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

[ForsakenRoe]

As always, my solution accommodates the most people. Your idea of "fun" isn't. Your idea of "better" isn't. YOU are literally writing off 75% of the community (by your example numbers) and telling them to screw off and go play another GAME while my idea means that both they and you can play this one. That makes your model worse in every way.

Question. Imagine there's a special panel at Fanfest. They are showing the direction for healers, as a way to publicly reassure players that they acknowledge the Abyssos situation was not a good time, and they're working on fixing the damage it caused. So, imagine that said panel opened with a mini-Job Actions trailer for the four healers, and as an example, WHM throws out some damage skills, a new one that looks suspiciously similar to Lost Banish, spends 50 of a new gauge on a massive cool heal, and then tears the target apart with Quake, Flood and Tornado. Do you think the average crowd reaction is going to be booing because there's new complexity added to the job, or cheering because we finally have Water spells in the kit? Because I imagine it'd be the latter, and big. Like, as big a cheer (if not more) as when SHB revealed PLD was getting a gapcloser

Correct. Upgrades, new effects added to abilities, etc, would all still exist.

You'll have to forgive some of us for not sharing your excitement for Glare 4 and it's +10 potency.

I'm with you on the 4-Healer Model.
Some nuance can exist within the Jobs - as it already does. I think this is the major sticking point. I recognize the Jobs already have complexity/depth while others reject the notion outright and hyperbolize that Healers are 1 button Jobs that don't do anything else.
I also agree with you that the concepts of easy and hard are subjective. I've long found GNB easier to play than old PLD, DRK, or WAR, though I'm not sure why.

The issue is that healing is binary. You either have enough and you live, or you don't and you wipe. Optimization on other roles has a different hard limit, that of the job's depth. A BLM can get more and more 'optimized', and find different techs, to push ever so slightly more damage up til the point where every tech has been found and used, and it's reached the 'perfect' gameplay. But said perfect gameplay is different from fight to fight, so they would have to do the process multiple times to 'master' the job in relation to each fight. Melee have similar, 'do your rotation correctly', 'shift buff timings to better match the fight timeline', 'minimize downtime to get one more autoattack', 'shift true north timings so you can get every positional', etc

Healers, on the other hand, have their 'mastery' mostly tied up in 'reduce at-cost healing to zero'. Once you get your damage-losing heals to zero, that's kind of it, any further 'mastery of the job' is almost autopilot, being 'keep DOT up, spam filler'. We just want to have a bit more to do (optionally) after the standard 'reduce atcost heals to zero'

Some of the people on your side have literally said before that people should not be able to play as they do currently and clear Savages OR even Extremes. Yes, that is gatekeeping. The idea of it being accessible "in MSQ 4 mans" is not actual accessibility.

Is that me you're referring to? Cos I'd happily say I'm wrong, and change my stance if it'd get changes into the game. I would prefer it if people actually had a grasp of how to play their class in hard content yes, but that can be changed. After all, the gap between 'standard' and 'full opti' in my designs is quite low. Thinking on it more, yeh why not. I'll amend my stance:

If the condition to get my WHM design added is 'ok but the current gameplay of 'refresh Dia every 30s and spam Glare thereafter' must still be able to clear every content in the game, including week 1 Savage and Ultimates', then I can go back to the design and tweak Dia's duration/damage such that it's less punishing to drop it for 18s at a time. I'd prefer to keep the duration at 12s. Maybe I could swap it and Banish (so it's 15s and B is 12s) and tweak potencies/gauge gain accordingly

...do you GENUINELY not realize that some people find Healers enjoyable to play right now? That "crappy loop" is your SUBJECTIVE take and not one universally shared?

Yes, and some people 'genuinely enjoy' Runecrafting in OSRS, despite the vast majority of that game's playerbase finding it absolutely horrid to train. This doesn't mean we shouldn't add new ways to train the skill that are more fun, more engaging.
Ironically, the OSRS community seems to have an iron rule: 'Any training method added cannot be any higher XP/h than the current best method'. Or in more relevant terms, 'any damage rotation for healer cannot be any higher DPS than current rotation'
That attitude gatekeeps good ideas from getting into the game and it annoys me to no end

I'm not "sacrificing" one. I'm SACRIFICING THREE. I'm SAVING one from you! What you want is the sacrifice. What you want is the suck. What you want is the crappy loop. What YOU want is the shit gameplay that I'd hate to be subjected to. I'm not "sacrificing" one healer to save three. I'm SACRIFICING three TO SAVE ONE. And YOU get all three. AND THAT'S NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU.

And yet somehow I'm the one who got accused of having an ego /s

I'm going to ignore "failing to offer a good reason" as I've done so dozens of times, you just don't want to accept it. Moving on from THAT to mutually exclusive:
The problem is, it is.
Unless the complex and simple forms HAVE THE SAME OUTPUT, it's mutually exclusive because there will be some content that the latter cannot clear otherwise. Therein lies the problem.

You gave reasons, the point is that none of them were 'good' in the eyes of others I guess

If we tune the potencies such that you CAN clear the content (even Ultimate/Week 1 Savage) by playing EXACTLY as you do now (ie on SCH, Bio DOT every 30s, Broil spam, ignore EVERY other new button that's added), does that remove the opposition to the idea? I assume not, because it's not about whether you can clear with suboptimal rotations, or you'd have learned from the many posts, from many people, showing how suboptimal you can be and clear that you can be alarmingly suboptimal and clear, even week 1 Savage. As an example, here is my first clear of P11S, on week 1:

31 Succors, 21 Ruin2's, 4 Energy Drains, one Dissipation. Those 'optimizations' sure don't look too 'required' to me. And before you say 'oh the coheal made up for it probably' they also had 6 Med2's and 2 Cure3's, so it's not like they were perfect either.
Stop assuming that 'any change to complexity = immediately locks someone out of content', it might be what some people would want to see, but things can be tuned such that it doesn't. And idk about others, but if I have to choose, I'll take 'people can play really badly and still clear' if it means getting changes to the healers. And yes I mean all 4

Taking this part out of tags because I think it could lead to a potential understanding of one another's positions

Hell, you've seen MY WHM and SGE proposals, have you not?
In both cases I made the DPS rotation more engaging, and I did it without even adding another DPS button (or button at all) for WHM, and actually DECREASING the total number of abilities on SCH!

Yes, I remember your WHM proposal, and agreeing that it'd be pretty acceptable. I remember it being more rigid than mine but equal if not higher complexity to execute. Which brings me to the final points: I think you aren't as against the idea of 'extra complexity' as you might think you are. It just has to be the 'correct kind' of complexity, a kind that you understand well, and vibe with, such that it doesn't feel 'clunky' to you. And with your hatred of staggered DOT timers (understandable) and previously mentioned 'I get GNB much better than any other tank somehow', I think I see why your WHM design was the way it was: You prefer static looping rotations, or rotations built from understandable/predictable 'blocks'. Ie, 'Glare x 3, Banish' is a simple 10s 'block' that builds the foundation, '3 Solace/Rapture > Misery' is a 10s block, but doesn't require the parts to be in sequence, etc. Current healers have a 30s block of 'apply DOT, press filler 11 times', when you think about it in that sense. I guess it explains your Arcane Mage days. And your defense of current SMN, being as it's got 4 'blocks' too now (3 summons and a demi). It's funny, I'd have made new PLD be very similar in style to what you seem to want from jobs, built from 10s 'blocks' (I'd even have made Shield Bash part of the rotation, SE hire me).

(you'll have to forgive me if I'm wrong in that assessment, but everything seems to line up)
(also forgive if you've already said as much, i don't remember reading it anywhere)

Question is: you're presumably not opposed to WHM getting that design, else you'd never have pitched it. So, if all three nonWHM healers got... whatever extra stuff to add complexity, and WHM got 'your design, exactly as you want it', like, you're creative director for the job's design and get to decide everything, VFX, potencies, interlinking of skills, everything, would you be opposed to that? Or is that design 'what Ren would be ok with WHM having, if it had to be one of the three offered to the wolves, and it was eg SGE that was being kept 'as is''? Cos I'm under the assumption that it's the latter, but if it were the former, then a lot of opposition to your essays would likely die off. I imagine a fair few people would accept your WHM, where it doesn't get any new actions, but instead gets new interactions between skills as you had listed