For those who main/semi-main a DPS (e.g. DNC, RDM) but like Healers...

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

And I wish that SE would realize that what makes WHM friendly to "casuals" is it's Lv.50 kit and how MSQ encounters are currently designed.

Unless the tank(s) have never heard of stance or mitigations, and unless the rest of the party thinks the goal is to stand in the orange 100% of the time, Lv.50 WHM has what it takes: Readily available HP restoration. And if you find yourself running low on MP, just don't do anything for a few moments. There's no meaningful enrage to contend with.

That leaves multiple expacs worth of levels to do something interesting and exciting with WHM.

I would go further & say "If you want beginner/casual friendly healer go play CNJ" lol, because they do have what it takes for those MSQ encounters, dungeons, and trials! (obviously random DF groups wouldn't take that kindly, but you get the idea)

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not gonna lie, I don't have much of an idea what's the general consensus on healers here, other than that people are bored from spamming same button. Even though I barely play healers nowadays, I used to love healing in every game, but well, FFXIV's healers don't meet my expectations when it comes to healing so I play mostly SAM/PLD, which is why I don't come in this part of forums very often.

I thought that idea to keep WHM same and make others interesting is somewhat popular, but that might be general consensus from somewhere else. I guess it makes sense in light of current SMN and RDM situation. People are probably worried that making WHM too easy relatively to other healers will make people choose WHM for the sake of accessibility, and that people playing harder jobs will not be rewarded accordingly for their higher efforts, which is completely fair, because that is happening right now with SMN and RDM.

But well, I don't really want to read 10s of pages of posts to find out whether mine and yours idea is popular or not. But I'll stand by it (unless someone gives me some insight why it's bad idea, of course), even though I understand the risk of it being implemented the same way SMN was. My reasoning is that WHM is simply most favorite job for casuals, so I think that if SE actually did some drastic changes to healers, WHM is last job they would drastically change, especially if it meant making it more difficult. I myself would love if all 4 healers were very distinct, had a lot of space for skill expressions, and had better gameplay than 12111111, but I really think that keeping one simple job for casuals is much more realistic scenario that SE might consider and even implement. They do not want to alienate casuals which are playing WHM because of it's simplicity, it's simple as that.

I guess my main issue with that approach is that it treats 'casual-friendliness' as this sort of wholesale, sacred, and impermeable thing that's impossible (or taboo) to analyze and reach a better equilibrium from, when the reality is more likely that you could simultaneously have a WHM that is more engaging to most of your common camps of healers AND actually improve upon most aspects contributing to 'casual-friendliness', to a greater net accessibility/responsiveness/enjoyability even to your most casual players, because that matter does break down into many finer aspects.

Would that take more work than just giving up on that job preemptively for some sort of misguided political bargaining chip for a nebulously defined group that can't or won't speak for itself? Of course. But that work is worthwhile and deserved.

Reserving a job's entire current state regardless of what its parts contribute to or how much is essentially to bar analysis of that kit and thereby bar even the prospect of improvement. Being cautious is good, but preemptively denying a job any changes whatsoever, no matter how vetted, is just wasteful and pointless.

No job should be stuck with that kind of treatment.

Examples of 'Casual-friendliness' being rather more complicated and piecemeal than most "Keep WHM the same" arguments would imply:

While difficulty isn't mutually exclusive on the whole, individual challenges' contribution to that 'difficulty' is largely zero-sum.

The more of your throughput is locked into CDs or HoTs/DoTs, for instance, the more those particular moments disproportionately matter, but the less each other moment of uptime does. A healer struggling with GCD-healing-minimization in itself, for instance, will actually be less skill-gapped in their rDPS when carrying a higher portion of DoT/CD-based damage (as opposed to having only or almost only their filler attack).

The more of your healing potential comes from "free" CD-based healing, not only the less potency-per-GCD can you put out in balance (since you're now assumed to have near to 100% damage-contributing uptime instead of the <75% of yesteryear), but also the more punished you are for tapping into less finite/discrete resources. Or, more simply put, leaving relative healing requirements at or below the level that can be covered wholly through "free" resources gaps further gaps casual play, since it increases the relative punishment of any conservative or less informed play (I don't know when next we'll get burst, so I'll hold onto some of this).

Now, that knowledge gap being widened by being tuned around healing only with oGCDs would be a 'good thing' to players who want more of their performance to come from having 'solved' the fight and then executing in that exact way ad nauseum thereafter, certainly. But it sure as hell isn't making the job more 'casual-friendly', despite its "low" relative healing requirements (how much rDPS is put at risk from damage intake) and starves rewards for those who'd like to have room to min-max the healing itself, rather than just healing-minimization. (And that's even without accounting for the counter-intuitiveness of a kit increasingly making its foundational tools redundant or outright punishing.)

And yet somehow many (including even Misshapen Chair) insist on implying that low relative healing requirements (little visible rDPS cost from healing) are "casual-friendly", or that if using virtually any GCDs at all, rather than just... slightly more of them... weren't purely optional or weren't meant only to salvage past mistakes then matchmaking would go all to hell because of the casual players? (All while complaining that the most casual players can't remember to sequence their many excessive healing oGCDs in scripted order before --or, as to prevent-- touching any of their GCDs heals?) It's a mess.

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And yet, there are generally some things we can usually agree upon, per such ideals as "easy to learn, hard to master" or making that ideal true not just of the job as a whole, but it's actual interactions with content (so it's not just "hard af until you 'solve' the fight, then easy/boring af thereafter").

There are ways that we parse the optimizations available to a given job (what they can do for some degree of reward ultimately towards the uncapped throughput useful to the encounter) and look at which should be considered most core and therefore hold the largest portion of the pie, without so squishing all else that those other optimizations are hardly worth thinking about.

And we [S]should[/I], imo, expect a level of care in job design nearer to that.


__________________

Who is even supposed to benefit from the "Keep WHM exactly the same" approach?

Who gains from being maximally punished for each excess non-"free" heal and being so highly rewarded for having quickly 'solved' the healing bottlenecks of the fight and then having worked backwards from there to establish their then-constant rhythm of healing CDs? ...Is that really the... "casual healer" that seems slated to gain the most?

Who gains from precluding any further infrequent non-healing actions that could reduce the relative ppgcd cost of GCD heals? Depending on implementation, yes, having nothing but Glare and 2 Dias per minute could help those who are especially bad at tracking CDs (in general or, somehow, only if they're damage-producing) and/or pre-planning GCD heals (if such were ever required) to retain room for hitting their offensive CDs/DoTs more or less on time.

But does that single aspect of difficulty produce more of a skillgap between the elite and average player than does the aspect affected (minimizing GCD healing)? What about when we decrease the chance of falling asleep at the wheel/on the book/cane/nouliths?

[Renathras]

...

Whether intended or not, the first part of your post sounds very...aristocratic? Technocratic? "It doesn't matter if this affects other people and they don't like it, they're ignorant children who just don't know any better."

But be that as it may, my point in presenting the quotes was to show that this forum - for whatever reason you want to try to justify it as - is/has been an echo chamber on these issues, and has not been more accommodating to different ideas, which was Sebezy's argument.

Something that I need to state here: When someone presents an argument, and someone counters THAT argument, bringing up a different argument and presenting it as not countered/debunked isn't really fair. I didn't present those quotes to debunk the argument that people of certain calibers, experience, or whatever else think a certain way. That wasn't the discussion. The discussion was whether this place seemed to have a narrow set of represented/accepted views and whether Reddit was more or less accepting of diverse views.

I think I made the case pretty clearly that this place DOES have a narrow set of represented/accepted views, and that the mainsub in Reddit is more accepting of diverse views, which was debunking that argument.

If you want to engage in arguments as to WHY that might be, we can, but that's a different argument. And as I say, sounds rather aristocratic/technocratic, which I don't tend to find a good thing, personally.

.

As to the likes in the above post:

As I said, people here dislike me since I'm dogged about representing a different viewpoint, and so "Attack Ren" is what gets likes. People have argued for months that isn't true (and there have been other cases I've pointed to that suggest it is), but that's the most stark example yet. So next time someone talks about which posts have likes and which don't, as if that's relevant to good or bad ideas, I will point again to this as the reason likes are a meaningless metric, as people are willing to like a post that presents the same idea I have as long as the poster attacked me before saying it.

I thought that idea to keep WHM same and make others interesting is somewhat popular, but that might be general consensus from somewhere else.

I think that's the general consensus most everywhere else that isn't here. Or, at least, that people are accepting of it.

Isn't the issue with SMN/RDM not that SMN is easier so much as that RDM does LESS damage? It's not that SMN does the same damage for less work, it's that SMN is actually an outright DPS gain over RDM. We see a similar situation with the Tanks. While WAR was doing less damage than DRK and GNB, people didn't really care (people grumbled, but it wasn't destroying the meta) and GNB was still the most played with DRK represented pretty well. With the last patch where PLD and WAR got buffed (PLD is still on the weaker end), WAR now not only is easier to play, it also has the superior personal and party mitigation and healing suite (did Shake It Off really need a HoT in addition to its other effects on the Job that already has Nascent/Bloodwhetting?), but it ALSO has on many fights the higher damage. There's literally no reason to take a DRK over a WAR unless you just like it's aesthetics as it's doing less damage, harder to play, and doesn't have a better mitigation or HEALING kit than WAR does, and PLD is likewise weaker. So we've seen WAR's use statistics explode.

So the SMN/RDM issue is less that SMN does the same damage as RDM as it is that SMN does MORE damage than RDM.

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I do think the difference between "leave WHM the same" and "completely rework SMN" is the latter was pulling the rug out from under people. A lot of people liked old SMN and not only did they lose that with new SMN, not only was the Job they liked changed, there was no alternative. There was no Caster introduced that they could even swap to for that playstyle.

On the other hand, what we're talking about here is far more likely to alienate mains of OTHER Healer Jobs who like their simple kits being robbed of them, but if WHM stays the same, people who like it right now won't be alienated, and it'll be a "port in the storm" for people that like the other Healers' current simple playstyle. They might have to level/swap Jobs, but at least they have that option, which SMN did not.

If anything, the SMN change highlights, imo, the reason we need to leave AT LEAST one Healer alone.

I agree with your assessment there on why it makes sense to leave WHM alone and why SE probably would do so. I think the important thing is that the healers be made distinct. Leaving one alone is fine as long as the other three are distinct from it. As I often say, the problem right now is that they're all the same simple, making them all the same complex wouldn't improve the situation, they'd just be homogenized a different way. Better to make them all different in that respect, so that everyone has at least one they like.

And when people bring up aesthetics, I point out that's always going to be true. Some people love BLM's looks but want a FF single-player game version of it, like Vivi from FF9 who just casts their one most powerful spell (or an elemental weakness to the enemy type) over and over then uses Osmose when they get low on MP. But people who enjoy that playstyle won't get it with BLM here. At the end of the day, you can't have every aesthetic/Job to yourself, no one can, and no one should. We each have to decide which we like better, the aesthetic or the playstyle, and as much as possible, the Devs can try to match aesthetic to playstyle. Like SGE is this big brain hyper-smart Greek doctor mixed with Gundam pilot to control their nouliths, so them being a complex Job speaks to that fantasy, while WAR also really appeals to the people that play it because the people that find "unga bunga" appealing are going to find a Job that plays "unga bunga" appealing as well. The match is strong enough WAR players seem to be very satisfied with it.

...but there will be some people whose preferred aesthetic and playstyle don't match up, but that's unfortunately life. Even if we made all the Jobs identical for that person so they could have their pick of aesthetic, that would upset everyone else who doesn't like that. And this is generally accepted in most games. If you play D&D and want to be a character that wears plate armor, casts powerful offensive magics, has the strongest healing spells in the game, can hide in shadows, and can detect and disarm traps, while also pelting enemies with your powerful composite longbow...well, that option isn't there. You can get something close by mixing multi-classes or getting to stupidly high levels where you can abuse some traits (like Rogue "Use Any Item"), but for the most part, you have to pick the parts that you like best. Maybe you choose to go with plate and healing spells and forego the rest with Priest, maybe you give up on the offensive spells and trap detection and try to keep the rest with Ranger, maybe you decide to dual class Fighter into Cleric or Thief into Mage, or maybe you go with the Fighter/Mage/Thief tripleclas Swiss Army Knife. But no matter what you do, you're still going to have to give some things up and decide which parts of aesthetic and gameplay are most important to you. We all do it, and that's just the way it is with games that don't just have an open ended skill system.

But well, I don't really want to read 10s of pages of posts to find out whether mine and yours idea is popular or not. But I'll stand by it (unless someone gives me some insight why it's bad idea, of course), even though I understand the risk of it being implemented the same way SMN was. My reasoning is that WHM is simply most favorite job for casuals, so I think that if SE actually did some drastic changes to healers, WHM is last job they would drastically change, especially if it meant making it more difficult. I myself would love if all 4 healers were very distinct, had a lot of space for skill expressions, and had better gameplay than 12111111, but I really think that keeping one simple job for casuals is much more realistic scenario that SE might consider and even implement. They do not want to alienate casuals which are playing WHM because of it's simplicity, it's simple as that.

Irrelevant to healers:

You mean the one where Titanmen doctored a quote from me to mislead people, cutting out the part where I said that it was doable on spells but had a very small frame to do it in and people decided to ignore that? Most of the people attacking me for that were attacking me from other threads and just saw that as something they could pounce on, not a legitimate disagreement. That seems to happen a lot around here. As far as neutral tone and escalations, I don't have quotes from other people in my signature to belittle or mock them.

I'm not always right, but I'm also not always wrong when people attack me. I don't remember everything in the post, but there were several posts in there where I WAS saying things correct and people didn't care. Because whether the information was correct or not wasn't relevant to them. Attacking me was what they cared about and wanted to do. It's kind of like the people there who will attack Renault for harassment and bullying but refuse to attack Titanmen for harassment and bullying. What that says to me is opposition to harassment and bullying isn't something they actually care about - if they did, they'd call out both - instead, it's just a thing they can use to attack the one guy they don't like while not attacking the guy they like for the same crime.

And one more thing is that a lot of times, people like reading into my posts things that aren't there. It's happened here before, and it happened in that same thread you mentioned. Someone even later seems to have realized it when I said "Why didn't you ask me to clarify instead of assuming the worst?"

Some people's opposition to me is fair, and I tend to actually respect that. Many are not. It doesn't "seem" like everyone's against you in the cases where everyone is, in fact, against you. /shrug

But this is irrelevant to all this discussion and neither here nor there. I moved on, and if other people can't, then there's nothing I can do to help that along anyway. Like your sig, for example.

I was actually curious about it, so I went back and rewatched the video in question (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbWubxOTUWU) and... yeh, there's a lot of sarcasm and cynical tone.

Thanks for the thread, will look it over.

As to the video: The guy is snarky, as that's his style, but he says twice in it this general suggestion, so it doesn't seem he was being sarcastic in it. He says it in the middle of the video and then again at the end. Around 6:15 ("You know what would be surprising though? I don't even want to remove the one DPS button playstyle. Let one healer have this stupid ass rotation - probably White Mage - that way people don't lose their unga bunga role. Embrace some uniqueness where this game allows you to.") and then at the end. And in both places he says his reason for being frustrated with SGE is how over-safe it played it. "I just don't want every single healer to feel exactly the same at the core", which is my own position as well.

He sounds snarky, but not disingenuous when he says it both times.

And, as we've discussed here before, he's actually wrong on that one thing - that encounter design has always been the way it is now. Boss autos with possible crits, random targeted damage, few oGCD heals, etc.

I would go further & say "If you want beginner/casual friendly healer go play CNJ" lol, because they do have what it takes for those MSQ encounters, dungeons, and trials! (obviously random DF groups wouldn't take that kindly, but you get the idea)

CNJ isn't a full Job. You literally cannot que for some content on it.

This is like saying "If you want a complex healer, go play BLU". Sure, that's AN answer, but is it a GOOD answer when you can't do basically any content on it? Would you accept that as the solution for your desired type of healer? For the Devs to tell you you can get that on BLU as it is right now?

Besides, we even had this same discussion once before...

Would that take more work than just giving up on that job preemptively for some sort of misguided political bargaining chip for a nebulously defined group that can't or won't speak for itself?

I mean, they do speak for themselves. I speak for me, others in places like Reddit that I quoted are speaking for themselves as well. You just dismissed their views and statements. You can't call a person a mute when they're speaking a ton and you're just choosing not to listen because you don't think their words deserve being listened to.

Oh, as for the DoTs - I know some of you love the idea of putting more damage into the DoT and less the nuke. Sebezy makes this argument intelligently and cogently. Using math, she's shown that it would be more forgiving to casual players to have more damgae in their DoT......
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......
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...if they have decent DoT upkeep. If you have 100% DoT upkeep, then having more damage on your DoT sounds great for casual healers, since it means they can devote more GCDs to healing with less damage loss. Fantastic idea, right?

I did a DF P9N two days ago. The other healer did not use her DoT.

...no no, not "let it drop off". Not "occasionally forgot about it in a heated moment for a minute or something".

No. Didn't use it. At all. As in, the debuff NEVER appeared under the boss health bar.

But she had pretty solid Glare uptime and kept her GCD rolling as far as I could tell between Glare, Medica 2, Cure 2 spot healing, and so on. Kept Lucid rolling pretty well, and used Lilies and Misery.

The only thing she didn't use, like at all, was Dia. Meaning this proposed change that's supposed to help casuals would actually have hurt that casual. Something I don't think skilled players understand is how difficult it is for casuals to upkeep DoTs. I've mentioned it a lot, but for some reason, it's like talking to a brick wall. (I tend to have good, but not perfect, DoT upkeep because I use my 1 min CDs to keep alignment, Lucid on WHM and Aetherflow on SCH [since it's where I often look at my Aetherflow and Chain buttons since they're right next to each other and notice when they're at 30 second increments), but I struggle with that some too when things get hectic or even just not being able to see the debuff fall off the boss (as I've said many times, the native UI which I and other casual players use does not inform you in any noticeable way when your DoT falls off, and there's no way to have the boss healthbar show all buffs so you can see other important stuff on it from party members while having the Focus bar show only your own - at least, not that I've found; not that that would be a perfect solution, but it might help some......though casuals often don't use focus target, either, first time I did was in the Solus fight so I could keep track of his spells, and then I realized how amazingly useful this tool was.)

Anyway, point is, I don't think a lot of skilled players are understanding how casuals play, so they don't understand why their solution/compromise proposals don't appeal to said casuals, and might actually make things worse for them, not better. Until that understanding is reached, it may make compromise difficult, while leaving the people on the skilled side TRYING to compromise very confused as to why their proposals keep being rejected.)

And as to your "Who benefits?" question:

Casual healers do.

I don't understand how this is hard to understand, but making Jobs more complex is going to hurt the people already not inclined towards complexity. Propsals for making WHM more complex do not make GCD heals less punishing. The only thing that would outright do that would be making the GCD heals contribute to Misery, an idea you oppose (I get why you oppose it, your reasons aren't invalid, I'm just pointing out that you do oppose the one thing that would be most casual friendly to do). On the other hand, giving it a more involved damage rotation is going to hurt casual players since it means breaking out of it to cast GCD heals, the comfy fallback of the casual, is more punishing, not less. That the damage comes from 5-10 buttons instead of 3-5 doesn't make it more friendly unless those buttons do damage even when not pressed or the Job is given mechanics to increase their damage when they engage with their GCD heals.

I'm not sure how this is difficult to understand.

The people helped by the change are the people bored right now, not the people who are not.

[ty_taurus]

NJ isn't a full Job. You literally cannot que for some content on it.

This is like complaining that a room is too dark to be used as a guest room because the lights are off. Have you tried turning them on?

I don't actually think anything useful will ever be done with the classes, nor do I think that's the smartest or best solution. The entire argument originally was to try find some way to compromise with you who is entirely unwilling to compromise an inch for the sake of conversation. But saying that Conjurer or any other class "Cannot" be used is literally stupid. All you do as the dev is assign the rest of White Mage's actions to Conjurer except for any DPS buttons they would otherwise add, swap those actions for traits that substitute those actions with added flat potency on your filler, and flip on the switches that are flipped off. Naturally, I have no experience with FFXIV's engine, so actually making that change myself would require learning that engine, but doing the equivalent in something like Unity or Unreal is something I could probably knock out in an hour mechanically. I'd probably spend more time mathing out how to make Conjurer's damage values viable. But it would take very little time to make it functionally identical to any other job.

If the dev team wanted to do it they can do it far more easily than adding an entire new job. They won't because they feel no need. They aren't in the same position of wanting healers to be healthy, well-designed jobs for their game and aren't trying to bargain with a forum white knight for some peace and quiet. But if they felt the desire to make jobs more interesting, offer more rewarding gameplay, and have a stronger appeal to more skilled players, yet provide easy-access entry points for beginners, reworking the classes to be beginner friendly, viable choices even in Savage (even if not meta choices), it's one of the fastest and most economical ways to do so. The classes were even originally intended to be interchangeable with jobs, not just incomplete stepping stones. Jobs only had a few actions the class didn't have, and classes had access to every cross class option. The problem was there weren't enough actually usable cross class actions for any given class to use that weren't also available to that class' respective job.

[A_moth_called_rose]

...what do you like about those Jobs?

Sure sure, "more damage buttons/rotation", but is that it, or is there something more that could be incorporated into Healers? Mobility? Utility? Buffs? Melee attacks?

What are the things you like about your main(ish) DPS Job aside from rotation?

I can play the game without having to constantly move my mouse to UI elements. That's it. Most the DPS are homogenized to the point of being indistinguishable from one another mechanically, but until FFXIV support hover/mouseover casting for targeted abilities, I have no interest in touching the healers outside of leveling them once and being done with them.

I want to fight the bosses, not fight the UI.

[Shurrikhan]

Whether intended or not, the first part of your post sounds very...aristocratic? Technocratic? "It doesn't matter if this affects other people and they don't like it, they're ignorant children who just don't know any better."

Mate, you were acting like any narrowing of ideas could only come from a narrowing of interests, seemingly to then dismiss ideas coming from these forums (unless in agreement with you) as a result of interests too narrow to be worth considering remotely representative.

While the nature of the participants is a possible reason for narrowed ideas, the nature of that participation in the given venue is just as likely a reason for why discourse may vary between two locations.

Which is exactly what one will see, too, in perusing r/ffxiv and r/ffxivdiscussion. Both tend to show the same base opinions as here. It's only the more concrete, constructive theorycrafting of improvements/solutions that ends up developing differently... because r/ffxivdiscussion and especially r/ffxiv hardly has any such theorycrafting period -- again, due to the characteristics of that venue (we very rarely maintain long-form or multi-thread discussion with each other over there).

I did a DF P9N two days ago. The other healer did not use her DoT.

Which mattered oh so much... in P9 Normal? ???

Our DoTs are the value of 2.5 to 2.6 fillers per minute -- less than 11% of our total direct DPS (smaller still for SCH or AST rDPS), or at most ~5.6% of a DPS's throughput given the same ilvl and percentile. A DPS loses as much from minor misalignments.

And you're going to claim, what, that it'd be utterly abhorrent/unfair/devastating if a healer should have to hit more than a single button to get 90% of its damage potential?
???

Propsals for making WHM more complex do not make GCD heals less punishing.

Any new design lever a kit could add to make GCD heals less punishing... would be complexity. Manipulars are complexity. Lilies, themselves, are... complexity. Plenary Indulgence is... complexity.

Your proposed all-GCD-heals-feed-the-Bloodlily solution, too, relies on... complexity.

In your case, by hiding a Glare's value and effectively a 100 MP refund in every GCD heal, shifting their effective MP costs in ways that further penalize higher-MP-costing GCD heals relative to Cure/Regen, turning Glare into a trap to be removed from your hotbar, and making oGCD heals largely redundant from the sheer amount of free healing thereby possible... except when obliged to spend every 4th GCD on Misery. (Each GCD for which you forget to do so will cost you 71% of a Dia's bonus value, a far more severe and frequent rigid timing check than WHM has ever had before.)

P.S. If actually balanced, you aren't ultimately going to give GCD heals a lower relative cost at any particular HPS requirement.

If you increase offensive ppgcd but decrease the expected %offensive uptime, you make GCDs a part of gameplay but slightly increase the relative penalty of each GCD missed, even though the total rDPS dependence on management remains the same. If you make every bit of healing --GCD or otherwise-- "free", then you have to balance the kit around that fact, thus increasing the relative rDPS impact of any mismanaged healing ability while badly reducing your output ceiling in solo or little-healing-required content and far more early capping the sense of progression available to healers as they grow more experienced and/or more geared.

However, you can change how they fit within the rest of the kit to make them far more intuitive and therefore friendly to players, especially those without the experience to have yet made sense of those oddities.

The only thing that would outright do that would be making the GCD heals contribute to Misery, an idea you oppose.

Which was, among other things, because your proposed implementation was bonkers levels of broken, easily giving WHM up to triple the free healing of other healers (while devolving Solace and Rapture into solely a saving of 2s of casting time and 300-900 MP saved).

Yes, you 'reduced complexity' in effectively removing Glare from the kit and making oGCDs a less mana-intensive option in case one needed them, all by removing the core benefit of Lilies to instead add a cleaving Glare's damage value to every single GCD heal, with no complicating limitations beyond "Dump every 4th GCD," but that was largely why your suggestion was so broken. The lack of underlying complexity on your roundabout attempt to reduce GCD-healing penalties left you with no controls by which to stop your runaway train.

...But you've also added further complexity, even in a zero-nuance way, via the braindead but punishing chore of having to hit Misery every GCD it's available as not to waste Blood Lily cultivation, so that the GCDs you just lulled players into using liberally again become traps every 4th GCD (when Misery is made available).

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Yet the funniest thing is that the whole attempt ignores the fact that if the devs just hadn't given each job the means to maintain 100% offensive uptime in the first place, they wouldn't then have their attack potencies tuned down to balance them around that fact. You could literally just curtail WHM's oGCD healing (putting them at high MP costs) and buff their GCD actions (both output and cost-efficiency) to the same effect as making every healing action also a cleaving Glare.

If you actually approached the matter interested in efficient design and player-friendliness and wanted to reduce the skill-gap and unintuitiveness caused by the sharp gap between at-cost and "free" heals... the easiest solution is found in rebalancing the kit power itself, as not to leave a third of each healer's kit as a "fallback" to veterans but an actual trap to less experienced players.

The people helped by the change are the people bored right now, not the people who are not.

"I don't hate it" =/= "Any and all possible changes, even in keeping with and no harm to my interests, would disturb me."

And pick a damn camp. Who are you for?

Is it those whose rewards are most pronounced under the existing system? I.e., those who 'solve' the fight, then repeat at nauseum, laughing at any fool who dares use one more GCD of healing than they absolutely had to while you get your Malefic percentage that much closer to 91.7%?

Or is it casual players?

See that balance of healing kit power proposed above, by which we stop leaving healer kits a counterintuitive mess? That would primarily benefit the casual experience in healing, even while also meeting many of the requests of more veteran.

It's also a change.

[Sebazy]

I did a DF P9N two days ago. The other healer did not use her DoT.

Balancing around people's mistakes is bad.

Rather it's better to look consistent errors and mistakes and see if it's an issue with how the game presents data to the player. Dots have always historically been lacking in presentation from ARR. As I mentioned elsewhere, a few fixes are to make personal debuff icons on the boss target/focus bar much larger and clearer relative to other debuffs, another option would be either to have a self only aura attached to your own dots, or perhaps even have a distinctive sound when your dot falls off.

Designing the game around the mistakes is a bad choice as IMO that's a big part of what's landed the game in it's current state. A lot of people will play to the standard the game expects of them which is why you see things like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAJ9InV3-MI

[Shurrikhan]

Balancing around people's mistakes is bad.

Yes and no, I feel. If a job is, to the vast majority of players, more difficult to optimize than other jobs and you give it nothing compensatory for that fact... then you basically just put it on most players' avoid lists.

To me, it's fine that a given job has a bit of an advantage among your "95th percentile" and up kind of players... so long as it also is likely to underperform among your 25th and under or so. It'd just mean you couldn't balance the tiers of difficulty/optimizations among each job quite evenly which... yeah, would be nearly impossible to do and isn't worth pursuing over job identity.

Better to have some slightly fewer options among your ego-parse/post-game BiS super-speedruns than for the average player to lose options just because a job is, as objectively as is possible, more difficult than others for zero reward.

(To be clear, that reward doesn't always have to be total direct throughput. It could be flexibility or the like... so long as that flexibility were actually relevance.)

[Monokhrom]

Dancer be nimble
Dancer be quick
Dancer will steal your chick

[Deo14]

Would that take more work than just giving up on that job preemptively for some sort of misguided political bargaining chip for a nebulously defined group that can't or won't speak for itself? Of course. But that work is worthwhile and deserved.

Reserving a job's entire current state regardless of what its parts contribute to or how much is essentially to bar analysis of that kit and thereby bar even the prospect of improvement. Being cautious is good, but preemptively denying a job any changes whatsoever, no matter how vetted, is just wasteful and pointless.

No job should be stuck with that kind of treatment.

I don't propose to keep WHM exactly the same, but simply not to alter it too much, so it won't alienate casuals, and then bring back AST and SCH to former glory. I fully understand that this is not ideal, however, it is realistic. How many times in this game's history did they make job harder and more complex, instead of easier and more brain dead? Which is why I think it's okay to have this sacrificial lamb, that people dissatisfied with the potential changes can turn to.

Yes, my idea is essentially negotiating, again, it's not ideal, but it's more realistic. There are casuals, which do indeed like playing healers for their simplicity. Some people are just fine with 1211111, and even though my inner gamer would want these people to wake up and put more effort into their gameplay, that's unrealistic, this game does have a lot of these people, and we know from the past that devs are afraid of the casuals and wouldn't want to go against them.

As for implementation details, there's a lot of theory crafting, with making GCD heals be worth it, making healers actually heal and so on. You could make AST cards GCD, but next malefic will deal 2x damage, Adlo could deal damage if it bursts, or refund you gauge when it doesn't, whatever, there's lot of options how you could fix healers. But I'm not really qualified for this, and jumping straight into details when we don't know if SE will even bother doing something is not my forte.

Isn't the issue with SMN/RDM not that SMN is easier so much as that RDM does LESS damage? It's not that SMN does the same damage for less work, it's that SMN is actually an outright DPS gain over RDM.

I think we discussed this enough in that SMN thread. It's complex set of issues, it's not just about damage, it's also about difficulty (both general and encounter-specific), utility and tax for it, mobility, community's perception and many more.

But this is irrelevant to all this discussion and neither here nor there. I moved on, and if other people can't, then there's nothing I can do to help that along anyway. Like your sig, for example.

I can remove my signature, and you can slowly start restoring your reputation. But if you keep making these walls of texts, making bad arguments and dying on the most stupid of hills just so you seem right, it won't help.