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

[IDontPetLalas]

Regarding that statement of "players only stay with a game if it hooks them emotionally" if you are going to apply that specifically to job and/or encounter design I don't see how you can or should treater all players as a monolithic block.

There are players that stay in this game because of glamour, or because of RPG, and that pass the entirety of their game in Limsa or in clubs. Some of these players are are likely very invested in their character's lore and how it looks, possibly their animations but not its progression or skill floor/ceiling.

Finally, can anyone point me to the source of those people who are actually asking for complex DPS skills for healers? I still haven't seen it..ever.

Let's compare this to savage or ultimate raider. What's the emotional hook there? It is far more likely to be the job optimization, the sense of achievement when they complete a difficult duty in most efficient way possible synchronizing their skills with their party.

[Shurrikhan]

Shouldn't less skilled players be given a reason and opportunity to improve? It isn't engaging to go through content mindlessly. Players only stay with a game if it hooks them in some way emotionally.

Also, is it fair for Square Enix to balance healers around the lowest denominator? If they continue to do that then FFXIV will continue to lose veteran healers, because they're bored, leaving only the least skilled.

A 10-14x increase in GCD healing required (flipping the portions of uptime spent healing and portion spent attacking) is hardly a small and manageable shift. You already saw my suggestion, ultimately about a 25% nerf to outgoing healing (with small accordant changes), which would be itself a huge increase to GCD healing required because the largest factor forgoing the need for GCD healing right now is simply how much is provided for "free" via oGCDs.

Let's not pretend that anything / everything short of a n absurdly extreme or "nuclear" option (more healing requirements than we've ever had before, just to balance out having the least engaging downtime activities we've ever had) is no change at all...

[Sebazy]

I'm saying everything up to that point was too easy. Healers weren't prepared for the sudden leap in difficulty. Difficulty should be a steady slope instead of big steps up, if you know what I mean.

This is a big part of the puzzle for sure. For all it's jank, one thing 2.0 ARR absolutely nailed right out of the gate was it's progressive difficulty curve that steadily ramped up as you progressed through dungeons into the HM Primals and onto Coil. They even used to dungeons to introduce people to key primal mechanics. Genius design IMO.

One part I will disagree with you on though, it's not always possible to have constant healing requirements throughout the fight. Even Godka had some downtime (We needed it to get MP back). I do agree that a rethink on healing requirements and incoming damage is a central piece of the puzzle if at least to eliminate the chances of us getting another Byregot or E8S, but giving us something to do during downtime and solo content should still be a consideration IMO. It doesn't have to be DPS, buffing/augments gets the thumbs up from me++

[Avoidy]

You're also bored when you heal because 95% of the relevant content in this game doesn't even require a healer. For healing to be enjoyable across the board, the entire game would have to be revamped to make support roles feel enjoyable. This means making people more dependent on each other in ways that feel meaningful. This means gutting the current "I do my own thing until it's time for the 2 minute moment to kick in" system and replacing it with one where, say, your Mana actually means something and gets supplied by support jobs. Or your attack speed can be lower and you want it to be, and this can be supplied by support jobs. Or the boss can and should be debuffed and this debuff is supplied regularly by support jobs. And on and on and on.

Since we can't even count on people to press Esuna in a timely manner and the game is actively shaping itself to suit those kinds of players, you can kiss this dream goodbye along with any notions of a complex damage rotation.

[Aravell]

This means making people more dependent on each other in ways that feel meaningful.

This is one of the main things that was lost going into ShB. If it were up to me, I'd want tanks to return to their SB level of mitigation. Inter-party reliance is not a bad thing, tanks were not actually as squishy as people remembered back in SB, you could still do the mega pulls with a fantastic healer. But at this point, if any move is made to shift tanks down so they rely more on the healers and their co-tank, some tanks will riot, especially those who are so used to WAR being a one-man army that doesn't have to care one bit about what anyone else in the party is doing.

People often say that relying on other people to do their job is not fun, but having no inter-party reliance is also a bad thing. We don't currently do dungeons with other players, we currently do dungeons adjacent to other players.

[vetch]

Finally, can anyone point me to the source of those people who are actually asking for complex healing skills for healers? I still haven't seen it..ever.

Go spend more time on the healer forums then.

[WaxSw]

You are talking about the healer paradox. Simply put, the better the party plays, the less healers are needed. This is true in all MMOs, at least the ones I've played.

While I'm not denying the current situation is boring, I feel the answer is to make changes to the healing kit, such as giving healers the buff/debuff abilities which damage dealers have currently. One idea I've seen bantered around is having heal spells restore a percentage of health, instead of having potencies. Perhaps, that'll address the issue of having healing spells being too powerful for the content.

It's because that healer paradox why its common for the devs to give healers more stuff to do outside healing, wow knows it, overwatchs knows and basically any other game with the exception of XIV seem to know it. Engagement by healing, is, by definition, finite.

Buff/Debuff abilites are part of a dps rotation, which is also what we ask for, not simply attacks. If you mean buffs in the term of mit then it would solve nothing because the amount of focus on dpsing would remain the same and in the less healing intesive contents those buttons would hardly be necessary

That would result in healers using their damage spells most of the time

This is what we are doing, right now, in all the content. From normal mode to savage healers spend easily over 90% of their total GCDs on dpsing, adding more buttons if anything would be that 90% of those GCDs more engaging and not a slog where 1 button can be over 50% of your total actions (yes, GCDs AND oGCDs)

I believe two facts can be concluded from that circumstance.

Believe what you want, the truth is that more healing leads to less healers and I can assure you the game wont go out their way to teach those players how to use those tools, besides, even in that tier the problems of healers spending 80-90% of their total actions remained so that is clearly not the solution. As healers get better they dps more and that dps should be a reward and not boring gameplay.

Actually, that is what people are saying. Asking for a complex damage rotation is pushing healers further into the role of green dps...

That people is saying that we want a dps-level rotation as if we were dps when we are not asking for that. What we ask is that if current healers are a 1 on the dps scale and dps are a 10, the content would be far more enjoyable if intead of being a 1 we were a 4-5, not having a rotation on the same level of complexity of a dps job but a better than one because if dpsing is, in one way or another, what we are going to doing the most (because 99% of the content dont need healer-level healing) then make it more engaging than simply pressing 2 buttons

So, the answer is to increase the number of damage spells healers cast? That makes no sense

It does.

The problem is that healers are boring because dpsing is what we do the most and the dps rotation is extremely lackluster. You can solve that problem in 2 ways:

-Make them interact with the dps rotation less, this is the "healers heal more route" with all the issues I've mentioned and far more like the dev resources spent and how it would make even casual content less accessible for everyone

-Make the dps rotation more engaging, which is what most veteran healers support because it consumes less dev resources, is more aproachable and casual friendly, increases the skill ceiling of the jobs without strictly raising the floor, tackles the core issues of the game better...

It makes perfect sense that healers ask for a better dpsing.

The big white elephant in the room is we healers have been spoiled by the ease of the content, the potencies of our heals, the MSQ, and all the other challenges presented to us by Square Enix. That needs to be addressed before anyone starts changing healer damage rotations.

For the same reason casual content dont have dps checks, to not wall players because other people's actions. If they were to stop spoiling (like in the healers heal more route I mentioned) the healers unable to keep up with the hps would face a hard wall, increasing the frustration among players and like we saw in EW 2nd tier reducing the amount of healers overall. This is also leaving outside factors like how there is not a sweet spot for healing, the thing a noob healer identify as hard is a slog of 1 button dps spam for a veteran and what a veteran may find engaging may be straight up unhealable by the less experienced player.

[IDontPetLalas]

Go spend more time on the healer forums then.

You're still not providing an answer, but nice try at trying to deflect the argument.

[LilimoLimomo]

In 27+ months of playing FFXIV, that is literally something that's never happened to me, and something that I've never had to worry about.

I'm genuinely happy to hear that's the case; sadly, it's not the case for everyone. While some of my friends are top tier, some of my friends are just barely "good enough" to do baseline content. And some of these players have literally stopping queuing for content without a pre-made or a Trust because the number of times they've been criticized or talked down to has left the enduring impression that in any group with randoms there's a non-trivial chance that someone will single them out. And that sucks a whole lot.

It's a problem that the game has, one that the devs themselves recognized in 2021 when they revised the form factor of the game's list of Prohibited Activities (which caused quite a stir as players worried they weren't even allowed to offer suggestions anymore).

Sadly, as we well know, the ToS alone doesn't prevent harmful behavior, it can only mitigate and sometimes punish it. That's why it's also beneficial to use game design itself as a means to provide solutions to problems such as these. By giving players a diverse array of options to select from, each player can find one that better suits their personal needs and playstyle.

[LilimoLimomo]

I get called LOTS of names in there and am the subject of near constant dogpiles - to the point the common Healer forum posters will dogpile on me in any other part of the forum now, such as General or the Tank or DPS forums - since they don't like the idea of a compromise that has even one healer Job still appealing to people that like healing as it is today.

For what it's worth, even when I don't agree with you I like reading what you write here, as you tend to be one of the more reasonable users here. I appreciate that you provide your reasoning, tend to acknowledge and value a diversity of perspectives, and try to stimulate genuine good faith discussion. ^^