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

[AmiableApkallu]

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.

Care to take on ty's challenge, then? It's an easier ask than your ideal outcome, as he's looking for merely more healing GCDs than Dosis GCDs. (Personally, I'd accept, at least as a starting point, any sort of hypothetical encounter + hypothetical job design.)

Anyone who's actually run healers through Duty Finder can tell you that the "wiggle room" you speak of is quite wide. S-tier parties will leave you bored to tears. Trash-tier parties will starve you of resources faster than you get them back.

[SeverianLyonesse]

I would give each of the healers a different "mini-game" to play DPS in between healing.

AST: Remove Minor Arcana (useless). Give AST an OGCD ST spell called Nova. Give it a coin flip skill (why does the gambler job not have a coin flip?), Zenith and Nadir. If you flip Zenith, you proc Nova again for free, and it increases in power up to three times ending in Supernova AoE. If you flip Nadir, Nova does not proc, Supernova count resets, and you do a small AoE heal to party members.

SGE: If Addersting had more generators and more outlets SGE would be in great shape. SGE feels like it really wants to be a build-and-spend laser boi.

WHM: Just more big blasty OGCD spells. Flood, Quake, Tornado. WHM should be unsubtle as a bomb.

SCH: Delete SCH. Just let the poor thing die already.

[Sebazy]

Honestly, SE have backed themselves into a sorry old corner with the forwards march towards oGCD cooldown dominated healing.

I've mathed it up far too many times to be bothered repasting it here, but the TLDR is that the amount of healing a spreadsheet superstar duo can cover without barely ever touching a healing GCD is really quite shocking, look at some of the top ranked E12S door boss healer logs. And that was a fight that threw out AoEs like they were halloween candy.

To a more average or less preplanned healer, they were likely under far more resource pressure in that fight, especially if they started prog on release.

If you want healers to actually be spending GCD time healing, the kits themselves are as big an issue as the encounters we are up against.

Another thing I'll add is that in all honestly, I don't think Savage healing requirements are the problem here, we've not really had a repeat of E8S in a while that I'm aware of at least. The bigger problem is that once you've gotten used to Savage requirements and then step back down to something like this expansions alliance raids, it's just a gaping void of nothing.

I honestly find it staggering as to how uninvolving, uninspiring and unrewarding some of these bosses got as a competent healer and how no one at SE seems to realise that it's a draining experience. There's barely much of anything to heal unless you luck out and get a complete barn fire of a run and even then you just end up spending much of your time and resources hard casting raises rather than doing triage etc. Sure you can try hard your damage and get a decent log but is it even worth it given how insignificant your overall contribution is up against 23 others? No wonder so many simply choose to just watch something on a second screen and mindlessly mash whatever.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

DoTs and Procs for the DPS aspect.

I also would just make Healing in general more weak, more expensive and heal bombs would be all a thing of a "1 per run" cooldowns basically, like, 2 benedictions per dungeon. That to make healing a lot more involed than now: Regen and zzzzzzz cause i can heal an entire dungeon worth of enemy DPS in like 2 buttons.

[Niroken]

Anyone who's actually run healers through Duty Finder can tell you that the "wiggle room" you speak of is quite wide. S-tier parties will leave you bored to tears. Trash-tier parties will starve you of resources faster than you get them back.

That's generally why healing and tanking have been increasingly made easy, so it doesn't scare off any additional players from the already small population when compared to DPS. Trying to change the game to fit increased healing demand is not only much harder but is also a lot more nuanced then adding additional OPTIONAL damage skills.

[Aravell]

Fundamentally it's all the same principle: tune encounter damage, player healing output, and mitigation tools such that more healing is required. The only difference between different tiers of content would be what percentage of cast time is mandatory healing/Esuna/etc and what percentage of cast time is wiggle room for player mistakes (fewer mistakes = more potential for DPS); as content increases in difficulty, there should be less of that wiggle room.

You say that they could do the same thing, but you also say that there has to be an upper limit, therefore, it likely won't be any different than it is now. Any experienced healer would be able to breeze through dungeons and they would still be bored when they don't get an absolute disaster of a team, adding a couple more AoE heal casts or Esunas per minute will not be any more engaging than it is now. Experienced healers at this moment can go through dungeons with 0 GCD heals, if you add in some Esuna casts, they would still be casting their 1 damage spell 90+% of the time.

New players don't stay new forever, they also will eventually gain experience and also become bored, they absolutely do need to strike up a balance between healing and non-healing activities. It's not acceptable that content should be segregated in such a way that you have to be at the level that the content is tuned for to be able to enjoy said content, because MSQ is a required part of the game, so everyone should be able to have fun in any battle content in the game, whether it be dungeons, alliance raids or ultimate raids.

[SargeTheSeagull]

I love how, without fail, the people with the absolute worst solutions to healers' current design are the people who have nothing but grays on the naughty website. Obviously that's not the entire story but if you don't know to roll your GCD then you don't know what you're talking about.

[Teno]

Just give us sage pvp gameplay on the offensive side, and base the other jobs around the same level of engaging gameplay, that's all.

Clearly the pvp gameplay is where the game is at in an ideal world, where the game designers freely express themselves and where class identity is at its best.

In short, where they're unbridled by their terrible pve constraints.

[Connor]

I love how, without fail, the people with the absolute worst solutions to healers' current design are the people who have nothing but grays on the naughty website. Obviously that's not the entire story but if you don't know to roll your GCD then you don't know what you're talking about.

What’s that law about how the longer an online conversation goes on the higher the probability someone will make a Nazi/Hitler comparison?

That’s literally the ffxiv forums except replace ‘Hitler’ with ‘grey parse logs’.

Seems a little petty to go out of your way to check out someone’s (illegally) obtained metrics solely to make the point that their parse is too low for their opinion to be valid. I mean, where do we draw the line? Should only 99-100% parse players be allowed to give their opinion now?

[SargeTheSeagull]

What’s that law about how the longer an online conversation goes on the higher the probability someone will make a Nazi/Hitler comparison?

That’s literally the ffxiv forums except replace ‘Hitler’ with ‘grey parse logs’.

Seems a little petty to go out of your way to check out someone’s (illegally) obtained metrics solely to make the point that their parse is too low for their opinion to be valid. I mean, where do we draw the line? Should only 99-100% parse players be allowed to give their opinion now?

Actually lmao. Why should the opinion of someone who literally doesn't understand what they're talking about carry any weight? Disagree with whoever you want all you like, but if you disagree with people out of sheer ignorance then your opinion carries no weight. If you gray parse, its not because you're bad, it's because you don't know how the game works and therefore your ideas on how to fix a game's perceived issues don't matter. It's like asking someone who can't cook for a recipe. Sure they understand that adding heat to food cooks it but beyond that they just plain don't know. Sure they can tell something tastes bad but would they be able to make that dish better than someone who actually makes food regularly? Your response is the equivalent of "oh well should only Michelin star chefs should be able to write recipes?" obviously not. But i don't want a cookbook written by someone who doesn't have tastebuds either. There's clearly a middle ground.

As for "illegally obtained" I could just as easily look at their lodestone achievements and draw effectively the same conclusion.