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

[Connor]

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.

While it definitely does seem to be true that Yoshi is aiming for a ‘more healing over dps’ style, I think it becomes much more confusing when you consider that healer dps technically is a requirement for everything savage+. Which naturally trickles down to lower level content (‘if you can max dps in savage you can max it in expert roulette’ etc), ultimately creating a scenario where ‘healers primarily use offensive actions’ in general content because they’re approaching it like it has savage level dps requirements.

Honestly though I don’t even know what the solution could be. I don’t think healers should be ‘all the way dps’, but I also acknowledge that it’s literally impossible to make ‘healing’ itself actually engaging. We can’t have support spells because of balancing and nobody likes them lol , so realistically there is no path forward except just giving the healers more damage but not so much that it becomes unbalanced. Which I don’t really think will solve much of anything either, because it’s essentially going to be the same as what we have now but with an extra dps step.

Either that, or honestly sometimes I think maybe they should just go ‘iron fist’ style and force the game to conform to their vision. At the very least it’s end all the arguments. They’re too quick to say things then contradict themselves immediately after with the way the game is designed. Though, that’s not to say that their ‘vision’ wouldn’t possibly make things worse lol.

[AmiableApkallu]

While it definitely does seem to be true that Yoshi is aiming for a ‘more healing over dps’ style, I think it becomes much more confusing when you consider that healer dps technically is a requirement for everything savage+. Which naturally trickles down to lower level content (‘if you can max dps in savage you can max it in expert roulette’ etc), ultimately creating a scenario where ‘healers primarily use offensive actions’ in general content because they’re approaching it like it has savage level dps requirements.

Honestly though I don’t even know what the solution could be.

The problem is this: The more time healers are required to spend actually healing, the less time they have to spend patching up people's mistakes. That's the fundamental trade-off. Time is not a fungible quantity.

Now, perhaps that's a fair trade off in Savage and Ultimates. (I'm not qualified to comment there.) But normal mode content, anything that NA/EU queues up for in Duty Finder? It's utterly unrealistic to expect few to no mistakes / perfect play at that level. This means either required healing cannot be tuned that high, or encounters need to be designed such that mistakes cannot be made -- the latter reminding me of early Final Fantasies, where the trash and boss are on the left side of the screen, and the party is on the right side of the screen.

Edit: Which is not to say that the current balance of required healing is fine. It is not. I do believe there is room for increasing healing requirements, even at the normal/Duty Finder level, via various mechanisms: bringing back crit autos and untelegraphed mini-cleaves, reducing the self-sustain of other jobs and roles, rebalancing where a healer's healing potency actually comes from (GCD vs. oGCD), etc.