The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[ty_taurus]

The actual solution I'd go with that I've talked about before is just add an auto-combo option for anyone that wants training wheels.

In reality, I'd like for WHM to develop a new, more fresh take on its offensive gameplay. But let's say, for the sake of simplicity, that WHM changes to have a DPS library that is effectively a combination of the high points of its history.

Stone > Glare: Your filler single target. (Potency is 300)
Aero > Dia: Your 30 second single target DoT.
Holy: Your AoE filler. (Potency is 170) Gains a new effect where the potency doubles whenever a lily is added to your healing gauge, or something like that.
Aero III > Luminescence: AoE DoT that stacks with Dia. Lasts 15 seconds.
Water > Banish: GCD AoE attack with a 30 second cooldown (Potency is 400)
Afflatus Misery: DPS refund AoE for spending lilies.
Assize: OGCD heal/DPS action every 40 seconds.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as what we actually get, but I'll use this as a reference for the auto-combo example. You can either set these actions on your hotbar independently, or you can set the auto-combo action to your hotbar instead. How that works is that the button changes to a specific action based on a priority system that looks something like this:

Afflatus Misery > Luminescence > Dia > Banish > Holy > Glare. It starts at Misery. If you don't have a blood lily, it goes to your DoTs, if your current target has each DoT, it looks to spend your charges of Banish and your Holy conditional. If none of those apply, it defaults to Glare. There would also be an AoE auto combo that would go: Afflatus Misery > Luminescence > Banish > Holy. The only thing you otherwise use manually is Assize.

Every job would gain an auto-combo option for single target and AoE that would run through your GCD for you. Players have the choice to run with or without it. Done. Problem solved. Can we go home now?

[Shurrikhan]

The actual solution I'd go with that I've talked about before is just add an auto-combo option for anyone that wants training wheels.

So give every healer more DPS actions and introduce the auto-combo system. This makes all 4 healers accessible to both camps. Pro-DPS healers get 4 healers, and Anti-DPS healers get 4 healers.

Tangential, since I'm referring to more traditional combos here instead, but...

XIV "combos" are really only 1 action per the whole combo (and are as able as they are to be consolidated for that exact fact). There is no reason for even DPS to be saddled with that little nuance available per button, let alone a non-DPS.

No, anything approaching a combo system to be added to healers, should be more like Monk -- but with only some 6 or fewer actions we'll likely have to work with, it'll have to actually support higher nuance per button than Monk's GCDs do.

But the last thing we need is to add 3 buttons to support a single new action split across 3 GCDs... that virtually everyone will reduce to 1 button anyways if given the option (especially if it isn't interrupted by healing GCDs, which would remove real benefit to the tactile cues of separate buttons).



I'll toss in a WHM mock-up later. Oddly enough, I do agree with Ren that WHM should have fewer discrete DPS GCDs than, say, SCH and SGE; but, that's because a huge portion of WHM's complexity should come from its early-accessible core and that its GCDs should be more multi-purpose, such that it has as many GCDs that can be used for damage as SCH and SGE, just fewer that have to be (while it also has the greatest number of brief but impactful situational utility GCDs).

[ty_taurus]

Ehh, I'm sorry, but... XIV "combos" are only 1 action apiece. There is no reason for even DPS to be saddled with that little nuance available per button, let alone a non-DPS.

No, anything approaching a combo system to be added to healers, should be more like Monk -- but with only some 6 or fewer actions we'll likely have to work with, it'll have to actually support higher nuance per button than Monk's GCDs do.

But the last thing we need is to add 3 buttons to support a single new action split across 3 GCDs... that virtually everyone will reduce to 1 button anyways if given the option (especially if it isn't interrupted by healing GCDs, which would remove real benefit to the tactile cues of separate buttons).



I'll toss in a WHM mock-up later. Oddly enough, I do agree with Ren that WHM should have fewer discrete DPS GCDs than, say, SCH and SGE; but, that's because a huge portion of WHM's complexity should come from its early-accessible core and that its GCDs should be more multi-purpose, such that it has as many GCDs that can be used for damage as SCH and SGE, just fewer that have to be (while it also has the greatest number of brief but impactful situational utility GCDs).

Why does it matter as long as it's optional? You are not obligated to use that system. It's just an automated button that chooses the "best" attack for the moment. If that can be a form of leverage in order to allow each job to have more varied gameplay, then what's the harm?

[Shurrikhan]

Why does it matter as long as it's optional? You are not obligated to use that system. It's just an automated button that chooses the "best" attack for the moment. If that can be a form of leverage in order to allow each job to have more varied gameplay, then what's the harm?

I'm not calling it harmful -- merely an utter waste.

Using XIV "combos" is to purposely make a single action take up multiple buttons of space. And that has accordant, if minor, issues:

Assuming a 3-step combo, we either...

• lose 2 actions (each 1 button) to support that 3-button single action just to keep that slightly less punishing an option,
  --or--
• we effectively make the already zero-advantage option of non-consolidation (especially, without a context in which those tactile cues of moving from 1 to 2 to 3 would be useful, as on ShB or EW SAM, HW NIN, etc.) also waste handier button-space that's becoming increasingly more valuable/limited.

XIV "combos" are pure bloat. If you want to use them to offer multiple different attack animations and some ppgcd cycling on a single action/button, by all means, go for it. But there's no point in constraining the rest of the kit around a pretense that those are separate actions.

At which point, you'll have just another Healer with n non-healing GCDs, but one of said GCDs has 3 animations. It's an incredibly small improvement, if any. And you could as easily have provided that animation variance instead through actual skill interactions (procs, status effect conditionals, branching sequence-based conditionals instead of merely a single rigid series of unlocks, etc.).

Any other way to use multiple actions together (or, better put, having each skill actually be its own action) would be better, be they actual combos (see other MMOs) or whatever other means of interaction. So while I wouldn't be opposed to a consolidated combo, we can most certainly do better.