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

[Saraide]

With respect, I don't understand what you're trying to say. It sounds like you're saying that right now the content is too easy, and therefore content being designed harder would be bad. Which doesn't make sense to me, so I assume that's not what you're intending to say. So I will kindly request that if you have an argument to make that you fully explain it.

What savage/ultimate experience do you have?

[Ivtrix]

What savage/ultimate experience do you have?

You looked, I looked, we both know the answer to that question

[LilimoLimomo]

What savage/ultimate experience do you have?

See, here's the thing. I'm totally here for good faith discussion/debate. If you'd like to participate in that, fabulous, I'd love to hear what you have to say. But your question has huge gate-keeping/ad hominem vibes, which doesn't really have any place in a productive discussion.

If I wanted to have that kind of exchange, I would just reply with, "How many RPG's have you worked on combat design on?" It would be pretty chill, because for 99% of the people here, the answer would be zero. And anyone misguided enough to think that credentials trump a coherent argument would make the mistake of thinking I was one of the few people qualified to talk about the design of combat encounters.

But I don't do that, because that's bullshit. That's not how logic works, and it's not how a healthy debate arrives at a sound and logical conclusion. You may not have experience designing combat, but that in no way means you won't have good ideas. So I'm here to listen to what you have to say in good faith. If you have a compelling and well-reasoned argument, I genuinely want to hear it. If I'm wrong, if my logic doesn't check out, I want to be convinced of that.

So if you've got a well-reasoned argument, I hope you'll share it with me. If not, that's totally cool; I'll just talk with others instead.

[Saraide]

See, here's the thing. I'm totally here for good faith discussion/debate. If you'd like to participate in that, fabulous, I'd love to hear what you have to say. But your question has huge gate-keeping/ad hominem vibes, which doesn't really have any place in a productive discussion.

If I wanted to have that kind of exchange, I would just reply with, "How many RPG's have you worked on combat design on?" It would be pretty chill, because for 99% of the people here, the answer would be zero. And anyone misguided enough to think that credentials trump a coherent argument would make the mistake of thinking I was one of the few people qualified to talk about the design of combat encounters.

But I don't do that, because that's bullshit. That's not how logic works, and it's not how a healthy debate arrives at a sound and logical conclusion. You may not have experience designing combat, but that in no way means you won't have good ideas. So I'm here to listen to what you have to say in good faith. If you have a compelling and well-reasoned argument, I genuinely want to hear it. If I'm wrong, if my logic doesn't check out, I want to be convinced of that.

So if you've got a well-reasoned argument, I hope you'll share it with me. If not, that's totally cool; I'll just talk with others instead.

You want me to explain therefore it's useful to know what your experiences are with the content we are talking about. A good explanation would require to know where the person you're trying to explain something to stands.

[LilimoLimomo]

You want me to explain therefore it's useful to know what your experiences are with the content we are talking about. A good explanation would require to know where the person you're trying to explain something to stands.

No worries, I won't take offense if you explain it to me like I'm 5. And that makes it so everyone in the thread can understand it and take part as well. Win-win.

[Saraide]

No worries, I won't take offense if you explain it to me like I'm 5. And that makes it so everyone in the thread can understand it and take part as well. Win-win.

So may I assume then you have no savage or ulti experience? In that case upping the healing requirement to the point of forcing both healers to spend a majority of their GCDs on heals is not feasable for several reasons. Firstly we have to take stock of what the healer experience currently looks like and that is even with extremely heavy healing in current fights you still have the vast majority of GCDs be on damage. As I said earlier the top healing log for p12s phase 1 has 78% of its GCDs spent on damage spells. That was with the other healer doing basically nothing. To solve this issue you would have to roughly double the damage output to get even in the first place to have a place to start at. But we would still be roughly at a spot where both healers are using around ~75% of their damage GCDs on dps spells.

From there you would have to probably roughly double the healing requirement again however there are big issues with that solution.

• Situations where something goes wrong will straight up be unrecoverable. If you need both healers to constantly be healing to even survive without something going awry then every time a healer dies it's going to be an instant wipe.
• Healers would become more and more stationary as many GCD heals have cast times meaning mechanical complexity for healers would plummet hard.
• Even if 50% of GCDs will be required for healing, the other half is still going to be boring nuke spam.

What you are asking for is essentially permanent harrowing hell, a mechanic from p10s that requires heal spam when not solved by tank LB3. This is doable as a one time mechanic in a fight, not as a permanent state of being.
Additionally, as of now getting people to full health can happen very quickly. This theoretical higher healing requirement would have it that raidwides are going out sheer constantly. Which will make rezzing so much less safe that there will be a real threat that every mechanic becomes a body check mechanic, something the current harder content is already being under heavy critique for.
Making aoe healing slow will then just shift the healing role into a near stationary heal spam machine. In general the mana cost would have be nearly nullified as spamming GCD heals right now is only possible in extremely limited capacity.

This also does nothing to adress healers being extremely simplified in any normal mode content. DPS retain most of their job complexity in normal mode content, Tanks a little less so. Healers have no job complexity in normal mode content at all. So we must ask do we only want to solve the healer engagement issues for harder content or for all content? Upping the healing requirement in normal content is largely out of question with how easy SE wants dungeons, trials and normal raids to be. If they did, many players who arent as good at the game would be hard locked out of choosing the role at all.

Upping the dps complexity on healers would not have that effect. We know this because many people who play DPS in dungeons and the likes are honestly not good at the game already. They massively drift a lot of cooldowns or forget to use some at all. The content is still perfectly clearable. This would remain with healers having a more complex dps rotation simply because normal modes generally have no enrages (or extremely lenient ones). Someone in your team will probably silently grumble or mald on talesfromDF but that's about it.

[LilimoLimomo]

...

Thank you so much for your well-explained thoughts! There's so much to consider here and you've been very thoughtful.

For the rest of this post, I'm going to try to distinguish between "mandatory healing/mitigation" and "wiggle room". In short, each encounter will have unavoidable damage (and other things like status effects) that has to be healed, mitigated, etc in order to survive the fight. Part of the difficulty of every part of an encounter will be the amount of "wiggle room" that is available to make up for mistakes; if not used for such recovery, then it can theoretically be healer DPS. That's the model for healing I'll be referring back to periodically.

As I mentioned in another recent post, I agree that we can't reach a satisfying outcome to this by simply raising incoming damage; there are a variety of aspects of systems that would need to be re-tuned, including healers themselves.

Healers would become more and more stationary as many GCD heals have cast times meaning mechanical complexity for healers would plummet hard.

You would definitely want to balance the healing required to the amount of movement requirements. If healers can't keep up with the mobility required by content in the same way that DPS and tank classes can, that would be something to address with their kits, whether that means changing certain GCD's to instant cast, allowing charge casts during movement, etc. In addition, not everything under the "mandatory healing/mitigation" umbrella needs to be healing. If there are resources that enable healing, such as MP or charges of various kinds, any abilities that actively manage these and thus prepare for the next bout of healing fall under this umbrella as well.

Even if 50% of GCDs will be required for healing, the other half is still going to be boring nuke spam.

I think there are a lot of different ways to make 100% of GCD's required for healing. To be clear, I'm not saying that's the goal, I'm just saying it's entirely possible. And if 100% is possible, then lesser thresholds will be possible as well. There's no need to settle for a huge amount of DPS time unless we choose to restrict ourselves to systems that prevent alternatives.

Situations where something goes wrong will straight up be unrecoverable. If you need both healers to constantly be healing to even survive without something going awry then every time a healer dies it's going to be an instant wipe.

This is a good concern, but thankfully it's addressable. Encounters do need to to have that aforementioned "wiggle room", and they will, to whatever threshold seems appropriate. But even aside from that, how recovery mechanics occupy the space of that wiggle room needn't look the way it looks now. Just to throw out some unpolished examples, healers can have re-raise, adding a single death buffer for an encounter. Or healers could have once-per-encounter abilities that can mitigate a sticky situation, but with a meaningful downsides like lowered DPS that makes them only for emergencies and not for the "official plan". Do not consider these to be actual ideas that should be implemented, but rather take them as examples of ways that problems that can't be solved with current gameplay mechanics could potentially be solved if we went outside the box a bit.

And if we're being fair, I do think it's important to point out that "50% of GCD's will be nuke spam" and "situations where something goes wrong will be straight up unrecoverable" cannot reasonably coexist. If our combat system somehow becomes so twisted that half of a healers GCD's are DPS and yet they don't have the bandwidth to recover from mistakes, then something is fundamentally wrong and needs to be addressed.

What you are asking for is essentially permanent harrowing hell, a mechanic from p10s that requires heal spam when not solved by tank LB3. This is doable as a one time mechanic in a fight, not as a permanent state of being.

Hopefully the above has clarified that this isn't what I'm after. ^^

Additionally, as of now getting people to full health can happen very quickly.

I anticipate that this is probably among the things that could need a change: that outside of certain rare-use moves, overall healing potency might need to lower to allow more space to play in each player's limited HP pool.

Making aoe healing slow will then just shift the healing role into a near stationary heal spam machine.

Yep, as mentioned above that would be a concern, and if mobility was too limited then adjusting the healer kit to allow more mobility would hopefully address that.

In general the mana cost would have be nearly nullified as spamming GCD heals right now is only possible in extremely limited capacity.

I can see mana going a variety of different ways. If we wanted to have more time spent actively healing, perhaps mana wouldn't play as much of a role in healing. Or if mana regeneration became something that healers could do actively with certain moves, then such moves would both aid in enabling healing while also occupying "mandatory healing" time without actual being literal healing.

This also does nothing to adress healers being extremely simplified in any normal mode content. DPS retain most of their job complexity in normal mode content, Tanks a little less so. Healers have no job complexity in normal mode content at all.

Similar to the above, I think there are a lot of ways to address this. I guess the first one would be to determine whether complexity is a desirable goal. Some players want it, some players don't, but in what proportions? Do these preferences align with other preferences such as the difficulty of the content they're engaging in? I don't have these answers so I can't say, but hopefully CBU3 has invested in trying to elicit this data. For my tastes, I personally don't think healers need much in the way of complexity. The only way that DPS can engage with the encounter is to play the game of solitaire that is their rotation, so I get why a degree of complexity might be preferred there. But healers have more pressing concerns: keeping the party alive from moment to moment. That's innately engaging in a way that slowly depleting a lengthy health bar simply isn't. Is it enough? The answer will vary from player to player. It's a big tangent, but on that note that's why I support class design where some classes are less complex and others are more complex, so that different types of players can all hopefully find a class that aligns with their needs and preferences.

I hope that helps to shine some light on why I see this as not only a desirable solution, but one that is well within the realm of possibility. And thank you for posing such constructive criticism, without which I would not have been able to clarify why I see things differently. ^^

[AmiableApkallu]

I think there are a lot of different ways to make 100% of GCD's required for healing. To be clear, I'm not saying that's the goal, I'm just saying it's entirely possible.

Care to share any one of those ways, with enough detail to form judgements such as, "that works," "that doesn't work," "I don't like that kind of mechanic," "that's a cool new ability," so on and so forth -- something enough to have a good faith discussion/debate over? (I mean, I can think of at least one way, but it's so atrociously bad that to put it forth would be to stand up a man made of straw.)

There are more than a few examples floating around these forums of how healer DPS kits might be made more engaging. There are at least a few ideas floating around these forums on how to make healing more required.

But all healing, all the time? Crickets. Nothing. The proof is in the pudding, except no one can seemingly offer any pudding, or even something that might aspire to be pudding one day.

[Sebazy]

I think there are a lot of different ways to make 100% of GCD's required for healing. To be clear, I'm not saying that's the goal, I'm just saying it's entirely possible. And if 100% is possible, then lesser thresholds will be possible as well. There's no need to settle for a huge amount of DPS time unless we choose to restrict ourselves to systems that prevent alternatives.

Bit late to the party on this one sorry.

We actually had this at one point, 3.0 AST in Gordias Savage.

It didn't work at all and effectively lead to AST needing to obscenely overtuned by 3.4 to get people to give the job a fair shake again.

The problem with approaching 100% GCD uptime on heals is that you're left with very little on the table. With 3.0 Gordias Savage and AST, I kid you not when I say that a shield or mitigation being missed was enough to start a snowball that could lead into an inevitable wipe in A1S unless your co healer was massively on the ball and had some MP/GCDs to spare.

Saying that people can pocket burst healing abilities to catch back up doesn't really ring true, those abilities will get planned in to the rotation and suddenly you're not at 100% anymore.

But healers have more pressing concerns: keeping the party alive from moment to moment. That's innately engaging in a way that slowly depleting a lengthy health bar simply isn't. Is it enough? The answer will vary from player to player.

It's only engaging so long as the player doesn't realise how little pressure they are actually under. Once the illusion is shattered and they realise that frankly, some tanks can practically maintain themselves these days then that leaves the player in a bit of a hole.

For a newer player coming up from sprouthood, it's much harder to notice. But for a vet that's done the rounds in Extremes and Savage and remembers the day where you *Needed* to maximise Regen uptime, stepping down to more casual content has this glaring and unmissable void of responsibility, engagement and purpose.