Healer role design change?

[Semirhage]

-snip-

WHM is a tricky creature. There's the "here's what they could do with it" angle, and the "here's what Square Enix has been really stubborn about" aspect too. WHM has several design....directions? "Identities"? Aspects which seem to be part of Square's design document on the job which they haven't outright stated but can be inferred from precedent? Whatever you want to call them, they s u c k. WHM is like a healer case study in how you design a job that hates FFXIV's combat system, much like BLM is for caster DPS. It's a job that you'd think maybe works if you squint at it, and then you introduce it to....*points at FFXIV*.

What's this, slightly more potent free heals on twice the cooldown (Tetra vs Essential Dignity)? How terrible! FFXIV's combat system rewards shorter cooldowns much more than it does long ones. Slow-cast spells that have slightly more potency? Hell with that, modern fight design wants you to zip around the arena every other GCD like an AST with Lightspeed can. Somewhat stronger GCD heals? FFXIV wants you dealing damage, and the other healers are set up much more comfortably to heal and deal damage simultaneously, while the lilies are a bandaid on top of stopping and swapping between them. Asylum's trait gives you Yet More Healing? Too bad for you; FFXIV MUCH more frequently likes it when you handle damage with a snappy cooldown while the boss sits around casting/not hitting anyone and don't spend precious time dumping a bunch of useless overhealing. WHM is designed to shine in a completely different game from this one. FFXIV's combat loves short cooldowns (the first thing any WHM cooldown sacrifices for something stupid that the game *doesn't* reward like slightly more potency), mobility (lol Expedient, Lightspeed, Icarus next to....overhealing lilies), buff-stacking (lol my only buff requires me to stand still).

The reason the caster DPS have so many instant casts is because they would be unplayable without them. I've poked around the subject in the DPS subforum a few times. FFXIV increasingly isn't designed for the RPG job fantasy of planting your butt in one spot, maybe scooting on occasion, and getting your fighters to handle wrestling in a web-grease-spike pit on fire. The whole game wants you to play like an action combat sword-swinger: dodge rolling and darting around and getting your whole arena length 100 meter dash cardio going. One of the reasons I'd be down for a full (GOOD, monkey's paw. GOOD rework) rework of WHM is because its whole design philosophy is just so anti-FFXIV. Playing WHM anywhere outside dungeon Holy spam feels like rolling an acrobatics character in a game that's set in a flat plain with no trees.

[Shurrikhan]

WHM is like a healer case study in how you design a job that hates FFXIV's combat system, much like BLM is for caster DPS.

I'm really hoping that analog isn't relevant to your wider point, since, if anything, the other casters would be more interesting if they didn't spend so much of their reiterations apologizing themselves right out of role identity.

And, if WHM were putting out a form of throughput that wasn't so quickly capped / made redundant... that'd honestly be fine. The core issue is literally just that (A) there's no non-burst and non-scripted healing to be done anyways and (B) despite its "big/pure heals" identity... it's typically had weaker or merely competitive heals in practice.

That said, on all other counts...

WHM has several design....directions? "Identities"? ... Whatever you want to call them, they s u c k.

...Agreed.

The reason the caster DPS have so many instant casts is because they would be unplayable without them.

And yet... BLM really does still do fine. Top rDPS for every fight. Top aDPS on many. Yes, modern fights are more demanding of mobility than before, but... cast times are no more a fundamental issue than positionals or any other form of contextual complexity.

Like... I agree with you that WHM deserves a rehaul, but... I don't think the 'issue' you're focused on is nearly as great as you make out here. It's instead a simple matter of parity, where other jobs simply have more.

And even if, say, the devs ended up fixed on the idea of WHM being a high cure-ppgcd healer... as long as they made up for that with offensive potency and compensatory features so that any healer pair with them had roughly the same offensive ppm in practice (WHM probably "chadding" over AST or SCH, but w/e)... that'd be fine.

For me, my main issue is that WHM's only identity is Generic Healer™ and that it so often just hasn't been balanced against the other jobs. But so long as fights are consistently demanding of mobility, that doesn't mean that you need to give every job the same amount of mobility, since you can just compensate for that lack of mobility in other ways. Similarly, even if more of a given healer's curative ppm would be GCD-based, as long as its total curative ppm and offensive ppm would be balanced in practice... it truly does not matter; you can quite simply raise potency in compensation, and the only "problem" would be that the "GCD healer" would be more rewarded than most for doing zero healing over raid buffs and for healing when there's nothing to attack.

[ForsakenRoe]

mobility (lol Expedient, Lightspeed, Icarus next to....overhealing lilies)

demanding of mobility,

Reading the word 'mobility' so many times has made me think that 'maybe I screwed up', check it:

Current WHM rotation, we have 18 GCDs per minute where we have 'little to no mobility' because 1.5s cast time/2.5s recast, only able to slidecast and use 1s of free space to move a little bit at a time.

Now look at this second graph, of what I pitched all that time ago (has it been a year yet)

Is this too much mobility? When I first made these graphs to compare '1min snapshot of rotation' I was mainly focused on 'try to lower number of boring Glare spam-casts, and replace with something more interesting'. I feel like, looking back at this graph again with a focus on 'how much mobility does this provide', I've gone and accidentally SMN'd the class out of most of it's cast times, as Glare (and it's upgrade Quake) are the only things on here with a cast time in my pitch, everything else is instantcasts. So 8 actual cast times per minute (SMN has 4 and people hate it for this reason). On the plus side, nobody gets to complain about 'oh no I can't do damage because the fight mechanics don't give me time to stand still', I guess

Maybe Banish needs a cast time too