Has anyone quit healing?

[ForsakenRoe]

I suppose it makes it rather difficult for us to converse when we aren't even using the same sets of definitions for the terminology.

Ty originated the spicy talk with a discussion on difficulty, not optimization.

The problem is, they end up being the same thing in a meta of "damage >>>>> everything else". No one cares, for example, that you have the most MP and HPS efficient healing. People who DO care only care that you did that for the sake of optimizing DPS. If you have the perfect healing CD plan and then sit on your hands when not using your oGCDs, no one is going to praise you as a fantastic healer. So the only optimization, in a practical sense, that matters is damage.

And with a meta of damage beats everything, that means that the harder damage is to optimize, in a very real sense (and for all practical purposes), that is the Job's difficulty. Even when healing needs to be optimized to achieve that, as you're fond of pointing out, that is only another way of saying "optimizing DPS".

So I think we're still talking about difficulty, you're just using a different word for it.

Your dish argument seems to be more akin to aesthetics than to spice or difficulty, and so not...directly relevant.

I think the "four meats" in this case are "Tank, Healer, Melee, Ranged/Caster", not the four Healers themselves. But regardless, even if we look at it that way, consider the opposite: You're saying if people love Chicken (WHM) and hate Beef (SCH), Pork (AST?), or Fish (Sage), that you're only going to make Chicken that is medium or hotter. And if they don't like spicy, you're telling them they have to go eat one of the other three dishes. Then you tell them all of those dishes, too, are only served as medium or hotter, and if they want something mild, they have to leave the restaurant and go eat somewhere else because you don't cater to them.

I feel that's far more detrimental.

That conclusion is like, the exact opposite of what I'm aiming for. The point is that in a casual piece of content like EX roulette, you don't need to use damage AT ALL, because the content does not expect that from the player. As such, the level of skill with the class the player that the game demands, in that content, is 'mild spice' level. If you are a mild spice gamer, then you can do EX roulette and that is fine. The hotter levels of spice, in this context, are for the players who prefer to 'spice up their gameplay' with more complexity. If a current Chicken/WHM enjoyer like myself wanted to have 'more spice' (ie, a more engaging rotation), the takeaway doesn't do that level of spice. I get Korma or Tikka Masala at best. If I want Vindaloo spice, they tell me I have to have the Beef/AST dish. Some people don't want Beef Vindaloo though. I don't play AST atm because it's too much APM and makes my hands ache. I played it for week 1 prog of P4S and my hands were agony for the rest of the night after getting off of the PC. Other people like that APM and that's cool too. I do not see why it's a seemingly controversial take to have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling on all four healers.

Again, and I cannot state this enough, if you are in casual content, the whole 'extra optimization' thing is completely irrelevant. Look again at the chart I made. You, Ren, said you cleared P5S on week 3 or 4 in pugs. I'd say that puts you about halfway between the green and red bars in terms of what you're expecting from the classes. So the orange bars are, for you, completely irrelevant. This isn't intended as a dig at you, it's to show 'you have decided not to push yourself to the point where those bars become relevant to you'. If you were to play SGE, you wouldn't have a problem of 'I can't handle the Hot level of spicy rotation this class is capable of, so I can't clear the new EX trial with it', because the EX trial does not ask for the Orange bar. It wouldn't even be asking for the Red bar, it'd be like halfway between the Red and the Green. Hell, the full extent of the Orange bar doesn't apply to ME either, because I don't intend to go for rank 1 parses, or speedclear raids. But, it IS a yardstick by which to measure myself still. I might never reach 100% of that orange bar, but I can still see if I got from 75% of the way up it to 80%, and feel good about that too.

Like, take the whole suggestion I made of SGE having a gameplay revolving around Augmenting your damage to create damage>heal interactions. Maximising the effectiveness of that system, to get to zero damage-loss GCDs, would be the Orange bar. But you could get through EX roulette by just using Prognosis, Diagnosis and Dyskrasia spam (which would all cost 0 MP under my system). Just like how you could clear that EX roulette with Prognosis, Diagnosis and Dyskrasia right now. The skill floor would be unaffected. The skill ceiling would be raised a lot. The mid-point of the skill expression bellcurve would be moved slightly upward, due to the ceiling getting moved so much distance. The idea of 'raise the skill ceiling without affecting the skill floor' shouldn't be controversial, and it's not even difficult to implement, considering the game we're playing. We have solo instances that you can literally AFK and clear, THAT is the skill floor at times.

And again, I added the 3 categories to give more context, a more accurate presentation of the breakdown of what I want from the classes. If I were to just have an overall rating like you guys, everything would be in Medium, due to how averaging everything out would work out. And then we'd have 'why are all the healers in Medium why do you even have the other categories' again. Yes, the bars all refer to difficulty. But that isn't a problem, because the game itself also has expectations based on difficulty. The game doesn't demand a tank know how to do their rotation perfectly, or even to pop CDs apparently, in EX roulette. You could Overpower/Total Eclipse spam your way through a dungeon and still clear. Old PLD was a good example of what I hope for, from healers (besides the 'drop atonements' that was jank): You could press whatever really in a EX roulette and clear. You could drop your DOT a bit in EX trial and clear. But week 1 savage, and optimizing to get a rank 1 parse, involved catering specific amounts of skillspeed to get exact GCD timings, spreadsheet memes, etc. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.

I think the "four meats" in this case are "Tank, Healer, Melee, Ranged/Caster", not the four Healers themselves. But regardless, even if we look at it that way, consider the opposite: You're saying if people love Chicken (WHM) and hate Beef (SCH), Pork (AST?), or Fish (Sage), that you're only going to make Chicken that is medium or hotter. And if they don't like spicy, you're telling them they have to go eat one of the other three dishes. Then you tell them all of those dishes, too, are only served as medium or hotter, and if they want something mild, they have to leave the restaurant and go eat somewhere else because you don't cater to them.

This part gets it's own dedicated section, and we're going back to wings for this one for one paragraph. Bear with me on it. You ever watch Hot Ones or something like that? I don't really watch it, but it's suitable for the metaphor. So, rather than the 'meats' (healers) being served in a sauce, maybe it's better to explain my mental image as like, serving the customer their 'meat' (in this example, wings) and a selection of sauces of varying spice levels. They can then choose if they want to go with Teriyaki-EX, Savage Sriracha or the 'FFLogs Fireball Special' to put on that wing, depending on how hard they want to sweat.

Other people's restaurant menus in here might have WHM Korma, SCH Madras, AST Vindaloo, SGE Jalfrezi.

Mine has WHM Korma, Madras, Jalfrezi, Vindaloo
SCH Korma, Madras, Jalfrezi, Vindaloo
AST Korma, Madras, Jalfrezi, Vindaloo
SGE Korma, Madras, Jalfrezi, Vindaloo

My hypothetical restaurant doesn't need to say 'ooh sorry we don't do that dish with X meat, you'll have to get Y meat instead for that'. So I don't understand why I'm the one who's being limiting in this situation. Instead, I feel like I'm giving the broadest choice possible. Unless the argument is 'only the absolutely top possible level of minmax is valid for comparison purposes', which, no I've definitely put thought into 'how does this affect the casual playerbase'.

Now, if you were arguing for each Job to have specs, and the specs offer different difficulties - but the exact same output, so doing a harder easier difficulty is you just intentionally taking on more less work knowing you will not in any way be rewarded penalized for doing so -

See how weird this sounds when it's flipped? Why would, for example, a DRK who just throws out Edge whenever, who misaligns their Living Shadow/Shadowbringers from burst windows, and who just refuses to use Bloodspiller and overcaps the gauge for the entire fight, be allowed to have 'the same output' as one who is sweating to push maximum damage? The answer is, as I've outlined above, that the game expects the latter level of skill expression in some content, and not all. So the former DRK who just facerolls the keyboard is able to clear EX roulette just fine, but must practice if they want to tackle Savage. Same as I'd want for healers, Glarespam is not even required at all to clear EX roulette, and is more than enough to clear EX trials. You don't even need to put Dia on your hotbars to clear EX trial. But Savage would ask you to use the rest of your kit too.

If this game were to have 'specs' I'd do a lot more with it than just 'different rotation for the same job', I'd use it for like, giving a different role to each job. SMN/SCH split style. GLD/MRD could have a DPS spec, DRG/NIN/SAM could have tank specs, MNK could have a healer spec that uses Riddle of Water or something, MCH could have a healer spec that uses healing multitools (autocrossbow that fires syringes or something idk), DNC could be a healer like everyone thought it would be. And finally, at long last, BLU would have a spec where it is a regular ass job and can do content with people. Someone made this many years ago (when HW was current) and I thought it was cool as hell. At the time I thought 'damn I'd be a Valkyrie main so fast' but now I'm a healer. I'd probably mostly play Rune Knight