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

[Saraide]

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.

I want to add to that that even the people on top of the healing logs are still using damage spells the majority of the time. The highest healing log on doorboss is spending 75% of its GCDs on damage, 66% of which just on broil. Trying to tip the scale to over 50% healing GCDs will have disastrous results.

[Ivtrix]

Dipping back into some WoW its wild how well some of the healing specs in wow (both priests, mistweaver) are able to seamlessly integrate their dps abilities together with the healing kit.

XIV healers feel light years behind wow healers at the current.

[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.

[PyurBlue]

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.

While I do feel like increased healing requirements can help in a few areas, I also don't think that a healer that just presses Cure over and over sounds fun. If anything it's a step backwards. This is what I do in low level dungeons because there is no healer AoE damage. I try to encourage the tank to pull enough to make it so that I have heal constantly so I don't feel useless. In high level dungeons, at least there is some engagement in optimally weaving OGCD's between attacks.

I haven't thought very deeply on how to improve healer rotations, but I think the return of something like Cleric Stance would help. Instead of just upping damage and lowering healing, it might also change how some spells work. The damage jump also doesn't have to be large, I'd use it just for the small gain and added engagement, and if the increase is small that means less confident healers won't feel pressured to use it if they don't want to.

[SargeTheSeagull]

Please see the healer forums for this conversation, which we've had about eighty times now. TLDR: Give WHM seraph strike, give SCH its stormblood kit back, declunk AST's cards and perhaps put them on the GCD, give SGE a 1-2-3 proc combo that generates or spends a sting/gall or interacts with phlegma.

[Connor]

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the reason devs are so hesitant to give new dps abilities to healers is because everyone is so militant about it…

[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.

[fulminating]

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.

I had a crack at it, but may have overcorrected in the other direction significantly. I'm a bit unfamiliar with sage and even if I've underestimated sage healing output, this would probably still be more of a roadblock than the steps of faith ever were.

Boss does autos, floor may be made of lava.

TGC doom (8s doom)
spicy dot (30% hp damage per tick, esunable) (could be throttle instead)
TGC doom (10s doom)
akh morn (8 hits, 20 damage per hit spread over 8 seconds.)
enum tankbuster. 450 damage before mits or 100 to two players (p8s natural alignment style). With a shield on a dps it should be fine.
I think it's time for a break from aoe healing, so someone is getting a debuff that turns heals into damage and vice versa. If they die, the damage they received is distributed to the entire party.
It's TGC doom time again. (12s doom)
Spitty tankbuster - 20 damage 5 times, entirely coincidentally tailor made for haima, which will reduce it to 5 by 5

1 eukrasia > dosis (cid doom cast bar)
2 eukrasia > prognosis (bar completes)(preshield to prevent humourous wipes to bad server tick alignment)
3 Soteria > ixchole > pneuma > physis 2
4 pognosis
5 esuna (2) >
6 esuna (1) > druchole (4) (just needs to do >20% for them to live
7 esuna (3) >
8 esuna (4) > kerachole?
9 dosis > panhaima + krasis (tank) (doom 2 cast)
10 eukrasian prognosis > pepsis
11 prognosis > holos? +shake it off
12 I may have killed everyone even without the temptation to refresh the dot
13
14 eukrasian diagnosis > taru (dps)
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23 haima
24

[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.

[OgruMogru]

If I was made queen I'd make it so that overhealing provided a party dps buff. Synergizes with party mitigation, makes mana and resource management more engaging, doesn't alienate "pure"healer players whilst providing another avenue for affecting party dps.