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

[ty_taurus]

Not a healer main, but I feel like healers could use more semi-spammable dual-purpose spells that both deal damage, and heal to break up the pace of spamming the same damage spall over and over again.

Idk how spells that deal damage and heal at the same time would break up single button spam. If the damage is higher than your filler spell, then why is the healing attached? If the damage is less, it'll be avoided as much as possible. If the damage is the same, then you have Pneuma, which rarely gets used anyway because Sage already can't burn Addersgall fast enough on actual healing needs.

[Aravell]

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.

[CamuiKushi]

As a PF raider, I feel through that, as well as other minor nuisances (people without food, tanks not pressing mitigators in time, etc), that the 'triage' part of a healer's job is well served, but that doesn't excuse the 111112111112 in between the scripted damage.

Very valid point. The healing side of things does feel good, the times I enjoy playing healer is when I'm in DF and people are making mistakes I gotta clean up/do triage. Obviously that's not ideal and shouldn't be the only time the job is interesting since the top-end encounters are all about doing the fight cleanly.
I have some ideas, but I don't think they could (or even should) apply to all the healers. Which I guess raises another point: the reason this is a problem to begin with is because the healer DPS options are almost entirely 1:1 so they don't have anything that makes them uniquely interesting.

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.

[mallleable]

Idk how spells that deal damage and heal at the same time would break up single button spam. If the damage is higher than your filler spell, then why is the healing attached? If the damage is less, it'll be avoided as much as possible. If the damage is the same, then you have Pneuma, which rarely gets used anyway because Sage already can't burn Addersgall fast enough on actual healing needs.

In my mind they would do the same damage as regular dps spells so that would replace dps spells during times of high incoming damage. They would probably require other healing ogcds to be rebalanced.

[ty_taurus]

In my mind they would do the same damage as regular dps spells so that would replace dps spells during times of high incoming damage. They would probably require other healing ogcds to be rebalanced.

I'm not opposed to having more tools like that, but I think there needs to be more interesting costs to using them other than just something like a long cooldown, and I don't think that will have that much of an impact on filler DPS spam on its own, but reworking more OGCDs into GCDs with different costs to manage can, if done correctly, be a good thing.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Redesign combat so healing and support skills are more impactful and needed so healers aren't stuck in a situation of either being bored mashing their limited number of damage skills because their entire healing/support toolkit is just about unnecessary, or being thoroughly annoyed because they're burning all their CD's and MP on healing non stop because they got stuck in a party full of ppl that refuse to learn how to play the game.

[Turtledeluxe]

I get the feeling that fun is very distant from the priorities of job design. Balance in 8 man savage raids is the only concern they have when creating new jobs and adjusting exiting ones. What they are trying to do above all else is make sure that everyone is capable of the same DPS in a short encounter against a single enemy in an arena and that the tools they have will make up for any difference in these numbers.

I 100% agree and it's why at every chance I get, I post against listening to raider feedback. Raider feedback has dictated combat and Job design long enough. The team needs to get back to whether or not jobs feel unique and fun and creative encounters. On the subject of the 2 min meta Yoshi P himself has said they are open to taking risks but players don't want it. So we have to tell them we want it, even if it only results in small changes. I'm not saying the game needs to go full Heavensward but did we have to go so totally far into the opposite direction? Also is it literally impossible to give jobs fun gameplay loops at the cost of balance? I don't buy that.

[Katish]

As long as there is down time, there is damage to be done (unless you're just sitting there) and to a good healer (or even just a normal healer) that is basically the entire fight. It doesn't even matter if ogcds are removed, healers relying on GCDing will still have said downtime. Look at blue mage, it can keep up with dps and gcd healing just fine and healing still makes up only a small amount of button pressing. 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...it was what healers have always been doing in this game, a little less in the past, but still significant. In fact, healers had a lot more to keep up with than today whether it was healing or damage, showing there's room for a rework across the entire role on every level.

[Niroken]

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.

I honestly don't understand. Upping healing requirements also increase the responsibilities to the same or higher degree as people place on healers who are expected to do damage, so it's not people being lazy trying to keep Netflix dungeon healing. Must be some kind of superficial aversion to attacking monsters maybe? Maybe they only get a tingly feeling when health bar goes up. No idea.

[Local_Custard]

To those who believe that the issue with healer design can be completely resolved by increasing the healing requirements only, I have a challenge for you:

Design for me 1 minute of a fight against an unnamed dungeon boss that showcases the increased healing requirements you believe will solve the problem with healer design, and show me how you will force a Sage to spend more GCDs on healing than on Dosis spam. You have 24 GCD casts in 1 minute, and you'll need to force them to burn through all of their OGCDs in order to get a Sage to start relying on GCD heals, or you need intense enough back-to-back healing that a heal weave > heal GCD > heal weave will be necessary to resolve the mechanic successfully. Show me the breakdown of where that Sage uses each cooldown, taking into account cooldowns that are shorter than 60 seconds (Ixochole and Kerachole). You can use approximates, such as "mechanic A will bring the party down to around 30% remaining HP" or something like that.

A reminder of Sage's cooldowns:
- Physis II
- Soteria
- Druochole (limited by Addersgall, 1 per 20 seconds)
- Keracholex2 (limited by Addersgall, 1 per 20 seconds)
- Ixocholex2 (limited by Addersgall, 1 per 20 seconds)
- Taurochole (limited by Addersgall, 1 per 20 seconds)
- Haima
- Panhaima
- Rhizomata
- Holos
- Zoe
- Krasis
- Pneuma

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.

maybe if I remember I'll design a fight- that seems like an interesting thing to undertake! I'm not in the "healer requirements need to be higher" boat per say, more so in the boat of wanting more to do in down time than just pressing a single button and occasional cards (I'm all for more cards with astro- the more people i can buff at once the better). I might make a thread out of this- I'd be interesting in how someone might design a dungeon/raid/trial boss (I'm all for silly and insane ideals- maybe purposely bad for giggles).