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

[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.

[ChrysOCE]

It has cropped up in this thread in the past, and usually it comes across from people asking to keep DPS kits how they are "because I'm a healer, not a DPS, make me heal more", typically not realising how much we need to increase incoming damage to actually make us use most of our kits, or that you can have more to heal alongside extra DPS options. You yourself said in the first page:



The sentiment is still very much the same. Healer kits should be bad because you're a healer and not a DPS.

No that is not the same sentiment. Saying that, when I heal, I want healing/mitigation/support to be my focus is not the same as saying "hEaLeRs OnLy HeAl".

[LilimoLimomo]

That seems incredibly unfair then to Scholars who used to have a lot more DPS skills. Now if they ask for those back, suddenly they're asking for "triple the amount they currently have". If SCH never lost those, would you suddenly be okay with them having another DPS skill?

That's a fair point! And in my opinion, I do think there should be more disparity between classes. If half the healers given a more involved damage rotation to keep their thumbs busy, I think that would be fine. I just don't agree with a solution that gives that to everyone, because not everyone wants that.

And if it's okay for Scholars to have extra attacks in that scenario, why is WHM and AST suddenly not allowed to have that?

Because many healers don't want this functionality, so I oppose it becoming a universal feature.

Tanks are also about 50/50 in DPS/defensives, the ratio is a lot higher than you realise.

I'm talking about gameplay, not just counting the buttons. Frequency of using defensive parts of the kit are meaningfully lower compared to the DPS parts.

Aggro wasn't all that meaningful when it was there beyond the opener or someone forgetting Diversion, so it's loss wasn't felt all that painfully for most tanks.

I'll agree that I don't think tanking reached its potential, but aggro was something, replaced with nothing.

DPSing as healers is ultimately going to be necessary no matter how much healing is required, and the lax healing requirements in casual content means that someone doing that with a modicum of skill behind them is going to get bored quickly. The solution is to make the downtime engaging in some way rather than forcing savage-level healing on the healer who can't keep up with that. DPS is the obvious answer because it is always useful, and buffs are just indirect DPS.

I've addressed this earlier in the thread so I will respectfully acknowledge your thoughts. If you'd like to see mine they're earlier in the thread, but no pressure.

Also healers having mechanical identity... SCH and SGE say otherwise. The two are so close in design that I have the same buttons on the same places on my hotbar. Tanks have a similar issue, especially between WAR and DRK, but you don't see nearly as many people complaining about those 2 compared to the healers.

I meant that healers overall have a mechanical identity, not the individual roles. Because I agree: healers blur together and overlap too much. And I also agree that tanks have the same problem, which I have complained about numerous times on these forums ^^.

[Maltothoris]

Well there a thing with the mitigation and support for healers. They've taken away quite a few things that healers used to be able to do in those categories. In mitigation, scholars lost virus and that was turned into addle and feint while astros lost disable and that was eliminated. For support,astro had all the different cards but not it can only do damage and its clear in their minds that only astro and sch should be able to buff the damage of the party.

I hate to be rude but Yoshi-p and his team are fools when it comes to healers.

[TheDustyOne]

So what exactly do you want to do when there is no healing required?

If you want healing to be at a point where you're healing for a large majority of the fight, then you pretty much do just want healers to only heal. If you want there to be some level of downtime for recovery and optimization, then DPS should be more interesting in that period than Glaroillicosis + DoT and I have no idea why you would be against more DPS options.

[LilimoLimomo]

You're not on the same page. You have been arguing against ty's point for the entire thread.

We are both on the page that Glare spam isn't fun and needs to be solved. We have different ideas about how to solve that. Because of that we are arguing. We agree on the problem, not the solution.

[Nizzi]

Beyond the nastiness of the sentiment, it's a bit of an odd stance to take considering that the designer of this game has gone on record saying that's not the game he's trying to make, which suggests that the fact that it is that kind of game is an accident and that given enough time he will eventually correct that mistake. That being the case, I hope you'll find it satisfactory if one day you need to find a different game because Yoshi-P achieves his goal. Not that I wish that on you; I would by far prefer a design that works for everyone.

You are living in a fantasyland if you believe that. He's been given a decade, why hasn't he done it? It's been nearly 5 years since ShB came out and the healing requirements have not increased to only have "some downtime". He pruned SCH's DPS kit going into Shadowbringers and got rid of Aero III on WHM to equalize all of the DPS kits to be the exact same monotony, surely that was the time to finally do this? What about when SGE came out and they split the role in two subroles? We're still spamming our 1 key more than ever? Got it. Getting rid of healer damage rotations solved none of the issues it was supposedly meant to address; and if we're Word of God-ding, remember that Yoshida has already said many times that the level of healing that we're getting is the highest they can see it going. He specifically said this about E12S and how he considered that fight the ceiling for Savage healing for where the playerbase can handle it.

You are not getting the healbot game you want. This is not that game. In fact, many times this expansion we've had Japanese players complaining directly to Yoshida in open Q&A's because nobody was playing healer in party finder, a phenomenon that was also very true on NA and EU. He had to ask people to "please give Healer a try." because the increased healing requirements from Asphodelos into Abyssos caused a lot of people to stop playing healer or were otherwise unable to handle it, resulting in parties taking sometimes hours to fill while waiting for healers. There are two options for the role: Healers getting more buttons to press when no healing is needed, or fights doing a lot of damage to keep them engaged. This expansion has shown many times that if you go the latter route, it results in the fight being harder for party finder players and results in more people being gatekept from clearing while they wait for healers who can handle the increase of requirements. You are gating more players out by increasing healing requirements from clearing content than you are by giving a few extra buttons to engage healer players when there's no job to do.

There's no nastiness in that statement either, I mean it sincerely: go play another game if you don't like the fact that healers deal damage in this game and are constantly dealing it. I main a healer because I like how healing works in this game. I enjoy prog and mapping out CDs and where I handle things in a fight, and I also enjoy that I contribute via DPSing. Why should what we like about healers in this game change for you and people who don't even seem to enjoy healing in this game at all and want it to be like other MMOs when you could instead... just go play those to get that gameplay? Sincere questions: Do you main a healer? Do you do high end content on a healer at all? Because I do, do you think I would've sunk hundreds of hours into prog on a role if I didn't enjoy it? No, but if they take away what I like about the job I play and the role I will quit the game entirely and I am very clear about that in many of my posts.

I want to play this game, not "make it like other game but in this game!!" I will continue advocating for the healers to fit the game that they are designed for and for this role to not be designed for the people who don't like them fundamentally, or for people who would be better suited playing a different game.

[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.

[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.

[TheDustyOne]

That's a fair point! And in my opinion, I do think there should be more disparity between classes. If half the healers given a more involved damage rotation to keep their thumbs busy, I think that would be fine. I just don't agree with a solution that gives that to everyone, because not everyone wants that.

While I do sympathize with someone that wants a simple kit, a single nuke + DoT is not a good kit. Warrior is a good example of a simple kit and that's what WHM should try to match in complexity.

Because many healers don't want this functionality, so I oppose it becoming a universal feature.

Ty I believe had a survey that asked jobs what they wanted most. 70+% Healers outside AST wanted more DPS buttons, which instead wanted more damage buffs. That last one is ultimately what would better suit those players.

I'm talking about gameplay, not just counting the buttons. Frequency of using defensive parts of the kit are meaningfully lower compared to the DPS parts.

The gameplay is down to the fight design. We need more incoming busters and raidwides for the tank defensives to be more in play, which also in turn makes the healers more integral. It's a fight design issue, not a kit issue. But otherwise I agree there.

I'll agree that I don't think tanking reached its potential, but aggro was something, replaced with nothing.

I don't disagree honestly, I wouldn't mind aggro returning, but it would have to be rebalanced to where it becomes an integral part of tanking instead of opener only.

I've addressed this earlier in the thread so I will respectfully acknowledge your thoughts. If you'd like to see mine they're earlier in the thread, but no pressure.

A lot of others have already said what I wanted to say, so I'm not too worried about responding to what you said earlier because I think it'd just be a repeat of other sentiments.

I meant that healers overall have a mechanical identity, not the individual roles. Because I agree: healers blur together and overlap too much. And I also agree that tanks have the same problem, which I have complained about numerous times on these forums ^^.

I can agree at least. I've had suggestions in the past on how to diversify healer kits on the healer forums. I liked the idea of AST going full time mage and fast-forwarding regens, snapshotting buffs to reapply them after they expire, etc.