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

[Renathras]

Actually lmao. Why should the opinion of someone who literally doesn't understand what they're talking about carry any weight?

Because you're talking about changes that affect them. If you're talking about things that affect people, they get a say.

Not to mention people have a lot of reasons for doing or not doing content. People without statics tend not to enjoy doing Extremes/Savages, or have to be a lot more cautious with heals to make up for mistakes, which leads to lower parses. ilevel difference between a person in full Savage and a person without also make a difference.

Lodestone doesn't, in fact, give you that information.

But regardless, people can understand the problems extensively without having a orange parse ultimate clear, and any proposed changes would affect us all.

It's not like asking someone who can't cook for a recipe.

It's like asking your friends what everyone wants for your pizza, and then telling ONE friend "You aren't a cook so you don't get a say. You can't cook a pizza, so you CLEARLY shouldn't be voicing what you do and don't want on our pizza."

...

Great posts all around, thank you for voicing them!

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

I think part of the disconnect is how subjective this is. No one is saying "I want SUPER ULTRA COMPLEX damage rotations for healers!", but people are often proposing things that ARE complex.

SOME ARE NOT. This is true. My SCH proposal (though I'm not in the pro-DPS camp), my WHM "Holy Might" proposal, and one of...Roe, maybe?...proposals were not. But a lot of the other proposals are rather involved.

It makes sense, with 4 healer Jobs, that we have one with a complex damage kit. But not doing so with all of them.

Here is their satisfactory solution: Go play another game...

If this isn't a satisfactory answer for those bored with healing, then it isn't for those who would dislike more DPS buttons. It's also...kind of rude. The answer to people disagreeing with you is pretty much never "just leave then". That's arrogant gatekeeping, not good faith discussion.

I just can't stand this double standard where no one yells at a Warrior asking for a new attack to spend Beast Gauge on, but a healer asks for another attack and it's "I play healer to HEAL. If I wanted to DPS, I'd play a DPS" Bet. I play tank to TANK! If I wanted to DPS, I'd play DPS.

WAR damage generates threat generates tanking. SOME of their damage even generates sustain which is also tanking.

The only healer damage that generates healing is Kardia.

Besides, there are plenty of WAR players that argue over proposed changes when they are proposed - for the most part, WARs seem to like their present state of affairs, so...this is a poor example. There ARE, in fact, a LOT of Tank players that want tanking to be focused on tanking and not damage dealing, with more abilities and boss/encounter design around positioning and facing the boss, add management, etc, and abilities that contribute to those objectives. One reason for the GNB Continuation range change was because of Tanks complaining they were having to choose between damage dealing and positioning the boss - the thing even now Tank players consider one of the main components of tanking.

The closest parallel here is probably that. Healers doing damage IS NOT healing. No, shaving a few seconds off an encounter is not "mitigation" from foregone damage. That's always been a stupid argument and always will be unless your damage contribution is significantly changing the encounter timetable. The only other time it matters is Enrage if your DPSers are doing a bad Job of being DPSers, which is a different problem as it is, but also isn't "mitigation".

All I'm hearing are excuses. So basically, there is no good reason for tanks to continue getting more and more DPS variety while healers don't...

Just out of curiosity...how much "DPS variety" have Tanks gotten the last expansion or two? PLD's major rework aside:

ShB:
PLD got Atonement and...Confetior? They had a bit of a mini-rework but basically you lost Halone combo (and the second -2 branch combo) and gained Atonement and once per minute would Confetti into Holy Spirit spam...which was already a thing from SB. Oh, and a Gap Closer, finally?
WAR, after having been reworked (in 4.2, was it?) got...what? Infuriate reskins of existing buttons? Oh, they got Nacent...but that wasn't a DPS action.
DRK you tell me, don't play it.
GNB got introduced, so we'll table this one for now.

EW:
PLD prior to the rework stopped hitting Holy Spirit after Confetti and instead hit the Confetti button 3 more times then skipped a Goring to go straight into a Royal combo. It gained a Shelltron upgrade and a Spirits Within reskin.
WAR got an AOE Upheaval (which shares a CD with Upheaval, so they could have just made it an upgrade with falloff like Expiacion for PLD was), and Primal Rend, which is a button to hit after Inner Release but BEFORE you start the Fell Cleave spam...which didn't change.
DRK same as above, but people were not complaining more.
GNB got an extra gauge, which was immediately consumed by Double Down. They could have just made DD cost one gauge and not bothered with the gauge expansion. Otherwise, Gnashing Fang's combo was reduced to a single button, Burst Strike finally got a Continuation (no new button and existing mechanic), and Heart of Stone got an upgrade and Aurora a second charge. But Heart of Corundum and Aurora aren't damage buttons, and Continuation isn't a new damage button, so in practice, the only thing they got was Double Down...which honestly could have just been an upgrade of Sonic Blade and nothing would really have changed.

So...where is all this new and exciting "DPS variety"? For the most part, it's "here's a button to press once per minute" or "here's a reskin upgrade of an existing button you already had; which now has the exact same use case as before so nothing has changed".

It'd be like if Assize got a second charge and Presence of Mind now did a burst of damage on use. Sure, it would be a change, but the latter wouldn't change the overall rotation and the former would only SLIGHTLY alter how you do burst and wouldn't alter your Glarespam at all.

Exactly. And you know what won't decrease the boredom of many healers? DPS.

Hear hear!

And it boggles my mind so many people are so insistent it does and refuse to acknowledge that, for many healers, not only will it NOT decrease their boredom, it will make them DISLIKE playing healers instead.

You are just proving the point? You barely need to heal and end up DPSing for the most part. So is this good healer design? Is this good content design? It's just DPS more and have a complex DPS option because, as it currently stands, all healers are, are a DPS with healing tacked on. Is that good?

I think this is the crux of this entire thing.

More damage buttons is a band aid. A facade. It doesn't fix the underlying problem, it only papers over it. And that only please people that like the paper veneer while alienating everyone else. For example, people complain about the 0 healer TOP clear...but how does giving healers more DPS buttons prevent a 0 healer clear? It doesn't. It doesn't address how we have too much healing power vs encounter design, either.

It's a solution to a different problem - SOME people are bored - which generates a host of additional problems - now OTHER people are upset because they have to be a DPS Job when trying to be a Healer - and it doesn't even fix the actual underlying problem of the disconnect between encounter design and kit design, the other Job's tools that allow them to minimize or even not have healers, etc.

Those problems need to be addressed FIRST, not AFTER, adding more damage buttons.

Who here has actually said "I ONLY want to heal, as a healer"?

No one. It's a strawman and always has been.

This is silly and reductive. Anyone who plays a class can ask for whatever they want. And anyone else is free to disagree and ask for something else. You're not being robbed of your free speech just because some people on a forum disagree with you.

I think this is important to remember, too: The forums are for everyone. For ALL feedback, positive and negative. Not JUST feedback from one perspective and no others. The Devs want to see what everyone has to say. Both the people who are upset AND the people who are happy/content AND the people who are upset but disagree with the first group on the solution.

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.

This post is long enough as it is, but this has been discussed before, and it does:

Single target, WHM - WAR:

Glare - Storm's Path
Dia - Storm's Eye
Assize - Upheaval
Presence of Mind - Inner Beast
Misery - Primal Rend
Solace/Rapture - Fell Cleave
Thin Air - Infuriate

AOE, WHM - WAR

Holy - Mythril Tempest
Assize - Orogeny
Presence of Mind - Inner Beast
Misery - Primal Rend
Solace/Rapture - Fell Cleave
Thin Air - Infuriate

WAR has a 3 charge gap closer it tries to dump in burst, and it has a 1-2 before it's Glare/Dia and a 1- before its Holy (note in PvP, these are compressed into a single button, some people do that with add-ons, and it has been floated before that the game should make that as an optional toggle for players). The only other thing is Infuriate, which WHM doesn't exactly have a parallel with, but Thin Air works in a similar way (both giving you a free use of an ability without expending the normal resources it would use, though Infuriate boosts its and its CD is reduced when using spenders). Their DPS kits are actually fairly close to 1-to-1 now. If WHM had a 1-2-3 combo instead of Glare and Dia could stack to 60 seconds, they'd be effectively identical in terms of overall rotation aside from Solace/Rapture being heals (though still gauge spenders) instead of attacks.

On the flipside, WAR has no "spamable defensive abilities" since defensives don't work like that. Tanks don't have a tank equivalent of Cure 2, that is. So they have to fill that in with something, and that's where they get filler like the 1-2-

Give WHM a 1-2-3 and make Dia a self-buff that stacks to 60 sec and you have basically WHM now entirely equal to WAR's kit in terms of buttons. So we're far closer to this than people ragging on healer DPS seem to realize. SPECIFICALLY for the case of WAR - less so for GNB etc - but specifically in the case of WAR, it doesn't have a lot of attacks, and some are distinctions that make no difference (Upheaval and Orogeny being separate buttons is kind of silly since the shared CD and use cases mean you will NEVER use Upheaval in AOE or Orogeny in single target, making them functionally equivalent to Assize). Most of WAR's "extra" DPS buttons are due to filler (1-2 and 1- AOE, Upheaval and Orogeny being separate is a total of 4 "excess" buttons that don't do anything), and are filling out WAR's hotbar since WAR doesn't have Cure, Cure 3, Cure 3, Medica, Medica 2, or Regen as GCDs. WAR has oGCD defensive abilities, but the total number of oGCD defensives is 9 (10 if you count Arm's Length but that doesn't work on bosses and WHM has Surecast), where WHM has 9 healing oGCDs (not counting Thin Air, Swiftcast, Surecast, or Lucid Dreaming).

This is honestly pretty close in terms of overall abilities. WAR's extra attacks come in place of WHM's extra GCD heals...something healers, especially "the GCD healer", kind of need (and are used in high end content, just less than WAR's 1-2-)

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And yes, Ty had a survey - two, in fact - which had limited participation (under 200 respondents on the first, and less than half that on the second?) most of which were from this forum with some from FFXIVDiscussion on Reddit. In simple terms, probably not a representative sample of the playerbase at large.

Couple things. Only heal healers could just keep on pressing a single button if they added more options for damage, you lose nothing.

Only if it does the same amount of damage as performing the rotation. Otherwise you DO lose something if you're doing any content with Enrages or DPS checks. This argument is invalid unless people proposing it are suggesting the more complex DPS rotation do identical or negligibly different damage. (E.g. current SCH's Energy Drain optimization which, in a practical sense, doesn't end a fight more than a few seconds earlier when fully optimized.)

What DPS checks though? By the time they hit the later floors of savage where a healer is indeed capable of making or breaking the run with their DPS, I think it's fair to expect them to know how to play and manage a reasonable amount of damage no?

No.

We're not talking "do a reasonable amount of damage" - healers DO THAT NOW.

We're talking "execute a DPSer rotation".

You can "tap" all you want, I'm contesting hyperbole. Also, don't make me tap (3) and (4).

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.

Gonna stop here, but...yes, this.

4 Healers Model.

We have 4 healers, don't make them all the same. Make each one for a different style. If that's one as it is now, one with DoTs, one with a DPS rotation, and one with a support buff suite, then hey, that's great. Changing them all from being one way (1 button spam) to all being a different way (various flavors of "DPS at home Job") doesn't fix the problem. It substitutes one problem with another.