). In the end, for the purposes of purely a "Magical DPS," that means having a solid but vulnerable core with lots of ways to capitalize on and support it that in turn could overflow into party support. And, to me, that'd be pretty great.

Did you play SCH in ARR?

If so: Did you like it?

I played every job in ARR, yeah, between main and this char. Could have been better, of course, but I liked it well enough. I definitely micro-managed my pet more than was necessary (causing it to stutter step, dodge every mechanic, etc.), though, so that may have been a bit part of that attraction. Solo healing a minimum-ilvl Titan Extreme on it was, yeah, pretty darn fun. I can't say I much care for SCH anymore though.

[ty_taurus]

I don't disagree that many people play this way. However, many do not.

Ask Jonny Casual if he's thinking about the difference between a lost Glare or a dead DPS doing more damage than him when he casts Cure 2 or Raise and he will look at you in utter confusion. "When someone's dead, I Raise them. That's what healers do. When someone's damaged, I heal them so their health bar isn't as empty and they aren't as likely to die. That's what healers do."

The buff to Misery wasn't "players would not use lily healing for any other reason". It was "high end raiders trying to maximize their parse or clear tight Enrages would not use lily healing for any other reason". And it wasn't even true of all high end raiders. People were using Lilies before the change. Some where just complaining about it. A lot.

I think part of the problem with the language barrier here is you are accurately describing a portion of the player base and gamers in a more general sense. The problem isn't that you aren't accurately describing that part. The problem is you aren't accurately describing them/us all as a whole. You're describing a part and then extrapolating that part's view onto the whole, leading to confusion and a difficulty to understand and reconcile the disconnect when you run into someone that is from the part you aren't accurately describing. It also seems to cause you to believe the part you're describing is either the whole or at least such an overwhelming majority as to be functionally equivalent (in terms of how the game should be designed), when we don't actually have evidence to support that and, at the very least (again, the Lucky Bancho numbers: https://i.imgur.com/t6eJLaj.png ) have evidence showing a significant portion of the player base (at the very least a large minority) doesn't fit into that.

There are 3 realities about gamers that game designers need to understand and recognize:

1. There will always be a community of gamers that will discover the fasted road to victory, or the most efficient way to play. This community will seek out and attain "perfection."
2. There will always be many more who follow that community of gamers to reach the highest level of play; a few will reach that, but most will fall short somewhere along that road.
3. There will always be some gamers who are unaware of or who do not care about seeking "perfection" and will play whatever way feels most natural to them.

Good game design seeks to create an environment where all players who are interested in the particular genre can feel satisfied with the provided experience. Not all decisions that can be made in respects to how DPS determines healer gameplay along that road to max efficiency are inherently harmful to those in the group that are unaware or do not care, such as the example of Afflatus Misery. Making Misery DPS neutral may not have mattered at all to Jonny Casual, but what it did do is provide a QoL improvement to the WHM experience for those who seek perfection and those who obtain perfection both from a raiding perspective as well as a casual perspective, because now instances of afflatus healing and misery can be used in easier content comfortably.

And even if someone is not consciously thinking about the choices that yield the most damage as a healer, their actions are still supporting that regardless. Not every choice will be the "right" choice per say, but people are not healing their allies because every time you restore their HP, a star is obtained, and whomever has the most stars at the end of the fight wins.

[ForsakenRoe]

The main reason Dedicated healer/Support healer split would not work is super easy to foresee: in the format this game has for encounter design, healing is binary. You have enough, or you don't and wipe. Coincidentally, this is the reason the devs don't 'understand what we want' from healers. Tanks don't complain that they 'want to do less damage, and focus more on mitigating and holding aggro', because everyone playing tanks likes to hit Confiteor and Double Down (well, when they crit). Only healer seems to have this split of players, where some want to do more damage, and some don't want to. Anyway, back to the point, once the 'Dedicated Healer' is at the point where their healing is causing big amounts of overheal, the questions come up: Do you force them to swap to a Support healer for more damage? Do you ask them to do damage when they don't need to heal (completely negating the point of them being 'the dedicated healer')? Is there some reward in place for them overhealing, to enforce the idea that they shouldn't be doing damage?

Let's say the healing in a raid is covered 100% by the Dedicated healer. If it's possible to remove some healing GCDs from their load, by having the Support healer throw out some occasional heals like Indom or such (tools they would need to have, in order to get through solo-healer content like a 4man dungeon), then the Dedicated healer does what with the newly freed up GCDs? Presumably, damage. So instead of 4 healers who all do somewhere in the ballpark of 6k damage, it reads to me like this idea is 'lets have 2 healers that do 6k, and 2 healers that get saddled with more of the healing responsibility, and because of that only get up to 2k damage.' Now, this might sound satisfying at first, having a healer that is 'the dedicated HPS machine'. But this is meant to be for the benefit of 'players who don't want the stress of managing a DPS rotation', right? So, here's the kicker: with this idea, the point of failure for 'we didn't have enough healing' goes from two healers, to mainly being the burden heaped onto just one. 'Why didn't we survive this mechanic' changes from 'we didn't get healed enough from WHM, maybe also if we had more mit from SCH it'd help WHM keep up' to 'the WHM did everything wrong'. Especially when you factor in how in this tier, where a DPS missing Feint or Addle would often translate to 'where was shields and mits SCH/SGE?', and when you say 'I used them, you didn't use Addle' they say 'go again' and drop the conversation before the fault can properly be assigned. The healer is the first point of blame for a wipe, and this would just reinforce that perception like tenfold imo

Unless we're suggesting keeping mits on the Support. In which case, it's the Pure/Barrier split, renamed? I'm not getting it. But all in all it sounds like a design being written for a FFXIV that doesn't exist, and cannot exist, because people have formed a perception of how it plays. Over 8 years of 'healers need to pump as much damage as possible' is not going to be undone. Even if the gameplay is changed to try and enforce one healer to be 'the HPS bot' and one to be 'on standby to spotheal', people in this game will find ways to try to reduce the GCDs used by HPSBot, so they can do damage too. The only solution that comes to mind is to make HPS requirements tuned in just the right way, to have HPSBot's HPS be mandatory, and DPS requirements such that Support-Healer's DPS is mandatory. Enforcing the 1/1 the Pure/Barrier split is meant to. However, as with P/B, that would only work in week 1/2/3 prog. Once gear comes in, we're back where we are now. And it still doesn't address the fact that in more casual content like dungeons, if SupportHealer is able to heal through the EX roulette (and they'd have to be able to by design), HPSBot Healer's HPS is going to be redundant.

So while I can appreciate the sentiment behind the idea, I think it's just not feasible in execution.