Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[ForsakenRoe]

Oh this is a Dragonflight bluepost. They were addressing the fact that they had to bump player HP up by 30% because of how much damage they're adding into the content and how strong healers are. Or at the very least, that's what I remember the context being.

This part is important for a specific reason and everyone needs to understand this: Going into DF, blizzard bumped player HP and mob damage by 40%, while keeping healing output the same. Effectively, nerfing healing as a percentage of the HP bar by 40%. This was done in response to how little healing GCDs were being needed in highend content at the end of the previous expansion. ONE PATCH LATER, and they had to do the same process again, this time for 25%. You'd think this should dispel the myth that 'oh we need to increase the healing required of the party!', as gear makes us so strong so fast that we always, ALWAYS, outscale the raid damage to a ridiculous degree. But we keep hearing people going 'no we should have to heal more!' and then when we had to actually 'heal more' (and by that I mean mit more thanks SE) this tier, a lot of people could not keep up. Increasing the requirements on a binary pass/fail like keeping the party alive is just going to cause animosity when newer players struggle to keep up. Of course, the natural response to that is 'well of course we don't mean making ALL the content hit harder, casual content would not be affected by this change'.

Okay sure, lets say SE make ultimates hit harder. What about the other 99% of the content in the game? The issue for many of us disgruntled healer mains is not just that 'savage feels kinda bleh once you are on farm', but that 'all content below savage doesn't even get to be interesting in the first place', because people who clear Savage are at a skill level where they can often infer what a mechanic is going to do, even when 100% blind. Enemy faces a certain direction? Probably get behind it. Can't tell you the number of times I've seen a donut or circle AOE in a dungeon, and, like the doll in Lapis, instinctively moved into the AOE after it goes off, expecting a followup (ie, donut goes off, move into the donut expecting a quickfire circle AOE).

So what is the solution that would make content across all difficulty levels more interesting? Adding a slightly more in depth rotation to the healers to make them a little more equal to tanks without the 123 (for example, I've previously suggested WHM getting one new button on a 15s CD, and changing Dia to 12s duration) would be a potential solution. I find it very curious that there was no massive outcry of 'how healer kits are bland and boring' back in Stormblood, when SCH had all of it's DOTs and AST had interesting cards. No, the complaining back then was about how trash the WHM Lilies were (100% justified). As for 'well then what if people can't adapt to a new rotation(lol) and they cause enrages???', balancing passes can be done to make the current gameplay of 'refresh DOT when needed, spam Glare' be very close to 'the optimal new rotation' in output, I'm not on the dev team and I still managed to get the difference between my conceptual rotation, and 'my conceptual rotation but you don't press the new button at all' to be within 2%.

The classes are the lens we view the game through, that we interface with the content through. If the class feels crappy to play, it doesn't matter how good the content is. Moving the skill ceiling away from the classes and making encounters more technical doesn't make for satisfying gameplay, as when we run into content that is below our skill level (ie, if you're a Savage clearer and you go into an EX), if your class was only fun because the raid boss was challenging, then going up against Scarmiglione is not going to feel satisfying. Instead, for us healers it's just several minutes of pressing 1 over and over. And I've done the maths on a run I did of, I think P8S P1? Removing every, EVERY, OGCD healing tool from the run, I still had over half of my casts being damage skills. I sometimes feel like the people asking for 'more healing requirements', 'remove/reduce OGCD heal access' and the like, do not fully grasp just how much would have to be changed to make that design work. not to mention all the heal checks which are currently based on 'this design we have now'. Imagine for a second, we remove every OGCD skill, and reduce the power of every GCD heal by 25%. How do you keep up with J-Waves in TEA? How do you keep up with all the Pantokrator wave cannon stackmarks? It's such a massive undertaking with such a high risk of going badly wrong, compared to an alternative like, idk, adding back SCH's DOTs.

If a more significant portion of the game's tanks couldn't be bothered to pop even a single defensive, would that be reason to forever thereafter constraint the game around their ineptitude?