How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[ForsakenRoe]

For what it's worth, Ren did very specifically stat "healing ogcds" and not "every single kind of ogcd, fullstop".

And that's why I asked, 'why are we singling healers out with this change, just to 'fix' an issue with them in the most roundabout way possible', with it very likely not actually fixing the issue? Okay, let's say we now have every healing tool that is OGCD at the moment, now GCD. Every single one, even buff type stuff like Soteria or Krasis or Zoe. Even Pepsis! Let me go take a decent SGE run of mine (P8S doorboss):



So, let's be generous and say that EVERYthing is GCDs now, because the objective is to mix up how often we press our filler spell (Dosis). Personally, I'd keep stuff like Soteria, Krasis, Zoe as OGCD but we're taking it to the extreme for the example. We can see that, aside from me being kinda trash (one Soteria in an 8min fight, what are you playing at), around 60% of my skills used were just Dosis. Removing all of my damage GCDs (Dosis, E.Dosis, the Eurkasias for those E.Dosis, Toxicon, and Phlegma) leaves a total casts of 48. 48 x 2.50 (GCD) is 120 seconds worth of GCDs that would be spent on these healing tools. Exactly two minutes of extra encounter duration would be needed to fit it all in. So lets fit it in, by pruning the worst skills from our damage (that'd be the filler, Dosis). We take 48 casts of Dosis out to sub in these healing skills that we needed, leaving 83 Dosis. We then use an online calculator to find out what percentage of the total 213 casts that 83 is (because I'm lazy) and get:



...Let's call it 39%. This is still only Dosis, mind you. If we factor in Phlegma, DOT, Toxicon, the Eukrasias to access the DOT, we're going up to...



So, it is with no surprise that I can say, with evidence to back it up, that 'we will still be using over half of our GCDs on damage even if you did this'. And all of this workarounds and rebalancing healing potencies, all to desperately avoid the simple obvious solution of just making the over-half of our time, where we are doing damage, a little bit more interesting. Now, there's one situation where I'd give this idea credit. If SE actually ramped healing requirements so that the GCD heals are more required. WOW has stricter healing required even in their 'casual content', and it only goes up from there. Their 'most heals are GCDs' system works because there is so much TO heal, but even then there's time to sneak in a bit of damage. Or in some cases, like Paladin, Monk, Disc, you can do both at the same time. I hear Resto Shaman's got a talent that makes their 'GCD version of Asylum', Healing Rain, also do damage to enemies.

Oh, and there needs to be a solution to SCH. If the change happened to their fairy commands, it'd be untold levels of clunky awful feeling gameplay. If you specifically exclude the fairy from being GCD-ified, you lock SCH into being meta for the rest of time. We've already had like 6 straight years of it being a locked slot, we don't need to go back to THAT aspect of HW design thanks

[Iedarus]

I don't quite agree...but pretty much agree.

Honestly, the solution is simple but it won't happen. Start by basically removing oGCD healing from the game. Heals should be a trade-off, ESPECIALLY for non-Healers (Tanks/DPSers). Clemency is a trade-off, Bloodwhetting is not. DPSers shoudln't be pooping out massive healing as a oGCD fire and forget weave that costs them nothing to use other than the CD itself.

For Healers, they may keep a FEW (emphasis on FEW) oGCD heals, mostly long CD powerful ones used as emergency buttons or as part of a careful plan like how Tank invulns are - in other words, stuff like Benediction.

Outside of that, heals should be GCD abilities, with a few oGCDs that are either mostly weak or long CD clutch/strategic abilities.

oGCDs for Healers should mostly consist of modifier abilities. Things like Presence of Mind or Divine Seal that are focused around tactical use to further their GCD healing package, which should be generally weaker, but sufficient to deal with casual healing needs easily enough and obviously mostly functional for higher end content, using the modifier abilities to deal with situations that demand higher healing output.

.

Which would constitute "significant rethink".

...unfortunately, it would also piss off the players that enjoy doing most healing with oGCDs to maximize their DPS contributions, so...

EDIT:

Also this:

Having ample access to oGCD healing is fine. In fact, it should almost, if not entirely, be exclusive to healers. With how dps centric this game is, the healer role should be the least punished by healing. The problem is when SE makes so many oGCD heals that they run out of ideas for them and churn out garbage like Protraction in a desperate bid to keep healers from having more than two damage buttons. All they have to do is shave off the superfluous oGCDs and give us damage buttons in return. It really isn't rocket science.

[Icecylee]

And that's why I asked, 'why are we singling healers out with this change, just to 'fix' an issue with them in the most roundabout way possible'

...

So, it is with no surprise that I can say, with evidence to back it up, that 'we will still be using over half of our GCDs on damage even if you did this'. And all of this workarounds and rebalancing healing potencies, all to desperately avoid the simple obvious solution of just making the over-half of our time, where we are doing damage, a little bit more interesting.

It's less "singling healers out" and more "addressing the excessive amounts of free healing that's spread out around all roles in the game". (Also on a personal note I kind of do miss 2.x WAR having a defensive cooldown on the GCD in Inner Beast and kind of wish we had leaned more into stuff like that instead of moving entirely away from it, but that's that separate discussion entirely.)

And yeah, I don't think this one change would be the solution that fixes every problem healers in 14 have, I even acknowledges that I feel like we need more GCDs that contribute to the group's damage in the same reply. But it seems strange to me that people are so hostile to the idea of healers... spending more time on GCD heals. Or well, no, I do get it; it's because the game has actively pushed everyone into needing that mind-frame to play the role in Current 14 well. But still: it doesn't have to STAY like this. If all the healers were designed such that occasionally tossing out was not only normal, but the only way *to* deal with incoming damage, people wouldn't have to get up in arms anytime someone did it. It'd just be how you play the game. And yeah it wouldn't be a huge change, but like... even if it only winds up with you pushing dosis 10% less at best, that's still less mashing your filler spell and ultimately isn't that the direction we want to be moving in??? Again, not a perfect all encompassing solution, but imo it's one of the small steps we should be taking in parallel with other solutions.

[Silver-Strider]

It's less "singling healers out" and more "addressing the excessive amounts of free healing that's spread out around all roles in the game". (Also on a personal note I kind of do miss 2.x WAR having a defensive cooldown on the GCD in Inner Beast and kind of wish we had leaned more into stuff like that instead of moving entirely away from it, but that's that separate discussion entirely.)

And yeah, I don't think this one change would be the solution that fixes every problem healers in 14 have, I even acknowledges that I feel like we need more GCDs that contribute to the group's damage in the same reply. But it seems strange to me that people are so hostile to the idea of healers... spending more time on GCD heals. Or well, no, I do get it; it's because the game has actively pushed everyone into needing that mind-frame to play the role in Current 14 well. But still: it doesn't have to STAY like this. If all the healers were designed such that occasionally tossing out was not only normal, but the only way *to* deal with incoming damage, people wouldn't have to get up in arms anytime someone did it. It'd just be how you play the game. And yeah it wouldn't be a huge change, but like... even if it only winds up with you pushing dosis 10% less at best, that's still less mashing your filler spell and ultimately isn't that the direction we want to be moving in??? Again, not a perfect all encompassing solution, but imo it's one of the small steps we should be taking in parallel with other solutions.

Sounds like how Healers played in ARR and even then, Healers had more DPS actions and mitigation tools to juggle.

[ForsakenRoe]

And yeah it wouldn't be a huge change, but like... even if it only winds up with you pushing dosis 10% less at best, that's still less mashing your filler spell and ultimately isn't that the direction we want to be moving in??? Again, not a perfect all encompassing solution, but imo it's one of the small steps we should be taking in parallel with other solutions.

Problem is, it's a baby step that we are sat with for a whole expansion. And if we then go 'it wasn't enough of a step, go further with it', dev team will wring their hands, and go 'mmm well I dunno, cos if we consider the casual players...' and dither and delay about if they actually should follow through with it. Then another expansion later, they finally get another 10% of our Dosis casts out of the picture. It's too slow an implementation. The issue is severe enough that it warrants radical, immediate course correction. And the level of 'course correction' that I think would be needed, if done via the 'make the healing OGCDs into GCDs', would mean certain HPS checks at the end of fights, eg Terminal Relativity, J-Waves in TEA, and the like, would not be clearable anymore. They're designed to be cleared with 'use GCD healing, and mix OGCD healing in to keep up', so suddenly changing the OGCD tools to GCD means you're essentially removing a Medica/Helios of throughput from the player. Maybe there's a way to work around that from the player's side. Maybe there's a way to rebalance the OGCDs to have more potency. But again, it seems like we're going round the houses to try and solve the problem in the most roundabout way possible, all in order to avoid the simple and logical solution of 'just add some damage skills back'.

And yeh as Silver says, ARR. Or, I'd argue more apt a comparison is HW, where we had 'a couple of OGCDs' to AOE heal the party with, like Assize (used for damage only though usually, thanks Cleric Stance), Asylum, Indom, W.Dawn, and... Did AST actually have any? The bubble's regen didn't stick unless you channeled it, iirc. And Opposition extended buffs, not a HOT. Did it actually have ANY OGCD tools to heal the party, or was it just 'Essential Dignity on the tank and pray the SCH got it'? It's been so long I can't remember. I remember Disable though, they should bring that back

edit: Let me put my thoughts on 'But it seems strange to me that people are so hostile to the idea of healers... spending more time on GCD heals.', and push back against it. The problem is not 'that', 'that' is what we do in early progression. I've got no problems with throwing out a safety shield for a raidwide in week 1 prog. No 'competent healer' does, it's what we have to do to get the clear, so we do it. No, I think the problem is that as a player gets better at the fight, as a tank they get to do more damage and take less damage, as a DPS they get to do more damage, and as a healer we get to do more damage, yes, but do less healing, it's antithetical to the role's purpose. Changing all of our OGCD heals to be GCDs does not 'solve' this problem, it only delays the inevitable. It doesn't matter to me personally if 60% of my casts are Dosis, or 16% or even 6%. What matters is that, as I improved at that fight, my Dosis casts go from 40%, to 50%, to 60%. My 'reward' for getting better at the fight and my class, both in the current game and in this proposed 'solution', is that I get to press my boring damage spam skill a bit more often. THAT is what we need to address, and this proposal doesn't address it. Maybe we go down to 40% Dosis casts, like my maths said. Heck, in prog maybe we would be as low as 30%. But as we learn the fight, our 'reward' would be that we creep up to 35%, and then 40%. Players better than me could maybe even reach 50%. But that is the issue at the heart of it, the fact that the reward is 'press this one button more'.

It'd be like telling a tank 'hey you got better at the fight, okay your reward is you get to press your level 1 skill 25 more times in the fight'. No extra OGCD damage stuff like Blasting Zones, no bonus DOT ticks, no extra resources, just 'oh you get 25 more Keen Edges'. And maybe that player is so good they start parsing orange, and their reward? 35 Keen Edges.

[Renathras]

For what it's worth, Ren did very specifically stat "healing ogcds" and not "every single kind of ogcd, fullstop". And honestly I agree with him on this point, even. ogcd heal bloat is absolutely one of the largest factors in why we're stuck just mashing one GCD button over and over. Could we use more dps or support actions on the GCD? Sure, obviously. But if it wasn't so easy to just pop an ability with no opportunity cost and thus is far and away better than using a GCD heal, you're already losing out on having a good reason to change up that singular button you're mashing. And changing most of the healer heal-related ogcds into torqs instead of direct heals mean we can still have our frankly overpower heal options readily available, but ever so often you still gotta lay off the glare for a couple of seconds. Granted, this might do dumb shit to SCH in particular but it's not like SCH having stupid issues due to how their pet-but-not-really stuff works is anything new and they couldn't take a change like this as an opportunity to making it work saner on a fundimental level.

Moving all the dps/tank heals over to the GCD or otherwise giving them greater opportunity costs (like if shelltron/intervention's regen effect ate MP instead of just being added on for free) would also make it a hell of a lot less appealing to just outright replace healers with extra WAR/DNC/SMNs, too. No reason at all to assume that would need to apply to defensive / offensive buffs tho, which are very clearly designed from the ground up to be weaved. I get where he's coming from on this, and it's definitely not anywhere close to the worst idea he's ever had.

Oh wow. Thank...you...?

Ever see DBZ Abridged? There's the scene where Trunks and Vegita come out of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and Goku says something like "Nice haircut" to Trunks. In his mind (inner monologue), he's saying to himself "Oh my god! First positive words from another person in a year! Don't panic! What do I say? What do I say?" then says out loud "Thanks, I grew it myself." Then internally saying "Noooo!" but Goku responds "Neat.", leading to Trunks' inner thought saying "Just roll with it."

I'm...not used to someone seeing ANYthing I say in here positively. It feels weird. But thank you.

[EDIT: Heh, found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBdfrMwyvHk "TFS - Vegeta and Trunks emerge from the Hyperbolic Time Chamber"]

Yeah, it seems the big problem with healing right now is that Healers have WAY too much healing packed into oGCDs, leading to the Glarespam issue. They simply never have to break up Glarespam because their oGCDs take care of all the healing. In many cases, literally all of the healing. Add to that Tanks and DPSers having oGCD healing that's also powerful and you have a situation where you just don't have to take Healers as they've become redundant, or can solo heal things.

The obvious solution isn't just to remove all healing, but rather shunt healing into GCDs. ForsakenRoe brings up a valid point noting "What if Tank defensive CDs were GCDs?", but that's the thing, Tank defensives need to be oGCDs because they're reactionary to what bosses are doing but must be used before the boss completes the action. Or, the other class of them, are emergency abilities (invulns). Healers having those kinds of oGCDs (e.g. Benediction if it didn't have the time lag) make sense, and I even said as much in the above.

I would amend my above post slightly that there could also be oGCD heals besides big clutch emergency ones with long CDs, but they should be relatively weak, augmenting your GCD healing suite, not replacing it. Stuff like Fey Blessing or maybe even Whispering Dawn, for instance, that could be used to assist with maintenance of party health pools, but shouldn't be doing it in lieu of actual healing spells.

SCH would be the one hit weird by this since it's antithetical to the way they operate (WHM not so much since this is historically how WHM worked until arguably somewhere between SB and ShB, and it still has a somewhat thin direct healing oGCD suite), but it's not like SCHs are enraptured by Broilspam now, and as noted in the "Healers Then and Now" thread, SCHs are actually the the most "Glarespam" of the Healers now, more than WHM or SGE and on par with AST.

The current combat system is "If you're not doing damage you're dead weight.", the amount of effort to accommodate changing this would probably kill whichever tier they push those changes in. Just look how much bother the 2 minute buff and increased healing demands of abyssos changes have caused.

Debateable. Any such changes would come with an expansion, and boss health would be tuned for it. It's certainly no worse than adding complex Healer damage kits instead that boss health would have to be tuned to try and hit the average of a wider Healer spread of damage range. The fact that most oGCDs mirror GCDs already means the damage (to the party) wouldn't be as weird as it is now (where they're trying to stress Healers by stressing their oGCD kit use and the party's overall mitigation use), and it would be easier to tune boss HP pools and expected party damage if the Healer expected damage output spread/range/band was more narrow.

And that's why I asked, 'why are we singling healers out with this change, just to 'fix' an issue with them in the most roundabout way possible', with it very likely not actually fixing the issue?

1) It's not singling out Healers - I already pointed out that DPS and Tanks would be hit the hardest by making their healing all GCD forcing them to trade damage for healing if they wanted healing, like in the case with Clemency.

2) You use "fix" in quotes when this would be an actual fix, no quotes.

3) It's not the most roundabout way possible. It's the way that addresses the actual problems healing in FFXIV has right now - that healing is too powerful (oGCDs are a big part of that), that Tanks and DPS can contribute enough healing while still meeting damage checks so they can sub out Healers (removing powerful Tank/DPS oGCD healing directly addresses that, too), and that Healers are largely reduced to one-button Glarespam (which they wouldn't be doing if they needed to spend GCDs healing on a consistent basis). It addresses all the major problems healing in FFXIV has, as well as the breakdown of the trinity in FFXIV. Moreover, it's less roundabout than "Healers are bored with easy healing and one-button spam, so let's give them...just as easy of healing but now they push 2-4 DPS buttons more, doing a thing that isn't even their archetype design to do to keep from being bored." "More DPS buttons" is, if anything, the roundabout "fix". And it doesn't even fix the core problems, it just masks them by covering your boredom some while leaving the systems that make you bored and make your role feel unrewarding in place.

4) It very likely WOULD fix the issue - as noted in (2), it addresses all the issues healing has right now - the issue is if it might cause side-effects that might need to be addressed. But it should be noted that ANY change will. The "more DPS buttons" change would as well, since if encounters were designed around Healer damage (as we more or less agree they now are), the Devs now have a wider range to try to balance over, and have to decide whether to balance low (where the high end players find the content now falls over and is trivially easy) or high (where large portions of the raiding community are no longer able to clear content), and what even would be correct metrics to use and a correct place on that spectrum to place the "low" or "high" if they made that decision. It could also lead to the Cleric Stance fiasco again. This change is no more likely to cause major disaster than that would.

Okay, let's say we now have every healing tool that is OGCD at the moment, now GCD. Every single one, even buff type stuff like Soteria or Krasis or Zoe. Even Pepsis!

/sigh

Did you even read my post?

oGCDs for Healers should mostly consist of modifier abilities. Things like Presence of Mind or Divine Seal that are focused around tactical use to further their GCD healing package, which should be generally weaker, but sufficient to deal with casual healing needs easily enough and obviously mostly functional for higher end content, using the modifier abilities to deal with situations that demand higher healing output.

...in other words, stuff like Zoe and Pepsis would still be oGCDs considering they're modifiers, not direct heals themselves.

So, let's be generous and say that EVERYthing is GCDs now, because the objective is to mix up how often we press our filler spell (Dosis). Personally, I'd keep stuff like Soteria, Krasis, Zoe as OGCD but we're taking it to the extreme for the example. We can see that, aside from me being kinda trash (one Soteria in an 8min fight, what are you playing at), around 60% of my skills used were just Dosis.

With current encounter design and healing quantities on spells. I'm not quite sure how you're not getting this. These things wouldn't be the same. That's kind of the point.

...Let's call it 39%. This is still only Dosis, mind you. If we factor in Phlegma, DOT, Toxicon, the Eukrasias to access the DOT, we're going up to...

Again, this isn't relevant to the discussion since boss damage output and Healer potencies would be adjusted, but even if we assume that it is - that's not actually terrible since it wouldn't be DosisDosisDosisDosisDosisDosis, it'd be EuDosis Dosis Diagnosis Dosis Dosis Zoe EuPrognosis Dosis Pepsis Dosis Plegma Prognosis Dosis Diagnosis Dosis and so on. But, again, that's not relevant since the numbers would be tuned around smaller heals used more often.

Oh, and there needs to be a solution to SCH. If the change happened to their fairy commands, it'd be untold levels of clunky awful feeling gameplay. If you specifically exclude the fairy from being GCD-ified, you lock SCH into being meta for the rest of time. We've already had like 6 straight years of it being a locked slot, we don't need to go back to THAT aspect of HW design thanks

I mean, we could just leave things as they are now, I guess... /shrug

It's less "singling healers out" and more "addressing the excessive amounts of free healing that's spread out around all roles in the game". (Also on a personal note I kind of do miss 2.x WAR having a defensive cooldown on the GCD in Inner Beast and kind of wish we had leaned more into stuff like that instead of moving entirely away from it, but that's that separate discussion entirely.)

And yeah, I don't think this one change would be the solution that fixes every problem healers in 14 have, I even acknowledges that I feel like we need more GCDs that contribute to the group's damage in the same reply. But it seems strange to me that people are so hostile to the idea of healers... spending more time on GCD heals. Or well, no, I do get it; it's because the game has actively pushed everyone into needing that mind-frame to play the role in Current 14 well. But still: it doesn't have to STAY like this. If all the healers were designed such that occasionally tossing out was not only normal, but the only way *to* deal with incoming damage, people wouldn't have to get up in arms anytime someone did it. It'd just be how you play the game. And yeah it wouldn't be a huge change, but like... even if it only winds up with you pushing dosis 10% less at best, that's still less mashing your filler spell and ultimately isn't that the direction we want to be moving in??? Again, not a perfect all encompassing solution, but imo it's one of the small steps we should be taking in parallel with other solutions.

This.

It's why the "real healers" thing comes up so often, because people who insist they want to heal are actively hostile to the idea of...healing instead of doing more damage.

You're correct that the game has forced that mind-set, but that mind-set and the mechanics that have fostered it are ALSO the reason we're in the morass that we're in where everyone is upset with things being the way they are. It's time for a paradigm shift.

Sounds like how Healers played in ARR and even then, Healers had more DPS actions and mitigation tools to juggle.

Did they?

I've done comparative analysis before and, depending on which patch and how you're counting, WHM in EW has as many or, at most, one less, damage action than they did in ARR. Their oGCDs (other than Benediction) were also modifier abilities (Divine Seal, Presence of Mind - at the time used almost exclusively on heals) or utility abilities (Shroud of Saints, Swiftcast - then used almost exclusively on Raise). Their damage actions realistically consisted of Stone 2 (even then Stone 1 was not beneficial to use unless you liked the animation better and didn't mind doing less damage; for the record, I like the Stone 1 animation better, but we have to be honest), Aero 1 (Dia), Aero 2 (cast + DoT like Miasma), Holy for AOE (Blizzard 2 was lower damage, I think?), Thunder for another DoT, but ONLY in patch 2.0 itself (this was removed in either 2.1 or 2.2 and traded for Blizzard 2, I think), and that's pretty much it. Oh, and Aqua Veil when it did damage.

EW WHM has Glare (Stone), Dia (Aero 1, though pressed less often), Misery (less often than Aero 2, but we're just talking number of abilities), Holy is still Holy, and Assize in place of Aqua Veil. As Thunder was removed in 2.1 and Blizzard 2 wasn't ever used in most any combat applications (since Holy didn't require a target, it didn't even have a niche use for targetless damage), the number of damage abilities of WHM now is comparable to most of ARR.

Problem is, it's a baby step that we are sat with for a whole expansion.

Maybe, but the alternative seems to be "leave everything as it is", not "add more damage buttons".

Moreover, even if we pretended the alternative WAS "add more damage buttons" (which, let's face it, is the reason you're fighting me on this solution; because if it worked, it would thwart your more damage buttons from being added, like as not), there's no guarantee that would fix anything. As I pointed out above, that doesn't FIX the underlying issues of healing being too easy, Tanks/DPS having sufficient healing without needing Healers, Healers being dropped from 4 mans or 8 mans solo healing, etc. It doesn't fix ANY of that. All it does is make you, personally, IF you enjoy damage rotations, slightly less bored while not addressing any of the underlying problems Healers have, and probably not even making everyone less bored. Healers that don't like damage dealing will find it tedious and annoying, not satisfying, and Healers that REALLY like damage dealing in a realistic sense (like BRD or RDM level rotations) aren't going to be happy with just a couple more DoTs with annoyingly disjointed timers.

So it arguably wouldn't fix the problem anyway even IF it was the alternative, which it really isn't since the Devs seem adamantly opposed to enacting it.

I DO get your concern of "if it doesn't work, we're stuck with it for a whole expansion". I agree that seems to be how the Devs deal with Healers.

But the alternative is "Just extend the EW model for perpetuity", which I can't imagine you truly would prefer...? o.O

[Semirhage]

It's why the "real healers" thing comes up so often, because people who insist they want to heal are actively hostile to the idea of...healing instead of doing more damage.

You're correct that the game has forced that mind-set, but that mind-set and the mechanics that have fostered it are ALSO the reason we're in the morass that we're in where everyone is upset with things being the way they are. It's time for a paradigm shift

I've played healers in tabletop and tabletop-inspired video games just as long as you have. The same tabletop games that formed the inspiration for the entire MMO genre. I don't recognize the "healers should HEAL, it's their trinity role!" landscape you constantly talk down to the rest of us about. I recognize healing as occasionally, occasionally, skin-of-the-teeth party-saving shenanigans. When it's necessary, you're the star of the show dragging your bleeding party through a nasty encounter. That's not every encounter, nor is it even *most* encounters. Most encounters, unless your party members have zero regard for their own safety, healing is your side gig. You do it on occasion. Avoid it when you can. End the encounter first. Patch people up later. What am I doing in those encounters (and more narrowly, the several turns I get during those encounters) when I'm not casting healing spells, which as a reminder is nearly all of them? Am I dancing around, going "Healers should heal ONLY!"? Am I spamming a boring no-cooldown bland attack spell? No, actually. I have a suite of things to do that keeps things fresh. I can buff up allies with strength and speed. I've got debuffs to apply to enemies in specific orders that multiply my or allies' damage output. I've got attack spells that do a whole bunch of different things. I can pick up combat feats and whack things with a hammer.

This bizarre trinity-lock makes healers more boring, not less.

[Renathras]

You may not recognize it (somehow?) but it's been true for 20 years, if not longer; as long as the Trinity has existed (which is from AT THE LATEST 2004) it's been true in some form or another. Even before then, before there were clearly defined roles in gaming, there were often setups that had leanings. Baldur's Gate in the 90s, for example, often would have people specialize in healing since it was strictly necessary to have available. While you had an option of how much you wanted to lean into it (Cleric vs Druid, for example), it was still present. And that's based off tabletop, which as you say was the inspiration for MMOs. MUDs, likewise, had class and skill setups that allowed people to focus more on healing or buffing or utility or damage. Indeed, TANKING, if anything, is one of the newer things to come on the scene, not Healer as a role. Back then, it was a thing you tried to force (e.g. having your Paladin or Warrior in full plate run into the room first to try and be the first thing enemies saw), but you often didn't have clear ways to generate, force, or keep agro. It was kind of a chickens with their heads cut off thing as to whether the enemies made a bee line for the healer in the back hurling Sling rocks or not.

For most of MMO history, healing was not a "side gig". In WoW, Vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cataclysm, and Mists (after that I can't say since I pretty much left the game), there was consistent, unavoidable damage, which required consistent healing to counter. Healing wasn't a side gig or optional. Druids would roll HoTs across the party because if they didn't, people would die, and combat raises were rare (only Druid had one, and it had a long CD on use, with Shaman having a self-only combat raise). And that was the gold standard of MMOs for a decade and a half. "End the encounter first. Patch people up later." only makes sense on trash fights, not 10+ minute boss fights. There is no case where you can output enough damage on a Healer to bring fights to a significantly earlier end, and if all of you are to be believed, the encounters and boss HP are designed around Healer damage, so you're ending the fight on time, not early, by using them.

And what do you do when not casting heals? Well, in Baldur's Gate, Clerics and Druids would use Slings. You would...literally be autoattacking, with your autoattack being throwing stones. In Everquest, you'd /meditate (/sit, basically). In WoW you'd basically always be casting a heal - Holy Paladins in Wrath would Beacon one Tank, target the other, then spend the next 10-20 minutes pressing Holy Light, breaking it up occasionally to use Judgement of Light/Wisdom if in 10 mans. In 25 mans, you'd usually have a Prot and Ret Paladin doing both of those for you, and the other Judgement (the one that did a heavy or stun or whatever) was useless.

I think the issue is more you're used to games where Healers aren't all the same (and often where they had customization - in BG, for example, you had the choice of spells to use from your spellbook in your various slots, and in BG2, you had Kits, or basically specs), so you could pick one that was more support and combat focused. In other words...my "4 Healers" idea you constantly attack because you want what it offers, in effect, but you want it for the one Healer you suspect would be the one that wouldn't have the gameplay you wanted.

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

We are going in circles. People in Vanilla WOW did not 'just' heal because the healing was more demanding. Classic WOW proved very much that actually, people back then were just bad at the game. I was able to get plenty of attack time in during levelling. Discounting that time as 'oh wands don't count cos that's like autoattacks' is absolutely ridiculous, because casting a spell interrupts your wand's swing timer. If you are 0.2 seconds away from using a wand shot, and you cancel to cast Flash Heal, you're reset back to whatever your wand's timer is. Maybe in raids, it's a lot tougher to get healing out and there is less time for damage. Or maybe it is not, I wouldn't know, because Classic WOW has this amazing system where, if you don't need as much healing, you can respec a healer to a DPS and push more damage that way. Makes it a bit harder to work out when there's flexibility like that. If the raids were locked to a comp of 2/5/33, then we'd likely see some of the healers doing some damage, especially considering, again, Omen of Clarity (autoattacks make your next resource spender free, including your heals), Judgements (autoattacks refresh the duration), restoring MP via Judgement of Wisdom, etc.

This also proves part of the issue. I had time to damage stuff in dungeons. I might have had time to in raids, IDK I burned out at level 48 in the vanilla version (Feralas sucks ass), and got tired of running daily heroics in Wrath for a trinket that never dropped (and I was Enh because a friend wanted to go Resto Druid). So we could say 'raids require big healing' sure, but 'dungeons kinda don't.' In fact, I saw a 'Enh healing guide' where you'd basically play Enh the regular way, but spend Maelstrom on instantcast Healing Wave or Chain Heals, allowing you to do like 50-60% of the damage of an 'actual DPS' while still keeping up with the healing the dungeon required. Sound familiar? It's the problem we have here! Raids need heals during prog, and dungeons absolutely do not. The devs of WOW saw how little challenge healers had in WOTLK's end, and made it 'more challenging' by ramping up healing requirements. We got Cataclysm. You know the effect Cata had on the healer population. You should therefore know, that 'increase healing requirements' is an absolute death knell for the role's playerbase. This game used MOP design to steer it's design for the remaking into 2.0, so I would argue it should take lessons of 'what to definitely not do, under any circumstance ever' from the absolute decimation caused by the Cata healing changes.

And if we DON'T use our DPS tools, as you claim should be the case, we don't clear the fight at all. So every fight in the game thus far has to be rescaled in HP to factor in this sudden drop in healer DPS, or it becomes harder/potentially impossible to clear at minimum ILVL. I know the DPS checks on old Ultimates like UCOB aren't exactly... demanding, anymore, thanks to the stat squish, but the mere possibility that they become impossible due to a change like this should be reason enough to pause and consider the ramifications of such a gamewide shakeup. Also, if you're saying that only the 'healing' OGCDs should be made GCD on tanks/dps, Arcane Crest/Riddle of Earth would never get pressed, for a start. Tanks would get 'globalled', that is, in the time between an ability like a TB hitting them and the next autoattack getting to them, they would not be able to react due to Equilibrium and the like being GCD'd out. It feels clunky. It'd also screw up the loop for some jobs. I heard somewhere that GNB has only 3 seconds of leeway in it's 60s loop, or it does not get enough Cartridges to do it's full burst. So, any downtime and it's immediately on thin ice. Adding a forced -2.5s to that because they need to use Aurora to help stay alive, means there is zero flexibility left.

Oh, and you'd have the Holy Paladin doing the Judgement of Light in WOTLK, to my knowledge. More than anything, it needs to judge something, because the talent Judgements of the Pure gives them 15% cast/melee haste for 60s whenever they use Judgement.

Actually nvm I was looking into JOL and it seems that, while it scaled off of spellpower originally, in 3.2 (and therefore WOTLK Classic too, being on 3.3.5a) it was changed to a flat 2% of the attacker's health pool. Guess it was scaling way too hard because of the Holy Paladins stacking SP gear. So yeh, theoretically anyone could put it up, now. But the Holy Paladin gets an additional bonus of haste for doing so. And with that revelation, now I understand why this is here:

If everyone's going to heal for a flat 2% whether it's a Holy, Prot or Ret putting the Judgement up, I guess it doesn't matter which judgement the Holy uses, just that they use one of them for the haste buff. But this part also makes sense to me, because the only other way to get back mana is potions (oof), Divine Plea (halves your throughput while it's active), AFKing (lmao), or attacking with Seal of Wisdom/Judgement of Wisdom up (having both means two potential procs of mana). I'm too used to the vanilla renditions of things I guess

Also I've asked before but I don't recall getting an answer, what would you do on Vanilla Loatheb, the Naxx boss who, when you cast a heal, locks you out of casting any more heals for 60 seconds? Stand around for 60s? Or actually hit the boss with whatever you have, be it autoattacks or Smite casts? Even in the remade version for WOTLK, where it's 16s of 'cant heal' and 4s of 'can heal', what are you going to do for those 16 seconds? And a question to you Semi, if you are playing D+D as a cleric (or other healer), and you don't need to heal anyone, do you skip turn or whack the nearby enemy with your mace? (I've never played D+D I wouldn't know)

edit:

...in other words, stuff like Zoe and Pepsis would still be oGCDs considering they're modifiers, not direct heals themselves.

This.
It's why the "real healers" thing comes up so often, because people who insist they want to heal are actively hostile to the idea of...healing instead of doing more damage.

I've done comparative analysis before and, depending on which patch and how you're counting, WHM in EW has as many or, at most, one less, damage action than they did in ARR. Their oGCDs (other than Benediction) were also modifier abilities (Divine Seal, Presence of Mind - at the time used almost exclusively on heals) or utility abilities (Shroud of Saints, Swiftcast - then used almost exclusively on Raise). Their damage actions realistically consisted of Stone 2 (even then Stone 1 was not beneficial to use unless you liked the animation better and didn't mind doing less damage; for the record, I like the Stone 1 animation better, but we have to be honest), Aero 1 (Dia), Aero 2 (cast + DoT like Miasma), Holy for AOE (Blizzard 2 was lower damage, I think?), Thunder for another DoT, but ONLY in patch 2.0 itself (this was removed in either 2.1 or 2.2 and traded for Blizzard 2, I think), and that's pretty much it. Oh, and Aqua Veil when it did damage. EW WHM has Glare (Stone), Dia (Aero 1, though pressed less often), Misery (less often than Aero 2, but we're just talking number of abilities), Holy is still Holy, and Assize in place of Aqua Veil. As Thunder was removed in 2.1 and Blizzard 2 wasn't ever used in most any combat applications (since Holy didn't require a target, it didn't even have a niche use for targetless damage), the number of damage abilities of WHM now is comparable to most of ARR.

1: Excluding 'modifiers' reduces the number of non-damage skills that are being considered as 'GCDs' in my maths, essentially increasing the percentage of the total that the 'damage skills' constitute. I purposely included those modifiers (despite saying I wouldn't if I was doing the design) to show the absolute 'best case' of how low we can push the 'damage skills as a percentage of total GCDs used' value.

So, let's be generous and say that EVERYthing is GCDs now, because the objective is to mix up how often we press our filler spell (Dosis). Personally, I'd keep stuff like Soteria, Krasis, Zoe as OGCD but we're taking it to the extreme for the example. We can see that, aside from me being kinda trash (one Soteria in an 8min fight, what are you playing at), around 60% of my skills used were just Dosis. Removing all of my damage GCDs (Dosis, E.Dosis, the Eurkasias for those E.Dosis, Toxicon, and Phlegma) leaves a total casts of 48. 48 x 2.50 (GCD) is 120 seconds worth of GCDs that would be spent on these healing tools. Exactly two minutes of extra encounter duration would be needed to fit it all in. So lets fit it in, by pruning the worst skills from our damage (that'd be the filler, Dosis). We take 48 casts of Dosis out to sub in these healing skills that we needed, leaving 83 Dosis. We then use an online calculator to find out what percentage of the total 213 casts that 83 is (because I'm lazy) and get:

/sigh

Did you even read my post?

2: 'Real healers' have no issue with doing healing. We throw out Medica 2 for Aionagonia, and safety shields on every raidwide during prog. Our issue is that as we get more gear, we don't need to do that anymore, and we replace it with one of our many OGCD tools, which feels cool. Reducing 'useless healing' and getting that overheal % as close to 0 as we can feels fun. The problem is that the reward is 'press this level 1 skill more times'. If you want a WOW example, imagine your reward for practicing as Priest so much that you get time to fit 30 GCDs into the fight that you otherwise wouldn't have, and you're told 'you can cast Smite 30 more times'. Not Mind Blast, not SW:P, not Penance. Just Smite, and it's absolutely terrible animation god I hate it it looks so weak. Back to FFXIV, I have no issue with 'healing'. You can look at my logs, I won't care. I have some good ones, sure, but you can see that I also have a fairly 'meh' median on later fights. You know why? It's not because I'm not skilled, the fact I have some purples shows I'm at least 'sort of competent'. No, the reason I have those medians is because in a lot of runs (I PF) I make the active decision:

'Sod this fight, and sod wiping to stupid mistakes, I am going to purposely overheal, play safe, do whatever is necessary to get the clear so I can get out of this hell.'

And if we clear anyway, me doing 10 less Dosis casts (replaced with E.Prognosis or something) is worth it to make sure we absolutely definitely have enough mitigation for the raidwide. IDK who you're aiming this 'no true scotsman' bullshit at when you say 'real healer' but it sure as hell shouldn't be me at least

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.

[Icecylee]

Sounds like how Healers played in ARR and even then, Healers had more DPS actions and mitigation tools to juggle.

ARR was when I had the most fun playing WHM, so it sounding like that was kinda intentional yeah.

Problem is, it's a baby step that we are sat with for a whole expansion. And if we then go 'it wasn't enough of a step, go further with it', dev team will wring their hands, and go 'mmm well I dunno, cos if we consider the casual players...' and dither and delay about if they actually should follow through with it. Then another expansion later, they finally get another 10% of our Dosis casts out of the picture. It's too slow an implementation. The issue is severe enough that it warrants radical, immediate course correction. And the level of 'course correction' that I think would be needed, if done via the 'make the healing OGCDs into GCDs', would mean certain HPS checks at the end of fights, eg Terminal Relativity, J-Waves in TEA, and the like, would not be clearable anymore. They're designed to be cleared with 'use GCD healing, and mix OGCD healing in to keep up', so suddenly changing the OGCD tools to GCD means you're essentially removing a Medica/Helios of throughput from the player. Maybe there's a way to work around that from the player's side. Maybe there's a way to rebalance the OGCDs to have more potency. But again, it seems like we're going round the houses to try and solve the problem in the most roundabout way possible, all in order to avoid the simple and logical solution of 'just add some damage skills back'. 35 Keen Edges.

idk, the devs have routinely taking parts of healer kits, pushed them into higher levels and replaced the now missing gaps with a whole fuck ton of nothing so it doesn't really seem to me like kit functionality in older content is a major concern. God knows going into Coil on healer with today's L50 kits aren't given even remotely the same experience they did when it was new. worst comes to worst they could tweek some numbers if something truely became unclearable, like they did during the stat squash.

I guess I'm sympathetic to being worried that this dev team in particular might only take this one singular step and then want to want and see for an entire expansion, though. I sure as shit wouldn't say it's the only thing that needs to be changed, lol. But it's weird to me that you'd go "not enough of a change, ignore it" rather than just "yeah, ok, that's a decent small step but really should be a footnote in larger sweeping changes that need to be made". Though I guess if you think adding a couple of skills back would be enough that stance makes sense (i don't personally, tho).

also for what in worth in easy content like dungeons, even most normal trials, as i tank i *absolutely do* wind up pushing less buttons as people get better at them slash especially gear rewards start coming in, because you pretty quickly hit a point where small% mitigation stops mattering. not so much the higher tiers of content, but yeah. Which, yeah, is why I do think healer dps and/or offensive support action pools need to be a bit more robust *on top* of neutering the free healing - so skilled players have more to strive for.