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

[AmiableApkallu]

In theory you certainly could criticize the exact cadence of a person's timing. But I'm not concerned about that for a few reasons:

In all the casual content I've done with less-skilled players, I've never seen anyone make that kind of criticism. I've seen lots of criticism about not casting specific spells, though.

And that's probably because "You aren't pressing your buttons at optimal times" and "You never cast Glarega" are two very different kinds of criticism. One is talking about never using a valuable part of a player's kit, while one is much more down the nitpick road. Given that difference, I don't think there's a reason to presume that in the absence of Glarega, good faith criticism about never casting Glarega would simply be replaced by good faith criticism about button timing optimization. Again, I've never seen such a criticism.

Have you ever seen criticism like that while running a dungeon? And if so, how frequently?

I wasn't talking about optimal timings. I was talking about not casting specific spells, which is exactly what you say you've seen criticized. It's easy to point out that someone isn't casting a specific spell if they have a grand total of one option to choose from. It's harder to do that when they have an interesting menu to choose from.

But really, as far as I'm concerned, this is making a mountain out of a molehill. In 27+ months, I've never seen any individual criticized, nicely or rudely, in-game about their DPS, including my own. Heck, no one commented in-game on the absolutely atrocious DPS that led to the 14+ minute, wipe-free run of P7N that I got to experience.

(I mean, yes, I don't doubt that rude individuals exist out there, but are they really so prevalent as to necessitate gimping healers because some poor person might discover that, yes, there are rude individuals on the Internet if you spend enough time there?)

[Sebazy]

<snip>

SE also have consistently failed to push the strength and flexibility of the armoury system. With the number of jobs we have now, IMO it makes perfect sense to have some jobs more suited to content than others. As long as everyone gets their time in the sun somewhere but being off meta isn't crippling, it's all good IMO.

Before someone comes along and says 'but noooo, it'll be bad because 'insert favourite job here' will get blacklisted from PF in content it's not meta for'. My honest response is 'deal with it, make your own if you care'. FFXI showed the strengths of this in action perfectly. I'd always be one of the first to arrive at the raid and I'd usually start out on SCH so I could cover a bunch of different roles until more people turned up. As the raid gathered I'd switch out to BRD, WHM or BLM as needed and I can promise you, the variety of gameplay really kept things fresh far longer than they would have been if I'd just have turned up as BRD and spent the evening on that day in and day out.

Sometimes you've got to save players from themselves and pushing a bit of variety on them is a good way to stall burnout even if they aren't entirely onboard with it. Besides the penalties for switching jobs are minute in this game compared to a more traditional MMO like WoW.

[Sebazy]

I guess I don't really see the point of bringing this up? It seems like a way to dismiss the issue as being not really an issue at all, but more of a personal problem for people who have skin with deficient thickness. Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying though.

You're not, my point is that there's only so far you can protect people. Even if you disable chat, people will still find ways to be obnoxious.

*edit*. I'll drop this one though if that's your preference, apologies if it feels like I'm trying to pressure you on the point++

[ASkellington]

With the first option, if you're a player who is alienated by the change, too bad, sucks to be you, this game no longer welcomes your preferences. But at least with the second, even if you aren't getting your first choice, even if you need to change classes to do it, there's a class where you can still have the type of experience you enjoy, the one that fits your needs.

I think the option that caters to multiple preferences is the better choice because it serves the most people as best it can, thus maximizing utility.

What you're not understanding is that it doesn't cater to multiple preferences.

AST has a card mechanic.
SGE and SCH are shield healers.

If you like WHM, a healer that has no card mechanic, a slower APM, and isn't a shield healer, you are out of luck unless you play another job. Is my point. WHM getting an extra dps button that fits its design of a GCD healer, may have a longer recast timer than Glare (say 20s for example), is not alienating people. If they forget to press the button? It really doesn't matter outside of EX and Savage.

Further, there's nothing stopping WHM from being an easy to access healer with extra complexity if you want it other than a limited design. Which is what it and all four healers have.

You used SMN vs BLM as an example, but a better one would probably be GNB vs WAR. WAR has Fell Cleave for its DPS burst as well as an extra buff to manage. GNB has 2 bursts in a minute.

WHM can get a similar treatment as WAR while also being something that current WHM mains and future ones like. And I still don't see why it can't get that.

[ForsakenRoe]

You used SMN vs BLM as an example, but a better one would probably be GNB vs WAR. WAR has Fell Cleave for its DPS burst as well as an extra buff to manage. GNB has 2 bursts in a minute.

Or better yet, WHM/AST as WAR/DRK. One has a slower, very GCD locked gameplay style, and one is about pooling everything for the 2min window and going absolutely ape mode with doubleweaves.

Most people who suggest 'designs' for WHM over on the Healer section, make sure it remains that slower, GCD focused gameplay choice. But said people also want it to have more rewarding feeling GCDs than just spamming Glare. Misery's a good example. Preparing and using one in an AOE pull is more damage than casting 4 Holys, but we don't often do it, because in dungeons it doesn't really matter if someone's being 'suboptimal'

[LilimoLimomo]

Which is why the solution should not be 'leave one exactly as it is', but 'balance the extra complexity for one of the healers in such a way that it is mostly ignoreable for those who don't want to interact with it'. Look at it this way, if we have only Dia and Glare for the majority of our GCDs, then any movement that costs us a Glare is punished even harder, because that's the majority of our damage: Glare. Dia doesn't need to be 2.3ish Glare's worth of damage, it being that high just makes missing ticks of it (due to being bad at DOT management for example) more punishing. It could be 450p total instead of 715 with the missing potency moved elsewhere in the kit. But because SE has removed so much of our kit now, all of the potency has to be forced into the few buttons we have left.

I've read this a few times, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I see a lot of data, but what's the conclusion you're trying to build to, and how is it connected to those values?

We already know that SE will add stuff for the expansion, so that alone will cause 'changes to the job', so that falls flat IMO.

It's not about changing nothing about the job, it's about not making additions to the DPS rotation. Which isn't uncommon for healer jobs. Off the top of my head, WHM didn't get any additional DPS buttons in Endwalker, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the same in Dawntrail.

one, the job that usually gets thrown out there as 'the one to leave alone',

To be clear, it's not explicitly about leaving it the same as much as it's about having a simpler option. And recently, Summoner was made much simpler and is a common class to see played. I think it's a great model of how you can have both simpler and more complex classes in the same game serving different parts of your audience.

As Skellington put, and I have mentioned elsewhere: I am a good example of why this idea (keep one as is) would not work well. I want to have more complexity in my healing downtime, to keep me more engaged in lower difficulty content. Doesn't matter how good I get at the game, EX roulette is still the fastest way to cap my tomes. So, I have an alt I use to reclear Savage fights with a friend, so she can 'skip' her static to the later fights they want to do (because they no longer need gear from earlier ones). This alt has one class levelled. For the sake of the example, let's say it's WHM. I do not believe that watching the other 3 healers, that my alt does not have levelled, getting more complexity to their downtime damage rotations while WHM stays exactly where it is, is going to feel good. Doubly so, when people suggest that 'if you want more complexity, play one of the other healers'. It takes time to level another job to max, I don't believe that telling someone they have to grind another job to max is a 'solution'.

I agree wholeheartedly that it's not ideal. What I'm trying to say is that offering one class that does what you want is a better solution than offering you no classes that do what you want. Nobody is going to get everything they want. And if they do, it will be at the expense of other players. That's not my kind of solution.

I mean, let's put the shoe on the other foot. Given two choices, which would you prefer:

1. All healers stay basically exactly the same as they are now in Dawntrail; there are new abilities, and they're all new ways to heal that don't shift the game one way or the other.

2. Two of the healing classes (including your healing main) are the same as what's written in 1, but the other two healing classes get all the changes you personally have wanted to see...they're just not in your current main.

Which would you prefer, and why?

[ASkellington]

To be clear, it's not explicitly about leaving it the same as much as it's about having a simpler option. And recently, Summoner was made much simpler and is a common class to see played. I think it's a great model of how you can have both simpler and more complex classes in the same game serving different parts of your audience.

Here's where I think you're not understanding. Ignoring the backlash SMN got, you are right that the Caster role is diverse in complexity.

The problem is that said complexity doesn't not equal 2 buttons. SMN still has a simple rotation despite how many buttons you may need to press.

"Well SMN is a DPS" I hear you say. This is why I made the comparison between WAR and GNB. GNB has much more complexity to its rotation in comparison to WAR. It can still do the basic job of tanking as most of the buttons they press to mitigate are role actions, and the ones that differ, don't differ too much.

Healers can have a similar model where in they have a similar healing kit (as they do now) with minor differences with varying degrees of DPS complexity that isn't just primarily a DoT and a Nuke. So why then are we forced to just have 1 or 2 healers with 2 DPS buttons when it works for tanks just fine?

[ForsakenRoe]

I've read this a few times, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I see a lot of data, but what's the conclusion you're trying to build to, and how is it connected to those values?

Off the top of my head, WHM didn't get any additional DPS buttons in Endwalker, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the same in Dawntrail.

To be clear, it's not explicitly about leaving it the same as much as it's about having a simpler option. And recently, Summoner was made much simpler and is a common class to see played.

I agree wholeheartedly that it's not ideal. What I'm trying to say is that offering one class that does what you want is a better solution than offering you no classes that do what you want. Nobody is going to get everything they want. And if they do, it will be at the expense of other players. That's not my kind of solution.

I mean, let's put the shoe on the other foot. Given two choices, which would you prefer:

- The more things we take out of the kit, the more lifting the remaining things have to do to compensate and keep our potency output the same. As an example, if they removed Dia because 'some people cannot manage DOT timers', that 1430p per minute has to come from somewhere else in the kit. So Glare would likely be bumped up by 20 or 30 potency, and thus missing a Glare cast is now 'more punishing' in terms of damage lost because of the missed cast, compared to the time where Dia still existed. The same applies with other things that have been removed in times gone by

- Wouldn't surprise me either. But it's probably not a coincidence that these kinds of complaints started popping up in SHB, and not in SB

- Yes, and most people who suggest WHM getting any additional complexity make sure to respect the idea that it should be 'the simple one'. We just disagree with the premise that 'it being simple = it does not change at all'. Additionally, look at how many people complain about how they miss old SMN and it's complexity. I imagine at least one of the players of Old SMN was forced to level a new job because they didn't like what had happened to SMN

- Again, 'additional optional complexity' does not need to mean 'suddenly the class is unrecognizeable'. For my part, my suggestion for WHM is to rescale Dia to 12s instead of 30s, and to have a 15s CD GCD that is Water themed. Everything else for 'damage optimization' comes from 'put the damage refund moves inside raidbuffs for a tiny gain'. Like we do with Misery already. Beyond that, I also suggest like 3 or 4 different healing tools, mitigation tools, and even bringing back lower level versions of things, like Divine Seal > Temperance. If anyone were to play my design for WHM and think 'I can't keep up with pressing this new Water move on CD' then they can just... not press it on CD. I had listed it as being 40p more than the current Stone/Glare you have. So over one minute, you lose 160p for ignoring the button entirely. For reference, Glare is currently 310p. If anyone wants to get whiny about 'why is the WHM not using Water their damage sucks' over 160p a minute, in an EX roulette or 24man especially??? I'd just feel sad for them, with all the problems and injustices of the world and THAT is the thing they choose to get angry about

[Renathras]

Where's my WHM with a mildly more interesting DPS kit, perhaps along the lines of ForsakenRoe's proposal? Where's my simple, direct HP restoration and regen healer with a DPS kit based on direct damage that isn't godawful boring?

Are you proposing we add a healer?

I mean, this goes both ways: Where's my non-complicated SCH, AST, or SGE? Where's my SCH, AST, or SGE with simple DPS and focus on GCD healing? Where's my healer Job that is focused on healing instead of damage dealing? Where's my healer that doesn't have an annoying, tedious DPS "rotation"? (I find DPS rotations boring, that's why I don't play DPSers as I don't find their "gameplay" engaging).

Either we have what we have now or we have a mix. There's no useful situation where we go to all the healer Jobs going from the same 2 button rotation to all having a complex DPS rotation. All you're doing then is changing which group of people you're pissing off, so that's not a valid solution.

Agreed. I don't think healers would really be complaining about the state of their DPS rotation if their role was actually engaging on the healing end.

...some would. There legitimately are some people that play healer Jobs but really want to be DPSers.

But I agree most wouldn't be complaining if the healing was actually interesting in high end content.

To be fair, though, many people aren't complaining NOW. So that's something to consider as well, that many people are content with the current system.

Probably, but I expect it to be even less likely for SE to make healing engaging than to give us some 'mostly ignorable extra damage buttons', since 'not being able to keep up with the extra healing' directly translates to 'party wipes because they hit zero HP'

If we're talking Savages (or even Extremes), that's irrelevant, since not doing enough DPS also leads to party wipes due to enrages.

EDIT:

I do agree with the idea overall, But isn’t this ultimately just the same thing?

Well, I tend to think of SCH as being more like old SMN or SB SCH while SGE I would think is more akin to RDM (RDM has no DoTs) or BLM or something, where it's more about combo actions or relations. This could take the form of Dualcast-esque mechanics like RDM, or SGE being ranged with pew pew lasers means it could be designed to have a damage kit something like MCH, which would be more active but less "upkeeep/DoT" focused. I think either would feel different to play than old-SMN-esque DoT mage.

So these would still be two different playstyles.

SCH can have a DPS focus via DoTs since it could use oGCDs to weave Faerie abilities and use Eos more seriously as the basis of its healing.

Likewise, SGE can have a DPS focus via direct damage spells (or even WEAPONSKILLS if we go the MCH route), leveraging Kardia and oGCDs that enhance, boost, AOE-ify, etc Kardia so that its healing is primarily through the Kardia mechanic and proper rotation increases the healing done

SCH would, of course, have Diagnosis and Prognosis to fall back on if the player horribly flubbed their damage rotation or something and lost healing that they needed to make up for, but the goal should be to heal by damage upkeep in this case, which contrasts with SCH's kit under this idea being upkeep of DoTs while freely weaving oGCD Faerie abilities to conduct its healing. SCH's healing would be more active on the part of the player directing Eos (and just keeping DoTs up "on the side" to maintain damage output) while SGE's would be more automatic while doing their damage rotation, with Kardia swapping and Kardia-boosting/modifying oGCDs weaved to enhance its effects to be sufficient healing for the party.

And yeah, AST as a party buffer makes more sense as its already built that way. They just need to make cards more available (instead of one charge per 30 sec) to make it feel like you're constantly throwing out buffs left and right, not just cramming 3 out all at once and then not doing any for a few mins.

Except it's still not an either-or situation. The devs have proven that they can create a satisfying healing kit with good interactions, a satisfying dps kit with room for skill expression and good fight design that requires healers to heal, all this was done back in SB. We're asking for them to go back to that good balance of design instead of trying to push all the complexity into the mechanics dance itself, which is clearly not working because you only progress a fight once, after you clear, you now understand the fight to the point that most of the complexity is already gone. (Also, the more complex moving parts they put into a single mechanic, the more limited the solution becomes, but that's another problem entirely.)

You mean the expansion where one healer was completely benched, one spec of the one healer with specs (AST) was mostly benched, and people who didn't enjoy DPSing on healers were sidelined from content?

That doesn't sound like an improvement.

...and, ironically, notwithstanding that: You DO know my proposal IS to more or less revert SCH and AST to SB, right? The only change I'd make offhand is for SCH to keep Expedient and the far better pet responsiveness we have now.

As for the damage kit, it could be expanded somewhat. But, my concern is S.E. will not provide us with challenging content. That would result in healers using their damage spells most of the time. They'd be like blue mages rather than healing classes. That's why I lean toward the idea of changing the healing toolkit to make healing fun again; rather than, adding a more involved damage rotation.

Just wanted to say I very much agree with this.

It would really suck if we're just given DPS kits instead of healing and told "Now you shouldn't be bored since you have DPS rotations!"

I hate DPS rotations. If I liked them, I'd play DPS Jobs. The reason I don't play DPS Jobs is because I don't like DPS rotations, I like healing and supporting the people that do. If they make all healers more DPS intensive than SMN, I'd just play SMN or a tank, and that would suck. I might just quit the game, which would suck even more.

[IDontPetLalas]

Just going to chime in here

1. All healers stay basically exactly the same as they are now in Dawntrail; there are new abilities, and they're all new ways to heal that don't shift the game one way or the other. No as we already have many heals that aren't needed under many circumstances, so what is your reason for adding new healing skills? Why would this feel satisfying?

2. Two of the healing classes (including your healing main) are the same as what's written in 1, but the other two healing classes get all the changes you personally have wanted to see...they're just not in your current main. Again, not an option. How are you going to pick which ones to change? Will it be one pure and one barrier? If so, that could force someone into only one choice of pure and barrier healer. Or- maybe it's going to be the new healer (sage) and the least popular healer (AST). Well sucks if those happen to be your main healers.

Not really a viable approach. I am more allowing change to be introduced into all four healers so that the skill floor is forgiving but it allows someone who want to have more challenge, can have those options. [/COLOR]