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

[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.

[mallleable]

A whacky rule change idea that could affect how tanks, and healers approach incoming damage would be everyone takes critical damage when at critical health. A change like this would affect every duty.

[RareItems]

Maybe change the main Healer DPS ability so it levels up the more you use it continuously?

Like for Example : SCH Broil > Broil 1 > Broil 2 > Broil 3 > Broil 4 > Broil 5

Using any other action in between or upon using Broil 5 resets it back to basic Broil. Makes the Healer decide to either DPS more or heal lol I guess.

[AmiableApkallu]

For your second point, I feel like you have to be misunderstanding what's being said here; if you genuinely think that Ultimates requiring a threshold of healing at which healers don't have time to DPS would lead to not having the GCD rolling for 75% of the fight, you'll have to explain that one to me.

Okay. I'm bored. Here's how I'd think about this. If I'm not mistaken, a Lv.90 WHM has access to the following MP per minute:

• Natural regen @ zero piety: 200 MP per tick * (60 seconds / 3 seconds per tick) = 4000 MP
• Lucid Dreaming: 550 MP per tick * (21 seconds / 3 seconds per tick) = 3850 MP
• Assize: 500 MP per cast * (60 seconds / 40 seconds per cast) = 750 MP

Total: 8600 MP.

I'm fairly certain this is far beyond impossible, but assuming you can get your piety up to 2683, that's another 181 MP per tick. New total: 12,220 MP.

Assume the fight ends in 8 minutes (and no intermissions), so that we can go MP negative at a rate of 1,250 MP/min. New total: 13,470 MP.

That's 2 non-free Medica II's, 11 non-free Cure II's, and one Glare Esuna. Three more GCDs devoted to Lilies, and one more Cure II thanks to Thin Air, and we up to 18 GCDs. At a 2.5sec GCD, you get 24 GCDs. Thus, I conclude that without reworking WHM's MP economy, the upper limit for how much time a WHM can spend healing is somewhere around 75% of the time. Furthermore, 66% of the active GCDs are Cure II, which is still one-button spam, just by a different name.

===

Now, that's not what the quoted claim asserted, but in environments where people really try to optimize damage, e.g., Savage and Ultimate, this is one of the things you start to think about when optimizing for damage: How little Piety can I get away with? I've merely flipped the question around.

My point: It's easy to just say, "turn up incoming damage, totally reasonable and doable." It's harder to say that while also considering knock-on effects and what they might look and feel like.

[Katish]

...

Sorry I was not home, to counterargue that's not what some healers want (if you consider some a small majority [I would say only a few]). If you observe the forums, most healers want dps buttons (at least the ones that are speaking out do), the ones that don't want dps skills are among a silent majority or nonexistent when observing (We can't just theorize here as there's no major sign of representation of those that do). As this is the forum (the place to gather feedback), it is the ideal spot to speak up about discontent...that is to say, I don't disagree that healing needs changes, in my opinion it definitely does. But I think adding dps skills to see how they're seen is a good first step as that's a major backlash. If they are added, and a big population still share a major discontent then that should be addressed (Can't address what you don't know, right?). If a majority is discontent but are silent, then a group will usually come together forming or sharing those opinions...But as the forum represents, this population is niche.

But if it does come to that...Square will have to balance both giving way to both sides and actually fixing healers on every level, which is something I would highly like to see, a compromise if you will.

[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.

[TheDustyOne]

Maybe change the main Healer DPS ability so it levels up the more you use it continuously?

Like for Example : SCH Broil > Broil 1 > Broil 2 > Broil 3 > Broil 4 > Broil 5

Using any other action in between or upon using Broil 5 resets it back to basic Broil. Makes the Healer decide to either DPS more or heal lol I guess.

The problem with this is that you're still just pressing one button over and over again, it's not that different from having a melee job with only a single combo and nothing else. There's no big decision making being made behind this compared to say, SB SCH where the many DoTs and varied timers constituted reasons for why you had to stop the Broil spam. At the moment, the only thing doing that for SCH is a single DoT and forced movement situations where Ruin II has some use.

Healers really don't need a large amount of damage buttons to be engaging in their DPS kits, 4-5 regular use buttons is enough to have an engaging kit, but when you're spending 12 GCDs on a single button, that's where the issue lies. Every healer should have some defining job mechanic that is used for their damage, and a couple of abilities that interact with that mechanic; SGE could have a basic 0-100 gauge and abilities to spend that gauge on, WHM could have BLM styled procs similar to Firestarter and Thundercloud, SCH could have DoTs and ways to manipulate them like Bane or Fester, etc.

[LilimoLimomo]

Thus, I conclude that without reworking WHM's MP economy, the upper limit for how much time a WHM can spend healing is somewhere around 75% of the time. Furthermore, 66% of the active GCDs are Cure II, which is still one-button spam, just by a different name.

I am 100% with you here. Having more healing to the degree I'm talking about is not something that can be achieved by simply raising output damage numbers in encounters. There would need to some amount of adjustments to the healers themselves as well. Potencies, MP economy, etc. There are all sorts of ways that might look, from tiny adjustments that have broad impacts, to full reworks that entirely redesign what healing gameplay looks like. I'm interested in all of it and not married to any one method. But for my personal tastes and my opinion, the ideal outcome would be one where the spells healers cast in content matched to their skill level are almost entirely healing spells, save for an appropriate amount of wiggle room.

[Boblawblah]

I wonder if the boring damage rotation issue could be solved by adding cast times to some of the OGCD heals, and enabling combo benefits with using our damage spell and a couple GCD heals in sequence? For example, Glare, Cure II (combo gives 900 potency), Cure III (combo halves MP cost).

hmm, I kind of like this idea. It'd be neat to be able to combo an esuna into a damage spell, or a damage spell into a more powerful esuna that removed multiple conditions, etc. Something that used what the healers already have in a new and interesting way.