How would you solve the boring "damage rotation" of the healers?

[Avoidy]

Not sure. XIV has certain limitations that make it difficult. Here is how healing was handled in tera, though. For context, Tera's healers actually had to wait in queue to enter dungeons because so many people played the role and enjoyed it. When I played a tera private server after the game shut down, healing and tanking were actually really REALLY popular, and dps were the ones getting instant queues because so many more people just wanted to tank/heal. So, you can have a system where people love healing. Here is what they did for priest, which is the healer I mained. There was another one called mystic, and it played quite differently. By the time I quit, both were pretty viable for different reasons.

Anyway, here it is. Basically priests had a debuff they'd cast on the boss every 15 seconds or so iirc. This wasn't a dot, it was an actual debuff. It lowered the boss' defensive capabilities by like 10% or something, which let your whole group do way way way more damage and boosted everyone's parse/cleartime. It was expected of you to keep this up 100% of the time. Looking at logs after a fight, if your uptime on it was low, you would get called out for it since it was literally just pressing a button every 15 seconds. This was the tip of your responsibilities. Beyond that, you had party buffs to put out. One of them was called Energy Stars (estars for short) which did a whole bunch of stuff for your group but one that people loved was it lowered your party's CD on all of their skills by some percent, I don't remember anymore. Long story short, some classes actually had different rotations when they played with priests, because they were able to cram more into their opener. A lot of people preferred priests for this reason. Paired with a certain tank that increased the party's attack speed, the two were like a match made in heaven. If you had a lancer and a priest in your party, you could attack faster thanks to the lancer, and attack more often thanks to the priest. It was effing beautiful. But there's more. A priest was also the group's mana battery. You had a few mana regen skills and you used them off CD. Since every class relied on mana to attack, the difference between a good priest and a bad priest was that with a good priest you could complete your rotation; with a bad priest, you'd run out of mana and have to chug pots (which had a long cd and were not really ideal) to get through it. There was room for individual skill expression here. There were lancers who would only want to party with me, because other priests slacked on their mana and they couldn't keep going as hard as they would've liked. We'd regularly hear people say "I'll only go for a personal best if X is healing me" because of stuff like this, and it felt damn good. After all of this, there were other things like you'd have high potency attacks on long-ish CDs that you'd tap when they came off CD, but most importantly there weren't vuln stacks like in XIV. So if your team got hit by something, it didn't matter as long as they could recover from it. What this meant was a good priest could tell the group "just ignore the first point blank aoe, I'll heal you through it." Or there would be certain attacks that stunned, and you had an aoe esuna that you could tap and cleanse everyone at once. If you did this with good enough timing, it'd be like the stun never even occurred, but a bad priest would react slowly and people would just sit in the stun. That's skill expression. It was amazing. I had so many groups able to just ... ignore entire phases because I'd pump heals and cleanse their debuffs so fast that it was like it never even happened, and I actually got to feel like a supportive boon to my squad. And then we had skills like Sleep, except they actually mattered in hard fights; bosses would begin casting insta-wipe mechanics, and it was up to you to Sleep the boss and interrupt it.


Do you see how this is different from XIV? In XIV, you just press one button 95% of the time and the team can generally survive fine without you. There's no feeling that you matter at all. But to implement any good changes here would force players to actually rely on each other again. Or it might make people "anxious" about their performance, and we can't have that. God, just writing all this made me want to heal in tera. It's such a shame that tera died despite pushing the envelope on so many things, while this game doesn't even bother trying to innovate anymore and gets more and more players with each expac. I could talk about this for days. They did tanking better in that game too. If you're curious I could elaborate, but w/e