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

[ChrysOCE]

By not worrying about damage input from healers and have encounters actually require healers to focus and provide heal/mitigate/support, with healer DPS as a distant secondary concern? If I wanted an interesting DPS rotation, I would play DPS. When I play healer, I want to heal/mitigate/support.

[Mayhemmer]

By not worrying about damage input from healers and have encounters actually require healers to focus and provide heal/mitigate/support, with healer DPS as a distant secondary concern? If I wanted an interesting DPS rotation, I would play DPS. When I play healer, I want to heal/mitigate/support.

You're missing the point.

Most veteran healers will correct you in that the desire for a healers damage kit to be more involved than [> dot > filler > capstone skill >] is not "wanting to be a dps". It's wanting it to be more engaging.

Complexity of damage kit and complexity of healing kit are not a cemented binary choice, no matter how much Yoshi P or any other developer may try to say otherwise. There will always be moments in content that require more of one, and less of the other, at any given time, but there's no reason why one or both NEEDS to always be consistently dull.

[ChrysOCE]

You're missing the point.

Most veteran healers will correct you in that the desire for a healers damage kit to be more involved than [> dot > filler > capstone skill >] is not "wanting to be a dps". It's wanting it to be more engaging.

Complexity of damage kit and complexity of healing kit are not a cemented binary choice, no matter how much Yoshi P or any other developer may try to say otherwise. There will always be moments in content that require more of one, and less of the other, at any given time, but there's no reason why one or both NEEDS to always be consistently dull.

And if the encounter design was better, healers wouldn't require a complex DPS rotation. We would be busy throughout the fight providing healing/mitigation/support. Instead, it's DPS..... heal in between.

[Nizzi]

And if the encounter design was better, healers wouldn't require a complex DPS rotation. We would be busy throughout the fight providing healing/mitigation/support. Instead, it's DPS..... heal in between.

Hmm, well I've done DSR on Scholar and that's a very pressing and busy fight that requires a lot of GCD shield casts, and the "simple DPS rotation" is still boring as sin, so...? It sounds to me like you just have an insanely unrealistic expectation of the amount of GCD healing this game should/could have.

[LilimoLimomo]

Hmm, well I've done DSR on Scholar and that's a very pressing and busy fight that requires a lot of GCD shield casts, and the "simple DPS rotation" is still boring as sin, so...?

With respect, if you're casting DPS spells often enough to get bored of them in the highest end content available, then it sounds like the healing requirements are tuned too low.

[Nizzi]

With respect, if you're casting DPS spells often enough to get bored of them in the highest end content available, then it sounds like the healing requirements are tuned too low.

No offense but this is just a bit of an absurd comment, especially when the shield healer in DSR is the one who is super pressed for the first 11+ minutes of the fight (shield healers have been the harder of the two subroles to play this entire expac and definitely the more important of the two in the party). And you're saying DSR is tuned too low?

Too many people in this community seem to want healers to be designed for an entirely different game than the one we're currently playing, and I notice this more often than not with DPS/Tank mains and people who don't do high end content on healers. This game isn't WoW, it isn't Ragnarok Online, it isn't FFXI - it's FFXIV, a game where healers do damage constantly, focusing on always keeping their GCDs rolling like every other job and have always had an inherent tradeoff built in between using a GCD for healing or for dealing damage.
This is baked into the system and they are the only role that has this consideration; it is always where healer optimization has been in and what the mark of a good healer is. Replacing Broil Broil Broil with "Succor Succor Succor" or "Physick Physick Physick" doesn't suddenly make pressing 1-1-1, or 2-2-2, or 3-3-3 fun, meaning that there's no amount of pressing your GCD heals that will suddenly make only having Broil and Bio fun.

Succor is my second most cast ability in DSR. I looked at my log and I had 325 GCD presses over the course of the 18:51 minute encounter (DSR). 48 of those were Succor Casts, 19 were Adloquiums, and then there's one cheeky Physick. That's 21% of total GCDs spent solely on healing, disregarding all healing oGCDs and also disregarding any of those that are used in downtime. Healer is already the hardest role during prog in Savage and Ultimate; increasing the healing requirements or saying something like DSR is tuned too low for a Scholar is going to gate infinitely more people out of this game than would ever be able to handle it. Healing is already the main focus of what healers do; but measuring it by GCDs spent is never going to work because healing fundamentally does not work like that in this game; there's a reason heal GCDs cost 10% of your MP versus the 4% that your DPS buttons do. Changing that would require an entire fundamental rework of the entire role, the game's encounter design/philosophy and likely a lot more to make this style of healing work in FFXIV, and again; pressing GCD heals does not make the time where you press Broil Broil Broil Broil more interesting. Upping that does nothing for that. It is not a fix. P8Sp2 did not make it fun. DSR did not make it fun. TOP has not made it fun.

And at that point, I just find it easier to say that if you don't like how healing fundamentally is in this game and you "don't play a healer to DPS", you should go play another game where healing is more like that. This type of feedback has been a death sentence for this entire role since Shadowbringers because not only is it never going to happen with how encounters are designed and the amount of players that would be gated by healers who couldn't keep up with the healing requirements, but it limits healing being satisfying for the people who do main it. The role has been slowly strangled by this for years now. It's okay to not like certain things, I don't like tanking or DPSing in this game bar playing BLM last tier, but even then I haven't touched it in probably a year now.

I like healing in this game - it's why 99% of my posts here are Healer/SCH related- and I like that I have to deal damage and focus on healing when it's required, mitigating and having a plan. It's why I've mained Scholar for years now, because Scholar is the only job left with the trade off of heals vs DPS on an oGCD level and that means my healing plan can radically shift beyond cutting GCDs once I've learned a fight and know what the timeline is like and where I'm going to put certain heals, and where things aren't needed anymore.

We can make arguments that healers should heal more, I won't disagree. We can make arguments that oGCDs are too powerful, there's too many of them, tank healing has gotten too high and needs to be nerfed into the dust, the fight design this expansion has basically been "Okay the SGE/SCH gets to play now while the WHM/AST doesn't need to do much of anything except Glarebot" and other arguments and I wouldn't disagree. But the argument that increasing healing to a ridiculous level or "make us do something that's not DPS!" would somehow make 2 DoT refreshes a minute and then only Glare/Broil etc "fun" is just not true. It will not.

We already know that healers with more DPS buttons that have to GCD heal even more works; we had it in the game until Shadowbringers. It works, it's how the role is fundamentally designed and making our GCD DPS rotation fun and satisfying at all levels is the biggest core issue facing this role, and the problems with the healer role design are the biggest issues facing the game at the moment - more than any 2 minute meta boogeyman, more than huge hitboxes and 100% uptime guaranteed fights, more than ANYTHING else.

But unfortunately, the "i just play to heal, if you want to DPS, just play a DPS job!" players who don't engage with healing outside of their casual roulettes will get what they want in Dawntrail, as usual. These people are like little spoiled children who constantly scream for more and more to go their way in regards to our role, and they will always get it. There's no point caring, it won't change and people with no investment will continue to ruin it for another expansion and whine "why isnt it more like other games?? i dont play this to DPS!!!" because the developers only care about what Tank/DPS mains complain about in regards to healers, and not what healer players say about their jobs. /shrug

I'm so excited for another 3 years of my Yoshi-P approved healerslop. Non-healer main approved!

[Renathras]

As a WHM, I don’t want a damage rotation, I want more healing and buffing. Having to dps all the time is bad design. If I have to dps, I’d rather keep the WHM dps setup as is.

As another WHM main, 100% agree with you.

When I feel in the mood to DPS, I play SMN. It's...not at all often that I play SMN. The rest of the time, when I'm playing healers, I don't want to muck with DPS complexities/rotations. If I did...I'd be on my DPS Job, not on my not-DPS-Job.

.

Prove to me that you can make 1 minute of a dungeon level fight that will make the healing side outweigh the DPS. Show me each GCD in that 1 minute and how more of them will go to healing instead of Dosis spam. I know it's a tall order, but I'm only asking for 1 minute.

For one thing, you wouldn't keep the existing pool of abilities.

The biggest change right now that would make healing more engaging would be removing oGCD healing from the game. That ALONE would make choosing heals (and MP management...) more frontline, and would obliterate the "111111 spam" in an instant, even if healing requirements were unchnaged. But, of course, we wouldn't leave them unchanged. Bosses being able to autoattack all the time would be done as well (this USED to be a thing, no standing and casting for 5 minutes), and there'd be balancing done on the Tanking sustain side.

So it's not a simple fix, but nothing worth doing is.

I've seen a fairly large amount of people say that upping healing requirements is all that's needed to completely fix healer boredom, please explain how casting Cure/Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis 150 times is more engaging than casting Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis 150 times? Because it looks equally boring to me.

Well, for one thing, at least casting Cure 150 times means you're picking targets (presumably somewhat intelligently) while pressing Glare 150 times on a single target boss means you aren't.

...and I don't mean that to be snarky; it's not trivial. As people point out all the time with AST, the higher APM is only partly due to the oGCD weaves. It also includes the player targeting individual party members.

I don't think anyone is arguing, btw, to just have Cure 1 and no other spells and just use Cure 1 150 times. But people aren't wrong in that would be more engaging than Glare 150 times.

So I guess my suggestion would be to give each healer something unique to do with their DPS during downtime. This problem isn't going to be fixed with a single addition/modification.

I've been saying this for...a while. I even have a name for it, the "4 Healers Model". Which is a simple concept: We have 4 Healer JOBS, why do they all have identical rotations and near-identical gameplay?

SGE and SCH are the biggest offenders, since you can play them almost the same and probably 80% of their kits map 1:1 with each other. WHM (due to Lilies) and AST (due to Cards and some of its oGCDs) are the most different, though they still have a MOSTLY identical basic rotation.

I think it's good for some healers to work like they do right now, because there are a lot of healers that DON'T want DPS rotations/complexity/a DPS Job.

But there are some that DO. In the case of Tanks, they fixed this by adding GNB as a "Melee DPS that tanks". That's what SGE should be, a "Caster DPS that heals". (Arguably it's what RDM should have been, but we crossed that bridge half a decade ago, lol)

The answer isn't "more damage rotation for everyone!" since that's going to alienate a lot of people, too. Trading alienating part of the player base (boring DPS) with alienating the other part (complex DPS) isn't a good answer, since we have the same problem, just the opposite people pissed off.

The answer is to split half and half. We have 4 healers, there's no reason we can't do that. Heck, if they got rid of the stupid "Pure/Barrier" split (which is dumb because (a) barriers/mitigation are ALMOST always better and (b) AST is already half-barrier healer anyway), then we could have even more variation since we'd now have all 4 healers to work with if they ALL had barriers/mitigation tools instead of being segmented like they are now where WHM has less party mitigation than BLACK MAGE (seriously, Addle is 90 sec CD vs Temperance at 120!)

Yes, I was being snarky there. ... So where are and aren't you ok with...

Because I was replying to you, not them? I've been told by people, when I asked them, that they can call me out for things and not others and it NOT be inconsistent because it's not their job to call out everyone for everything and they can pick and choose. Those are, btw, the people "around the forums who stop taking (me) seriously".

Also also: Trying to make a conversation about a person (me and people taking me seriously or not) is bait, and one I'm not going to indulge further.

.

There ARE, absolutely, people that want more damage buttons.

There ARE, absolutely, people that do not.

Both groups should be addressed. Trying to appeal to authority fallacy or the like (which is what the "veteran healers" argument is), or attacking people pointing this out, is not a winning argument. Worse, it does nothing to address your concerns because it leads to us all bickering instead of agreeing.

As I said in Ty's thread, I very much think they should have some healers that are more DPS/complexity focused (SGE and AST are two good candidates). However, they should not do this for all the healer Jobs. I fully support doing it with some. I will fully oppose doing it with all.

Yes, the healing needs fixing but more importantly the dps and support buttons need to be addressed as that is what you're doing in most of your downtime...

The problem is, that's not what everyone healing WANTS to do - and contrary to minority opinion, it wasn't "always this way", either (ARR healing, particularly on WHM, was more consistent and more GCD focused, with far less spared on damage due to MP actually being limited back then and Cleric being dangerous at the wrong times).

That HAS to be addressed. That can't be the "we'll get to that later, but first shiny DPS rotation!". That CANNOT be the way to address the problem. It'll just alienate tons of people.

a game where healers do damage constantly,

I think that's the problem, though - and as noted above, wasn't always the case. That's bad design. Having healers in your MMO designed to be DPSers is bad design. Most MMOs recognize this, which is why "the healer that heals by doing DPS" is usually a special, often higher skill variant, not the general design.

Because it's bad design.

FFXIV isn't an ARPG, so it doesn't work that way. The oGCD thing is more a problem here, which is why we DIDN'T have this problem back when we DIDN'T have a wash of oGCDs. Boss damage being reduced to a tickle just made thinks even worse.

[ReynTime]

No offense but this is just a bit of an absurd comment, especially when the shield healer in DSR is the one who is super pressed for the first 11+ minutes of the fight (shield healers have been the harder of the two subroles to play this entire expac and definitely the more important of the two in the party). And you're saying DSR is tuned too low?

Too many people in this community seem to want healers to be designed for an entirely different game than the one we're currently playing, and I notice this more often than not with DPS/Tank mains and people who don't do high end content on healers. This game isn't WoW, it isn't Ragnarok Online, it isn't FFXI - it's FFXIV, a game where healers do damage constantly, focusing on always keeping their GCDs rolling like every other job and have always had an inherent tradeoff built in between using a GCD for healing or for dealing damage.
This is baked into the system and they are the only role that has this consideration; it is always where healer optimization has been in and what the mark of a good healer is. Replacing Broil Broil Broil with "Succor Succor Succor" or "Physick Physick Physick" doesn't suddenly make pressing 1-1-1, or 2-2-2, or 3-3-3 fun, meaning that there's no amount of pressing your GCD heals that will suddenly make only having Broil and Bio fun.

Succor is my second most cast ability in DSR. I looked at my log and I had 325 GCD presses over the course of the 18:51 minute encounter (DSR). 48 of those were Succor Casts, 19 were Adloquiums, and then there's one cheeky Physick. That's 21% of total GCDs spent solely on healing, disregarding all healing oGCDs and also disregarding any of those that are used in downtime. Healer is already the hardest role during prog in Savage and Ultimate; increasing the healing requirements or saying something like DSR is tuned too low for a Scholar is going to gate infinitely more people out of this game than would ever be able to handle it. Healing is already the main focus of what healers do; but measuring it by GCDs spent is never going to work because healing fundamentally does not work like that in this game; there's a reason heal GCDs cost 10% of your MP versus the 4% that your DPS buttons do. Changing that would require an entire fundamental rework of the entire role, the game's encounter design/philosophy and likely a lot more to make this style of healing work in FFXIV, and again; pressing GCD heals does not make the time where you press Broil Broil Broil Broil more interesting. Upping that does nothing for that. It is not a fix. P8Sp2 did not make it fun. DSR did not make it fun. TOP has not made it fun.

And at that point, I just find it easier to say that if you don't like how healing fundamentally is in this game and you "don't play a healer to DPS", you should go play another game where healing is more like that. This type of feedback has been a death sentence for this entire role since Shadowbringers because not only is it never going to happen with how encounters are designed and the amount of players that would be gated by healers who couldn't keep up with the healing requirements, but it limits healing being satisfying for the people who do main it. The role has been slowly strangled by this for years now. It's okay to not like certain things, I don't like tanking or DPSing in this game bar playing BLM last tier, but even then I haven't touched it in probably a year now.

I like healing in this game - it's why 99% of my posts here are Healer/SCH related- and I like that I have to deal damage and focus on healing when it's required, mitigating and having a plan. It's why I've mained Scholar for years now, because Scholar is the only job left with the trade off of heals vs DPS on an oGCD level and that means my healing plan can radically shift beyond cutting GCDs once I've learned a fight and know what the timeline is like and where I'm going to put certain heals, and where things aren't needed anymore.

We can make arguments that healers should heal more, I won't disagree. We can make arguments that oGCDs are too powerful, there's too many of them, tank healing has gotten too high and needs to be nerfed into the dust, the fight design this expansion has basically been "Okay the SGE/SCH gets to play now while the WHM/AST doesn't need to do much of anything except Glarebot" and other arguments and I wouldn't disagree. But the argument that increasing healing to a ridiculous level or "make us do something that's not DPS!" would somehow make 2 DoT refreshes a minute and then only Glare/Broil etc "fun" is just not true. It will not.

We already know that healers with more DPS buttons that have to GCD heal even more works; we had it in the game until Shadowbringers. It works, it's how the role is fundamentally designed and making our GCD DPS rotation fun and satisfying at all levels is the biggest core issue facing this role, and the problems with the healer role design are the biggest issues facing the game at the moment - more than any 2 minute meta boogeyman, more than huge hitboxes and 100% uptime guaranteed fights, more than ANYTHING else.

But unfortunately, the "i just play to heal, if you want to DPS, just play a DPS job!" players who don't engage with healing outside of their casual roulettes will get what they want in Dawntrail, as usual. These people are like little spoiled children who constantly scream for more and more to go their way in regards to our role, and they will always get it. There's no point caring, it won't change and people with no investment will continue to ruin it for another expansion and whine "why isnt it more like other games?? i dont play this to DPS!!!" because the developers only care about what Tank/DPS mains complain about in regards to healers, and not what healer players say about their jobs. /shrug

I'm so excited for another 3 years of my Yoshi-P approved healerslop. Non-healer main approved!

This post should have ended the discussion. It's one of the very few here that isn't disconnected from reality.

In FFXIV DPS is everything, and every role is a DPS + an extra function. Every fight has been designed around that. They're not going to change 10+ years of encounters because of 1 role, specially if that's going to do the one thing they constantly express concern about, which is difficulty of healing for less experienced players.

[LilimoLimomo]

This game isn't WoW, it isn't Ragnarok Online, it isn't FFXI - it's FFXIV, a game where healers do damage constantly, focusing on always keeping their GCDs rolling like every other job and have always had an inherent tradeoff built in between using a GCD for healing or for dealing damage.

I agree that that's what the game is. But at least according to the man at the top, it's not what the game is supposed to be. Yoshi-P has gone on the record numerous times (in 2017 and 2021) saying that in group content, there is no expectation that Healers do damage and that for balancing purposes their DPS is assumed to be zero. And since those times, he has never said anything to the contrary. So if that's his stated design goal, and the highest difficulty content in the game leaves enough time to spam DPS spells that healers get sick of it, then I would say that there are some tuning issues there where the design goals aren't quite being realized.

[Zarkovitch]

add a new dot problem solve. Until the next expansion they might add a damage ability