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

[ForsakenRoe]

We don't need much, just a couple of small, focused changes is enough to spice things up. For example, for the damage side of things, all I would ask for WHM is to reduce Dia's duration to 12s (because 30s feels stupid), and to add a new Water/Banish GCD with a 15s CD. That's all. That's not going to suddenly make WHM gigabrain to play, you could even make a macro to auto-use Banish if it's ready and Glare if it isn't, if you wanted.

As mentioned elsewhere, you never saw these 'healing is boring' complaints back in Stormblood when AST had it's old cards and SCH had it's DOTs. All we heard back then was 'can we make WHM as fun as SCH/AST and not have these trash Lily thingys', and SE heard that and went 'ok, we have reduced the fun of SCH/AST to achieve fun parity, enjoy' instead of just doing the SHB Lily fix to SB WHM and building on it from there

'More healing required' would be a more 'thematic to the role' solution. It'd also absolutely devastate the more casual players and likely cause an even bigger exodus from the role than we've seen. Abyssos ramped healing required, and we're in the situation we're in now. It got so bad that even JP started asking about the shortage

[Connor]

'More healing required' would be a more 'thematic to the role' solution. It'd also absolutely devastate the more casual players and likely cause an even bigger exodus from the role than we've seen. Abyssos ramped healing required, and we're in the situation we're in now. It got so bad that even JP started asking about the shortage

This is often brought up as the reason why healers exist as they do (‘new players can’t handle anything else’), but that kind of feels like a smokescreen to me lol. It assumes that the healers is literally the only job with any healing or support capability which simply isn’t true.

Like, if we take Lil Jimmy NoFriends as a new WHM into expert roulette. The tank itself is going to have various defensive / healing capabilities for both themselves and others. Melee dps have Feint and Second Wind, Red Mage and Summoner have the obvious healing capabilities, Bards can buff defense and healing amounts and Dancers have limited healing capabilities. Unless he’s going into a 4-man dungeon with a specific setup of 3 dps (which he’d have to intentionally opt into as a pre-made) - which are all melee - it’s doesn’t seem to accurate to me to say ‘he has to do everything healing related all by himself and it will not be possible because he lacks the required skill’.

Obviously I’m not advocating that literally all healers should be carried through content by tanks and dps, but at the same time, the ‘healers can’t need to heal more because newbies can’t handle it’ is predicated on the idea that nobody else can help them, which I personally don’t think is true outside of extremely specific circumstances

Addendum: rather than rewording the post (I didn’t realise how it looked until I re-read it lol) I just want to clarify that the ‘they’ making this argument is the devs themselves, rather than general community

[ZephyrMenodora]

I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex healing

[Aword3213]

Theirs only so much "healing" spells you can add really thats the issue.
Fights are also just not designed for healers to heal most of the time, so they would also need to change that, I think having Proc based attacks on healer would add more to look out for.

Don't get me wrong I want healers and tanks to actually have more impact and importance in their support tools even in casual content, instead of making them plainly green/blue DPS only. But that will likely not change unless fight design changes.

I understand that and I agree with you. I wish SE could revamp and rework our healing toolkit as a whole and make healing/support asepct of the toolkit more interactive and interesting.

I know it's very unlikely for SE to do so, but the same could be said about the requset for more dps options. According to healer subforums, they have been asking for more dps options for years. It didn't get us anywhere. If anything, the statement from Yoshi-P during the Endwalker interview only enforced his stance of "no dps for healers"

I'm not averse to more dps buttons for healers though. I just prefer having a gameply that focus more on utility and healing to doing dps.

There have already been some comments regarding this, I would just add that I find our healing toolkit to be bloated for our current game design. If DPS options (note- again there is this concern about "complex" DPS rotations- which is coming out of nowhere) were added AND some changes were added to encounters that required us to use our support and healing in more interesting ways and not just dodge mechanics, that would definitely get my vote.

It's not coming out of nowhere though. I didn't mention "complex dps rotation" with the intent to make a strawman. It's in the title of this very thread.

Yes, our healing toolkits are bloated. To make matters worse, non healer roles are also capable of contributing lots of healing.

How come nobody ever asks for actual support gcds and utility spells or debuffs lol, it’s always either ‘pure heal’ or ‘pure damage with ogcd healing’

Yes, more support GCDs. New skills, regardless of healing or dps, coming in the form of oGCD still results in 11111 gameplay.

[Payadopa]

Spreadsheet warriors asked for this, so SE obliged them. We used to have more support, more job synergy more Individuality but then someone broke out a calculator, declared a certain job combination suboptimal and a few years later this is the result. Blissful uniformity.
People also bitched about melee uptime so SE made bosses bigger.
Honestly, I don't envy them. No wonder they stopped replying in the EN forums years ago. lol

[ForsakenRoe]

Obviously I’m not advocating that literally all healers should be carried through content by tanks and dps, but at the same time, the ‘healers can’t need to heal more because newbies can’t handle it’ is predicated on the idea that nobody else can help them, which I personally don’t think is true outside of extremely specific circumstances

Yes, I would also like to believe that by the time a player reaches EX roulette they would have enough skill to meet a slightly higher challenge than what is currently offered by the game. But some insist that adding more damage buttons to the healers would cause said players to be unable to keep up, and cause wipes. So, by that token, I would argue that not only would 'more healing required' also cause said players to be unable to keep up, them being unable to keep up would not be just 'oh they might not make the enrage timer and cause wipe' (what enrage timer in EX roulette, Cagnazzo charging his ult?), it would cause literal wipes because 'I could not keep people alive because I ran out of MP/I did not know my range limits/I mismanaged CDs earlier in the fight/whatever reason'.

And again, the point of a change that would 'solve the problem' is that it has to solve the problem in all content. It's no good if Savage requires more healing, but Ex roulette and 24mans are left alone to protect the casuals. Because then the problem still exists in those contents. A solution should be able to affect all content levels, and be impactful to those who need it's effect, and as ignoreable as possible for those who do not, or those who cannot perceive it's impact. So, slightly more involved damage rotation, potencies balanced such that Glarespamming is 90%+ of your total potential output. Those who want to go giga-sweaty in a 24man can, those who don't, can ignore it all. We've done the maths on how to make more interesting rotations, and balanced them such that 'Glarespam style' is less of a DPS loss to the design, than it's possible to lose thanks to crit variance right now. If random people on a forum for a 10year old MMO can manage to math a design like that out, SE sure should be able to

I didn't mention "complex dps rotation" with the intent to make a strawman. It's in the title of this very thread.

I know it's in the title, but we have to be careful with the phrase and the context surrounding it. 'Complex DPS rotation' and 'more complex DPS rotation' are two very different things, potentially. For example, if we were to have, on SCH:

Bio, 30s duration
Miasma, 24s duration
Shadowflare, 15s duration

That is 'more complex DPS rotation' than what we have now. But I doubt anyone would seriously call it a 'complex DPS rotation', only 'more complex than the current one'. Personally, all I'm asking for is one or two buttons on each healer. If that creates something that qualifies as a 'complex DPS rotation', then that's just sad, that such simple rotations would be considered 'actually complex' and not just 'more complex than current'

[SieyaM]

What I can see happening, which is a concern I've voiced before, about adding an actual rotation or burst phase to healers is that healers will be encouraged to not heal if it will interrupt the rotation or burst phase. No matter how dire the situation you will either be healed at the end of a rotation when it won't interrupt other abilities they use for DPS or not at all during a burst phase so they don't waste GCD or oGCDs if they have them for dps during that time.

[Teno]

Come on, some comments in this thread are ridiculous.

"Play a dps if you want to dps".

Please refrain from spouting bs when you are clueless.

Healers have been green dps since ARR, end of the line. Their gameplay has considerably worsened since pretty much SB. ShB rubbed salt in the wound and let's not talk about the spit in the face that was EW.

Now, not everything is grim and healers are again in a very good state but... only in pvp, where they mostly focus on burst/support (and cc but kinda irrelevant) with heals on a cd. In fact, if they could do away with their s*** pve constraints and bring over some of the pvp things they've added to pve, the game would be immensely more fun.

[ASkellington]

What I can see happening, which is a concern I've voiced before, about adding an actual rotation or burst phase to healers is that healers will be encouraged to not heal if it will interrupt the rotation or burst phase. No matter how dire the situation you will either be healed at the end of a rotation when it won't interrupt other abilities they use for DPS or not at all during a burst phase so they don't waste GCD or oGCDs if they have them for dps during that time.

They quite literally made tanks' 123 combo no longer able to be broken by their ranged GCD aggro attack and most of the healers heal on the oGCD where they can weave their combo. This holds no water.

Also, whoever said that a healer's rotation would look akin to a tank/melee dps? They can have debuffs that do damage on a 15s recast timer, extra DoTs to add on (which are press and forget btw), delayed damaging abilities akin to Earthly Star, or some combination of the above.

Any healer worth their salt is going to heal when they need to. What that looks like is going to be different depending on the healer, their team, the fight, and their gear. I may stop my rotation because I feel I need to heal half way through the 15s of the 2min window another healer may say, "no, you can wait" and be just as right as I cause they know you aren't going to die in 15s.

Neither of these responses are justification for not giving us extra dps.

[LilimoLimomo]

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

My gut reaction was that there are DPS classes for that. But I think that was the myopic, reactionary response.

A more thoughtful reaction would be: why not? Just as DPS jobs offer both SMN (simple) and BLM (complex), maybe there should be a single healer job that adds that complexity for players who want something more involved to diddle with between heals.