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

[Shurrikhan]

I do agree with this. It's one thing the "stacks up to 60 seconds" would make work. Right now, if there's a mechanic you need a heal for at 30 sec, your options are to clip your DoT early or let it fall off for a few seconds. While neither is a terrible DPS loss, it doesn't reward fight knowledge.

??? No. That's completely reversed.

The priority conflict is the point. The whole reason DoTs made GCD heals more interesting back then and GCD heals --especially with a degree of actual MP management-- made DoTs more interesting in turn was that you wanted to have put out enough healing by that exact GCD that you use it on reapplying the DoT at the right time. And it's only around then that it actually rewards fight knowledge.

You conserved MP via Cure/Regen despite needing to get HP up quicky before this tankbuster, thinking you'd nonetheless have time to refresh your per-12s DoT... and you were wrong, and therefore punished. Or, you correctly gauged that you'd need to be less efficient here in order to make that time, because you remembered when the next burst would hit, and so you did replace it on time, rewarding you for that fight knowledge and good gamble.

Even a fixed 60-second DoT like Higan would do far more than that "durations stack to <2/3/5x their original duration>", though. Under your approach, you have no point of decision; you just mindlessly throw out DoTs until it nears cap, and then have 40-59 seconds to remember again that the button exists to repeat that process. It'd have near-zero difficulty or reward, and would act only as the shallowest of maintenance, rather than any sort of decision-making that plays synergetically with your other decisions to be made.

If you remove the priority conflict that adds that extra layer of pacing checks to one's heals by making it so you can add the full value of the DoT at any time so long as the total duration wouldn't go over 60 seconds (literally 5 applications of old Aero II), you've removed the whole point of those DoTs. You've made it harder to fail, but also made them add nothing of interest to gameplay.

I don't know how anyone would be fond of that kind of approach. When you make everything increasingly fail-proof and thereby leave mechanics with only some tenth of their former nuance or complexity, that shit is boring.

Also agree that MP management (or lack thereof) is an issue.

Likewise agreed. Though it really confuses me that you could want actual gameplay from the one aspect... all while seeming downright eager to consign other forms to a shallow pretense.

Yes, DoTs back then had more frequent pace-setting, but DoTs and their pace-setting is what allowed for the player to engage with gambling compromises between Cure's efficiency and Cure II's burst more frequently and with greater reward. They were all part of the same system, worked together, were synergetic. Why fix only the longest-term and thereby least-felt aspect of that system and neglect or degrade its other, more frequent and more palpable parts?

Not saying this to be snippy, but I think we have to agree to disagree. As I say, I think of mistakes as "based on the knowledge you had at the time" not "based on what a skilled player would assume is the knowledge you should have had at the time".

At that point you make idiots, the intoxicated, and the concussed, etc. basically incapable of mistakes, since, by your definition, as long as they can't recall any information pertinent to the would-be decision, acting to one's disbenefit can't be considered a "mistake".

Which partly gets into the rest of your reply; you seem to be overestimating the (fundamental) differences between then and now in what was optimal in Healer (or any Role's) gameplay:

ARR WHM didn't chain cast Stone unless you were bad.

ARR WHM absolutely did often cast consecutive Stone IIs, usually unless the player was bad. The rules were the exactly the same as now: maximize uncapped output (e.g., by minimizing wasteful short-term output).

Healer kits just had less of their total output locked into healing back then. That's all that's fundamentally changed.

Assize locks in 600 damage and 600 healing potency per minute. Every pure healing oGCD that doesn't share a resource cost with an offensive ability locks in its curative ppm, preventing you from improving your total output if/when healing requirements are already met.

For every WHM "dancing" in Cleric to DPS, there were plenty more than busy doing GCD healing, which was both accepted (not ridiculed like today as a "Sylphie" or "Cure 1 spammer" or "healbot") and was the norm.

Healers who didn't properly stance-dance were scolded for wasting 70+% of their value in each mismatched GCD... because they were. Those who refused to use any attacks were scolded as Syphies and thereby wasting much of their would-be value... because they were.

If you raised someone, you used Protect in battle so they wouldn't get plastered by the next raidwides due to their Weakness debuff.

While yes, people did sometimes cast Protect on raised allies, it was worth less than 4% mitigation even on a tank, and was therefore basically never actually worth casting in combat; one would be better off saving that GCD for a Stoneskin before the next otherwise assuredly fatal raidwide (since Weakness and Brink of Death increasingly reduced max HP).

But I suppose that was the benefit of obfuscating what stats and actions actually do? That people got to pretend it mattered?

On the other hand, put that same kit into the hands of XIV players today and they are unlikely to simply assume that a tooltip as vague as "Increases Defense" (with the effect of Defense itself being hidden from players) or even "Reduces damage taken from physical attacks" will actually be worth casting and will instead look it up online and promptly use it only as a before-combat chore, which was all it was actually good for.

Why? Because the average player has gotten better and, perhaps more importantly, less naive.

I remember playing Resto back in an era where the Druid's job during raids was not to deal damage, but to keep near-100% uptime on Rejuvenation (their mana efficient instant cast single target HoT)

If you were at all overhealing, you would have been better served by casting the occasional Moonfire instead of focusing only on maximizing HoT uptime; the goal should be increasing the reliability and later speed of clears, by preventing deaths (including those that would occur to Enrage, if you have the room to make that difference in offense), not uptime of a frequently bottlenecked effect like a ST HoT.

_______

I'm guessing all that summary below my quote was written for others, rather than for me? Else, you're already aware that I've raided on each healer in WoW and XIV both, since Vanilla and ARR respectively, so I'm not sure why you're giving me this historical summary... I'm already aware. I experienced it. Probably more extensively than you have.

If your main point beneath this was more related to Lyth's, in that we could have more far varied Healers, then I agree. But no matter what kind of Healer --heck, no matter what role you're playing-- the ultimate goal is the same: to increase the reliability of clears while it'd be uncertain, and the speed of clears thereafter. Anything that doesn't add to that goal is merely a rough and incomplete guideline -- a training wheels idea of one's job to be contextualized and thereby replaced with additional understanding.

Given any particular balancing point in Healers' total contribution, you are never going to make unnecessary costs (be they GCDs or oGCDs that could have been spent instead on attacks) more appealing.

You'd have had a choice between outputting an uncapped Resource A and a Resource B that is frequently more vital but is currently already capped, and chose B, wrongly. Or you chose B when B was necessary to keep some alive --thereby actually producing, across your party, less of Resource A-- rightly. Etc., etc. The more we layer that choice into knowledge-dependence and the occasional gamble, the more interesting its points of interaction will be, but it still comes down to ultimately better or ultimately worse.

All you can change is how many actions one has prior to tapping into their 'last resort' / 'at cost' actions as to make them seem less or more redundant, and the portion of Healers' total contribution that is locked into Resource A vs. Resource B.

Anything else doesn't shift previously bad choices nearer to good ones... so much as to simply have nerfed all content, thereby making decisions less important for everyone (by nature of having overbuffed a Role with whom they can party... or just be outright replaced by, as per when tanks get horribly overbuffed).