I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[Renathras]

1 Healer clears happening and 0 Healer clears happening RARELY when encounters VERY SPECIFICALLY allow it through MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF CHEESING MECHANICS by VERY HIGH SKILLED GROUPS isn't something I see as a massive problem. Ultimates, in particular, are extremely scripted and designed around the (weird) idea that people should just take no damage, as mistakes result in damage (and proper play little to none), which is just bad design in general. That has nothing to do with Healer kits, btw, but encounter design. The idea that encounters can't have periodic or consistent but low amounts of damage is absurd. Every Healer Job in the game has some kind of Medica 1 equivalent, just give them a reason to cast it.

In MMOs past, when people found clever ways to skip mechanics or reduce/eliminate the need of classes or roles, it wasn't looked on as an indictment of the game, even if it happened multiple times. It was looked at as very skilled players able to express their skill by breaking what most people either couldn't do or wouldn't bother trying. that's why the volume of it happening is important and why "it happening at all" isn't the crisis.

4 mans not needing Healers is far more of an issue, since that IS more common run content and doesn't require highly skilled players to pull off cheesing mechanics - it merely requires having a WAR Tank.

They also don't need to alter old content: Again, every Healer Job in the game has a Medica 1. Yes, people would have to GCD heal. Healing SHOULD be GCD based, not oGCD based. That's part of the reason it's so "boring" and there's so much "Gloilafiosis spam" - because Healers have lots of empty GCDs to fill with damage spells when they aren't NEEDING to use those GCDs on healing instead.

Honestly, nothing above Extreme matters since the bulk of the playerbase doesn't engage with it. See? It's easy to hand-wave away everything in the game that makes your argument problematic. Doesn't mean it's valid to do so.

I don't play Savages for a simple reason: I don't like PF them and I have a variable schedule that doesn't allow for set group times for a static. It's that simple. And I did know what slidecasting is (I've been using it for 3+ expansions now!), people who want to discredit a person so they don't have to deal with their arguments (ad hominem fallacy) just enjoy ignoring the parts of what people say that doesn't suit their narrative and using whatever they can, even if it means ripping out context and removing parts of conversations that clarify or specify a position, so they can keep doing so. And a lot of things are also subjective (like what does and doesn't count as "skill expression".)

You might also note that I tend not to tell people roles are or are not for them. I DO note when people seem to be advocating for something outside of the role, however - like when people insist we can't be required to use more GCD heals because that cuts into their damage uptime, or when all their solutions are to fix damage rotations.

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I've presented one argument that you can't handwave away, and to date, no one's actually countered it. More than one, but one in particular: That adding more DPS buttons doesn't fix the problem, it just papers over it by making people "less bored" (some people).

The underlying problem is that Tanks in particular, and DPS on the side, have far too much healing and mitigation, in an encounter design paradigm that emphasizes mitigation over healing, and that encounters themselves do not have enough outgoing damage.

The general response I get is "they can't redesign EVERY. FIGHT. IN. THE. GAME!", ignoring the fact that they haven't redesigned "EVERY. FIGHT. IN. THE. GAME!" when they did things like removed Healer damage kits, give Tanks more healing, and so on, and that Healer kits are bloated with healing - something we all agree on, btw - that they don't need because encounters don't call for it.

The other counter is "Jimmy Casual won't be able to clear!", ignoring that these same people are insisting that Jimmy Casual shouldn't be clearing hard content anyway, and when we're talking about Ultimates and Savages, it shouldn't matter; people should be able to use their healing buttons competently at that level. And for those saying they're bored even in 4 mans and 4 mans would have to play like Savages so THEY won't be bored - I'm sorry, that's just an inane argument, as they're never going to be engaging. If you find Spamming 3-4 attacks engaging (most AOE "rotations" in the game in general), that isn't far from spamming 1-2. MSQ stuff's always going to be easy and everyone just deals with it. WARs popping Bloodwhetting and then doing their 1-2 AOE rotation isn't that "engaging", either.

And think about it:

If people aren't taking Healer Jobs TO CONTENT because they don't need THE HEALING - why are they going to take you to content that doesn't need THE HEALING just because you have a few more DPS buttons and are less bored?

NO ONE has answered this question yet. I think because the answer is "It doesn't fix the problem".

It's why I started that thread about what changes WOULD prevent a 0 Healer Ultimate clear.

SCH having 3 DoTs and Fester would not have stopped a 0 Healer TOP clear, now would it? And we all know it. So I don't understand why none of you seem to want to admit it, unless you just want more damage buttons/to be a DPS-lite and don't actually care about the problem. But even I don't think that's true. ("Then why'd you mention it?!" because I can't understand why you guys won't agree with me on how your solution doesn't actually address the problem!)

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Point is, the big problem is encounter design.

The more sober minded people here, like Roe, have even made this argument. Hell, I think even the non-sober minded ones like Semi have.

My issue is that more DPS buttons doesn't fix THAT. We have the same problem, and people bored with 2 button spam are going to get bored with 4 button spam with time after the novelty wears off. It's not a futureproofed solution.

The game needs a combat system redesign, and it's not even changing "EVERY. FIGHT. IN. THE. GAME!", since most fights before ShB ALREADY have the right system. Go back and do the 4 man Ala Mhigo dungeon, for example. It's ridiculous that a level 70 dungeon has greater healing requirements than a level 90 one does, despite us having far more tools at level 90 to deal with damage.

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And it boggles my mind how, instead of admitting "Yeah, Ren's got a point, that IS pretty stupid and problematic", people would rather attack me than attack the actual problem.

I'm not your enemy, believe it or not.

I'm worried about the same problems you guys are.

I'm just ALSO worried your "fix" isn't a lasting solution, in addition to it further watering down the Trinity system.

Again: Healers having more DPS buttons - how does that prevent 1T/3D dungeon runs? How does that prevent 0 Healer Ultimate clears?

What's that? It just makes you less bored in content, but it won't matter since you won't be taken to the content in the first place? It doesn't prevent 0 Healer Ultimate clears or 1T/3D 4 man runs?

Yes, I know it doesn't...so how can it be a solution - or THE solution - to the problem when it doesn't actually address the problem?

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The irony about DPS being mandatory, btw, is that MMOs introduced Enrages SPECIFICALLY because otherwise, you could just make a party of all Tanks and Healers and clear any content. They had to enact Enrages (or MP negative Healers at a high enough rate even Healer redundancy wouldn't work) to make DPS relevant.

And now we're at the other end of things where they've made Healers and in some content Tanks irrelevant by forgetting that Healing checks should exist and that in a game with infinite Raises, you can have a squishy eat a tankbuster from time to time, like the 1 Healer 0 Tank clear of RubiEx.