Paired Threads: What would it take to make Heaker kits "complex/interesting"?

[Renathras]

Imagine a situation where a casual player is struggling to keep up with the incoming damage of the fight. Now imagine we have two universes, and in each one, one of the two suggestions was put in place. In the 'healers now have more tools to do damage with' universe, the casual player feels no difference between the 'Source universe' as it were, that we have now, and their hypothetical universe, because they're busy fighting for their lives to GCD heal through the pain. In the other hypothetical universe, the healing requirements were increased, and as such the casual who was already struggling to stay afloat versus the oncoming damage, now is unable to keep up and the party wipes. When I say 'casual friendly', I mean that 'in an emergency, this change can be ignored for the sake of keeping the party alive'. You can't ignore an extra 20% (or however much) HPS requirement, or people drop dead.

There are two problems with this scenario:

1) In the more DPS scenario, now the party wipes because they didn't meet the enrage check when the casual player dropped their DoTs and DPS rotation.

2) In the "more healing" universe, the casual player shifts to spamming more GCD heals while the hardcore player would be using their oGCD toolkit more fully and sprinkling a some GCD heals into the mix. The whole reason we have the GCD heals right now (in theory) is as backups in case you run out of oGCD resources. Take P5S, for example. You can deal with the bleeds by using Regen (a GCD) and some oGCD. If you burned all your oGCDs and Lilies, you can fall back on Cure 2. This system works because the hardcore player can be efficient while the casual player isn't outright punished, they just are quicker to fall back on the "easy to use" tools. MP is so free that it's not an actual limiting factor.

The only way the more DPS buttons isn't unfriendly to casuals is if the amount of increased damage is negligible. "Yeah, you have a second DoT! It does...10 more potency than Glare! Woo!" Where it's so negligible dropping it isn't going to make or break any clears.

As for old Ultimates: That's already true. WHM doesn't get its first semi-spamable on the move heal until Afflatus Solace. While Ultimates require more care than "use on CD", Assize and Asylum are still not up all the time, and Tetra is single target. Moreover, many of those GCD heals have 1.5 sec cast times, allowing for ample slidecasting, a skill Ultimate raiders can't get by with not having. But if that was REALLY an issue, we could just make it where casting heals does not break on movement and the problem's solved. Or conversely, make all GCD heals instant cast like Lilies. I'm sure you'll reject all of those, but those would settle the issue.

And as you note, this is ALREADY a problem with old Ultimates, and hasn't been this huge issue garnering national attention or Dev changes. So it seems unreasonable to suggest that a change would force it to when it already is a problem that is already unaddressed.

oh, and if you had asked people 'which would you rather SE design fights like more, regular design where things hit like wet noodle, Abyssos with harder hitting raidwides and bleeds after to emphasize mitigation, or Barbariccia where it's not the damage that's the challenge, but the frequency it comes out at',

Probably Abyssos. I haven't seen anyone in the replies mention Barbaricca. I know a lot of hardcore players like Barbaricca, but it was murder in PF after week 1. Though part of that might have been the pretty punishing body check with the stack + 2 meteors bit.

Are you at all familiar with the concept of the "day crowd" and "night crowd" relating to the Jesus story? Not a religious thing, but the concept? The idea is that Jesus seemed to be beloved by the people, then all the sudden, they were demanding his execution. The theory goes "well, they were two different groups of people". Basically, the normal people out in the daytime loved him, but the aristocrats and elites out at night and their hangers-on hated him.

I think there's a similar concept here where the hardcore and high end raiding community likes certain things but the playerbase as a whole isn't in agreement.

But we all play the same game. So the way to handle the problem is to make the differences in the kinds of content we clear (something not shared) not in the Jobs (something shared). That is, if they add a DPS rotation to WHM, that DOES affect everyone. Remember Cleric stance? Remember casual Healers getting witched at for not using it (and hardcores getting witched at FOR using it)?

On the other hand, if the change is to CONTENT, that's far less of a problem. For example, if P9S is made like Barbaricca and Ex6 is made like Ex2 (granted, Hyd was a bit harder than the normal launch Ex) and normal/MSQ is made like it always is, then everyone wins, since the content doesn't bleed over. Savage isn't MSQ pushover easy and midcore Extremes aren't Savage hard, and people aren't witching at each other for using or not using their full DPS toolkit.

We are (I think...?) in agreement that damage should be more consistent and not 10 second of huge spike then 60 seconds of downtime.

[Sebazy]

1) In the more DPS scenario, now the party wipes because they didn't meet the enrage check when the casual player dropped their DoTs and DPS rotation.

...


The only way the more DPS buttons isn't unfriendly to casuals is if the amount of increased damage is negligible. "Yeah, you have a second DoT! It does...10 more potency than Glare! Woo!" Where it's so negligible dropping it isn't going to make or break any clears.

I'm not really sure how you can actually put that down as a valid point TBH. Name one piece of casual player friendly content in recent years where an otherwise entirely average but competent group wouldn't be able to clear if they had a healer that wasn't DPSing at all. The only one I can think of is E8S, and that's most certainly not casual player content even if it wasn't exactly the most difficult Savage turn either. If someone can do Lights Rampant in PF, I suspect they can maintain dots too.

To further expand on this point - Having more of a healer's DPS come from dots vs nukes actually makes things more forging and less impactful. Reapplying your dot a GCD late is much less impactful than missing a Glare GCD. I did a fairly in depth breakdown on this in another thread some time ago. Let me see if I can find it.

I'm not sure if BarbEx was as well received by the general playerbase as it was by the hardcore playerbase.

BarbEX is actually a more interesting case study than many seem to realise.

The big kicker is that if you look at the numbers, RubiEX is actually a bigger heal check on the 2 occasions where it genuinely requires healing. It also spaces the group out around the arena at this point making it difficult to reach people. If SE just cut out the portal puzzles it would actually be a pretty respectable healer check IMO, but as is, it just allows you to dump all your big cooldowns and lolstomp the aoe output without really thinking about it.

Meanwhile, BarbEX gets the thumbs up from me not because it hits especially hard because frankly it doesn't. Where it wins out however is the pace of the fight. It feels hectic, it doesn't have huge long sections of downtime with big nothing burger animations and sequences. Instead it's just relentlessly chipping away at you and it feels great for it.

It's the same secret sauce that makes fights like TitanEX so beloved IMO.