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

[Sebazy]

Are we talking about casual players or casual content? Because no one's going to be worried about healing OR damage in normal modes or MSQ.

I'm talking about "casual player in the content where the extra healing would matter".

I assume you're referring to casual players yeah. When is said casual player ever going to see an enrage where the healer fumbling their DPS rotation will make the difference between enrage and a clear? Rather than viewing it in a negative light, consider tweaks that would make more sense. Why would anyone add a 10 potency dot? Do you genuinely think that's what people want or that Yoshida will impliment? (Mind you, never say never with SE!)

The solution is to chuck more potency on the extra kit and then quietly nerf MND scaling so overall DPS stays about the same but people don't get outraged over something else taking a nerf. Endwalker has already demonstrated this with how severely healer single target DPS regressed relative to other roles despite potency going up but very few people cared.

Re BarbEX, Knuckledrum does about 700k raid wide over 15 seconds, RubiEX's Inferno does about 1.2 mill over 30 seconds, however people spend a lot of that at max range and out of reach for Indom etc. RubiEX is actually spikier with fewer but bigger hits vs Knuckle being more akin to rapid smaller AOEs with one big hit. The key reason why Inferno is a snore and Knuckledrum is great is the pace, both in how little time it gives you to setup but also exactly as you mention, you can't just bank all your CDs for it.

Agreed on an EX5 ultra, stopping the puzzle phases from being a target dummy once you learnt the pattern would have transformed the fight into something much better.

I'll also had thundercloud style procs aren't bad, though I'll reiterate for the 100th time that the native client - for all of us who don't use add-ons - does NOT have a good way of telling when something has procced

As things are I use a jumbo scale vertical pair of unbound hotbars that place important cooldowns and procs right next to where my character is on screen. As you say, hotbars off in Narnia aren't great for tracking things, but icons next to your character? That's the good stuff. However the ideal solution would be for SE to integrate key procs into a visual effect on the job gauge.

On the other hand, mismatched duration DoTs is one of the worst things to do. They're one of the hardest things to keep track of - DoTs in general are because of how you can't get the native HUD to show them off by themselves somewhere to make them easy to track or see when they've fallen off (a tiny icon with even tinier green number that's only a shade off from being the same white as all the other tiny icons with tiny numbers) under a boss health bar doesn't really help.

Perhaps this is something that will improve now that Yoshida has accepted that they need to take better inspiration from various plugin tweaks such as enlarged dot and debuff icons and clearer timers. Good use of focus target also really helps in this regard.

DoTs are probably the most un-casual friendly form of DPS, and it's really weird to me how hardcore players don't understand that.

I'm glad you said this as I managed to dig up some math I did a few years ago on this exact topic. Having a larger portion of your damage come from Dots relative to your nukes actually raises the skill floor and lowers the skill ceiling when it comes to overall DPS. The TLDR is that dropping GCDs or simply spending more GCDs healing vs DPSing hurts a more dot centric job less than it does a more nuke centric job. It's much easier to do a reasonable job of maintaining dots than it is to min max GCDs on Glare. Have a closer look at those bottom percentiles of SMN back in the day, I'd assume they were just players that were mashing ruin2 because they didn't care and weren't interested in doing any more than that. You can't really balance anything around that sort of player.

A more helpful and grounded way to look at this is to look at how the value of slamming every last GCD diminishes slightly when our dots carry more of our potency per tick vs our nuke.

Here's a couple of super basic timelines, the first potency is the complete potency so far over the timeline, the potency in brackets is dot damage only. 10 GCDs total, We're going to miss the 5th and 7th GCDs with a heal on both occasions.

Example A: What we have now - 290 Nuke, 70 Dot - 3310 potency over 10 perfect GCDs

1 - Dot - 70
2 - Nuke - 430 (140)
3 - Nuke - 790 (210)
4 - Nuke - 1150 (280)
5 - Heal - 1220 (350)
6 - Nuke - 1580 (420)
7 - Heal - 1650 (490)
8 - Nuke - 2010 (560)
9 - Nuke - 2370 (630)
10 - Nuke - 2730 (700)

Example B: 210 Potency Nuke, 140 Dot - 3290 potency over 10 perfect GCDs

1 - Dot - 140
2 - Nuke - 490 (280)
3 - Nuke - 840 (420)
4 - Nuke - 1190 (560)
5 - Heal - 1330 (700)
6 - Nuke - 1680 (840)
7 - Heal - 1820 (980)
8 - Nuke - 2170 (1120)
9 - Nuke - 2520 (1260)
10 - Nuke - 2870 (1400)

It's super simplified but hopefully it gets the point across. Example B has 20 less peak potency in a target dummy style setting, but yet comes out 140 potency ahead in the end with 2 GCDs missed. The more GCDs you miss, the more example B pulls ahead.

More emphasis on dot damage over nuke damage absolutely raises the skill floor for healer DPS and makes using GCDs for something other than a nuke less 'wasteful'. SE are absolutely missing a trick by not taking one of the healers down this route. Load them up with dots, add a 2.0 Bane style cooldown for good measure and you've got something that'll feel legitimately different for very little work.