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

[LilimoLimomo]

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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.

[LilimoLimomo]

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.)

I am honestly confused why you would mention good faith debates and ask me this. Because it's clear from the context you stripped my previous comment from that 100% GCD required is not intended to be a desirable way to play the game, just an exercise to prove that it's possible and thus disprove the proposal that GCD dps for healers can never be below 50% or whatever was said. And based on your wording, it seems like you have discovered at least one way to successfully do this. Thus, the proposal that I was intending to disprove has been effectively disproved. This was not the proposal of an actual design, but an exercise to determine the boundaries of the possibility space designers solving this problem have access to.

[AmiableApkallu]

I am honestly confused why you would mention good faith debates and ask me this. Because it's clear from the context you stripped my previous comment from that 100% GCD required is not intended to be a desirable way to play the game, just an exercise to prove that it's possible and thus disprove the proposal that GCD dps for healers can never be below 50% or whatever was said. And based on your wording, it seems like you have discovered at least one way to successfully do this. Thus, the proposal that I was intending to disprove has been effectively disproved. This was not the proposal of an actual design, but an exercise to determine the boundaries of the possibility space designers solving this problem have access to.

You've yet to demonstrate in any meaningful way that "it's entirely possible", where "it" is "there are a lot of different ways to make 100% of GCD's required for healing." The point isn't whether it's technically possible. The point is whether it's possible to design something that might plausibly considered fun.

Because here's my one way: The boss deletes 99% of the main tank's health every GCD. This is all they do, the entire fight. The healer has a single button that restores 99.1+% of someone's health, at a cost of zero MP and zero cast time. This design is complete and total garbage. You know it. I know it. We all know it. The idea that this is Yoshi-P's "good heal work" is preposterous. But it is "100% of GCD's required for healing." It's even accommodating of the least skilled of players.

I have trouble believing that anyone who argues for healers spending 100% of their time healing (or maybe more accurately, 0% of their time directly dealing damage) has what I just described in mind as a desirable goal. That design isn't the basis of a good faith discussion.

So, where's the pudding?

[LilimoLimomo]

The point isn't whether it's technically possible.

With respect, you quoted an instance of my demonstration whether something was technical possible. That was the point of what I wrote when I wrote it. Trying to leverage it for other purposes it wasn't intended won't result in a sound argument.

The point is whether it's possible to design something that might plausibly considered fun.

If the point is whether something will be fun, then generally speaking, all of this talk is meaningless. Most of the time you don't realize what's fun until you feel it and ask others to feel it to, with the controller in their hands, or a paper prototype if that works. You get a prototype functional, and that's when it's time to iterate and actually find the fun. Sometimes it's actually there, sometimes it's not. A write-up is an undependable way to find fun.

[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.