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

[Lailani_Fey]

We should remove damage oGCDs from drk because players might ignore mitigation in favor of their burst.

This however, I fully disagree with, someone tunnel visioning is not a reason to kneecap a jobs kit. [...]

Your analogy draws attention to an essential dilemma in class design. While I appreciate your perspective, the situation with tanks in FFXIV could be seen as a cautionary tale for healers. Consider the following:

• Tank gameplay has become less dynamic, with routine tankbusters and aggro swaps overshadowing core tanking elements like positioning or aggro management.
• Situations requiring a more adaptive approach, such as add management and crowd control in certain fights, are infrequent (P7S, E3S) and unengaging.
• While tanks do have moments to aid teammates, these are often pre-planned and not reflective of dynamic gameplay.
• The push towards a predictable, optimizable fight timeline seems to prioritize perfect execution over adaptability.

This trend towards predictability and optimization in tank roles could foreshadow a similar path for healers if their damage rotations are emphasized. It's crucial to address the foundational issues in healer design first, rather than complicating their roles with more complex damage mechanics.

[...] It's fine for better gear to make content easier over time, it gives that feeling of power and progression as people get through the content. Healers having access to a greater DPS kit just means that they don't get bored later in a tier from lack of healing, simply because they have another engaging thing to focus on.

I respectfully disagree with the notion that enhancing gear should primarily boost HP and defensive stats. The sense of power and progression can be adequately represented through increased damage output, without necessarily affecting survivability to a great extent. This approach could help maintain a balanced challenge in healing, regardless of gear level. Additionally, expanding healers' DPS toolkit as a solution to potential boredom risks overshadowing their primary role. The focus should be on making healing itself more engaging and dynamic, rather than shifting the role towards damage output.

Damage exceeding maximum HP is a mitigation check, not a heal check. Remove the tanks in such a situation and people die, remove the healers in such a situation and people still live, albeit at low health. A heal check is continuous, back-to-back damage such that even with mitigation, you will die.

You make a fair point about the distinction between mitigation and healing. I summed it up as healing responsibility especially because shield healers exist. If you are refering to tank responsibilities like Wild Charge or Tank Buster mechanics, I do agree and it should be kept as tank responsibility.

[Lailani_Fey]

Or if we removed Healing Waltz from DNC because it detracted from their DPS responsibilities. All this does is simplify a job down to its role and not what that job specifically offers.

Your point about the uniqueness of each job's toolkit is well-taken. However, the issue at hand is less about simplification and more about balancing the core responsibilities of a role with its supplementary aspects. For healers, the current trend seems to be a shift towards damage dealing at the expense of dynamic healing gameplay. My argument is not for the removal of damage-dealing abilities but for a careful recalibration to ensure that healing remains a central, engaging aspect of the role.

Healers can and should have increased healing responsibility compared to now, but that doesn't mean they can't also have more than Glaroilificosis spam + DoT. We know it can work because that's how it worked pre-ShB. SCH had like 7 different attacks back in SB while raiding (Broil, Bio, Miasma, Miasma II, Ruin II, Shadowflare, Energy Drain) and it didn't detract from its ability to heal. Now, it only has Broil, Ruin II, Biolysis, and Energy Drain in that same raid environment, with Broil being spammed much more compared to how it used to and Energy Drain being nerfed since then.

While I concur that more varied gameplay is desirable, it is crucial to understand the concept of contribution as a zero-sum game. Enhancing one aspect of a role often requires a corresponding reduction in another. This also applies to the distribution of a player's attention among healing, damage, and movement. In my view, Endwalker raids require an excessive focus on choreographed movement, which detracts from the core responsibilities of healing and damage dealing. Therefore, the priority should be on rebalancing these aspects to ensure a more holistic and engaging experience.

[Lailani_Fey]

We already had lesser free healing, less healing on the rest of the party, and we also had more complex damage kits back in HW and SB, you know what we called healers that didn't heal and only did damage back then? We called them bad healers and then we kicked and replaced them, then life goes on. Can we just call Glarebots bad healers and just kick them again?

It's frankly ridiculous that we have to have our kit design hamstrung because some healers can't do the job they queued up for. You know that some tanks don't mitigate during their burst because they think it's too hard, right? They just demand that the healer shields them, should we then ask for tank burst to be deleted because some of them can't weave mitigation?

Lowered healing requirements and gear creep is only part of the problem, if you only address that portion, you don't satisfy people in the end. Every part of the problem has to be addressed at once or we still end up with greatly unhappy people.

I agree that merely addressing lowered healing requirements and gear creep is insufficient. The approach should be comprehensive, targeting the root of the evolving design issues. My proposition is to start at the foundation and correct the existing and progressing design flaws. Adding more complex damage rotations to healers at this juncture would only exacerbate the underlying issues, leading the development down an unfavorable path. The goal should be to restore a balanced and meaningful role for healers, ensuring they are neither sidelined as mere damage dealers nor overwhelmed by monotonous healing tasks.

[IDontPetLalas]

I agree that merely addressing lowered healing requirements and gear creep is insufficient. The approach should be comprehensive, targeting the root of the evolving design issues. My proposition is to start at the foundation and correct the existing and progressing design flaws. Adding more complex damage rotations to healers at this juncture would only exacerbate the underlying issues, leading the development down an unfavorable path. The goal should be to restore a balanced and meaningful role for healers, ensuring they are neither sidelined as mere damage dealers nor overwhelmed by monotonous healing tasks.

First of all, there are a number of threads on this, to date, the overwhelming majority have not requested "complex damage rotations" for healers.


Secondly, " In my view, Endwalker raids require an excessive focus on choreographed movement, which detracts from the core responsibilities of healing and damage dealing." So now, your talking not only about overhauling the job design , but overhauling the fight design as well?

I'm not against examining any of the above, I'm just pointing out that doing so is likely a complex task and even if Square were to take it on, it would likely not be realized until..late 7.x? 8.0?

[ty_taurus]

I agree that merely addressing lowered healing requirements and gear creep is insufficient. The approach should be comprehensive, targeting the root of the evolving design issues. My proposition is to start at the foundation and correct the existing and progressing design flaws. Adding more complex damage rotations to healers at this juncture would only exacerbate the underlying issues, leading the development down an unfavorable path. The goal should be to restore a balanced and meaningful role for healers, ensuring they are neither sidelined as mere damage dealers nor overwhelmed by monotonous healing tasks.

I would say the exact opposite. Address the lack of damage options now while healing requirements are abysmal, let the community get comfortable with those changes, then gradually increase healing requirements at all thresholds till we find the sweet spot where content of all difficulties can ask for more without stressing the novice healers. Doing it the other way around will make it harder to acclimate to expanded attack options.

[TheDustyOne]

Your analogy draws attention to an essential dilemma in class design. While I appreciate your perspective, the situation with tanks in FFXIV could be seen as a cautionary tale for healers. Consider the following:

• Tank gameplay has become less dynamic, with routine tankbusters and aggro swaps overshadowing core tanking elements like positioning or aggro management.
• Situations requiring a more adaptive approach, such as add management and crowd control in certain fights, are infrequent (P7S, E3S) and unengaging.
• While tanks do have moments to aid teammates, these are often pre-planned and not reflective of dynamic gameplay.
• The push towards a predictable, optimizable fight timeline seems to prioritize perfect execution over adaptability.

The game has been scripted and choreographed for as long as I've been playing, I remember back in SB when I started friends would describe the raids as "DDR, but you do a rotation". We've never really had those dynamic, unscripted fights. I do agree at least that boss positioning has been stripped, but that's a fight design problem, not a kit problem. Aggro was also a "do once per fight and ignore afterwards", so it was never a particularly dynamic part of the kit. I wouldn't mind if it came back in a rebalanced form, but that's a separate discussion.

This trend towards predictability and optimization in tank roles could foreshadow a similar path for healers if their damage rotations are emphasized. It's crucial to address the foundational issues in healer design first, rather than complicating their roles with more complex damage mechanics.

Again, the game has always been pretty predictable in its fight design, and every job trends towards optimizing around those fights, it isn't a uniquely tank thing. Healers will optimize their healing such that it requires as few GCDs as possible to squeeze more damage in.

I respectfully disagree with the notion that enhancing gear should primarily boost HP and defensive stats. The sense of power and progression can be adequately represented through increased damage output, without necessarily affecting survivability to a great extent. This approach could help maintain a balanced challenge in healing, regardless of gear level. Additionally, expanding healers' DPS toolkit as a solution to potential boredom risks overshadowing their primary role. The focus should be on making healing itself more engaging and dynamic, rather than shifting the role towards damage output.

While DPS increasing is one power gain, being able to shrug off an attack that would otherwise be lethal is also part of that feeling of power. Stripping that away takes part of the fun out of gearing up.

Your point about the uniqueness of each job's toolkit is well-taken. However, the issue at hand is less about simplification and more about balancing the core responsibilities of a role with its supplementary aspects. For healers, the current trend seems to be a shift towards damage dealing at the expense of dynamic healing gameplay. My argument is not for the removal of damage-dealing abilities but for a careful recalibration to ensure that healing remains a central, engaging aspect of the role.

You can increase healing responsibilities while also diversifying their DPS kit, they're not mutually exclusive. The need to heal is based on the fight at hand, and the need to DPS is because the boss needs to die, both are important to the overall gameplay of a healer.

While I concur that more varied gameplay is desirable, it is crucial to understand the concept of contribution as a zero-sum game. Enhancing one aspect of a role often requires a corresponding reduction in another. This also applies to the distribution of a player's attention among healing, damage, and movement. In my view, Endwalker raids require an excessive focus on choreographed movement, which detracts from the core responsibilities of healing and damage dealing. Therefore, the priority should be on rebalancing these aspects to ensure a more holistic and engaging experience.

Enhancing one aspect doesn't require a corresponding reduction in the other. We can remove the sheer amount of oGCD heals we have, increase our DPS kit in exchange, and also increase the amount of healing we need because the GCDs are still readily available. The healing responsibility is tied to the fights at hand and the readiness of the heals at hand, not the amount of heals available. The fact that the fights are choreographed isn't the problem, it's the fact that choreography doesn't have enough incoming damage. If anything, we should be having better choreography where the tank has to move the boss as part of the dance, where we have more frequent mitigation and healing checks than now, and the tanks and healers can then have an engaging DPS kit in between those mitigation and healing checks.