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

[MintnHoney]

There is absolutely no reason for them to change Healer design going forward since they don't cause queue issues like Tanks. That's why Tanks get so much attention.

Oh? So the instant queues for healers, while Tanks often end up waiting to get into a party (despite even being "in need" at the time), is indicative of queue issues related to tanks, is it?

[Aravell]

Not really. While it's a risk, people can do this with impunity if no one reports them. Most people want to just move on and so don't report, and some people forget they aren't supposed to mention add-ons. I've seen people mention add-ons (or knowledge they could only have from one) in party chats before with some version of "crap...uh...forget I said anything" and never get in trouble since no one reported them for the innocuous error. Something like "God, I'm sucking tonight, I usually get way higher numbers than this" kinds of things.

I don't at all find it odd that it happens to people. I know it's happened before in parties I was in and just no one reported it, we called the person a dick after they left and moved on.

Sure, it can happen, I'll grant you that, but it's not exactly prevalent, is it? In my 10 years of playing on multiple DCs, I've only seen one passive-aggressive callout, and it was someone saying "not gg with you" after someone said "gg" at the end of a dungeon. I'm not sure why the threat of being bullied for not using your kit properly has to be a major consideration when it's not very prevalent at all.

[Supersnow845]

Oh? So the instant queues for healers, while Tanks often end up waiting to get into a party (despite even being "in need" at the time), is indicative of queue issues related to tanks, is it?

And the tank in need is because of a kink in the system meaning tanks are always checked first even if there is less healers so you can’t even use AIN as an example of need for tanks

Healers are still by far the least played role in casual content

[AmiableApkallu]

Sure, it can happen, I'll grant you that, but it's not exactly prevalent, is it? In my 10 years of playing on multiple DCs, I've only seen one passive-aggressive callout, and it was someone saying "not gg with you" after someone said "gg" at the end of a dungeon. I'm not sure why the threat of being bullied for not using your kit properly has to be a major consideration when it's not very prevalent at all.

I'm into my cups this evening, so I'll share another anecdote: I was once the got-every-job-to-90-and-beat-EW healer in a Praetorium run (the re-worked for four people version) that caused a wipe on the final fight because I couldn't keep myself alive. Consider for a moment how tragically inattentive and inept you have to be to let that happen. Seriously. Let it sink in.

How much flak did I catch for that? How much flak did I catch for not fulfilling my primary responsibility? None.

[Renathras]

Sure, it can happen, I'll grant you that, but it's not exactly prevalent, is it? In my 10 years of playing on multiple DCs, I've only seen one passive-aggressive callout, and it was someone saying "not gg with you" after someone said "gg" at the end of a dungeon. I'm not sure why the threat of being bullied for not using your kit properly has to be a major consideration when it's not very prevalent at all.

It arguably is prevalent.

I think it's more an anecdotal thing, though. As someone else said, if you're a generally good player, you're less likely to see it. You'd have to run a bunch of content (random stuff, not stuff you pre-decided with friends) only healing and not casting any damage spells to see if it happens or not.

Oh? So the instant queues for healers, while Tanks often end up waiting to get into a party (despite even being "in need" at the time), is indicative of queue issues related to tanks, is it?

This is REALLY anecdotal stuff. I often que for things as the three roles, and I find tank ques instant in 4 and 8 man content, healer ques instant in 4 man and some 8 man content, and dps ques instant in 24 man content and sometimes 8 man content. Indeed, I did a lot of Pande normals on DPS or tanks since the healer ques were the longest when it was fresh content.

I've yet to wait in any que for more than 30 sec as a tank, and I've often had to wait that long on healer. So this idea that healer ques are all instant and tank ques aren't is really strange to me since tank ques have been instant every time I've done them. So I genuinely "Press X to doubt..." that tanks have these wait times that healers don't, since my experience has been the two as comparable in most respects with the difference being more on the party configurations of the content.

And the tank in need is because of a kink in the system meaning tanks are always checked first even if there is less healers so you can’t even use AIN as an example of need for tanks

Healers are still by far the least played role in casual content

Again, using what metric? What objective - that is, not anecdotal - metric do you have to support this position?

The Lucky Bancho numbers go both ways, and are unofficial, and we have...literally nothing else to go by. In general, that is, across all types of MMO and MMO-like games, tanks are the least played role, though it's close enough that the two can sometimes be roughly comparable in games. Further, you specifically said "by far the least played", which I highly doubt. I doubt that healers are less played than tanks in general, mind you, but I suspect that if healers are less played, it's by a small margin.

Especially since you said "in casual content", which is the content where people (casual players) seem to actually enjoy the role. If you meant "healer is by far the least played role by high end players in casual content", that might be more accurate. Though I'd still question the "by far" of that statement.

But in general casual content played by casual players? Casual players seem to like healers right now since they're very veg friendly.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I'm into my cups this evening, so I'll share another anecdote: I was once the got-every-job-to-90-and-beat-EW healer in a Praetorium run (the re-worked for four people version) that caused a wipe on the final fight because I couldn't keep myself alive. Consider for a moment how tragically inattentive and inept you have to be to let that happen. Seriously. Let it sink in.

How much flak did I catch for that? How much flak did I catch for not fulfilling my primary responsibility? None.

Adding my own anecdote: back in ShB, I leveled WHM up to 71 not knowing wth I'm doing. Freecure? Yeah, I used those. I caused a couple of wipes sometimes. Nobody gives a $h!t. People were like "It's okay let's give it another try." The only time I started to change for better was at 71 where I had that disastrous Holminster where my inexperienced a$$ couldn't handle the pull with Freecures. I did dps when I could; it's when I had to heal, everything started to fall apart as I panicked.

Did I catch any flaks? None, at all.

Oh oh and also~.. I'm not entirely your 'angelic, kind'-healer too. I had a few 'petty outbursts' at rare times when my tank refuses to wall pull in a friggin' dungeons. What did I do? I purposely stopped being that competent Glare Mage and proceed on to use Cure I (and its equivalent on other healer) only. Any flaks? Again, none.

[Aravell]

It arguably is prevalent.

I think it's more an anecdotal thing, though. As someone else said, if you're a generally good player, you're less likely to see it. You'd have to run a bunch of content (random stuff, not stuff you pre-decided with friends) only healing and not casting any damage spells to see if it happens or not.

Since all we have is anecdotes, how can you say with any certainty that it is prevalent? And if it is that common, you'd expect to see more people complain about being called out. Your only basis that it is prevalent is from your own experiences and one other person's experiences, so can we really say with certainty that it's one way or another? And if there's no certainty to the claim that bullying for being suboptimal is prevalent, then why should there be major consideration for it in job design?

[ASkellington]

snip

I've already answered most of this and rebutted it. And frankly unless you're going to properly read what I've said numerous times, I'm done with you. You've consistently either willfully ignored my points as evidenced by the tanks/healers comparison and clearly do not want to have a proper discussion. All you want to do is argue with me and argue over semantics instead of the real problems.


I'm only going to talk about two things here. So actually READ what I have to say for once because you haven't numerous times of which I can quote.

They've said that same thing ABOUT BOTH. So if that means they won't add more healing requirements...it also must mean they won't add more damage buttons. There's no world where the first of those is something they won't bow on but the second is one they will. Especially since, as well all know, they pay more attention to the JP playerbase, and the JP playerbase is even more on the "more healing" bandwagon than the NA/EU/OC playerbase is. Meaning if they WERE to go back on one of those positions, it would probably be the more healing one, NOT the more damage one.

You can't use this, in any rational world, to favor your argument and oppose the contra. If anything, everything we know and have seen suggests the opposite is more tenable.

You know what my thoughts on this are? And I would love for it to be shoved into the devs' faces:

You can't have both. You can't have a boring, unengaging healing design made very easy to do because you're afraid to scare off new healers from the role while also having an equally bland if not worse dps design. One or the other have to give.

Now, why I advocate dps has been repeated enmass but I'll reiterate it here:

• It is easier to keep healing easy and make dpsing more complex than it is to do the opposite. Why?

It requires new encounter designs that are completely different to what we've seen previously.

We already had a tier where they "increased damage" and the veterans who refused to come back and would have been able to handle it were absent and the new healers to take their place couldn't. Remember the healer shortage in PF? Remember YoshiP saying and I'm misquoting here: "stop asking for healer changes to bring back those veterans and just play healer instead"?

The community and devs both do not want increased healing, damn what healer mains want. There's already a thread with people not wanting to roll back the increased survivability of tanks. And while I would love to say (and have!) "suck it up" clearly I'm in the minority. I would love to have more increased healing. I would love to feel more recognized for doing my job. I would love for tanks to have their healing nerfed so I actually have a place in this game. I would love for the game as a whole to have more team play and team responsibilities to the game. The community does not seem to want it.

• It requires a redesign of all four healers.

And I'm just talking about their healing tool kit here, not their dps. We have so much bloated healing in our kit that we don't need its well beyond ridiculous.

Not a single Twelvesdamned ability we got in EW was needed. Not. A. One. Were they welcomed? Sure. I like Expedient. I like Macrocosmos. I'd like Lily Bell if it applied on party hit instead of WHM's. I like Exaltation. SGE doesn't have anything "new" to it considering it debuted in EW but I do like Kardia's concept and I like Pan(Haima).

But did we really need any of it? Hells no. And I've gone in depth as to why with just AST's tool kit alone.

In 90% of the content in this game I can quite literally (and do frequently) heal with my lv70 toolkit and nothing else. MAYBE I'll use Macro over ES just because I like the ability but there is no where in the game where it's needed and I can't make do with other parts of my kit and have a better time with it while doing so.

Skills need to be pruned. Ideas need to be expanded upon. SGE is considered a failure by the healing community because its concept (Kardia) felt barely explored and seemed like the devs didn't even want to TRY to make a new healer because they just want to "make sure newbies have what they need" like a checklist.

And this is probably the core issue that the devs really need to rectify: not only that they don't want to try, but when they do "try" it feels like they don't even care. They don't care about what HEALERS want - a fun job experience like everyone else. They only care about the "new player experience" which I don't even believe at this point, and making sure what seems to be their "favored role" of DPS doesn't have to "suffer" with a new healer trying to learn their kit and dying repeatedly.

And note: I don't blame DPS for this nor new players specifically, but I do 100% blame the devs for sucking the life out of what makes the healing role fun and using them as a scapegoat.

Point is: they don't want to make fun healers. They want to make safe healers who have no way of screwing up.

• Healer down time is still going to be a thing and said down time should be further expanded upon.

There is going to be times where healers aren't going to be healing because there is no reason to heal. Even in a group setting. And while YOU may not find spamming Glare to not be tiresome in solo content, a good chunk of people are. Even adding buffs and debuffs aren't going to fix that issue. And considering WHMs have been asking for something over SCH and AST (and now SGE) I'm not willing to leave them behind. Further...

• You're so worried about healers being bullied over not pressing a few extra dps buttons and doing damage while also completely forgetting that, outside of Ex/Savage it doesn't matter.

No one is going to care about missed dps in a casual setting. Do you know how many times on the rare occassion I play GNB I've had my Gnashing Fang-Continuation drift? Plenty. Do people call me out for it? No.

"But that's just your experience someon-" I know that. I've heard it and I've had it done to me. On WHM no less. I even called the person out on it. You can even look through my posts where I detailed a WoD run where I had a PoS dps call out the healers in our alliances and I backed said healers up.

It happens.

But designing an entire role to prevent it from happening... is a stupid idea.

Why? It doesn't work. People are STILL going to be called out for X/Y/Z reason. And worse your giving rise to the problem of new healers not knowing how to be better because you don't give them the design space to be better.

I said it in my one post you've yet to read, but I'll say it here too:

A class/job's kit design should not be built around "accessibility" in terms of fool proofing it. Giving people an easier job to play is one thing. I'm not against that. I don't like SMN as it is right now and it deserves the current backlash it's gotten as well as changes to its new design to make it better. But giving people an easy job to do well with is not a bad idea.

Where it becomes a bad idea is where you give nothing for that class to grow in under the false pretenses of it being "easy". And that is where healers are at right now. They have nothing to grow in. The reason people are so harsh with healers doing dps is BECAUSE healers don't have that high of a bar to cross. You quite literally have NO EXCUSE to not be pressing your dps buttons at all for the entirety of a fight. Are you going to miss some? Yeah. Do you get a pass for doing nothing at all? Unless the fight's literally that short (and I'm talking about bosses here and not trash) NO.

And DPS is lax. I don't think there's many EXs or Raids (normal) or even Dungeons where there's an enrage timer. Which brings me to my final point:

• Giving more depth to the DPS is easier for the simple fact that if you make healing harder, less people are going to be willing to deal with a new or inexperienced healer when it's going to equal deaths and/or wipes.

You not doing DPS isn't some sacrilegious thing that people make it out to be (other than you standing there doing nothing at all). You not adequetely healing though? You think being bashed for not doing dps is bad? Wanna see what it looks like for not doing your "job"?

Cause I've been there. Plenty of times. I've been playing healer for over a decade and part of the reason why I've not been scared off of the role is because I didn't have a group of people harassing me on healing wrong when I was learning, offering no critique or how to improve.

I have a friend who did though. And they're deathly afraid of healing in this game. Enough so that I can't even help them despite them liking how AST looks. They actively don't want to deal with that harassment anymore. And I don't blame them. Because I've had that turned on me.

Only, that happened well after I've gotten confident in my healing skills. Several years after my career. I've even laid it into a tank who was doing their job wrong and telling them no amount of healing was going to fix their squishy butt. A new healer's not going to do that.

And worse? Unlike DPSing which isn't their primary job, healing technically is. Its gonna hurt worse. But hey if you want to bring that into the game, fine. I'm not going to be affected.

Now, I'm of the mind that said healers can grow from it. But if they can grow from increased healing, they can also grow from increased DPS buttons. Especially if it is quite literally nothing more than a Phlegma like ability - a stand alone dps button on a moderately short recast timer (say 20s).

As for this part:

Tell me, what's wrong with Holy and Assize being your 2 additional single target buttons?

I answered that on two separate occasions. I'll repeat them here:

Holy is an AOE not a single target button. Unless you're going to replace it with something else I see no reason why I would want it in a single target rotation. I don't like having a single target GCD on sub45 MNK and I don't want it here.

Assize is not a dps button. Not because its an oGCD but because it has healing tied to it. I don't consider Earthly Star a dps button and I don't consider Macrocosmos a dps button. WHY would I consider Assize to be one just because you to make a GCD with 2 charges? So it can be different than Phlegma?

You can change it 2 charges and on the GCD. I don't mind either way. But please stop saying what I'm asking for, because its not. YOU think its what I'm asking for, but its not what I'm asking for. And you telling me its what I'm asking for makes YOU the liar. Not me. You are asking for MY opinion. Not what YOU think is MY opinion. Take it and either use it or don't.

You've done so with everything else I've said, why not that?

[ForsakenRoe]

Another day, another Ren take

When people signed up for Healer - instead of the neighboring role of "damage dealer" - it stands to reason they didn't sign up to "do the job" of performing a damage dealing rotation.

And yet, despite this, SB and earlier had a damage rotation on par with what I and others would prefer to have. Pretty much every other game with a healer/support/'guy who helps keep team alive' role has more damage complexity than this one. The tale of 'healers should only heal' is as old as time and will likely continue to be an argument long after we stop playing. Healing is finite. You cannot restore health when someone is full health. There is a hard limit on how much 'more complexity' can be added to the job without doing it via adding to the damage side of the kit because of not only this simple fact, but also because of how much bigger an impact the change would have on less skilled players. Nobody wants to be the guy who couldn't keep up against the constant pulsing raidwides because 'oops I mismanaged my CDs earlier in the fight'.

In my 10S reclear this week I used Temperance early, so it was not up for Harrowing Hell. We had GNB and DRK (PF) so no mit from either tank beyond Reprisal. My mistake there, in week 1 gear, would have killed us. That one single misclick. Compared to that, 'oops I forgot to use my Miasma DOT for a total of 33 seconds over the course of this 10 minute fight' is absolutely not going to be the issue. Your insistence on keeping one healer exactly as it is for... whatever personal attachment you have to this exact format for healers, is blinding you

I'm a BIT confused. Do you not know the difference between GCD heals and "damage buttons"?

Yes, I know the difference. Bit patronizing to ask such a thing, no? Especially when you're fully aware of what content each of us regularly partakes in

If you don't understand the difference between someone asking for more GCD healing and someone asking for more DPS GCD buttons, I'm not sure you can stand in this conversation.

Yes, I understand the difference. The issue is that one of these two is going to cause a lot more issues at the low-end of the skill bellcurve than the other, by a significant amount. The only way to prevent 'more HPS needed' from screwing casual players is to have that change scale in 'magnitude of change' based on the content. And if the 'solution' only affects higher-end content, then it's not a solution. The issue of 'veteran healers find EX roulette kinda drab' is not solved if EX roulette is purposely exempted from the changes, so as to prevent the casual players from getting suddenly filtered by content they previously were able to clear.

By contrast, if said casual player completely ignores their 2 extra DOTs added to SCH, they do not suddenly cause wipes in Aetherfont, because the 'DPS checks' in EX roulettes (eg Cagnazzo charging his tidal wave) are so lax you could get a drink from the fridge, come back, and still beat the check with plenty of time to spare. Thus, with tuning to make sure that the potency gain of 'doing the optimal rotation' is not as high, to keep the output of the skill floor and ceiling close, such a change would 'cause enrages' only in super-high end content like Week 1 Savage and Ultimate. And that's a maybe, depending on fight tuning. This tier's enrage tuning was low enough that you could get away with quite a few things you normally shouldn't.

If you don't understand the simple facts of encounter/fight design, or just game design in general, I'm not sure you can stand in this conversation either. Feel free to continue suggesting 'fixes' that create more problems than they solve though. It gives me something to weave between my Glare casts

No my dear. You are. I've already shown you a great solution, but it's not good enough.

Which solution? The '4 healers' thing where one healer has to be left exactly as it is for 'the people who like the current gameplay' (despite said logic not being a factor in the decision to bring this gameplay on the healers going into SHB)? Or the WHM idea specifically, which I have said I would be okay with? I have doubts about how long it'd stay 'satisfying' given how 'static' the rotation would be, but I've said I'd at least try it. More than can be said for you with like, any proposed change to WHM's damage rotation. Think about it. If the line 'think about the people who enjoy the current gameplay' held water, SE would have used it as reasoning to leave the SB healers in their slightly more complex forms, and add a new healer that had this EW gameplay. Then everyone would have likely trash talked the 'new design' for being so dead-on-arrival stale.

You want one healer to remain as is, for the people 'who like the current gameplay'. So, in terms of damage GCDs, what if we have AST stay as it currently is, and change the other three? WHM SCH SGE all get more damage buttons, AST gets it's rework to make it less clunky to play (presumably card changes again), but keeps it's current GCD gameplay of Malefic and 2 Combusts a minute. This fulfills the '4 healers' thing you keep asking for, doesn't it? If AST got it's APM distribution reorganized to be more 'consistent' instead of being a doubleweave nightmare in 2min windows, and more focus on buffing for it's RDPS contribution instead of Malefics, wouldn't that make AST's design more suited for someone who doesn't want to have a complex damage rotation? Maybe that's an option worth looking into, though of course, some (sorry Skel) would not be a fan of AST being the 'left behind' one, but that's true regardless of which one gets left behind, hence the solution should be 'don't leave any behind, just have the 'extra optimiziation stuff' be optional'. Consider these extra suggested buttons as a speedrunning technique like BLJs. You don't have to BLJ to get up the staircase.

Even better, since you're so insistent on trying to find ways to keep from adding new buttons, my desired rework for AST's cards would not only keep the button count from increasing, it'd actually go down by one. If Minor and Major Arcana both auto-draw when the CD is up, then we'd only need the play button. Minor already turns into it's Play equivalent, so we'd be able to prune 'Draw' and save a button that AST can then use on something else. Maybe another AOE healing OGCD with a 60s CD, I don't think it's got enough of those yet right /s

Also, using 'no u' in 2023 is an interesting move. What 'windmill' am I tilting at?

The buttons are there, it's more an argument of adjusting how frequently they're used.

And yet, one of your biggest gripes with what I've suggested for WHM is that 'player would have to use Dia 5 times a minute instead of 2'.

I've already answered most of this and rebutted it. And frankly unless you're going to properly read what I've said numerous times, I'm done with you.

Unsurprising he's not reading your post, given that he appears to be not reading quotes of his own posts either (or he is and just doesn't realize what he said in them)

[ASkellington]

Unsurprising he's not reading your post, given that he appears to be not reading quotes of his own posts either (or he is and just doesn't realize what he said in them)

I'm going to be nice, as I've done several times in the past, and believe he's misunderstanding what I'm saying.

Maybe I'm not clear enough despite how many times I've tried to be so.

Its really hard to believe that, because on only one (1) occasion has he asked me for clarity on my thoughts instead of jumping the gun with his conclusions if he was ever confused.

I'm still wondering if he's ever going to read that other post. /shrug. Oh well. I've said what I needed to.

Back to advocating equality for WHM I guess or... w/e we want to call it.