How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[ty_taurus]

(Emphasis mine.)

I'm not sure how it makes sense to tie consequences to something that doesn't actually matter in the vast majority of the game's content and to something the game itself does an abysmal job of providing feedback on (you really need a friend furiously scribbling down your damage numbers in a spreadsheet). Consequences should be felt.

Consider BLM Ley Lines. You can feel the faster cast times standing in them. You can "lol, that was a bad idea" when you see that you plunked them down in the path of mechanics. You can imagine, "if I knew the fight better…." The button has an element of fun, an element of failure, and an element of nudging you towards better play. This design works because in the vast majority of content, that failure is enough to be felt, but it's not fatal to the encounter. The nudge towards better play is enough to trigger a self-improvement instinct without making you feel like you must figure out what's Optimal and Perfect.

GCD heals with MP costs function similarly. You can see HP bars go up. You can fret about your MP after spamming the button for 42 GCDs in a row. You can imagine, "if I didn't spam the button and tried something else…." Trading the MP cost for a damage cost breaks the design in the vast majority of content where optimal damage simply doesn't matter. The heals become freebie buttons devoid of any real weight. That might be great for novice anime healers who are so fearful of failure that they've grown allergic to DPS buttons, but there's a big gap between them and connoisseurs of high-scoring spreadsheets.

Uptime is not required in most content, but that doesn't mean it can't be felt or has no impact. The point is, a party will not wipe because the healer is not attacking, or not performing their rotation correctly, but that doesn't mean proper optimization and uptime management wouldn't shorten the duration of a fight, because it would. The system would exist to provide a reward to the healers that master their craft without punishing the healers simply learning, or not looking to become masters of healing. And it's how things have worked already anyway, only healers are punished with monotonous gameplay for mastering their craft.

[AmiableApkallu]

The point is, a party will not wipe because the healer is not attacking, or not performing their rotation correctly, but that doesn't mean proper optimization and uptime management wouldn't shorten the duration of a fight, because it would. The system would exist to provide a reward to the healers that master their craft without punishing the healers simply learning, or not looking to become masters of healing. And it's how things have worked already anyway, only healers are punished with monotonous gameplay for mastering their craft.

On the one hand: I agree, Good DPS does shorten fight durations, Bad DPS lengthens fight durations. My experience tells me as much.

On the other hand: It takes a lot of good/bad DPS to change the duration of a fight in a way that's really felt. And I'm not convinced one or two healer's performance is enough to count as "a lot." (Short of going to extremes, such as "will literally uninstall the game if they have to DPS", which I think is an outlier not worth considering.)

[Silver-Strider]

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.[/HB]

I would count Cleric Stance as a detail as well. Regardless if people liked it or not, it was a DPS tool at the end of the day.

[Deceptus]

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.

From an old 2.0 veteran I'd just like to point out that Blizzard II was amazing on healers in ARR because it allowed access to AoE at a **VERY** early level (WHM didn't get AoE until Holy), and at 50 potency per mob was a DPS increase on 4 or more mobs (might have been 3)

[Renathras]

Might break this up a bit, I dunno.

This feels a little disingenuous

That wasn't my argument. Gordias and Cleric are two separate issues. I'm listing them together because they happened/came to a head at the same time (HW). Apologizes for the confusion, if any.

And yeah, it's possible. That's the beauty of us having 4 Healing Jobs. In ARR, SCH and WHM were played VERY differently. SCH played a lot more with Cleric Stance while WHM did much less. This created both a diversity of healing gameplay depending on which one you picked as well as a synergistic feeling of working together with a co-healer that played to their Job's strengths. And for the record, I did the juggling act, too. I didn't care for it, though. But, to be fair, Medica 2 lasted a LOT longer back then, and Stoneskin ignored Cleric.

That's their entire MO.

No, it's not. You guys just like putting words in my mouth, acting like it vindicates you being entirely bad faith, then ignore when I correct the record.

He wants to suggest that Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions

Can you show me...WHEN...I said this?

Please, actually show me when I said this or what I said that was "Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions"?

I'm pretty sure I didn't EVER say that, or anything like that. I said (as noted above) that Gordias nearly killed the game a second time. There was no connection to DPS actions in that. I said that Cleric Stance caused a massive schism and animosity within the community. There was no connection to DPS actions (themselves; Cleric aside) in that. Where did I say this thing you and the 9 people that liked your post believe I said?

The mental gymnastics they do just to faceplant would be almost hilarious if it wasn't so persistently wrong

Again, WHAT did I say?

Not what you WANT me to have said so you can mock me.

What did _I_ actually say?

I would like a direct quote from you - surely you can provide evidence of your insulting claim - that I did what you claim here. So let's see it. If you people didn't make things up to attack me over, you'd have nothing to attack me over. Well, other than that you don't like my suggestions. But that would require you actually argue in good faith, and I suppose you don't want to do that.

100% projection, especially the second paragraph.

That I want more damage buttons and am afraid a more healing focused model would prevent that? What?

I mean, it IS true that I want more damage buttons for 2 or 3 of the Healer Jobs. I've said that over and over again. It's the entire point of the Four Healers Model that I push all the freakin' time. So I guess THAT could be projection my part. But I want that along with a more healing focused model, so how is that projection, exactly?

I know I hit too close to home and you have no defense. It's okay. /headpat

I also find it adorable you have to completely make things up to try and shoehorn in that you think what I said applies to me. Can you show me ANY instance where I have EVER suggested "press medica until clear" should be the standard for Extreme? Like...just one time?
No?
You can't?
Are you sure?

Because your claim ENTIRELY requires that I have done so.

God it's pathetic. I'm not sure you could have a more bad faith "argument" if you tried, but I shudder to say so for fear you might take that as a challenge...

The sad thing is, you and I aren't dissimilar, you just don't see it: "if I was there and waiting for MP5 I'd be wanding the boss to at least help with damage (and getting Judgement of Wisdom procs to help get my mana back faster). It's a cooperative game, with a timer to beat on the content (enrage), so you bet your bottom dollar that if I can safely help my team to beat that timer in some way, I'll do that."

This describes me as well. Glarespam is the modern Wanding.

I also find it hilarious you think I'm afraid of being attacked by an elitist for not using another damage spell. Dude, I play Tanks as well as Healers (they have more damage spells) and have played Healers since ARR. I DID use Cleric Stance. I DID cast Aero 3. I've told you before exactly why I don't want "more DoTs with different timers": BECAUSE IT'S BORING AND ANNOYING.

God, if you just listened to what I actually say FOR ONCE instead of making up your ridiculous caricatures about me, it would clear a lot of the bad air between us. You're not the only one on this forum who does so - seems to be a trend to just MAKE UP "Ren said X that he never said and look how bad faith and cartoonish he is over this thing he never said!" - but my god, me and you aren't so dissimilar if you'd just take yes for a freakin' answer.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Being able to use Medica 2 as a crutch to the point where it renders the rest of the kit invalid is like having a DPS kit that does less DPS than simply mashing the Glare button. Neither is a good situation in my eyes. It's just not good design nor does it make for compelling gameplay in the long term.

I'm trying to look at both from the same perspective.

Your argument is that more DPS buttons wouldn't hurt anyone, because people could choose not to engage with them and continue clearing content just fine and no one would have any major issues. This would suggest that Glare can be used as a crutch to the point it renders the rest of the kid invalid. Am I mistaking your argument?

Both of us are arguing from the perspective of "Focus the Healing model more on X" (in your case, damage rotation, in my case, healing requirement and button presses), with the "out" for those who don't enjoy that gameplay (or aren't skilled enough) that they have fallback buttons they can use instead to do a passable job.

Is that...NOT your argument?

I'm not asking this with snark or anything. I'm trying to see if I'm just misunderstanding your argument when you say that adding more DPS buttons won't affect people who simply choose not to use them and continue Glare spamming.

I do agree, it's why I find it funny when you've pulled the 'you just want to DPS more' card at times.

Maybe you can show me where I have, but I tend to try not saying that to you. You're one of the more fair minded people here that I agree with on some levels. (I say that about Roe and PetLalas, but I don't think I often make that argument with you. I may have, but I tend to think your positions are more...not neutral, but closer, and more well thought out and considered).

I genuinely don't think we'll ever see even remotely challenging healing in FFXIV at this point because from a commercial perspective, it just doesn't make sense.

If so, what on earth makes you think we'd see remotely challenging DPSing?

Pulling that rug out from underneath the casual player base and going back to a time like early ARR where people had to get through Titan HM just for a basic relic weapon would cause a riot IMHO.

I somewhat agree, but again, this would apply just as strongly to DPS kits, would it not? Which is probably the reason for the ShB changes (DPS kit gutting) and doubling down on them in EW.

I totally agree that going with 4 completely unique and diverse healers to see what sticks is the best move SE could make to start getting out of this corner, but again as I've mentioned elsewhere, I honestly don't think Yoshida has the resources on hand to actually pull it off. IMO they would need to hire another studio to brainstorm ideas for them, then have Sato's team pick and choose what to implement and integrated into the game proper.

Honestly, I agree with the first part, but not the second.

They have the creative talent:

Just look at the PvP Healer kits. In PvP right now, each of the Healers plays and FEELS completely different from one another. FEELS being the most important part. While I don't agree with all of it (I think Seraph Strike is a moronic ability - I'd rather WHM have the Protect and Cure 3 Ready effects tacked onto Misery and give it a damage boost to include Seraph's lost damage and then give them a spamable Cure 1 for the other ability slot), it clearly shows they have the capacity for creative Healer design on this team. They just need to see what of that they can transfer to the PvE game.

The creativity is there, they just need to USE it.

(Emphasis mine.)

I'm not sure how it makes sense to tie consequences to something that doesn't actually matter in the vast majority of the game's content and to something the game itself does an abysmal job of providing feedback on (you really need a friend furiously scribbling down your damage numbers in a spreadsheet). Consequences should be felt.

Consider BLM Ley Lines. You can feel the faster cast times standing in them. You can "lol, that was a bad idea" when you see that you plunked them down in the path of mechanics. You can imagine, "if I knew the fight better…." The button has an element of fun, an element of failure, and an element of nudging you towards better play. This design works because in the vast majority of content, that failure is enough to be felt, but it's not fatal to the encounter. The nudge towards better play is enough to trigger a self-improvement instinct without making you feel like you must figure out what's Optimal and Perfect.

GCD heals with MP costs function similarly. You can see HP bars go up. You can fret about your MP after spamming the button for 42 GCDs in a row. You can imagine, "if I didn't spam the button and tried something else…." Trading the MP cost for a damage cost breaks the design in the vast majority of content where optimal damage simply doesn't matter. The heals become freebie buttons devoid of any real weight. That might be great for novice anime healers who are so fearful of failure that they've grown allergic to DPS buttons, but there's a big gap between them and connoisseurs of high-scoring spreadsheets.

I...think I agree with all this, actually. I think you nailed it with the description of "felt". Intelligent game design should be where people can feel where they need to improve, not where they have to have a spreadsheet for it. RDM starting your Melee combo just when a boss telegraphs a point blank AOE and you have to back off and wait it out. Or if you get a big mana imbalance and have to push the lower mana to get back in balance. Seeing your MP bar go down and asking yourself if there's a more efficient healing structure you can use to extend your MP out longer. These are things that can clearly be seen, felt, reacted to, learned from, and improved from, all without needing a spreadsheet or third party "illegal" tool to tell you about.

On the one hand: I agree, Good DPS does shorten fight durations, Bad DPS lengthens fight durations. My experience tells me as much.

On the other hand: It takes a lot of good/bad DPS to change the duration of a fight in a way that's really felt. And I'm not convinced one or two healer's performance is enough to count as "a lot." (Short of going to extremes, such as "will literally uninstall the game if they have to DPS", which I think is an outlier not worth considering.)

Again, agreed.

This is how I feel whenever people say "the best mitigation is finishing the fight faster". How much faster are we talking? 30 seconds on a 12 minute fight? Can anyone actually FEEL that difference other than "we killed the boss before entering enrage"? Did it really save you healing resources in a way you can notice or feel? "we cleared before this mechanic and we had been having to go through this mechanic and clear just after it" is something you can kind of mark and measure, but it doesn't really feel significant unless and until the DPS gap is large enough to seriously cut down the time, and Healer damage can't do that.

edit:

psst!

[whisper]nice edit[/whisper]

1) With the current damage output and healing requirements and potencies. All things that we're talking about changing and would make your maths irrelevant.

2) Good for you? Again, we aren't as different as you want us to be.

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'.

I wouldn't mind at all. And?

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.[/HB]

I literally did this before:

In practice, SB WHM cast Aero 2 3.333... times per minute and Aero 3 2.5 times per minute. This is a total of 5.833... GCD casts per minute that weren't Stone IV.

In practice, EW WHM casts Dia 2 times per minute, 3 Afflatus (Solace/Rapture) per minute, and 1 Afflatus Misery per minute. This is a total of 6 GCD casts per minute that aren't Glare III.

On balance, EW WHM is casting non-Glare damage (or damage-adjacent Solace/Rapture) spells on roughly the same average frequency as SB era WHM did.

The real difference, honestly, is on the HEALING side, where a proliferation of oGCD heals (even on WHM) and the healing done by Afflatus heals can largely push non-Afflatus GCD heals off of average use, resulting in more Glare casts. Afflatus spells are, of course, being cast, but as noted, these can be thought of as part of the DPS rotation equivalent to the lost Aero 2 and 3 casts, so the foregone casts are Medica, Medica 2, Cure 2, Cure 3, and Regens, resulting in more "dead" GCDs that are filled with Glare.

ONE additional note is that Stone/Glare took up the GCD, so weaving was far less of a thing in SB, and only became a thing for WHM in ShB due to Solace/Rapture/Misery allowing for it at need. SB Aero 2 refreshes were on the 18 sec cycle, so if you needed to heal 6 seconds after applying Aero 2, you had no option but to clip if you were doing so with an oGCD; note that using Swiftcast to create a window...would also be clipping since you'd be clipping to use Swiftcast itself. Solace/Rapture gave WHM 2 additional weave windows per minute, and unlike a DoT, using these is a lot more flexible. In EW, this was increased to 3 per minute, with the 4th, Misery, lining up with buff windows every 2 minutes, for a total of 3.5 averaged additional weave windows not locked to a hard timer like DoT natural refreshes...and, of course, EW Glare/Glare III just outright allow a weave.

But in a strict sense, the DPS rotation of WHM in EW is just as complex (arguably SLIGHTLY more complex) than that of SB WHM, meaning WHM in EW isn't any simpler in a DPS sense. If anything, it's that HEALING has been made simpler, leading to DPS being more bland since there are more "dead" GCDs that have to be filled with the standard nuke. (One might note here that the first line solution would be to restore the SB healing model rather than changing WHM's DPS model, since the DPS model is pretty close to identical, and the Lily based healing model of SB...sucked noodles, so the modern system is an outright upgrade in use and functionality.)

But in terms of DPS abilities, EW and SB WHM had the same number, and roughly the same use per minute of non-nuke (Stone IV/Glare/Glare III) spells.

This was comparing Stormblood to Endwalker, but a similar comparison follows here since you're just using Aero 1 as your instant and Aero 2 as your cast instead of SB's Aero 2 and Aero 3, respectively. But, for the sake of argument, let's make sure we get this all out and add ARR to that list:

In practice, ARR WHM cast Aero 1 6 times per minute and Aero 2 3.3... times per minute. Note Fluid Aura was not on the GCD, so we'll set that aside FOR THE MOMENT. This is a total of 9.3 non-Stone casts. (Blizzard 2 would have competed with Holy, but as we all know - it didn't, and so doesn't count. That'd be like counting Physic as a heal since you could cross-class it.)

In practice, SB WHM cast Aero 2 3.333... times per minute and Aero 3 2.5 times per minute. This is a total of 5.833... GCD casts per minute that weren't Stone IV.

In practice, EW WHM casts Dia 2 times per minute, 3 Afflatus (Solace/Rapture) per minute, and 1 Afflatus Misery per minute. This is a total of 6 GCD casts per minute that aren't Glare III.

So there's your comparison. And looking at AOE, ARR was Holyspam, SB was Aero 3 2.5x per minute + Holyspam, and EW is 3 Solace/Rapture + 1 Misery + Holyspam.

Cleric was also an oGCD. You can argue it increased complexity, but not that it decreased Stonespam.

From an old 2.0 veteran I'd just like to point out that Blizzard II was amazing on healers in ARR because it allowed access to AoE at a **VERY** early level (WHM didn't get AoE until Holy), and at 50 potency per mob was a DPS increase on 4 or more mobs (might have been 3)

Was it an increase over Holy?

I have argued that we need "Water" at level 15 to be a low level spell that upgrades to Holy at 45, as that does seem to be a hole in our kit (not that Healers are the only ones with this issue of oddly late AOE buttons...), but Blizzard 2 was a damage loss over Holy once you got it, was it not?

Also, it HAS been a while, but I think back then I just rotated DoTs on things. The shorter CD meant lots of Aero 1 refreshes on 2-4 mob packs. And mass pulling wasn't common at lower levels at the time. At least, not in any DF groups I ever ended up in from Sasthasha to, what Dusk Vigil?

[Silver-Strider]

Can you show me...WHEN...I said this?

Please, actually show me when I said this or what I said that was "Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions"?

I would like a direct quote from you - surely you can provide evidence of your insulting claim - that I did what you claim here. So let's see it. If you people didn't make things up to attack me over, you'd have nothing to attack me over. Well, other than that you don't like my suggestions. But that would require you actually argue in good faith, and I suppose you don't want to do that.

Moreover, we have the more DPS option in our history as well. We know that DIDN'T work. We know it didn't because of Gordias and Cleric Stance and how it almost killed the game. We know it would be the more massive of the two changes in truth. We know that it would alter how the community views Healer dps because it already DID. We know people would be attacked and toxicity would increase because it already DID.

You implied that DPS actions didn't work and cited Gordias and Cleric Stance as your reasons why it didn't work, which is a fallacy.

I'm sure you'll backtrack and say something along the lines of "That's not what I meant", showcasing those mental gymnastics skills I mentioned to try and justify it, sort of how you tried to in this post by changing what you meant entirely by stating something completely different than your original post.

I'm pretty sure I didn't EVER say that, or anything like that. I said (as noted above) that Gordias nearly killed the game a second time. There was no connection to DPS actions in that. I said that Cleric Stance caused a massive schism and animosity within the community. There was no connection to DPS actions (themselves; Cleric aside) in that. Where did I say this thing you and the 9 people that liked your post believe I said?

You can't even keep your story straight anymore. Why people choose to engage with you when there's clearly some underhanded tones in your rebuttals is beyond me.

[Renathras]

You implied that DPS actions didn't work and cited Gordias and Cleric Stance as your reasons why it didn't work, which is a fallacy.

No, I didn't, but I see the reason for the confusion, so I'll break it out:

1) Gordias had such a jump in difficulty that it nearly killed the community at the time. We had more DPS options but it didn't keep people happy. My point here wasn't "we needed to remove DPS buttons". My point here was "having more DPS buttons didn't make things better".

2) Cleric Stance created an absolute schism between the pro and contra DPS camps in the game, creating a huge division within the community that got to be incredibly toxic, which led to the removal of Cleric, because of both the side wanting more DPS options and the side wanting less DPS focus/forced on Healers being at each other's throats. The more DPS side absolutely was not able to let it go and did not accept the people doing less DPS (due to less Cleric), which is the proof of what would likely happen now if we had the same thing with just more intensive DPS kits in lieu of Cleric. My point HERE was "having part of the community more engaged with DPS and part not did not result in a happy community where those who had the greater engagement got along just fine with those who did not". This is a counter to the idea "casuals and midcore can just not press those extra DPS buttons and no one will complain or be mad".

Yes, it's not what I meant.

No, it's not "mental gymnastics" when someone misunderstands something and you clarify it for them.

You can't even keep your story straight anymore. Why people choose to engage with you when there's clearly some underhanded tones in your rebuttals is beyond me.

I get you HATE me, but good god, man, stop assuming and reading things into other people's posts that aren't there. You'll be happier and healthier for it.

.

EDIT:

EDIT for absolute clarity: NEITHER OF THESE was me arguing that we had to remove DPS actions because of Gordias or Cleric Stance. Remember, THIS was what I asked you to show proof of: Please, actually show me when I said this or what I said that was "Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions"

Now, let's sit back and watch you get several likes even though you didn't even answer what I asked you to show - your claim was that I implied/said "Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions". Nice try moving the goalposts, though.

...seems you can't even keep your story straight anymore, doesn't it? After all, THIS:

He wants to suggest that Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions

Is not THIS:

You implied that DPS actions didn't work and cited Gordias .... as your reasons why it didn't work, which is a fallacy.

EVEN IF I had "implied that DPS actions didn't work" - which I didn't do, note (1) and (2) above - that isn't "suggest that Gordias was why Healers had to lose their DPS actions". In fact, it doesn't mention LOSING any DPS actions at all, now does it?

That's not mental gymnastics on my part - that's you being WRONG on your part. Because you wanted to assume I said things that I didn't so you could attack me over the things you made up that I didn't say. Exactly what I've been saying.

[Sebazy]

From an old 2.0 veteran I'd just like to point out that Blizzard II was amazing on healers in ARR because it allowed access to AoE at a **VERY** early level (WHM didn't get AoE until Holy), and at 50 potency per mob was a DPS increase on 4 or more mobs (might have been 3)

Also Blizzard II was still very very powerful on SCH in early HW. It was a key ingredient for how I pulled off 1000 dps in dungeons.

Your argument is that more DPS buttons wouldn't hurt anyone, because people could choose not to engage with them and continue clearing content just fine and no one would have any major issues. This would suggest that Glare can be used as a crutch to the point it renders the rest of the kid invalid. Am I mistaking your argument?

To clarify my stance: Both should be noticeable IMHO, crutch DPSing should be noticeable in solo content but not impactful enough make a significant different in group content. Crutch healing should be the opposite perhaps making it uncomfortable in group content through resource pressure. IMO it would go a good way towards reinforcing the importance of healing and encouraging the more inattentive player to actually try to engage with the kit. It doesn't need to be 2 Medica2s and your out. Perhaps even something like 4.0 SCH's Succor cost would be enough tbh. It just needs to make spamming that button get really uncomfortable.

Both of us are arguing from the perspective of "Focus the Healing model more on X" (in your case, damage rotation, in my case, healing requirement and button presses), with the "out" for those who don't enjoy that gameplay (or aren't skilled enough) that they have fallback buttons they can use instead to do a passable job.

Is that...NOT your argument?

Not quite IMO. There's a huge difference between a DPS doing their rotation and a DPS that's just spamming heavy thrust. Granted the game doesn't technically require anything more than that until Extremes for the most part, but it's still really noticeable even without tools giving you numbers.

On the healer side of things, from a purely healing perspective, there's currently little to no downside for doing the same thing. It's perfectly fair for little Timmy healer to feel that he is doing absolutely fine maintaining 100% Medica II and frankly, if he's doing a good job keeping his GCD rolling, it's unironically not wrong either. The only real downside is the awful medica II jingle causing all the healer mains eyes to roll out of their sockets around him

I'm not asking this with snark or anything. I'm trying to see if I'm just misunderstanding your argument when you say that adding more DPS buttons won't affect people who simply choose not to use them and continue Glare spamming.

I guess the TLDR is that I'm of the opinion that our DPS should be our focus in solo content and our healing should be our focus in group content. Both need to be able to support and encourage that. If I can heal even casual end game content whilst focusing more on my Netflix than my healing, that's a fail.

If so, what on earth makes you think we'd see remotely challenging DPSing?

That's a fair stance, but IMHO good DPS at least has a tangible and noticeable payoff even if it isn't required in casual content. Good healing has a ceiling on par with a ventilation duct in the same content and even the payoff of additional damage isn't particularly big right now IMO. I really should do a dungeon with only healing GCDs and see how high I can get my damage, an interesting experiment for tonight methinks++

I somewhat agree, but again, this would apply just as strongly to DPS kits, would it not? Which is probably the reason for the ShB changes (DPS kit gutting) and doubling down on them in EW.

Different thing really. DPS doesn't really have a true skill floor outside of the duty time limit. For healers that floor is people's HP bars, whilst it's a bar that's pretty difficult to actively fail, it's at least there. Making healing genuinely difficult in casual content would be akin to rereleasing a dungeon akin to early 2.0 Amdapor Keep where bosses effectively enraged and had multiple mechanics that even tanks couldn't get away with ignoring. I'd absolutely lap that dungeon up again, but you can guarantee that the masses would hate it because it would be a huge shock to the system even if it wasn't actually that hard in the grand scheme of things.

They have the creative talent:

I'm not trying to say they don't have talent, I'm trying to say they don't have the time and resources

Case in point:

Just look at the PvP Healer kits.

The key distinction here is the simplicity of the healer kits. They are simple and streamlined with a small number of very distinctive keystone abilities. It's so much quicker to design a kit that compact than it is to flesh out and refine a kit that needs 3+ hotbars to fully utilise.

The creativity is there, they just need to USE it.

We see sparks of that creativity, Macrocosmos and Earthly Star are close to perfection as healing abilities go, a little interactivity with the rest of the kit and they'd be amazing. Even the EW single target oGCD barriers were a neat addition. But these flashes of greatness are buried under a mire of Fey Blessings and Celestial Oppositions. If abilities like those don't scream '4pm on Friday we need to get something on the board to fill this slot', I don't know what does.

Again I can't stress the importance of this. They are running the same sized job design team now as they did at the release of ARR. Meanwhile we've got something like double the number of jobs plus the side task of unique if simplistic PvP kits ontop of that as well.

They either need to open the coffers and recruit or they need to turn to another studio in an advisor capacity and just buy in some whiteboards full of prebaked ideas to work with rather than trying to come up with ideas from scratch (Which is much more time consuming).

[ty_taurus]

I'm trying to look at both from the same perspective.

Your argument is that more DPS buttons wouldn't hurt anyone, because people could choose not to engage with them and continue clearing content just fine and no one would have any major issues. This would suggest that Glare can be used as a crutch to the point it renders the rest of the kid invalid. Am I mistaking your argument?

I know you're addressing Sebazy here, but I want to bounce off this point because it is an argument I've made in the past, and I want to go over a little hypothetical to break down some numbers. For starters, I'm going to break down DPS actions on healers into 3 catagories: Filler, the spammable spell that has no prominent restrictions, Rotational, the other DPS actions that exist exclusively to deal damage but cannot be spammed, and Refunded, the DPS actions that act as a refund of damage for using healing instead. "Rotational" in this instance doesn't necessarily mean "combo," it just is anything that you don't spam.

How this looks for White Mage currently:

Filler
- Glare or Holy

Rotational
- Dia
- Assize

Refund
- Afflatus Misery

I say Assize is rotational because you should be using it on cooldown, but you could also consider it partially similar to the refund category since, if it were used for healing and not on cooldown, you'd still gain some quantity of damage from it.

I took a look at a White Mage player who reached a parse of 97. This is not the average healer, of course, but it will give us a reference point for the "most" a White Mage is capable of. In P8S Phase 2, they were responsible for approximately 9% of the boss' HP (And the rest of their party was all on the same skill level, 95+%). Glare accounts for about 59% of that damage, Dia accounts for about 13%, Afflatus Misery for about 19%, and Assize for about 7.5%. Now, let's be a little ambitious and say with an update/rework of White Mage, we were to create a set of offensive tools for the job that redirects half of that damage from Glare over to a few new actions. Breaking things down into the categories from before, maybe this looks something like...

Filler
- Glare or Holy

Rotational
- Dia
- Holy*
- Assize
- New Action 1
- New Action 2

Refund
- Afflatus Misery

The Holy* here indicates we add some type of conditional circumstance in which Holy is used in single target gameplay. Based on this hypothetical, Glare now accounts for approximately 30% of your damage instead of close to 60%, and the other 30% is spread across this new holy conditional and the two new actions. Of course, this is just for the sake of making numbers easy, not necessarily suggesting this is how it should break down exactly.

Now, we've talked about 'what if I refuse to engage with these new buttons and just Glare spam, or just use Glare and Dia' but let's talk about the average player first, because the average player would still engage with these actions, they just wouldn't use them perfectly. An example of what the more normal player probably would look like. That's gameplay from Heavensward, and while this user does use Aero I, II, and III, Fluid Aura, and Assize, they not optimizing those actions. They aren't using things on cooldown or reapplying DoTs as they fall off. And that's fine. For the sake of simplicity, let's say they lose about half the potential of their rotational buttons, so they're losing about ~25% of the total damage they could do. Now, let's say we also have the extreme player who ignores rotational buttons and only uses filler and refund type offensive actions, plus Assize at times. This would mean they'd be losing closer to ~50% of the total damage they could do, which seems like a lot, but what does that actually mean?

In a team of evenly matched players, where the 97% White Mage was responsible for about 9% of the boss' HP, the average player (assuming they do the mechanics of the fight flawlessly) would be responsible for about 7-8% of the boss' HP, and the extreme player would be responsible for about 4-5% of the boss' HP.

Now, in everything below EX, all this really does is shorten the duration of encounters by a fairly mild amount. I'm not exactly sure how I'd math that out, but the main advantage the 97% White Mage would have would be just clearing things slightly faster. I wouldn't say the extreme player is rendering the 97% White Mage player's efforts as "invalid" but the main takeaway here is that whether or not you use those rotational actions won't have an effect on your ability to clear. All it does is make things a little quicker.

In an Extreme fight, the extreme player who does not use rotational DPS actions does create a risk of wiping, but this is only true in cases where the boss enrages at around 4-5% of their remaining HP, which can be a lot, but also wouldn't likely occur unless the party has a few deaths. EX fights have quite a bit of breathing room, and even Savage isn't designed with that 97% healer in mind. 9% of the boss' HP is not what fights are expecting of the healer role of course. Also, if your party has had several deaths, you also likely wouldn't be hitting that 9% as the 97% White Mage anyway, so really the different where your DPS mattered might be closer to perhaps 2-3% remaining for what is realistic of you. For the normal healer, that margin would be even tighter.

As for Savage and up, you probably would need to rely on those rotational buttons to some degree in order to get an early clear, but gearing up may eventually enable the extreme healer to get their clear.

[Quintessa]

WAR basically has an 8 second Walking Dead on a shorter cooldown.