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

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

which makes me incredibly sad because I miss the time in the first trash pull of Orbonne where any WHM that dared cast Regen would immediately get vaporized by 8 skeletons.

I still see this happening in this mogtome alliance raid spam because while regen ticks do not generate aggro anymore, actual heals, buff (thus regen too) application, and ground based ticks (soil, asylum, channeled CU) all still generate this artificial aggro.

[Renathras]

Increase the dps options and a casual player can keep playing the same because dps is optional there

Genuine question:

Are we talking about Savage content or normal Dungeons?

If we're talking about normal dungeons, then the healing requirement could be doubled and still be doable with Medica 2 spam. So that wouldn't hurt the casual healer at all.

If we're talking about Savage content, then the DPS contribution isn't optional.

So no, you can't use this deflection.

(That is, if we're talking casual content, then increasing EITHER is in the same boat of not mattering, so that doesn't support increasing damage and not healing; if we're talking hardcore content, then increasing EITHER is in the same both of very much mattering, so that doesn't support increasing damage and not healing, either.)

By, as we've been through hundreds of times, making the potency difference between 'optimal' and 'suboptimal' low such that 'doing it wrong' is not enough to cause an enrage,

Yes, it would basically have to be negligible. But as we've said when we've gone over this the hundreds of times before, "more work" has to be rewarded otherwise it is unacceptable to the very people demanding "more work".

Healing requirement, in a VERY technical sense, is a sliding scale from 0% needed healing to 99.99% of health damage provided damage waves have enough spacing to get people back up to 100%. More than that if we include mitigation, but we're just talking about healing.

Damage is also a sliding scale, but also has a lower bound of "fails Enrage", and the more difficult it is to access damage, the more difficult it is to clear Enrage.

I admit that there's a loss of parallelism in changing "need" to "able" in that first bullet point, but I think it better preserves the whole "healers should be required to heal more" versus "healers should have more interesting DPS options".

I feel like this is is the point of contention and people aren't quite getting it.

IF the damage output is different, it isn't an "option" anymore. It's only an option when it's functionally identical. No one wants a Stone-Aero-Water rotation that does the same exact damage and effects as a Glare-Glare-Glare rotation, but that's the only thing that would be absolutely optional.

This whole thing is why I pitch the 4 Healers Model idea all the time, since it addresses this by letting players who want to have to press more DPS buttons to pick the hhealer Job(s) that have them, and those who do not want to press them to choose the healer Job(s) that do not.

Because...

You're lumping a bunch of people in a group and saying they all suck. "You can't upkeep Dia? Well, obviously you wouldn't be able to cast Cure 2," which is a nonsensical argument. "They can't handle more DPS buttons because..." NO! It's because they don't have a mind for (or any interest/fun factor from) DPS, not because they don't have "awareness" or "oversight".

Look at all the DPS players in the game who can handle complex DPS rotations and clear high end content so clearly have awareness and such, but you throw them on a healer and they freak out and can't do it. It turns out, "awareness" to healer health bars and "awareness" to DPS CDs aren't identical skills.

You really seem to have a problem grasping this concept and I have no idea why. What you're doing is essentially saying anyone bad at playing piano will also be bad at harmonica and sculpting, but anyone good at piano is also able to play literally any instrument on the planet or perform any kind of art that exists with equal proficiency.

There are TONS of people that fail at DPSing but not at healing and mechanics. There are TONS of people that fail at healing but not DPSing and mechanics. This view is not only insulting, it's outright wrong.

It's hard for me to comprehend how you can come to the conclusion that the healbot/sylphies would stay when my time in DF experience observing the pug healers are telling me the otherwise.

To be fair, you have no way of knowing those aren't the "Green DPS healers", not the Sylphies. If healing became literally Medica 2 spam, the "Sylphies" would be the only ones that would do it.

While that sounds like a great thing, we have to remember that the dev team's idea of increasing healing requirements is to make raidwides that kill you without mitigation and to tack bleeds onto everything. I much prefer BarbEX over the entire Abyssos tier in terms of healing requirements. I personally prefer hectic healing scenarios like p2 BarbEX or Living Liquid in TEA over heavy damage+bleed like P8S, but I don't think we'll get any of that unless the dev team understands what healing requirements mean and not mix it up with mitigation requirements.

Yeah, this is the ultimate problem. But I continue to contend this is due to the oGCDs. Healing needs a total top-down revamp. As much as some people like "healing plans", those are as detrimental to good design as the 2 min meta is. Both hamstring design.

Think about it, we don't have MP management because of powerful oGCDs. We don't have breakup in the Nukespam because of the oGCDs. And "weaving" probably wasn't even some high minded design objective so much as an accident between janky netcode and workarounds for responsiveness. It's influenced the expectations for healing and has limited how "healchecks" can work since oGCDs provide so much healing that it generates the Roe/Sebazy/etc noted problem of how high healing demands would need to be to actually stress the healer kits.

At the core, the oGCD healing model is a pretty massive problem, and any solution has to at least acknowledge that being part of the issue.

[Aravell]

Yeah, this is the ultimate problem. But I continue to contend this is due to the oGCDs. Healing needs a total top-down revamp. As much as some people like "healing plans", those are as detrimental to good design as the 2 min meta is. Both hamstring design.

The biggest problem in healer design right now is, if you take the easy route and cut out the large amount of OGCD bloat......what do you fill the void with? Healer kits would be very, very barebones without all that bloat, what's the plan after that?

Do they strip mitigation and debuffs off the DPS and tanks and hand them back to the healers? I don't think the tanks will be too happy about that.
Do they give us more damage buttons? You probably won't be happy about that.
Do they replace it with other equally as pointless GCD heal buttons? That doesn't really solve the issue here.

If they seriously want to solve the stagnation of the healer role, cutting out the OGCD bloat is only one part of the solution. I'd want to see a complete revamp of healer kits to have the damage portion and the healing portion interact with each other, you don't need a bloated kit to have engaging gameplay, you just need a good kit with decent interplay within it.

Alternatively, they can keep most of the OGCDs, but add an MP cost to them. The basic AoE and ST GCD heals can be free or cost very little, but every OGCD should come at a cost depending on how strong it is. That would at least make average healers have to dip into GCD heals to conserve MP, while high-tier groups can still optimise to eliminate GCD healing as much as possible.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]To be fair, you have no way of knowing those aren't the "Green DPS healers", not the Sylphies. If healing became literally Medica 2 spam, the "Sylphies" would be the only ones that would do it.[...]

Cast bar exist. Sound effects exist (hiding VFX will not mute this). Status bar exist. Mini-map for general party member positioning exist. Although one of the biggest giveaway are usually their first line of defense when something (un)expected happens. Or if you're one of those 'maybe evil minmaxer', there's also the 'funky website' to tell the stories we need to discern. If one plays and actually put effort into bettering themselves on a role, they will gain this perceptive knowledge of said role gradually one way or another. So, I have to disagree on 'not having ways to know', that's on the borderline copium IMHO.

"Sylphies" being the one enthusiastic and capable to do the job is certainly not a scenario I'd find believable when there has not been any single encounter of these "Sylphies" that I witnessed where they did not crumble when the first sign of stress/pressure starts to happen in normal content. They straight up don't possess the mental capacity to process all of that at the heat of moment---something that most of these 'Green DPS' tend to have to some respectable degree (excluding Bad Green DPS, they're as bad, if not worse than Sylphies but less common in my experience). I can say this because believe or not, I spend majority of my times in normal contents.

[Zeastria]

1. Join a fight as DPS.
2. Never recive any heals, dies to raidwide.
3. if lucky you will have a smn/rdm
in your party who can ress.

[ForsakenRoe]

If we're talking about normal dungeons, then the healing requirement could be doubled and still be doable with Medica 2 spam. So that wouldn't hurt the casual healer at all.
If we're talking about Savage content, then the DPS contribution isn't optional.

Damage is also a sliding scale, but also has a lower bound of "fails Enrage", and the more difficult it is to access damage, the more difficult it is to clear Enrage.
IF the damage output is different, it isn't an "option" anymore. It's only an option when it's functionally identical. No one wants a Stone-Aero-Water rotation that does the same exact damage and effects as a Glare-Glare-Glare rotation, but that's the only thing that would be absolutely optional.

You really seem to have a problem grasping this concept and I have no idea why. What you're doing is essentially saying anyone bad at playing piano will also be bad at harmonica and sculpting, but anyone good at piano is also able to play literally any instrument on the planet or perform any kind of art that exists with equal proficiency.

To be fair, you have no way of knowing those aren't the "Green DPS healers", not the Sylphies. If healing became literally Medica 2 spam, the "Sylphies" would be the only ones that would do it.

It's influenced the expectations for healing and has limited how "healchecks" can work since oGCDs provide so much healing that it generates the Roe/Sebazy/etc noted problem of how high healing demands would need to be to actually stress the healer kits.

1: The statement that 'you could double healing required and still clear dungeons with Medica 2 spam' is more an indictment of the currently obscenely low requirements than anything. It also only applies to the dungeon bosses, not the whole dungeon. If you'd like to try to run an EX roulette without using anything other than Medica 2, good luck. Don't forget to bring Ethers, spending 1000 MP per GCD is going to leave you OOM in like 30s

1b: If the additional potency gained by doing the 'correct rotation' is not factored into the balance, then yes it is optional. As previously mentioned, if a new 350p GCD skill was added to WHM today, then the balance of 'what DPS is expected from the WHM' would not change. Originally, the fights were designed assuming the WHM would be using Glare at that GCD, now it's a skill that is 40p stronger. The DPS checks as they currently stand would get easier to meet if you're doing the 'optimal rotation' and equal if you just spam Glare like currently. It's on SE to make those potency differences low enough to not affect the DPS checks too hard, and to keep the DPS checks more lenient in content where there is checks, so that the healer players have room to spare GCD healing/raising if needed. Though, this has been mentioned so many times before, I have to assume at this point that you're willfully ignoring anything that speaks to the matter

2a: If the party wipes because the healer did not deal enough damage, there's bigger issues than the healer not doing damage. What you're looking at as 'suboptimal gameplay by healer that leads to wipe' is something like, not refreshing the DOT when it needs to be refreshed. Or not using a damage GCD the moment it's up. But with how the DPS checks are balanced, the 'suboptimal gameplay that leads to wipe' is more akin to 'the healer is dealing literally zero damage, be it because they're spamming overhealing or they're just AFK'. It is, as previously mentioned, more damage loss to ignore your DOT as a healer now, than it would be to ignore the new button in some of my proposals. But somehow I'm the one who'd be causing wipes to enrages, not SE and their insistence on cramming so much of our potency into a non-interactive, not-interesting, bland 'once per 30s' DOT that we press and forget. 1430p a minute would be lost if you ignored Dia entirely. 1430p from TWO GCDs PER MINUTE it's crazy

2b: It's more damage to do Garuda-Titan-Ifrit on SMN. But if there's a long movement phase (Akanthai Act 4) during the Ifrit section, we can change that to put Ifrit first, and then use Garuda and Titan for movement, at the small cost of 'now Ifrit is the one in buffs, but we gain damage because we can actually cast while doing the mechanic'. Is that not 'an option', because things are so binary that we can only look through the lens of 'this is optimal' or 'this is suboptimal'? Holding the 350p instantcast GCD for 2 more Glares is suboptimal, it might push one off the end of the fight and lose you a use (and therefore 40p). But by doing so, maybe you keep a GCD that you'd otherwise lose to movement for a mechanic, thereby preserving the 310p you'd have lost there. Damage rotation decisions have more going on than 'this is/is not optimal'

3: You should be aware, being as you're able to play 3 instruments, that certain basic tenets of a discipline carry over, regardless of the nuances of the individual thing. For example, playing piano, saxophone and guitar all have completely different methods to play in terms of what you do with your hands, or how one requires your feet, one requires using your lungs etc. But they all have the shared basics of 'sense of rhythm' or 'you can read sheet music'. Anyone who is good at a role in the game will have 'raid awareness' such that they can do fight mechanics on any role (we don't suddenly forget how to do stack markers because we changed from healer to DPS for this EX roulette, do we), and with them being able to 'autopilot' mechanics in that way, that frees up more mental load for them to focus on their role's duty, eg healing as a healer. You could say that 'some people just don't have the brain for healing' like I don't have the brain for DPS. And that's fair, to an extent, but I've never put effort into trying to learn a DPS so I wouldn't know for sure if that were the case. It might be that these players you speak of who are never going to be good at healing, are only such because they try it a couple of times, decide it's not for them and give up on trying to learn the role. Anecdotally, a friend of mine hates playing tank or healer. He's a DPS main through and through, and in WOW, specifically a Ret Paladin main. Doesn't like any other class as much as Paladin. Still managed to learn Sage in time for Asphodelos Savage, and that's also factoring in that he did the EW story as PLD. You might be overestimating how long it takes to learn to play a healer in this game

4: lol and also lmao. The 'Green DPS healers' is not one group, but two. There's the ones who will sac the whole party for the sake of one more Glare, who refuse to heal for any reason and would rather wipe to something really simple than use a GCD heal (I've met a guy who refused to drop Soil for something because he demanded and expected, in a PF run no less, Tactroubasamba from the ranged for that specific raidwide). Those are the players who muddy the waters of the discussion, thankfully they're quite few and far between. The other group is the much larger population of the 'Green DPS', those who try to do as much damage as possible to help the team kill the boss faster, but are completely fine with using a GCD heal as backup if they need one. SCHs already do this with Deployment Tactics so they should be no stranger to it, but I'm an example of the latter group too. I'll try and 'be optimal' for a few pulls for reclears, but after a few wipes I get tired of tryharding and just GCD wherever I have to to get the clear. Again, my logs are public, you can see my P12S runs, and how often I say 'screw it' and use Medica 2, or Asp.Helios in the few times I've started going as AST. The 'parse obsessed' subset of the Green DPS are as much a detriment to the party's success chances as a healer that refuses to use a single damage skill. But somehow, one's 'an affront to the holy trinity design' and one's 'doing their role'

5: It's the opposite, unsurprisingly. Having OGCDs to weave means that healing checks can have more design space, not less. If we deleted every OGCD we have, forcing every heal check to be dealt with via GCDs, then we've got two options. A single target heal check (multihit tankbusters), and AOE heal check (raidwide/stackmark like Styx). And we have two tools to solve them, ST heal GCD and AOE heal GCD. Furthermore, we're hard capped by the potency of those GCDs. We cannot have a heal check that stresses the players any harder than around '500p per GCD', because you cannot guarantee which healer would be tackling it, and while WHM's Cure3 goes to 600, you can't know that it'd be a WHM doing the fight. So basically, every heal check would boil down to either 'spam Medica' or 'spam Cure2 on targetted player'. Almost zero design space. Any additional 'design space' that is useable with 'only GCDs' is not exclusively the domain of 'only GCDs'. For example, if the boss autoattacks both tanks, plus one random player (or, the closest player, for Thordan in DSR as an example), then while it would be a more interesting 'heal check' than the aforementioned two, it also doesn't suddenly stop functioning as a heal check if there's OGCDs to use. It just means that OGCDs are a valid alternative solution to the fight

1. Join a fight as DPS.
2. Never recive any heals, dies to raidwide.
3. if lucky you will have a smn/rdm
in your party who can ress.

How far away are you standing that the AOE healing (that presumably is somehow keeping the rest of the DPS alive) doesn't reach you?

[Zairava]

1. Join a fight as DPS.
2. Never recive any heals, dies to raidwide.
3. if lucky you will have a smn/rdm
in your party who can ress.

Is this some sort of quip against healers getting one or two more meaningful dps buttons or something?

Look man I'm an atrocious healer in MMO's so if even I'm bored when playing healer except when people are eating gridanian topsoil something needs to give.

You can increase healing, you will still find healing downtime to use dps abilities. If that downtime can even be found in ultimates, what you're asking for is something they will absolutely never provide in casual content.

I support them increasing the healing that needs to be dished out, but it IS NOT going to fix the overlying issue of healing downtime being mind-numbingly boring

[MintnHoney]

1. Join a fight as DPS.
2. Never recive any heals, dies to raidwide.
3. if lucky you will have a smn/rdm
in your party who can ress.

You know what, it's true: the real thing that healers need, in this game, is someone worth healing. Maybe YoshiP can deliver that to us.

[Zeastria]

[hb]
How far away are you standing that the AOE healing (that presumably is somehow keeping the rest of the DPS alive) doesn't reach you?

You assume they would aoe heal - you are asking for to much here :P
Actually i pref to stay in melee range,
and that's where i stay most of my fights,
it's easier to dogde stuff, your buff reach all.

[Aravell]

I would like to reiterate once again for the people who think a healer not being optimal will lead to an enrage in any content other than week 1 savage/current ultimates. If a SCH does not have Biolysis up for the entirety of an average P9S kill, a single direct crit Hyosho Ranryu (or equivalent potency skills from other dps) under raid buffs can completely make up for that lost damage.