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

[ForsakenRoe]

https://youtu.be/D_gyLIjxKMs?t=244

Let me drop this here because it's relevant (probably language warning, it's WOW players)

Jdotb (very competent healer main) brings up the point of 'people started doing zero healer runs of M+' and how it's really screwy that it was possible to do that, and everyone tried to go 'yeh but it's not that big a deal right, it's just 2 runs in the top 100' to downplay it and such. And like some of us here, Jdotb says what we say: the problem is more than just 'only a small amount of these kind of runs occurred', more than 'how frequent this kind of gameplay came about and was successful'. The problem is that it happened at all. The fact that, in some of the most challenging content in the game, you can reduce (or in the case of TOP/these M+ keys, completely remove) an entire facet of the 'holy trinity', because offhealing/mit/utility from other classes has been powercrept for whatever reason, whether that be 'increase self-agency of tanks over their own HP' or 'reduce stress on healer' whatever, it hit a tipping point in both games. Blizzard has tried to address their issue by increasing incoming damage and player HP by 25% (not touching healing, effectively cutting healing power by 25%). SE has done nothing so far. I will be interested to see if Blizzard's 'fix' has long term lasting power, because they did the same for DF launch and this fix happened only one patch later, they might have to keep doing the 'fix' over and over every patch to counteract the gear level players get to

edit: random Jdotb video, damn that's a lot of wrath (glare), starfire (banish), moonfire (dia) and sunfire (...aero 3 but light themed?) casts for a healer huh, gee druid how come blizzard lets you have two DOTs (that's not getting into the fact cat form allows you to use another two DOTs potentially)

[ty_taurus]

It also stems from the fact that dissatisfaction with glare spam was directly responded to by Yoshi-P with the response that if you want to spend more time healing, you should play Ultimate. Disregarding how tone deaf that response is to the problem of not having enough things to do in most content, the very content he claimed was designed to let healers heal more so they'd have to Glare less has so little outgoing damage that it can be managed entirely by non-healer sustain. Even the poor taste solution to the problem that has been brought up ad nauseum for the last 4 years doesn't actually solve the problem.

It's like if you have a house fire, and when you call the fire department they respond with "Well, there's a river 2 miles from you." and when you go to the river to get water, the river is dry.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's like if you have a house fire, and when you call the fire department they respond with "Well, there's a river 2 miles from you." and when you go to the river to get water, the river is dry.

And upon making this complaint to the fire department (from a payphone, since your house has now burned down), they respond 'well, have you considered that living in a house might just not be 'for you', you know? Have you considered trying living in a tent in the woods instead'

[ty_taurus]

[Silver-Strider]

I don't think this is correct.

I actually looked at some of the worst ranked groups that cleared P12S P2 to see just how badly you'd have to play and still get a clear of the fight.
Lowest SCH was a 4 Gray parse.

118 Broil Casts
84% DoT uptime
18 GCD heals cast

Of the ~80k rDPS required to clear the fight, they contributed 4.6k.

Their biggest downfall? Not a single cast of Chain Stratagem the entire fight.

Something I believe you are forgetting in regards to old DoTs is how often they had to be reapplied. It isn't like now where they last 30s and are easily forgotten because of how little you need to reapply them. Before, you were lucky to get 4 Broil casts in a row before needing to reapply a DoT. With how weak your nuke was back then, there was a very noticeable difference in how quickly a fight finished, depending on if you maintained your DoTs or not. However, because of how weak your nuke was, it was a lot easier to replace it with a GCD heal since it contributed so little to your overall DPS at the time. It's why Healer requirements were higher, because you didn't have to spend as much time using your filler spell as you do now because most of your damage was passive.

[GrimGale]

The fact that, in some of the most challenging content in the game, you can reduce (or in the case of TOP/these M+ keys, completely remove) an entire facet of the 'holy trinity', because offhealing/mit/utility from other classes has been powercrept for whatever reason.

I wonder if it is even possible to extend this "courtesy" to DPS classes. Is it possible to do a "no dps" run at all? Or has the game hard locked a certain amount of damage to be done in order to survive enrages, and deliberately kept the potency of the non-dps classes low to ensure the red roles are absolutely 100% needed in high-end content?

[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.

[Semirhage]

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!)

People answer this problem constantly. You just don't like the answer to it, so you ignore it.

Let's get rid of a sizeable portion of oGCD heals. Let's make people GCD heal ten times more than they need to right now.

Yippee. Now I have to GCD heal ten times more than I do now. Let's take the fact that GCD heals in this game are boring, don't provide much avenue for choice, etc and put it in that box over there for the moment since it's a different topic. Okay, cool. Now that I'm sitting in this hypothetical future where GCD healing is more prevalent, I'm going to try to gain skill to reach the point where I minimize my healing. What do I look forward to?

Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare. Glare.

I'd like my reward to be head and shoulders more satisfying than that. And it'll still be boring as snot in GCD healer Sylphieland.

[Aravell]

I wonder if it is even possible to extend this "courtesy" to DPS classes. Is it possible to do a "no dps" run at all? Or has the game hard locked a certain amount of damage to be done in order to survive enrages, and deliberately kept the potency of the non-dps classes low to ensure the red roles are absolutely 100% needed in high-end content?

I don't believe you can clear current high-end content with no DPS jobs. Maybe you can clear the lowest floor of savage with all tanks jobs when everyone is BiS, but most high-end content cannot be cleared with no DPS jobs. Given that tanks only do roughly about 2/3 the damage of the higher end of DPS jobs and maybe almost equal to a physical ranged, it would probably be hard to meet the check for most high-end content.

[Renathras]

Let's take the fact that GCD heals in this game are boring,

THEN HOW DO YOU MAKE THEM NOT BORING?

Again, what is your issue with Healing in the game right now?

1) That Healers aren't needed?
2) That Healing is boring?
3) That DPSing on Healers is boring?

If your solution fixes (3), while your answer is (1), (2), or "all three", then your solution doesn't work.

So, how do you make healing not boring? What does that look like? Because if you do that, it fixes (2) and probably (1) at the same time.

THEN we can talk about more DPS options, once we've ensured that Healers are at least needed to clear content, which seems to be the bigger problem considering how often it's mentioned and how people continue to insist it's important even when I point out the edge cases aren't - but I do note that the general principle is correct, just the edge cases aren't how you prove that (looking at 4 mans is how you prove that).

...or is that somehow NOT a problem and people mentioning it are just throwing the kitchen sink out to try and make their argument stronger, not realizing (or caring) that it doesn't support their actual position?

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EDIT:

And no. For the record, people DON'T answer the question. They ignore it or talk about something else, as you just did, ignoring that the "more dps buttons" doesn't prevent another "0 Healer Ultimate" in any way. Healers with DPS buttons but without encounters requiring more healing just ends up being "the weaker DPS you bring for comfort then drop when you feel like it", which is identical to Healers in the game now, so doesn't fix anything.

And also: "getting to do DPS" isn't rewarding.